The Battle
Page 37
Colonel Halkett, who during the course of this brief combat had three horses killed under him, saved the situation by cheering his men and urging them on; the French lost heart when they saw the enemy advancing upon them with leveled bayonets. Richers continued: “They stood for a moment longer, then wavered, turned around and retired a short distance in relatively good order. Their formation then started to break up and finally they fled in total disorder. It seemed as if we were fresher than the tired-out Old Guard because we got closer and closer to them, taking many prisoners from those who could run no further. The wild chase continued forwards towards the enemy. Both sides fired only as much as they could when running. The enemy officers did attempt to rally their men, waving their swords and shouting ‘en avant!’ However, that was in vain for when an officer managed to gather a few men around him, our pursuit chased them away again.”
The most famous of the prisoners captured on this occasion was General Cambronne, commander of the 2/1st Chasseurs, the same man who had disembarked near Antibes a little more than three months earlier at the head of the thousand grenadiers accompanying the emperor on his flight from Elba. According to the account that appeared in a Paris newspaper a few days after the battle, Cambronne was the French commander who declared, “The Old Guard dies, but it does not surrender!” when summoned to lay down his arms. Much more probably, as his troops were beginning to disband, the exclamation he uttered was “Merde!” The general and two of his aides had been riding back and forth outside their square, encouraging the troops; noticing this, Colonel Hew Halkett had called on him to surrender, thereby occasioning his gracious reply. The Hanoverian skirmishers quickly noticed the general’s exposure and started firing at the three French officers. Soon Cambronne’s horse was hit and fell, dragging down his rider. “I ordered the sharpshooters to dash on,” Halkett wrote, “and I made a gallop for the General. When about cutting him down he called out he would surrender, upon which he preceded me to the rear, but I had not gone many paces before my horse got a shot through the body and fell to the ground. In a few seconds I got him on his legs again, and found my friend, Cambronne, had taken French leave in the direction from where he came. I instantly overtook him, laid hold of him by the aiguillette, and brought him in safety and gave him in charge to a sergeant to deliver to the Duke.” The colonel did not yet know who his prisoner was and asked him his name in the midst of a crowd of German officers, who had gathered around out of curiosity. The prisoner was wounded, and his face was covered with blood; he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “Je suis le général Cambronne.”
SIXTY - FIVE
THE MEETING AT LA BELLE ALLIANCE
While the British advance was pushing the enemy back, the attacking Prussians finally got the better of the obstinate French defenders, both at Papelotte, where Durutte’s men, reduced to a few hundred muskets, heard the musket fire coming closer on their flank and almost in their rear and yielded all at once to Ziethen’s pressure, and at Plancenoit, where the fresh troops brought into line by Pirch at last overcame the resistance of the Imperial Guard. The attack was primarily led by the Twenty-fifth Infantry, which had been formed on the basis of the Freikorps led by the famous partisan commander, General von Lützow, and still wore its black uniform. Plancenoit church was burning and tongues of flame were darting out of almost all the houses in the village; yet a furious barrage of musketry was still coming from the walls of the cemetery, preventing the Prussians from advancing beyond the village square, which was already filled with heaps of corpses. The only way to dislodge the defenders was to outflank them, so Major von Witzleben led the Twenty-fifth’s Fusilier battalion through the woods south of the village and burst in among the houses behind the French. The men of the Guard stubbornly defended every house, every hedge, every stone wall, but the Prussian skirmishers, vastly superior in numbers, continued to gain ground. Realizing that they were in danger of being caught in a pincer, the French abandoned the defense of the village and began an increasingly hasty retreat in the direction of Le Caillou, leaving behind the artillery’s wagons and guns. Until they reached the main road, the French battalions maintained a certain order, repeatedly forming square to fight off Prussian cavalry; but once they were on the pavé, all semblance of order disappeared, and the stampede became general.
At La Belle Alliance, Marshal Soult met General Radet, commander of the military police, and ordered him to gather all the cavalry who were without mounts and arm them with muskets. Radet set about his appointed task, assisted by his aides-de-camp and a handful of gendarmes; they collected muskets from the battlefield, armed all the dismounted cuirassiers they could find, and combined them with infantry stragglers to form a unit. When the Prussians approached from Plancenoit, preceded by a chain of skirmishers, Radet deployed his heterogeneous forces and held off the enemy for a while to the sound of a drum that was beating the charge; meanwhile, he saw to securing the carriages belonging to the emperor and Marshal Soult, whose drivers had already started to unharness the horses and slink away. Then, as the dusk began to deepen, everyone’s attention turned to escaping the present predicament: The inn from which Napoleon had directed the battle for a considerable part of the day was the point toward which Pirch’s and Bülow’s infantry from Plancenoit, Ziethen’s from Papelotte, and Adam’s and Hew Halkett’s from Hougoumont were all converging.
By this point, it was nearly dark, and the only formation in all of Napoleon’s army still capable of putting up a fight was the Old Guard’s First Grenadiers à pied, commanded by General Petit. This regiment, the best of the best, comprised two battalions, about a thousand men in all, nearly half of them decorated with the Legion of Honor. Held in reserve near La Belle Alliance, these troops had not participated in the offensive and were retiring in good order, formed in square, and stopping every few paces to dress their ranks and fire a volley. Not only did their fire hold off their pursuers, it also kept at a distance the crowd of routed French soldiers who wanted to take refuge in the squares and who would certainly have determined their undoing. “We fired at all who presented themselves,” General Petit confessed, “both friends and foes, for fear of letting in the ones with the others.”
Not long before, Napoleon himself had been under the protection of one of these squares, but he was by then already galloping toward Le Caillou, from where he would depart immediately for France, escorted by a battalion of the Old Guard—the 1/1st Chasseurs—who had spent the entire day guarding the emperor’s baggage and the imperial treasury.
Shortly after crossing the road near La Belle Alliance, Major Blair, Adam’s brigade major, met the first Prussians. There were no more French in the area, and the British officers were busy chalking the numbers of their regiments on abandoned enemy guns so they could later claim them as their rightful booty. Hew Halkett maintained that he and his brigade had captured a dozen guns of the Imperial Guard but left them where they were in order to continue the pursuit of the enemy; the next day, to his great irritation, he found those guns marked with the numbers of the Fifty-second and Seventy-first Regiments. The Eighteenth Hussars, still led by Sir Hussey Vivian in person, also met the Prussians near the road. In their enthusiasm, Vivian’s riders mistook the Prussians for French and cut down quite a few with their sabers. Night was falling fast, and in the thickening darkness British and Prussian troops fired on one another practically every time they met, causing a great many “friendly fire” casualties. Wellington himself noticed a Prussian battery that was firing on Adam’s men and had to ask the Conte di Sales to gallop over to the battery and apprise the gunners of their mistake. Fortunately, when di Sales reached the guns, he found someone who spoke French, and he was able to have the bombardment stopped.
In some cases, the officers involved in such incidents adopted a philosophical attitude toward them. For example, Lieutenant Ingilby of the horse artillery, whose battery came under fire from the Prussians just when the lieutenant’s men were harnessing the ho
rses in order to join the pursuit, calmly suggested, “As the Prussians had never probably seen British troops before, it was not extraordinary that they should take us to be the Enemy in the pêle-mêle sort of confusion that was presented to their view at first coming up.” Others, however, reacted less sportingly. When a Prussian battery took up a position a few hundred yards away and started firing on Captain Mercer’s battery, he at once gave the order to return fire; soon a German officer came galloping up in great distress and remonstrated with the captain: “Dat is your friends de Proosians.” Mercer replied that whoever fired on him was his enemy and continued to fire back, undeterred. The German officer took his leave after a cannonball nearly killed him, and the bombardment kept smashing up vehicles, men, and horses on both sides until a Belgian battery went into position nearby. Mercer managed to persuade them to fire on the Prussians rather than on him, and shortly thereafter the Belgians and Prussians ceased firing on one another and moved on.
After nine o’clock, not far from La Belle Alliance, the famous meeting between Wellington and Blücher took place. Probably influenced by the inn’s prophetic name, the iconography of the battle has always represented this encounter as occurring right in front of the building itself. Although both men were on horseback, the Prussian commander managed to lean out of his saddle and embrace and kiss Wellington, to the latter’s no little dismay, unaccustomed as he was to continental effusiveness. “Mein lieber Kamerad! Quelle affaire!” the old man stammered. Later, Wellington would maliciously comment on the scene: “That was about all the French he knew.” The two commanders decided together that the Prussians alone would continue the pursuit. This decision is usually explained by citing the exhausted condition of Wellington’s troops, but Blücher’s were surely no less tired. More likely the choice reflected the plodding management and slowness of movement that characterized British troops, even when they were commanded by the best of their generals. The enormous number of friendly fire incidents that were occurring wherever the two Allied armies encountered each other also must have made separating them seem like a good idea.
Wellington’s weary foot soldiers prepared to bivouac on the ground they had defended the whole day. But for hours fighting kept flaring up all along the front, so no one could really feel safe. Some officers of Halkett’s brigade were gathered around their provisional commander, Colonel Elphinstone, talking about the course of the day; the happiest of the lot was Major Chambers, who had succeeded by seniority to command of the Thirtieth Regiment and declared that he expected to be promoted immediately to lieutenant colonel. While all the others were agreeing with him and offering their congratulations, a few shots sounded nearby and bullets whistled around them. Lieutenant Pattison said that he would go and see what was happening, saluted his friends, and advanced several paces before he spotted some isolated French soldiers who stubbornly kept firing at him and his comrades. When a ball hissed past him, Pattison instinctively turned around and saw Major Chambers put a hand to his chest and move away from the group in search of a clean place where he might lie down; “in five minutes he was a lifeless corpse.”
Even in the rear, where small units of cavalry and militia were guarding large numbers of French prisoners, the tension of the battle was far from diminishing. The British or German cavalry troops could not afford to use good manners as they lined up the prisoners and drove them along the Brussels road, and more than one of the conquerors took advantage of the occasion to mistreat the French and mock their defeat. One or two writers remembered feeling nothing more than pity for those exhausted, ragged, sodden, mud-covered men, many of them disfigured by frightful wounds. But in some cases the prisoners, including those who were wounded, were so hostile and uncooperative that they could be made to march only under threat of arms. A British officer remarked that it would not have been wise to draw near to them without a loaded pistol or at least an unsheathed sword in one’s hand. The next day, in the Brussels hospital, Captain Bridges of the Royal Engineers personally saw and heard wounded French soldiers crying out “Vive l’Empereur” as surgeons sawed off their arms and legs.
SIXTY - SIX
THE PRUSSIAN PURSUIT
At Le Caillou, a little more than a mile from La Belle Alliance, Marchand, Napoleon’s valet, listened with mounting uneasiness as the musket fire drew closer. Acting on his own initiative, he had the emperor’s camp bed packed up and loaded on a mule; then he locked the great imperial nécessaire—which contained, among other things, 100,000 francs in gold and 300,000 in banknotes—and loaded it on his own carriage. For the past few hours, a stream of wounded and fugitive soldiers had been steadily returning along the main road toward France; when this stream turned into a flood, Marchand, without asking for authorization from anyone, ordered the large convoy of vehicles that constituted the imperial baggage train to leave Le Caillou. But the road was thronged with wagons, and everything was moving at a slow walk. Before long, Napoleon himself, who was riding on the road accompanied by the 1/1st Chasseurs, caught up with the convoy. Overcome with weariness, he gave orders to keep heading for France and climbed into his campaign coach. A few minutes later, the Prussians reached Le Caillou, where they set fire to the farm and its adjacent barns, burning alive all the wounded French soldiers who had been brought into those buildings.
The Prussians carried out the pursuit of the defeated enemy in a paroxysm of ferocity, the result of the tension accumulated in the fighting without quarter that had raged in the streets of Plancenoit, but also of the fanatical anti-French propaganda that had been fed to Blücher’s troops. Lieutenant Jackson of Wellington’s staff found himself in the midst of the Prussians between La Belle Alliance and Rossomme and was genuinely afraid that they were going to fire on him, so great was their excitement; everywhere around him, they were bayoneting wounded French soldiers to death. Later, the lieutenant came across a group of Prussian infantry who were debating whether or not to kill a wounded cavalryman; drawing near, Jackson saw that the injured soldier was a British light dragoon and began shouting, “Er ist ein Engländer!” until the Prussians went away. By this point, Lieutenant Jackson had had enough of these loyal allies: “I got clear of the Prussians as soon as I could, and was glad to find myself with a whole skin among the 52nd.”
Dr. Larrey, chief surgeon of the Imperial Guard and inventor of the ambulance, tried to escape amid throngs of Prussian cavalry; he had already suffered two saber wounds when an uhlan struck him down with his lance. Having dismounted to rob him, the uhlan realized that Larrey was not dead, whereupon he took everything of value that he could find on the doctor, tied his hands behind his back, and brought his bleeding prisoner to his general. According to Larrey, his squat frame and gray redingote deceived the uhlan, who was convinced that he had captured Napoleon himself. The Prussian general immediately saw the mistake and coldly gave orders for the prisoner to be shot. Larrey was standing in front of the firing squad when a Prussian surgeon who had worked with him in Berlin recognized him and managed to save his life.
The effectiveness of the Prussian pursuit, which enormously increased the victors’ booty and contributed decisively to breaking the morale of Napoleon’s army, is all the more noteworthy because the Prussians, no less exhausted than the British, had available very few troops still capable of marching. Gneisenau placed himself at the head of the vanguard and urged on his exhausted men all night long. According to Clausewitz, Gneisenau “had the drum beat incessantly, intending by this sign of his troops’ approach to strike terror into the hearts of the fleeing enemy on all sides, to frighten him out of his resting places, and to keep him in continuous flight.” With the Prussian drum hard on their heels, the French kept fleeing until dawn, abandoning guns and baggage every time the road became difficult. It was in the course of this pursuit and not in the battle proper that Napoleon’s army was deprived of almost all its cannon, a loss that transformed the defeat into a disaster. “It was the finest night of my life,” Gneisenau later wrote.