The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  After the rout of d’Erlon’s corps, the men in Kempt’s and Pack’s brigades had remained unoccupied for some time, and many of them left the line with impunity and busied themselves with “rifling the pockets of the dead, and perhaps the wounded,” as a British officer remarked. At least one colonel, troubled by such a breakdown in discipline, had to resort to the flat of his sword to persuade his recalcitrant men to return to their posts. The same officers—at least those who knew French—began to read the letters they found in the knapsacks of their dead enemies. Contrary to their expectations, the British officers found that these letters “developed a great deal of proper and good feeling, and were, upon the whole, not only interesting, but argued an advanced state of morality and education which quite surprised us.” A few officers even conversed with the French wounded who had been left lying on the ground in enemy territory; some of them “had just been liberated from our prison-ships by the closing of the war in 1814. They were exceedingly cautious in disclosing their sentiments on the state of affairs, not knowing how the day might end.”

  This interlude, however, did not last long, and soon Kempt’s and Pack’s troops were obliged to deal with the pressure exerted by a growing number of skirmishers advancing into no-man’s-land, while on the low ground at the bottom of the slope the divisions of Quiot and Marcognet once more deployed into attack formation. Farther to the left, Donzelot’s division, in spite of the losses it had suffered, still had enough tirailleurs inside the enclosure of La Haye Sainte to support the offensive with its fire. Finally, while one brigade of Durutte’s division was engaged to the limit in the struggle for Papelotte, the other, commanded by Pégot, was almost intact, and the emperor ordered it to move up alongside La Haye Sainte in order to take part in the coming attack.

  All along the front, from Hougoumont to Papelotte, swarms of tirailleurs went forward one more time, no longer bent only on engaging the enemy skirmishers and defending their own positions, but once again trying to drive off their adversaries and clear the way for the attack columns. All the artillery batteries that still had some ammunition in their caissons kept up their fire on the ridge as long as they could, and all the infantry battalions formed up shoulder to shoulder behind their officers and prepared to advance against the enemy positions. Given the situation, the number of men who participated in the final offensive is impossible to calculate, because virtually all the men in I and II Corps who were still capable of holding a musket were required to take part.

  Yet no offensive could have succeeded with only such worn-down troops as these. After taking fire for several hours, even units that had suffered a limited number of casualties and continued to maintain a perfectly ordered appearance would have experienced a significant loss in morale. These troops had few cartridges remaining in their pouches, and little would have been required—a shell exploding in their midst, a cry of panic coming from who knew where, the impression that other units were retreating—to stop their reluctant advance in its tracks, despite all the exhortations of their officers, and to cause the men to start disbanding and turning back.

  Only with fresh reserves, therefore, could an offensive be carried out successfully; for this reason, the last attack ordered by Napoleon in the evening of the Battle of Waterloo is known as the attack of the Imperial Guard. The emperor knew he could achieve the decisive breakthrough he had sought from the beginning only by sending in those Guard battalions that constituted the last fresh reserves available to him. With this in mind, clearly the Prussian advance on Plancenoit, despite being stalled, made a decisive contribution to reducing the probabilities of a Napoleonic victory. That morning, the emperor, envisioning a breakthrough, had kept at his disposal a strategic reserve of thirty-seven battalions; by evening, twenty-five of them were engaged in the combat with the Prussians and one was left behind at Le Caillou. Napoleon had eleven remaining battalions, and of these, six were Middle Guard and five Old Guard, a total of some six thousand men, all veterans. Half an hour earlier, a little more than a thousand of their comrades had driven the Prussians out of Plancenoit. Napoleon aimed his remaining forces at Wellington’s center.

  Not long before, the men of the Imperial Guard had remained at their leisure on both sides of the Brussels road, waiting for their moment to come, as it had in so many other battles, most recently the one at Ligny two days before. They had not been completely out of danger, because there was no place on the battlefield where a cannonball did not arrive from time to time, and a man could be cut down while peacefully sitting on his knapsack and smoking his pipe. In the early afternoon, shortly after the grenadiers of the Old Guard had taken up their positions, a ball had killed one of their vivandières, a woman from Elba named Maria, who had taken up with a Guard veteran on the island and wished to accompany him in his new adventure. Despite such risks, there had nevertheless been precious little for the men of the Guard to do all afternoon; they had even had time to dig a grave for Maria, bury her, and mark the spot with a wooden cross and a nailed-on epitaph. By evening, their hour had come.

  FIFTY - NINE

  “VOILÀ GROUCHY!”

  Accompanied by Napoleon himself, and stepping to the exuberant beating of drums, the Imperial Guard marched up the cobblestone road almost as far as La Haye Sainte and then spread out to the left, moving across the plateau between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont. To the right, d’Erlon’s infantry also began to march, preceded by a long line of tirailleurs. The sound of musketry and cannon fire coming from the area around Papelotte had intensified in recent minutes, and d’Erlon’s men looked nervously to their right, trying to understand what was happening over there. Discerning that the arrival of the Prussians might cause panic to spread among his troops, Napoleon made a deliberate decision to deceive them: His aides-de-camp were ordered to ride up and down the line, spreading the news that the infantry masses arriving on the battlefield were Grouchy’s troops. One of these aides, General Dejean, galloped up to Marshal Ney, who was overseeing preparations for the attack, and shouted, “Monsieur le Maréchal! Vive l’Empereur! Voilà Grouchy!” Ney immediately commanded one of his adjutants, Colonel Levavasseur, to carry the good news to the troops; the colonel galloped along the line, holding his hat on the point of his saber and crying out, “Vive l’Empereur! Soldats, voilà Grouchy!” Thousands of voices took up his cry.

  Carried along on a surge of enthusiasm, the advance of I Corps once again jolted the infantry of Picton’s and Alten’s decimated divisions. Up to that moment in the skirmishers’ combat, the French had sent in their tirailleurs “in far greater numbers, and consequently doing more execution.” But the Royal Scots officer who was responsible for this account added that the French were better armed and trained, and on the whole much more effective in this type of fighting. “The French soldiers, whipping in the cartridge, give the butt of the piece a jerk or two on the ground, which supersedes the use of the ramrod; and thus they fire twice for our once. I have occasionally seen some of our ‘old hands’ do the same. It was astonishing to find how galling the fire of the enemy proved to be, and how many men we lost.” When the French made their final push, the line of British skirmishers was no longer capable of standing against them. “About this time our ball cartridge was all expended, and no supply being at hand the skirmishers were called in, seeing which, those of the enemy came on in the most daring manner step by step. The ammunition cart was brought as quickly as possible to the height, and the horses being withdrawn, it was left there for us.” But every man sent to the cart for ammunition was killed or wounded; finally, a sergeant heaved a barrel full of cartridges onto his shoulder and ran back down the slope toward his comrades. Although he too was wounded and fell before reaching his goal, he managed to roll the barrel the rest of the way down the slope, and the men of his unit, their ammunition store thus replenished, were able to hold their ground.

  Under fire from tirailleurs perched on the roofs of La Haye Sainte, the riflemen of the 1/95th were forced to take refu
ge in the sunken lane. D’Erlon’s infantry, however, no longer had sufficient force to make a bayonet charge and settled down instead to a prolonged firefight. Captain Leach, who was commanding the Ninety-fifth’s riflemen at this point, related that the entire French line, all along the front of Kempt’s brigade, went down on one knee and kept up an uninterrupted fire. “The distance between the two hostile lines I imagine to have been rather more than one hundred yards,” he wrote. “Several times the French officers made desperate attempts to induce their men to charge Kempt’s line, and I saw more than once parties of the French in our front spring up from their kneeling position and advance some yards towards the thorn hedge, headed by their Officers with vehement gestures, but our fire was so very hot and deadly that they almost instantly ran back behind the crest of the hill, always leaving a great many killed or disabled behind them.”

  In the course of that firefight, the riflemen of the Ninety-fifth began to worry about being flanked on the right, as the advancing French were making steady progress along the cobblestones of the main road. These were the men of Pégot’s brigade, probably the freshest troops in the entire sector; the German soldiers in front of them, the remaining infantrymen of Kielmansegge’s and Ompteda’s brigades, were compelled to give ground and began to disband. After the evacuation of La Haye Sainte, Major von Baring’s men had taken refuge in the sunken lane a few hundred yards from the farm, and they were once again running short of ammunition. As the major rode back and forth behind his troops, trying to keep up their morale, his third horse was suddenly killed, and man and beast crashed to the ground. Baring was stunned by the fall and trapped under the animal’s carcass. His men, believing him to be dead, left him there; sometime later one of them, perhaps with robbery on his mind, approached the major, discovered that he was still alive, and helped him get out from under his horse.

  Still dazed and limping on a heavily bruised leg, Baring dragged himself to the rear, offering gold to anyone who would procure him another mount; but no one paid any attention to his pleas. Finally, a British soldier found a riderless horse and helped the major into the saddle. In great pain, Baring returned to the battle line, where he was informed that Sir Charles Alten had been gravely wounded. To his further consternation, the major noticed that there were but a few men in the positions formerly occupied by Ompteda’s brigade, and when he reached the sunken lane, he found it empty: even his riflemen, having exhausted their ammunition, had fled to the rear. At this point, a solitary French dragoon appeared on the scene, and Baring, trembling with anger and humiliation, had to gallop away in order to avoid capture. One of the officers of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, whose position was in the sunken lane a few dozen yards to the east, suggested to Captain Leach that they should concentrate a part of their force on their extreme right, in order to keep the chaussée under fire. But the captain replied that the Twenty-seventh Regiment, formed up in square near the northeast corner of the crossroads, behind the 1/95th, would have to suffice for their defense on that side, “for the French are gathering so fast and thick in our front that we cannot spare a single man to detach to the right.”

  To support his wavering center, Wellington called back Vivian’s and Vandeleur’s cavalry from their rearward positions on his extreme left; together, the two brigades could still count nearly two thousand sabers. When they arrived behind La Haye Sainte, after having spent a great part of the day in relative calm, the brigades’ officers were so shocked by what they saw that they became convinced that the battle was going very badly for the Allies. Sir Hussey Vivian declared that he had never seen such a sight: the ground literally covered with the dead and dying; cannonballs and shells flying around more thickly than musket balls; and the Allied forces, or at least part of them, in retreat. Colonel Murray, commander of the Eighteenth Hussars, confirmed Vivian’s assessment: “The ground was strewed with wounded, over whom it was barely possible sometimes to avoid moving. Wounded or mutilated horses wandered or turned in circles. The noise was deafening, and the air of ruin and desolation that prevailed wherever the eye could reach gave no inspiration of victory.”

  Fragments from bursting shells and the fire from the tirailleurs’ muskets came thick and fast, and Vivian later lamented, “No words can give any idea of it (how a man escaped is to me a miracle), we every instant expecting through the smoke to see the Enemy appearing under our noses, for the smoke was literally so thick that we could not see ten yards off.” Major Luard of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons corroborated this description: “The fire became every moment hotter, and from the rapid way in which it approached us, appeared as if the Enemy was carrying the hill by which we were partially covered, and I confess I thought at that moment the day was going hard with us, that the Infantry were beaten, and that we (the Cavalry), by desperate charges, were to recover what they had lost.”

  That proved unnecessary, because Sir John Lambert brought the remaining two battalions of his brigade forward and aligned them with the Inniskillings on the other side of the chaussée. Deployed in a two-deep line, Lambert’s men, 1,000–1,200 strong, covered a line more than three hundred yards wide, before which the French advance in the La Haye Sainte sector eventually stalled and turned into a confused, static firefight. Major Browne of the Fortieth saw the French advance as far as the farm and stop, but he was unable to tell whether the enemy troops were a disordered column or a multitude of skirmishers: “I think they had been driven back from their attempt to ascend the hill, partly by our fire, and partly by that of the troops on our right; but the cloud of smoke in which we were almost constantly enveloped prevented me from discovering their object in remaining there thus exposed, which they did in the most dauntless and daring manner; as fast as they fell their places were supplied with fresh troops.” At one point in the fight, the tirailleurs occupying the knoll above the sandpit (“who whilst laying down, appeared to shoot their objects with great precision,” as another officer of the Fortieth noted) tried to advance, but the fire from the British line quickly put an end to this attempt.

  While d’Erlon’s men, from Papelotte to La Haye Sainte, committed themselves to this persistent firefight, Reille’s troops on the other side of the battleground had likewise obeyed orders and undertaken their last assault on Hougoumont. The skirmishers seized the orchard almost immediately, and once again the survivors of the garrison were obliged to barricade themselves inside the walled perimeter of the château. Adam’s brigade, having moved down the slope all the way to the hedgerow enclosing the grounds of the château, came under fire from the tirailleurs in the orchard a short distance away and from artillery that had been brought up to within a few hundred yards. Colborne, the commander of the Fifty-second, saw some of the Hougoumont defenders take to their heels and thought that the château would not resist the French attack this time. Should Hougoumont have fallen, the already weakened position of Adam’s brigade would have become untenable, and the British generals decided the brigade should fall back. Adam withdrew his men to a position behind the ridge, where most cannonballs would fly over their heads, and sent to the rear all the wounded who could walk. This withdrawal left several batteries exposed, which moreover were running short of ammunition, so the gunners spontaneously decided that there was no point in remaining there. They were in the act of abandoning the guns when Sir Augustus Frazer plunged into their midst and energetically persuaded them to return to their posts.

  Shortly thereafter, a French deserter galloped up the slope to warn the British that the Imperial Guard was preparing to attack them. The narratives of this episode differ so widely in detail that they again serve to illustrate the difficulty in trusting eyewitness accounts. According to Colborne, the deserter was a colonel of cuirassiers who approached the ranks of the Fifty-second shouting, “Vive le Roi!” and then personally addressed to him these alarming words: “Ce sacré Napoléon est là avec les Gardes. Voilà l’attaque qui se fait.” According to Major Blair, General Adam’s brigade major, the deserter was a H
ussar officer who approached Blair while he was conversing with Frazer behind the Fifty-second’s lines, and warned him that the Imperial Guard would attack within half an hour; Sir Augustus galloped away to notify the duke, and Blair stayed behind and guarded the prisoner for a while. Then, realizing that the Frenchman’s warning was being verified before his eyes, Blair ordered a sergeant to escort him to the rear. In a letter to his wife, Frazer confirmed having spoken with the man and said he was an officer in the cuirassiers, but confessed that he did not understand whether the officer was a deserter or a prisoner. Frazer asserted that he handed the Frenchman over to Adam, charging him to transmit the information to the duke.32

  Adam’s infantry, deployed in four-deep lines thirty or forty yards behind the crest, could not see what was visible to Blair, who was on horseback at the farther edge, namely the Imperial Guard infantry, immediately recognizable by their enormous bearskins, as they occupied positions all along the relatively level ground between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. Young Ensign Leeke, who bore the colors of the Fifty-second, took advantage of this interval to look about him and analyze his own sensations. There was a strange smell in the air, the smell of ripe, trampled grain, mixed with the odor of gunpowder. All around him were dead or wounded horses, some of them—including the most horrifically mutilated—still trying to eat the crushed wheat and rye. A dead cat triggered a memory of home, and the boy became pensive for a while before he noticed that a cannonball was rolling down the slope, right at him. It reminded him of a cricket ball; “so slowly [did it move] that I was putting out my foot to stop it, when my coulour-sergeant quickly begged me not to do so, and told me it might have seriously injured my foot.” In fact, the ball would probably have taken it off.