A little farther on, the uhlans reached the last carriages in the imperial train; they had been abandoned by Marchand and left in the middle of the road, each of them with a team of six or eight horses still in harness, but apart from the animals there was no living creature in sight. In these vehicles, too, were hidden bags of precious stones, which Napoleon always carried with him as a reserve of liquid assets in case of an emergency—a policy more befitting an adventurer than an emperor. As their officers were urging them forward, the uhlans hastily filled their pockets with whatever they found and rode on; the fusiliers of the Fifteenth arrived after them and seized the lion’s share of the booty. The next day, one of their officers wrote, there were fusiliers selling diamonds as big as peas for a few francs. The rumor that Napoleon’s carriages were full of precious gems spread like lightning. The next morning, a British officer passing by the remains of the carriages met several Prussian soldiers digging and sifting the earth around them, looking for fallen valuables.
At Genappe the retreat of the French army was definitively transformed into a rout. Colonel Brô, commander of one of the lancer regiments that had wreaked such a terrible revenge on the British cavalry, had suffered a wound in his right arm in the fighting and was so weak from loss of blood that he was obliged to lean on his servant for support. Having heard that all the wounded were to retire to Charleroi, Brô paid the driver of a cabriolet from the baggage train to take him there, but they were unable to get past Genappe, because the road was clogged with artillery wagons. Brô was still there when the fleeing soldiers started to pour into the road, announcing that the battle was lost and the army in retreat. Two riders, passing in great haste, shouted to him that Napoleon had been killed in one of the Guard’s squares; the colonel needed some time to get over this tremendous news and start thinking about saving his own skin. Around him, the fugitives, maddened by fear, were killing one another in order to make way faster; General Radet, who was trying to maintain order, was pulled down from his horse and clubbed half to death with musket butts.
Major Trefcon, suffering from heavy bruises and a sprained wrist, had dragged himself toward the rear in search of an ambulance, and soon he too was on the road to Genappe, in the midst of a growing throng of fugitives. “I met an old cuirassier squadron commander, whom I had known in Spain in former days,” Trefcon later wrote. “He, too, was wounded and looking for the ambulances. When he came up to me, he said, ‘My poor colonel, we are most unfortunate. The battle is lost.’ I was furious, and I believe I answered him rudely. The squadron commander said no more, but sadly hung his head, as though dazed. I felt sorry for him.” Before long, however, Trefcon had to admit that his old comrade-in-arms was right; the fleeing soldiers were so numerous and so desperate that the day could not but be lost. Jostled about in the crowd and weakened by his injuries, the major decided to leave the road and seek a way to escape through the countryside; there, by good fortune, he was able to stop an abandoned horse, mount it, and head for the border.
In a house in Genappe, Chef de Bataillon Jolyet, who had suffered a stomach wound at Hougoumont, lay stretched out on a bed of straw after having comforted himself with a little bread and a glass of beer. He was thinking that perhaps the army would halt there and give battle again tomorrow, when he heard the bugles of the Prussian cavalry, which was galloping through the streets of the village. “Pauvre France! Pauvre armée!” he murmured, and so did the others there with him; however, they blew out the candle and locked the door, hoping they might be spared. The next morning, a Prussian officer knocked on the door and compelled them to open it; then he confiscated watches, money, and even the officers’ epaulets, acting as if they were lucky he was not taking their lives. Jolyet, who had hidden part of his money in his socks, was searched by several soldiers, and one of them was on the point of stripping off his boots, but his own comrades made him desist. Nevertheless, Jolyet later recalled, “They took my braces, my cravat, my belt, and my shirt, but they magnanimously left me my overcoat and my trousers.”
As soon as they got past Genappe, General von Gneisenau gathered the fusiliers around him and commanded them to sing the hymn “Herr Gott, Dich loben wir” (“Lord God, We Praise Thee”); then, in the thick darkness, he gave the order to continue the pursuit. Not far ahead of him, Marchand had almost reached Quatre Bras with his remaining carriages when he discovered that a cannon bogged down in the middle of the road made it impossible for him and his party to proceed. At that moment, Prussian cavalry caught up with the rearmost carriages and began to plunder them. Marchand opened the nécessaire, slipped the banknotes inside his shirt, and took to his heels, abandoning the rest. All the carriages fell into the hands of the Prussians, and thousands of louis d’or disappeared into the soldiers’ pockets before the officers were able to establish a modicum of order and post sentinels. The vehicles belonging to the general staff and the marshals’ personal carriages were also captured in that stretch of road, but Gneisenau kept pushing on with his remaining men, who were drunk with fatigue and weighed down by gold. “In the end,” Clausewitz wrote, “the force accompanying General Gneisenau in his tireless advance was really nothing more than a fusilier battalion and its indefatigable drummer-boy, who by the general’s order had been set upon one of Bonaparte’s carriage-horses.”
Napoleon himself continued his flight on horseback, the former colossus of Europe scampering away from the battlefield, in the midst of a crowd of his routed soldiers and accompanied by a few aides-de-camp. General Durutte met him at Gosselies, well past Quatre Bras, on the road to Charleroi. Despite his frightful wounds, Durutte was still alive. He had been assisted by a cavalry trooper, who had bound up his wounded arm with a handkerchief and stopped the loss of blood, and then he had come upon one of his staff officers and one of his servants, who had accompanied him as he fled through the fields. Whenever he felt himself fainting, the general summoned his servant, who held him up by his collar and revived him with a swallow of brandy. At Gosselies, Durutte recognized the emperor and tried to present himself to him, wishing to explain that in his present condition he was afraid he would be unable to continue fighting. But Napoleon, “irritated at having been recognized, or absorbed in his own reflections,” did not even deign to respond to the general. It was left to one of his aides to exclaim, “Oh, General, look what they’ve done to you!”
In the last hours before dawn, the crowd of fugitives reached Charleroi, where a single bridge allowed them to cross the River Sambre and reenter France. The few remaining wagons were abandoned in the narrow streets that led down to this bridge. Sacks of flour and rice were scattered everywhere, along with bottles of wine and brandy and hundreds of loaves of bread, which the fleeing soldiers stopped to skewer on their bayonets before continuing on their way. Peyrusse, the official paymaster of the Armée du Nord, reached the banks of the Sambre with a wagon drawn by six horses and containing the emperor’s personal treasury, a million francs in gold, only to discover that it was impossible for his vehicle to pass over the bridge. Peyrusse distributed bags of gold coins to the men of his escort, noting down all their names and making them swear to rejoin him on the other side of the river. As this process was going on, shots were fired a short distance away, and someone cried out, “The Prussians! Save yourselves!” In the general panic, Peyrusse’s men were scattered, and all the gold was plundered. While the first Prussian uhlans were entering Charleroi, Napoleon’s foreign minister, Maret, Duc de Bassano, who was in one of the carriages stuck in the bottleneck, ordered his men to shred all the official documents in his possession and throw the scraps on the muddy road.
In partial contrast to these images of disintegration stands the fact that most of the French combat units managed to maintain a modicum of cohesion and reach safety more or less intact. During the entire pursuit, the Prussians failed to capture even one Eagle, a sign that, at least as far as its regimental standards were concerned, Napoleon’s army did not in fact disintegrate. Moreover, the French b
rought along on their retreat a large number of Allied prisoners, who were not set free until many days or even weeks later. One of them, Lieutenant Wheatley, had to traverse the battlefield at Quatre Bras on the arduous march to France. Naked, unburied corpses were lying everywhere, so thick on the ground that it was impossible not to tread on them in the dark. His boots having been stolen, Wheatley was barefoot, and he later confessed with some embarrassment that walking on dead flesh already trampled into pulp had been a pleasant sensation compared to the torture of the pavé.
SIXTY - SEVEN
NIGHT ON THE BATTLEFIELD
On the battlefield, officers and soldiers of the victorious army tried to cook themselves something to eat before they sank into sleep. Some lucky ones had enough alcohol left to celebrate their safe passage through great danger. When the survivors of the Seventy-third assembled for roll call, Private Morris found his old friend, Sergeant Burton, standing before him. Burton gave him a clap on the back and said, “Out with the grog, Tom. Didn’t I tell you there was no shot made for you or me?” Captain Walcott of the horse artillery, charged with visiting all the batteries in order to draw up a list of the dead and wounded, spent a large part of the night roaming the battlefield on a weary horse requisitioned from a soldier; at two-thirty in the morning, when he made his report, Walcott was dead tired, but above all he was full of the brandy with which battery commanders and Prussian officers had abundantly refreshed him.
The distribution of any rations whatsoever was out of the question, and everyone had to make do as best he could. Sergeant Lawrence was given the task of turning up some forage for General Sir John Lambert’s horse and eventually found a full feed sack that had been abandoned by the French. To his delight, he discovered that the sack contained, along with forage for the horse, a ham and two chickens. Sir John allowed him to keep the food for himself, but he warned Lawrence to keep it well away from the Prussians, “who were a slippery set of men and very likely to steal it if they saw it.” Lawrence was in the act of cooking the ham when a crowd of these Prussians passed nearby, and two of them approached him to light their pipes at his fire. The two noticed the ham and casually observed that it looked good. Sergeant Lawrence immediately drew his sword and cut each of them a slice of ham, after which he had the satisfaction of seeing them take their leave without asking for any more. With a full stomach, Lawrence tried to sleep, but he was too worked up and in too much pain to succeed; a shell fragment had flayed his cheek, and the comrade standing directly behind him during the battle had handled his musket badly and scorched the sergeant’s face.
Many others did not have enough strength left even to eat, to say nothing of cooking, as was the case with an officer in Picton’s division, who fell asleep the very moment after the signal was given to break ranks. When he awoke in the middle of the night, his men were cooking cutlets, using the cuirass of a dead cuirassier as a skillet, and the officer realized he was hungry. He shared in the meal and later remarked that the French breastplates made excellent cooking utensils, but that it was necessary to use those without bullet holes; otherwise, the juices would leak out. Perhaps more wisely, the gunners in Mercer’s battery preferred to use cuirasses to sit on. When they found, in a ditch, a piece of meat—tossed there who knew when—they trimmed it with their swords and fried it in a standard-issue frying pan, over a fire made of lance staffs and musket butts; then they gathered a large number of cuirasses around the fire and sat down to eat together.
In conditions such as these, no one felt fastidious. The Fifty-first bivouacked for the night in the orchard at Hougoumont. “This place was full of dead and wounded Frenchmen,” Sergeant Wheeler remembered. “I went to the farm house, what a sight. Inside the yard the Guards lay in heaps, many who had been wounded inside or near the building were roasted, some who had endeavoured to crawl out from the fire lay dead with their legs burnt to a cinder.” Amid all this horror, a lieutenant of the regiment found a loaf of black bread in the haversack of a dead French soldier; an officer of the Foot Guards, likewise dead, lay beside him, and brain matter had oozed from this man’s head, soaking the Frenchman’s haversack and, therefore, his loaf of bread as well. The lieutenant cleaned it carefully before consuming it. He had not had a bite to eat since the dawn of the previous day, and he was famished.
Ensign Keowan of the Fourteenth was unable to find his servant, who had gone off in search of plunder. Left alone and obliged to shift for himself, Keowan joined forces with another officer; together, they managed to get their hands on a piece of cooked meat, a former part of some unknown animal, and washed it down with a little bloodstained water: “Such was the wine we drank at our cannibal feast.” Then the two prepared a bed of straw, in order that they “should not be taken for dead by plunderers,” and lay down to sleep. Even so young an officer as Keowan knew that at that moment the battlefield was filled with soldiers rifling the pockets of the dead—and the wounded, too—and that such men would not hesitate to finish off their defenseless victims in the darkness to put a stop to their complaints. Covering himself with a bloody overcoat taken from the corpse of a French dragoon, Keowan found it hard to fall asleep, as did his comrade, because of “the shrieks of the dying and the agitation of our minds.” When sleep finally came, it brought him nothing but visions of the most nerve-racking moments of the fighting.
Staff officers found better accommodation; Lieutenant Jackson, for example, went to dine in the Waterloo inn. The room was full of hungry foreign officers engaged in a lively discussion of the day’s events. Fortunately for Jackson, a colleague had reserved a table, and the two sat down to a steaming ragout. “I had not tasted food since early morning,” Jackson later recalled, “and before we sat down fancied myself hungry, but not a morsel could I swallow.” His fellow officer was in the same condition, but a staff officer in the Netherlands army asked permission to sit at their table and devoured everything by himself, without interrupting for an instant the narrative of his personal impressions of the battle. Overcome by fatigue, Jackson asked for a room; the host offered him the one reserved for Sir William De Lancey, who was then in the hospital. Jackson wearily climbed the stairs, but upon entering the room he was greeted by a groan. Lifting the candle, he saw a French officer lying on the bed, his uniform and boots still on, his head split open by a saber blow, and blood everywhere.
The man told Jackson that he had been taken prisoner early in the battle and asked how it had ended; when he learned of the French defeat, he gnashed his teeth and said that death would be preferable. Then, thinking better of the matter, he went on to say that the French had had their moment of glory, and that it was useless to struggle against destiny. Jackson left him alone, went to the common room, wrapped himself in a blanket, and lay down on the floor. But it was very difficult for him to fall asleep, because the room was still full of foreign officers eating, drinking, and conducting loud discussions. Finally, the lieutenant dozed off and had a terrifying nightmare in which he and the entire British army were running away from the battlefield at breakneck speed, closely pursued by the Imperial Guard, and the wounded French officer threatened him with his saber, accusing Jackson of having lied to him.
Many soldiers had more pressing things to do than sleep. The search for plunder never justified absence without leave, but after such a day, officers were inclined to close one eye. Lieutenant Hay of the Twelfth Light Dragoons sent two of his troopers on patrol and was not surprised when they failed to return, for they were, he said, “two Irish lads, sharp, active, brave soldiers to a fault, but both great scamps and up to any lark, no such words as fear or danger were in their dictionary.” When the two later reappeared, they brought with them three French prisoners, whom they had caught in the act of plundering a farm. A fourth Frenchman, a companion of the other three, had fallen to the dragoons’ sabers. The indulgent Hay asked no further questions. Some scavengers felt more scruples than others, as is evidenced by the story of a group of troopers from the Eleventh Light Drago
ons. These men had dismounted from their horses in search of booty, and while they walked around among the corpses, their spurs kept catching in the clothing of the dead, sometimes becoming so entangled that they tripped and fell sprawling on the mangled bodies. Their corporal, Farmer, confessed that the experience was horrifying; but there was, he said, nothing to be done: “It would be ridiculous to conceal that when the bloody work of the day is over, the survivor’s first wish is to secure, in the shape of plunder, some recompense for the risks which he has run and the exertions he has made.”
Only rarely did the plunderers concern themselves with assisting the wounded; on the contrary, there was an excellent chance that these, too, would be robbed, if not worse. A wounded British officer regained consciousness in the dark and found himself unable to move; a dead French soldier was lying on top of him, his face disfigured by a dreadful saber wound. The officer held his breath and tried to make no sound while a Prussian soldier searched another British officer lying, still alive, a short distance away; when this other officer resisted the search, the Prussian stabbed him to death. As the villain was about to turn his attention to the first wounded officer, two British soldiers, a private and a sergeant, appeared on the scene. The wounded officer called to them, and the two helped get him out from under the corpse, stood him on his feet, and gave him a mouthful of brandy. When they started to take their leave, the officer told them that he was afraid the Prussian—who was hiding behind a dead horse—would kill him. The sergeant quickly flushed the Prussian out of his hiding place and cut him down, and the private gave the officer a loaded musket for his protection, saying they could not stay with him because they had left their regiment to do a little plundering and could not run the risk of being discovered. “We fought hard enough to allow us a right to share what no one claims, before the Flemish clowns come here by cock-crow.”
The Battle Page 38
