The most famous episode from this sector of the battlefield involved a cuirassier squadron that charged into the Allied squares and then tried to return to their own lines by retreating along the Nivelles road, only to find it blocked by a barricade of felled trees, and behind them a company of the Fifty-first. Sergeant Wheeler was there, and he left a graphic account of what happened: “There were nearly a hundred of them, all Cuirassiers. Down they rode full gallop, the trees thrown across the bridge on our left stopped them. We saw them comming and was prepared, we opened our fire, the work was done in an instant. By the time we had loaded and the smoke had cleared away, one and only one, solitary individual was seen running over the brow in our front. One other was saved by Capt. Jno. Ross from being put to death by some of the Brunswickers. I went to see what effect our fire had, and never before beheld such a sight in as short a space, as about an hundred men and horses could be huddled together, there they lay. Those who were shot dead were fortunate for the wounded horses in their struggles by plunging and kicking soon finished what we had began. In examining the men we could not find one that would be like to recover, and as we had other business to attend to we were obliged to leave them to their fate.”
This incident made such an impression that no fewer than five witnesses recalled it spontaneously many years later, all but one of them insisting that the cuirassiers had been totally destroyed. The only man to provide a different version was Captain John Ross himself, the commander of the company stationed at the barricade. According to the captain, the cuirassiers—about seventy in all—had broken into one of the squares and there surrendered; then, however, finding themselves under the weak escort of a few light dragoons, the French had decided to tempt fate and tried to escape along the Nivelles road. Alerted to their approach by the irregular fire that accompanied their passage, Captain Ross posted his men behind the barricade and opened fire on the French when they arrived. The officer commanding the cuirassiers, realizing that the British dragoons were in close pursuit, preferred not to fall back into their hands and offered Captain Ross his sword. “There were twelve horses and eight Cuirassiers killed on this occasion, and the remainder, about sixty, were dismounted, taken, or dispersed,” the captain concluded. The discrepancy between his numbers and those of Sergeant Wheeler is emblematic of the uncertainties involved in trusting the memories of the people who were there.
FIFTY - TWO
“INFANTRY! AND WHERE DO YOU EXPECT ME TO FIND INFANTRY?”
Although weakened, the Allied cavalry deployed in support behind the squares kept trying to coordinate their own actions with those of the infantry and make the French squadrons pay a heavy price for their attacks. A Hanoverian officer had the impression that the enemy cavalry were deliberately drawn to within musket range by the feigned attacks of the British cavalry, and he observed that in the long run these maneuvers wore down the cuirassiers, who continued to attack but with steadily decreasing élan. Major von Goeben of the Third KGL Hussars also noticed that the enemy’s desire to advance started to diminish after a while. Repeatedly, some squadrons of the Imperial Guard’s chasseurs à cheval rode up to within three or four hundred paces of his regiment, which had been reduced to some eighty men. “Their officers were wearing tall, broad bearskin hats, and on several occasions some of them rode up to us, challenging the officers of our regiment to single combat. As they were much stronger, the regiment could not accept the honor, and the enemy cavalry accomplished nothing other than to offer their big bearskin hats as targets to some of the sharpshooters in this Hanoverian Field Battalion.”
In theory, the Imperial Guard’s famous Red Lancers, armed as they were with their long weapons, should have been able to drive their attacks into the enemy ranks, as indeed they tried to do; but in reality the squares had so many bayonets confronting each rider that it was simply impossible to urge the horses close to them. Captain de Brack, a squadron commander, saw some of his exasperated lancers rise in their stirrups and hurl their lances like javelins at the enemy. The Red Lancers charged, among others, a Brunswicker square, but even in this case they were unable to get close enough to do much harm. As soon as the charge was repulsed, two of the German foot soldiers stepped out of formation and ran over to a French officer who was trapped under his fallen horse. They cleaned out his pockets and then shot him in the head with his own pistol amid shouts of “Shame! Shame” from nearby British troops.
In time, there were so many dead or dying men and—above all—horses around the squares that advancing past them was becoming physically difficult. The centers of the squares were also filled with wounded and dying soldiers, and because the enemy cavalry continued roving in the vicinity, the infantry could not send wounded officers to the rear, as was the custom in the British army. As for wounded enlisted men, no one even tried to evacuate them from the squares. The cavalry, however, paid an even higher price: The fire from the squares, though slow, irregular, and inefficient, began to tell in the long run. Gronow declared that he would never forget the strange sound—like “the noise of a violent hailstorm beating upon panes of glass”—that his guardsmen’s musket balls made as they struck the enemy’s cuirasses; he added that the cavalry charges, which the men had so feared at first, eventually became a relief, because when the cavalry advanced, the enemy artillery was obliged to stop firing.
Others make the same observation. The Royal Engineers officer who took refuge in a square quickly realized that the cavalry’s horses would not dare to come into contact with the bayonets: “Now and then an individual more daring than the rest would ride up to the bayonets, wave his sword about and bully; but the mass held aloof, pulling up within five or six yards, as if, though afraid to go on, they were ashamed to retire. Our men soon discovered they had the best of it, and ever afterwards, when they heard the sound of cavalry approaching, appeared to consider the circumstance a pleasant change (from being cannonaded)!” Reynell, commander of the Seventy-first—whose position a short distance from the Hougoumont hedge was the farthest advanced of any regiment in Adam’s brigade—wrote of “repeated visits from [the enemy’s] Cuirassiers. I do not say attacks, because these Cavalry Columns on no occasion attempted to penetrate our Square, limiting their approach to within ten or fifteen yards of the front face, when they would wheel about, receiving such fire as we could bring to bear upon them, and as they retired, en passant, that from the neighbouring Square.” Macready of the Thirtieth observed that his men “began to pity the useless perseverance of their assailants, and, as they advanced, would growl out, ‘here come those d———d fools again.’”
In the late afternoon, as the sun was slowly starting to sink toward the horizon, the morale of the troops standing in the squares began to rise again. By contrast French cavalry officers, despite the fearlessness to which every enemy/Allied account of the battle paid tribute, were having more and more trouble gathering their men, whose numbers were steadily declining, and leading them in yet another advance. “In the midst of our terrible fire,” Gronow later recalled, “their officers were seen as if on parade, keeping order in their ranks, and encouraging them. Unable to renew the charge, but unwilling to retreat, they brandished their swords with loud cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’” The initial period of equilibrium had passed, and the number of those who sensed this shift grew steadily.
The British artillery had played a role in wearing down the cavalry’s striking power, but less than has been generally supposed. One factor is found in Sir Augustus Frazer’s description of the problems with the British guns, “which, by recoiling, had retired so as to lose their original and just position. But in a deep stiff soil, the fatigue of the horse artillerymen was great, and their best exertions were unable to move the guns again to the crest without horses; to employ horses was to ensure the loss of the animals.” Thus the guns in many batteries were no longer on the crest of the ridge, as they had been in the beginning; many must have slid back down the reverse slope, from which they were no lo
nger able to fire on the cavalry as it fell back.
More significantly, and contrary to the romanticized image of valiant British gunners returning to their weapons between one charge and the next and blasting away at the retreating enemy, the cavalry charges penetrated so far behind the Allied lines that disorganization and panic spread among the gunners. Wellington explicitly stated that many of them, having once abandoned their posts and reached safety, never returned to their guns until the end of the battle. According to Tom Morris, in at least one case exactly the opposite happened: When some French cavalry overran a battery posted within a few dozen meters of the squares, artillerymen rode with them, turned one of the guns around, and fired it point-blank at the enemy. Several loads of case-shot, colloquially known as “grapeshot,” opened broad gaps in the ranks of the Seventy-third, and one demonstration of the steadiness of the British infantry is the fact that after every shot the men closed up their ranks, drawing their wounded into the center of the square and throwing their dead outside it, without allowing the French cavalry to exploit their temporary advantage.
Major Lloyd’s battery, which had been stationed in front of Halkett’s squares since morning, was one of the few whose gunners did indeed return to their weapons in the intervals between one charge and the other and fire case-shot into the rear of the enemy cavalry as they retreated in disorder down the slope. One of Lloyd’s subordinates recalled, “In general, a Squadron or two came up the slope on our immediate front, and on their moving off at the appearance of our Cavalry, we took advantage to send destruction after them, and when advancing on our fire I have seen four or five men and horses piled upon each other like cards, the men not having even been displaced from the saddle, the effect of canister.” And yet on at least one occasion the battery commander, seeing that the enemy cavalry was in retreat, rode back to the guns only to discover that none of his gunners had followed him. Lloyd dismounted, determined that the cannons were all loaded—a measure of how precipitously the gunners had abandoned them—and fired one of the guns himself, then another; at last, unable to do anything else, he mounted his horse once more and returned to where he had left his men.
The battery that inflicted the most damage on the French cavalry was the only one whose gunners, contrary to orders, remained with their weapons throughout the struggle instead of taking refuge in a nearby square. Captain Mercer had so little confidence in the young German recruits formed up in the squares closest to him (“the young sourkrout-squares”) that he decided not to send his gunners to shelter in their midst. “To have sought refuge amongst men in such a state were madness—the very moment our men ran from their guns, I was convinced, would be the signal for their disbanding.” Had Mercer’s battery been posted on the forward slope, such a decision would have been impossible; but his guns were farther back, right in line with the squares, and protected by the high bank of the sunken road. The captain ordered his men to prime their pieces with double loads of shot and grapeshot, and they repulsed several charges of the Imperial Guard’s grenadiers à cheval; eventually, there were so many dead horses in front of Mercer’s guns that the enemy cavalry, even if they still wanted to, could no longer reach his position.
In two hours of incessant charging, the French cavalry regiments lost so many men and horses that their value as a striking force was gone. The twenty regiments that took part in the charges were led by a total of slightly more than 500 officers; of these, some 50-odd were killed at Waterloo, and about 250 were wounded, including one of two corps commanders, five of six division commanders, ten of twelve brigade commanders, and eleven of twenty colonels. In Napoleon’s cavalry, senior officers commanded from the saddle, led all charges, saber in hand, and paid the same price as their men. To these human losses, which exceeded 50 percent, were added the even greater losses in horses. It seems reasonable, therefore, to conclude that by six in the evening no more than a quarter of the troopers from the Imperial Guard cavalry divisions and from the corps commanded by Milhaud and Kellermann were still mounted on their horses and capable of wielding their sabers—a level of loss that would have destroyed the cohesiveness and morale of any unit whatsoever, including the most battle-hardened, rendering it effectively useless.
Given the final result of the battle, the protracted action against the Allied infantry squares must surely be considered a fatal error that consumed Napoleon’s powerful cavalry without achieving any concrete result. There is no doubt that the emperor had only an imperfect idea of the nature of Wellington’s deployment, and that Marshal Ney and his generals continued to attack without ever questioning whether what they were doing had any genuine probability of success. But the real blunder lay in the failure of the French to engage the Imperial Guard infantry in support of the cavalry. In his memoirs, Napoleon maintained that this was in fact his intention, but that the cavalry attacked too soon, before the infantry could support it. Taking account of the emperor’s habitually guarded and ambiguous language, this statement probably indicates that Napoleon, at the moment when he should have decided to send in his reserves, hesitated and ultimately refrained from doing so. In the culminating stages of the cavalry attacks, Ney sent a message to the emperor, asking for some infantry support, and Napoleon sent back a famous reply: “Infantry! And where do you expect me to find infantry? Do you want me to manufacture some?”
The Middle Guard and the Old Guard were in fact still available to the emperor at that moment; but with the Prussians threatening his flank, the doubts that had thus far stopped him from engaging his reserves had become still more persuasive. He could not have been certain that the forces he had detached to protect his right would be enough to stop the Prussian advance, and Napoleon could not afford to leave himself without reserves to face Bülow’s attack, should the Prussian general’s troops overrun Plancenoit and threaten to cut the main road behind La Belle Alliance. In addition, the Allied garrisons in Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte were still putting up resistance, and the emperor was even less disposed than before to send his last reserves into the abyss between those two strongholds; the capture of one or the other was an indispensable condition for his signaling the final advance. By this time, barely enough fresh troops for one last offensive thrust remained to Napoleon, and he had to make that thrust at the proper moment. On that sweltering afternoon, exhausted like everyone else from the effects of a virtually sleepless night and the enervating tensions of the day, and accustomed to believing that the Old Guard should be engaged only in the final stages of a battle, Napoleon hesitated. In the end he decided to wait, perhaps already feeling the uneasiness, the growing disquiet that would lead him before many days passed to convince himself that the cavalry attacks had been launched too soon, and that it was all Ney’s fault if the premature maneuver had been executed without success.
FIFTY - THREE
THE LAST EFFORT TO TAKE HOUGOUMONT
Though the multiple charges of the French cavalry failed to accomplish their goal of achieving a breakthrough in the center of the Allied line, they had a further purpose, which has not always received sufficient emphasis. The charges were also intended to maintain the pressure that the infantry troops of Reille and d’Erlon were putting on Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. To Napoleon, this pressure was destined, sooner or later, to provide the turning point in the battle by opening up enough space for him to launch his final attack. The cavalry therefore made a significant contribution to the emperor’s purpose, not only by nailing the entirety of Wellington’s troops to their positions and preventing any movement of his reserves, but also by coordinating their own action with the infantry’s, both in the area of Hougoumont, where the French offensive was ultimately defeated, and at La Haye Sainte, where, around six o’clock in the evening, it finally attained success.
The attack against Hougoumont had been sustained by the tirailleurs of Prince Jérome’s division, and then by those of General Foy, all afternoon long. These two commanders have been accused of prolonging a hopeless a
ttack, thus wasting their troops without any positive result, and of acting without specific orders. In reality, Napoleon could see perfectly well what was happening at Hougoumont, just as Foy, with the aid of a spyglass, could see him so clearly that he could distinguish his every gesture. (“I saw him walking back and forth, wearing his gray overcoat, and often bending down to the little table where the map was spread out.”) The prosecution of the assault on Hougoumont was an integral part of Napoleon’s strategy, and that afternoon the emperor in person sent a specific order to the generals charged with conducting the attacks: Even if they had not yet used their artillery against the château because it was almost invisible amid the thick vegetation, they were to assemble their howitzers and fire incendiary shells at the buildings so as to set them on fire.
Having received the emperor’s order, Reille transmitted it to his battery commanders, who opened fire on the château with such precision that a fire began to burn inside Hougoumont almost immediately, starting first in a pile of straw in the yard, then spreading to the barn roof and from there to the roof of the main house. The garrison had to detach more and more men in an attempt to contain the blaze and save the wounded; a number, however, were burned alive, along with the officers’ horses, which were being kept in the barn. Seeing the flames rising from the château, Wellington hurriedly wrote an order to the commanding officer of the garrison, whose name he did not know, notifying him that he had to hold his position at whatever cost; he was to evacuate burning structures, but as soon as their roofs fell in, his men were to reoccupy the ruins. Little by little, the soldiers abandoned the most threatened buildings, returning as soon as the fire finished consuming them; within a short time, almost the whole château was reduced to a charred ruin, above which hung an immense cloud of black smoke. Only the chapel was spared by the blaze, a fact that did not fail to impress the soldiers, since it seemed that the crucifix hanging above the entrance had kept the flames at bay.
The Battle Page 28
