The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  In a fury, Blücher rode among the men of the Sixteenth Brigade and tried to rally them. He personally explained to Colonel von Hiller that the Allied victory depended on the capture of Plancenoit and that his troops must therefore make another advance. While Hiller’s Westphalians and Silesians reordered themselves a good distance from the village and prepared to go back on the attack, a courier arrived with a message from Wavre and delivered it to the field marshal. General von Thielemann, who had been left at Wavre with his corps to cover the Prussians’ rear, reported that Grouchy was attacking him with a numerically superior force and asked for help. Blücher held an agitated consultation with his chief of staff. As the historian Peter Hofschröer later wrote, the Prussians’ situation was anything but happy: “Blücher’s main attack was faltering, his reinforcements were coming up too slowly, his ally’s defences were showing signs of crumbling under the French assault, and now his line of retreat was in danger of being cut.” The two Prussian generals knew they had no choice; at that moment, sending reinforcements to Thielemann was out of the question. “He won’t get so much as a horse’s tail,” Blücher exclaimed. Gneisenau expressed this thought in more formal terms, but his response to the III Corps commander was chilling all the same: “You must contest every step the enemy takes, because even the heaviest losses sustained by your corps will be more than compensated for by a victory against Napoleon here.”

  FIFTY

  “I’LL BE DAMNED IF WE SHAN’T LOSE THIS GROUND”

  While Mouton’s men were taking up positions in Plancenoit and contesting the Prussian attack, the French cavalry continued charging the Allied squares. Despite mounting losses, which had caused several regiments to abandon the action already, pressure from the French had not diminished, because Napoleon had ordered his other reserve cavalry corps, commanded by Kellermann, to replace Milhaud’s corps. Kellermann’s corps had been heavily engaged at Quatre Bras, but its remaining dragoons, cuirassiers, and carabineers still amounted to 3,500 sabers. Guyot’s Heavy Cavalry Division of the Imperial Guard was also sent into line and was soon participating in the charges. This division’s two regiments, the Horse Grenadiers and the Empress’s Dragoons, accounted for another 1,600 sabers between them. Even though each Guard regiment had detached one squadron to join the emperor’s escort, the total number of French cavalry troopers engaged at one moment or another against the Allied squares that afternoon rose above 8,000.

  In his memoirs, Napoleon maintained that Guyot allowed himself to be drawn into the combat without having received any explicit orders to attack the Allied squares. However, the cavalry of the Imperial Guard never went into battle without a direct order from either its commander or the emperor in person. At the Battle of Wagram in 1809, this inviolable practice aroused the ire of Marshal Macdonald, who came within a hair of accusing a Guard general of cowardice because he refused to charge without the requisite order from on high. On balance, therefore, Guyot’s declaration—that in the late afternoon the emperor ordered him to put the troops of his division at the disposal of Marshal Ney, which was equivalent to authorizing their immediate employment in the charges—seems credible. Only later, reflecting on this and other aspects of the battle that commentators had most criticized, did Napoleon become convinced that his cavalry had been uselessly sacrificed, and his memory of what had happened was deliberately manipulated to dissociate the emperor’s responsibility.

  The infantry massed in the squares continued to stand fast, but their steadiness was waning. Ensign Gronow of the First Foot Guards later wrote, “Our squares presented a shocking sight. Inside we were nearly suffocated by the smoke and smell from burnt cartridges. It was impossible to move a yard without treading upon a wounded comrade, or upon the bodies of the dead; and the loud groans of the wounded and dying was most appalling. At four o’clock our square was a perfect hospital, being full of dead, dying, and mutilated soldiers.” During one of the cuirassiers’ charges, Wellington himself took refuge in a square. He was “accompanied only by one aide-de-camp; all the rest of his staff being either killed or wounded. Our Commander-in-Chief, as far as I could judge, appeared perfectly composed; but looked very thoughtful and pale.”

  Having seen the difficulty of breaking up the squares by brute force, the French riders deployed a new tactic: They approached at a walk, or at most a trot, and when they were ten or fifteen paces away, they fired their carbines. “But their fire produced little effect, as is generally the case with the fire of cavalry,” Gronow commented. “Our men had orders not to fire unless they could do so on a near mass; the object being to economise our ammunition, and not to waste it on scattered soldiers. The result was that when the cavalry had discharged their carbines, and were still far off, we occasionally stood face to face looking at each other inactively not knowing what the next move might be.”

  Not far away, Captain Mercer’s battery also came under attack from isolated cavalrymen armed with carbines. Mercer was so anxious to prevent his men from wasting ammunition on them that he began riding back and forth in front of the guns. A mounted grenadier deliberately took aim at him, fired, and missed. Mercer wagged a finger at him, signaling “No,” and called him a scoundrel, loudly and in French. The man laughed and started to reload. “I certainly felt rather foolish at that moment,” Mercer confessed, “but was ashamed, after such bravado, to let him see it, and therefore continued my promenade. As if to prolong my torment, he was a terrible time about it. To me it seemed an age. Whenever I turned, the muzzle of his infernal carbine still followed me. At length bang it went, and whiz came the ball close to the back of my neck, and at the same instant down dropped the leading driver of one of my guns (Miller), into whose forehead the cursed missile had penetrated.”

  For a large part of the day, Mercer’s battery had remained in a relatively calm position, in reserve behind Hougoumont; but then Sir Augustus Frazer, commander of the horse artillery, came galloping up and ordered the captain to move his battery into the front line. “I rode with Frazer, whose face was as black as a chimney-sweep’s from the smoke, and the jacket-sleeve of his right arm torn open by a musket-ball or case-shot, which had merely grazed his flesh.” Frazer had Mercer take up a position just behind the sunken lane, between two squares of Brunswicker troops, informing him that enemy cavalry would charge him in a few minutes, and commanding him and his gunners to take refuge in the squares in such an eventuality.

  “We breathed a new atmosphere,” Mercer remarked. “The air was suffocatingly hot, resembling that issuing from an oven. We were enveloped in a thick smoke, and, malgré the incessant roar of cannon and musketry, could distinctly hear around us a mysterious humming noise, like that which one hears of a summer’s evening proceeding from myriads of black beetles…. it seemed dangerous to extend the arm lest it should be torn off.” Mercer’s men had barely started unlimbering the guns and hauling them into their battery positions when the Imperial Guards’ mounted grenadiers rode up the slope, apparently in their direction, “the two Infantry Squares at the same time commencing a feeble and desultory fire; for they were in such a state that I momentarily expected to see them disband. Their ranks, loose and disjointed, presented gaps of several file in breadth, which the Officers and Sergeants were busily employed filling up by pushing and even thumping their men together; whilst these, standing like so many logs, were apparently completely stupefied and bewildered. I should add that they were all perfect children. None of the privates, perhaps, were above 18 years of age.”

  The least experienced troops had clearly arrived at the limit of what they could stand, and a few squares actually began to break up. In the rare cases in which a French battery advanced far enough to stop firing blindly and start aiming at visible targets, the Allied losses became catastrophic. The most exposed of Kruse’s three battalions—the 1/1st Nassau, which had been moved forward to a position in the front line, found itself the target of just this type of fire, coming from French guns that had advanced to within three to
four hundred yards. The Nassauers could plainly see that the British batteries deployed in their front had been abandoned, and this made the enemy fire all the harder to bear. When a cuirassier squadron calmly rode up to a spot about a hundred yards away and halted there, waiting, almost daring the young recruits to fire on them, the Nassauers began to show signs of panic. Seeing their agitation, the cuirassiers charged, destroyed part of the square, and took many prisoners.

  The French artillery fire also opened a gap in the ranks of the 3/1st Foot Guards. This gap was wide enough to allow two cuirassier officers to penetrate the square, shouting and brandishing their sabers. Had some of their men gone in behind them, they would have had a good chance of smashing the formation; but evidently the two officers had got too far in front of the rest of their squadron, or perhaps nobody had the courage to follow them. Urged on by their sergeants, the Foot Guards closed the gap, while their officers, in the center of the square, shot the two cuirassiers to death with their pistols. Hardly an inexperienced German battalion, the Foot Guards were the most rigidly trained infantry that Wellington had in the field, and even these troops had a narrow escape. Gronow, fascinated, witnessed the entire scene, and he was so struck by it that he noted the names of the two officers who had liquidated the intruders, both of whom were killed in their turn before evening.

  At several times British and German generals maneuvered the squares, trying to obstruct the movements of the cavalry and, if possible, to seize the initiative. Well-trained troops could advance in square, however slowly. Captain von Scriba’s square had repulsed several attacks before being ordered by the Prince of Orange to advance against the enemy cavalry, which was lining up a short distance away and preparing to charge. Surprised by this unexpected move, the cavalry scattered under the fire of the square, and the Germans continued their advance. Almost at once, however, the French artillery and the tirailleurs stationed outside the wall of La Haye Sainte adjusted their fire, taking aim at the German square. For a few minutes, the officers tried to hold their position, but in the end, they realized that their men would be routed if they stayed there. The order was given to retreat, but not before Major von Schkopp, who commanded the square, was hit, along with several others. “Many of the soldiers on that flank were knocked down or wounded or killed, or were rendered momentarily numb with shock.”

  On the high ground behind Hougoumont, the British infantry’s difficulties were multiplied by the tirailleurs, who advanced through the tall crops every time the cavalry charges provided a moment’s respite. To counter this threat, the battalions of Adam’s brigade were deployed in lines four deep, so that they could deliver a volume of fire with some effect when the enemy advanced too far. Even in this formation, however, the men grew more and more impatient, and every so often one of them abandoned his position, ran forward, and fired his musket at the enemy. General Adam was so infuriated by his men’s indiscipline that he confronted them on horseback with his saber drawn, even going so far as to strike one of them on the head with the flat of his sword by way of persuading him to rejoin the ranks. Finally, Wellington ordered the brigade to move forward beyond the gun line and definitively drive off the French skirmishers, who were making life difficult for the artillery, too. “I’ll be damned if we shan’t lose this ground if we don’t take care,” said the duke to his secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset.

  Captain Mercer was obliged to hold his battery’s fire when Wellington, “with a serious air, and apparently much fatigued,” rode past, right in front of Mercer’s guns, and then the captain watched Adam’s infantry ascend the slope behind him, reach the crest, and head down the other side, toward the enemy. Mercer noted how even so straightforward a maneuver was rendered laborious by the dreadful condition of the ground: “His Grace was soon followed by a line of Infantry, who ascending the slope with ported arms, ankle deep in a tenacious clay and struggling with the numerous obstacles encumbering the ground, presented but a loose and broken front, whilst the feeble hurrahs they sent forth showed how much they were out of breath with their exertions.”

  The advance of Adam’s brigade was, on the whole, a good move; in case of a renewed cavalry attack, the enemy would have been unable to capture any guns. Furthermore, the ground in that sector descended rapidly, so the British gunners could have continued to fire over the heads of the infantrymen. Obviously, however, the position of Adam’s men became still more dangerous. Private Lewis of the 2/95th Rifles watched apprehensively as his comrades fell with disagreeable frequency all around him. A shell fragment wounded the man in front of him; Lewis closed up, and his unit began to move, but before they had gone twenty paces a volley of flanking fire cleanly removed the nose of the man next to him. Shortly thereafter, a cannonball struck the man on Lewis’s left, tearing off his arm just above the elbow; the injured soldier clutched Lewis, soaking his trousers with blood, before falling to the ground. Then Lewis’s battalion was ordered to advance past the guns, only to find itself immediately charged by enemy cavalry.

  These were the first charges that had assaulted Adam’s battalions directly, and the British officers and their men, like others before them that afternoon, were relieved to discover that cuirassiers were not, after all, as great a threat as they seemed. Ensign Leeke watched them advance: “They came on in very gallant style and in very steady order, first of all at the trot, then at a gallop, till they were within forty or fifty yards of the front face of the square, when, one or two horses having been brought down, in clearing the obstacle they got a somewhat new direction, which carried them to either flank of the face of the square, which direction they one and all preferred to the charging home and riding on to our bayonets.” Writing a letter home a few days later, Private Lewis boasted that the cuirassiers of “Boney’s Imperial Guard,” with all their gleaming armor, had charged his battalion only to discover that they could do nothing against it.

  In addition, Lewis’s account confirmed that the cuirassier’s new tactic of employing their short carbines had, in fact, some effect. “They fire on us with their carbines, then immediately do an about-turn while a comrade at my side collapses with a bullet full in the stomach and blood coming out of him as from a stuck pig. He barely had time to say, ‘Lewis, I’m done for!’ before he died. We continued firing at the Imperial Guard as they withdrew, and while I was reloading my rifle a ball struck it just above my left hand, breaking the ramrod and bending the barrel so much that I couldn’t ram the cartridge down anymore.” Perhaps Private Lewis added a little color to his narrative in order to impress the relatives he was writing to, but surely the confused succession of charges and firefights was proving destructive to the squares no less than to the squadrons attacking them.

  FIFTY - ONE

  THE NIVELLES ROAD

  The only attempt the French cavalry did not make was the one that Wellington most feared: to outflank his right wing west of Hougoumont, where the high ground defended by the Allied infantry descended rather steeply into a valley traversed by the Nivelles road. In that sector, the lancers and chasseurs à cheval attached to Piré’s division remained in sight all day long, their long lances visible over the tops of the tall grain; every now and then, they advanced as though they were going to attack, but the intention of this maneuver was only to draw the fire of the enemy batteries and, if possible, to keep a few regiments of British cavalry busy on that end of the field, their attention distracted from more important sectors. Although Piré’s men intervened occasionally to rescue some tirailleur squads from difficulties, the division as a whole held its position and never advanced. Thus in that part of the battlefield, much of the day was spent in an uninterrupted succession of skirmishes, in which neither side achieved any sort of decisive result.

  Among the eyewitness accounts of the battle, those left by soldiers in the regiments stationed along the Nivelles road stand in sharp contrast to the rest. These sources do not seem to be describing a great battle, but rather a combat of outposts, or sometimes a guerri
lla action. Sergeant Wheeler of the Fifty-first Light Infantry was posted with two men “behind a rock or large stone, well studded with brambles. This was somewhat to our right and in advance. About an hour after we were posted we saw an officer of Huzzars sneaking down to get a peep at our position. One of my men was what we term a dead shot, when he was within point-blank distance. I asked him if he could make sure of him. His reply was ‘To be sure I can, but let him come nearer if he will, at all events his death warrant is signed and in my hands, if he should turn back.’” When the French officer was close enough, a single shot killed him, “and in a minute we had his body with the horse in our possession behind the rock. We had a rich booty, forty double Napoleons and had just time to strip the lace of the clothing of the dead Huzzar when we were called in to join the skirmishers.”

  Although the troops stationed in this sector took insignificant casualties in comparison with those engaged in other parts of the field, this war of ambushes and surprises was nonetheless fought ruthlessly. The British Hussars of the Seventh stayed in their saddles for a long time in an area where they apparently ran little risk; one sergeant was even accompanied by his wife, who was mounted on a pony. Suddenly, however, Hussars started falling, but no one could tell where the shots were coming from. The sergeant’s wife got scared, and her husband began rudely insulting her; finally, a disgusted officer ordered him to send her to the rear. In the end, someone noticed that the irregular fire was coming from a field of rye, taller than a man, not far away on their left. A Hussar squadron rode into the field, surprised a group of tirailleurs, and hacked them to death with their sabers.