In fact the hollow way, the Ohain road, was no ravine, merely an ordinary country lane slightly sunk below the level of the rest of the ground. Captain Becke in 1914 estimated that:
At its deepest part, along Wellington’s battle-line, it was merely an easy in-and-out jump, complicated by neither hedge nor ditch, either on the taking off, or on the landing side. Such an obstacle, crossed under fire, might have overturned a few French cuirassiers as they essayed to scramble across it, it might even have loosened, or even disordered the formation of the advancing squadrons; but it could never have led to a disaster of any importance or magnitude.13
British cavalry brigades, such as Lord Edward Somerset’s, managed to negotiate this so-called ‘Ravine of Death’ without ill-effect, and Shaw Kennedy, who was just above La Haye Sainte, recorded how ‘the ground between them and us [the 3rd Division] presented no natural obstacles whatever’.14 Nor were Ney, Milhaud, Dubois or any of the other generals who led the charge subsequently criticised for launching an attack into an impassable hollow or ravine. In his report to Soult, Milhaud made no mention of the ravine, and we ought to accept it as, in Thomas Carlyle’s words, ‘the largest … piece of blague manufactured for some centuries by any man or nation’. In fact the legend of the chemin creux was simply created out of wounded Bonapartist pride, like so many other ex post facto explanations for the defeat, ranging from Bourmont’s treachery, via the weather, to imperial haemorrhoids. (There is a memorial at Waterloo to Hugo, who argued that Napoleon had been defeated by God, not by the Duke of Wellington.)
By 6.30 p.m. the cavalry charges had ceased. The number of French cavalry losses has not been established. Ney’s error had been to try to squeeze 10,000 cavalrymen with forty horse artillery guns into a narrow space of 1,100 yards to attack over 13,000 infantry in squares who were protected by 7,000 horsemen and seventy-five guns and howitzers. With the very difficult nature of the terrain, sucking large numbers of French cavalry into its folds and dips, in truth there was no need for an Act of God.
During Ney’s cavalry assaults on the British squares, across to the east, the Prussians were advancing in force, and by 5.30 p.m. von Bülow’s front two brigades (the 15th and 16th) were heavily engaged in trying to capture the château of Frischermont from General Lobau, whom Napoleon had ordered to hold up the Prussians for as long as possible while he tried to break Wellington’s line. Von Gneisenau adopted a manoeuvre for arriving on the battlefield that passed the rear corps to the east through the others, which rested by the roadside. This meant that although the advance was slightly slowed when they did hit the battlefield there were no gaps in the Prussian line.
Von Bülow’s entire corps numbered around 30,000 men against 10,000 under Lobau’s command (of whom only 7,000 were infantry), but Lobau was a tough and resourceful general who had proved himself redoubtable in rearguard actions before, notably at the battle of Essling. His infantrymen were the 5th Line Regiment, the same men who were sent to arrest Napoleon near Grenoble when he returned from Elba, but who had acclaimed him instead.
Sheer weight of numbers began to tell, however, as brigade after brigade issued forth out of the Bois de Paris, and Lobau was forced out of Frischermont and back to the village of Plancenoit. Later he was forced out of that too, and his force was particularly vulnerable once it was out in the open, particularly to von Bülow’s plentiful infantry, cavalry and artillery. Seeing the danger of being cut off from his line of retreat, Napoleon ordered Duhesme to recapture Plancenoit with the Young Guard Division, which he managed to do by about 6.45 p.m.
The arrival of the Prussians on the battlefield in large numbers emboldened and encouraged Wellington’s army as much as it demoralised Napoleon’s. When at 4.30 p.m. two Prussian aides de camp passed in front of the British line in search of Wellington they were heartily cheered on their way by the Anglo-Allied soldiers. Fourteen thousand of Napoleon’s reserve had to be drawn off to try to contain the Prussians, severely limiting his options and weakening his assault in the centre. As the two Prussian corps of von Pirch and von Zieten marched in from the east at about 6.30 p.m., Wellington at last saw the prospect of winning the upper hand.
Zieten’s arrival on Wellington’s left flank permitted a useful realignment when the 4th Brigade, commanded by Major-General Sir John Vandeleur (the 11th, 12th and 16th Light Dragoons), and the 6th Brigade under Major-General Sir Hussey Vivian (the 1st Hussars KGL, 10th and 18th Hussars), plus Sir Robert Gardiner’s Horse Artillery Group, moved from the far left of the Anglo-Allied line to the centre, on von Müffling’s advice. Looking through his telescope from his vantage point at Papelotte the Prussian liaison officer had seen both Zieten’s proximity to Wellington’s left and an ominous massing of the French infantry reserve around La Belle Alliance, presaging another huge assault on the Anglo-Allied centre and right-centre.
Vandeleur, Vivian and Gardiner arrived just in time. Captain (later Colonel) Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons recalled how: ‘In passing along the line it appeared to have been much cut up, and the troops, which in part held their position, were but few, and had suffered greatly. From marching under the shelter of the hill we could not distinctly see: yet I conceived from all I could learn that many points in the position were but feebly guarded.’15 Some historians believe that without the moral and material support that Wellington was afforded by this strengthening of his centre, the fourth phase of the battle might have gone badly awry.
Meanwhile, over at Wavre, seven miles to the east of the slopes of Mont St Jean, Lieutenant-General von Thielmann was finding himself hard-pressed by Grouchy’s much larger force. He sent Gneisenau a warning of defeat if he was not sent reinforcements. ‘Let Thielmann defend himself as best he can,’ was Gneisenau’s typically blunt answer to the aide de camp who brought the message. ‘It matters little if he is crushed at Wavre, so long as we gain the victory here.’ Not only was Grouchy’s help far too little far too late, but the Prussian high command was clear-headed enough not to allow it to draw men away from the crucial area of decision — at Waterloo.
For it was there, sometime between 6 and 6.30 p.m., that the French at last won their first concrete success, when, having completely run out of ammunition, Major Georg Baring’s force finally had to evacuate the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte.
4
The Fourth Phase
ALTHOUGH THE DEFENCE of La Haye Sainte had been heroic, Major Baring’s increasingly desperate requests for ammunition had not been heeded. Wellington freely admitted after the battle that it had been a terrible error not to have cut holes in the wall at the back of the farmhouse, through which extra supplies could have been passed. The farmhouse had been periodically reinforced during lulls in Ney’s six-hour siege, including by the 5th Line Battalion, KGL and some 200 Nassauers, but no one seems to have done anything about the need for extra shot and powder.
Since the Germans used rifles rather than muskets, they could not be supplied with the same ammunition as the rest of the army, and there are reports of their supply wagon having been overturned on the Brussels road. Whatever the explanation, by five o’clock the situation was worrying, and by six o’clock it was desperate. Approximately 400 men of the 2nd Light Battalion, KGL, reinforced by up to 800 men later on, had held out superbly, but that could not go on indefinitely.
The French, led by Marshal Ney in person, commanding those parts of d’Erlon’s corps that had not been lost or demoralised earlier in the battle, had set the roof of the farmhouse on fire. By this stage the nine companies inside La Haye Sainte only had an average of between three and four rounds of ammunition left per man. Each had started the battle with sixty rounds, which Captain Becke considered ‘an inadequate amount, considering the nature of the fighting and the importance of the post’.1 Yet the arguments made by several historians that ammunition should have been stored inside the farmhouse do not address the problem of the burning roof, and therefore the possibility of a catastrophic explosion in the courtyard.
The struggle for La Haye Sainte was described by Charles O’Neil:
The combat now raged with unabated fury. Every inch of ground was disputed by both sides, and neither gave way until every means of resistance was exhausted. The field of battle was heaped with the dead; and yet the attacks grew more impetuous, and the resistance more obstinate.2
What almost all the authoritative early accounts on Waterloo and the eyewitnesses do agree upon — including Captain Becke, Henri Houssaye, Major Baring, Sir James Shaw Kennedy, Sergeant-Major Cotton, Captain Siborne, Colonel Chesney and Ney’s aide Colonel Heymès — is that La Haye Sainte fell to the French sometime between 6 and 6.30 p.m. The King’s German Legion were forced out of their citadel, by then collapsing in flames, at terrible cost. Of Major Baring’s original 400 defenders only forty-two were still fully operational by the end of the battle, the others all being killed, wounded or captured, an appalling attrition rate. Unlike the 95th Rifles just outside the farmhouse, there had not been a single deserter.3
For all his shortcomings earlier on in the battle — indeed during the campaign — Marshal Ney now took speedy advantage of the fall of this strategically vital farmhouse in the centre of the battle field, commanding the road from Charleroi to Brussels. This was the most dangerous moment in the entire battle for Wellington, affording as it did Napoleon’s best opportunity to punch a hole in the Anglo-Allied centre, before the large-scale arrival of the Prussians sealed his fate.
Ney brought up horse artillery, which started to pour fire into the Anglo-Allied line at devastatingly close range. It was here that the Inniskilling Regiment took the highest casualties of any infantry unit in the army. On the battlefield today is a memorial stone commemorating the stand of the Inniskillings, and Wellington’s verbal tribute to their sacrifice: ‘Ah, they saved the centre of my line.’
Ney also brought forces to bear on the Sandpit, forcing out the 95th Rifle Regiment (later to become the Royal Greenjackets). According to a new history of the 95th, a hundred Riflemen were so demoralised during the course of the engagements there that they simply absented themselves without good reason for the rest of the battle.4 An attempt to recapture the farmhouse by Colonel Ompteda and the 5th KGL was defeated, leaving Ompteda dead, the battalion virtually wiped out and the King’s colours taken. The centre of the Anglo-Allied line wavered momentarily under the terrific onslaught, and this was perhaps the psychological moment at which Napoleon should have flung every available man into the action in front of the farmhouse.
That he failed to do so cannot be put down to the Emperor’s lack of nerve, or lack of understanding about what was happening. His line infantry, exhausted after d’Erlon’s failed efforts, were in no state to deliver the killer blow, just as his cavalry had blown itself riding in vain around the British squares. Furthermore Billow’s corps had meanwhile retaken the village of Plancenoit, less than a mile to the east of La Belle Alliance, forcing out the Young Guard house by house and therefore threatening the whole right flank. Thus when Ney sent Colonel Heymès to beg for fresh troops to exploit the perceived weakness in Wellington’s centre, Napoleon responded with heavy sarcasm: ‘Des troupes! Où voulezvous que j’en prenne? Voulez-vous que j’en fasse?’ (Troops! Where do you want me to get them from? Do you want me to make them?’)
Of course the Emperor still had the bulk of the Imperial Guard to commit to the fray, but he tended only to do this at the precise moment to turn victory into a rout, which this clearly was not. Meanwhile, Wellington was in a scarcely better position, and gave repeated orders for his line to stand fast, understanding that even a modest re-alignment backwards might be misinterpreted as a withdrawal by the men themselves, which might itself turn into panic. Soldiers at the limits of their endurance, even veterans, could break and run, and Wellington — coolly riding along the line wherever he was most needed — placed cavalry regiments from his reserve directly behind infantry battalions that seemed most at risk. (When a Dutch regiment started to move back about ten yards, Wellington personally rode over to prevent it breaking and positioned the 11th Light Dragoons accordingly.)
It is astonishing that any verbal orders could be heard at all above the din of battle, a hellish wall of sound that Charles O’Neil vividly described:
The continued reverberations of [the] pieces of artillery, the fire of the light troops, the frequent explosions of caissons blown up by shells, the hissing of balls, the clash of arms, the roar of the charges, and the shouts of the soldiery, produced a commingling of sounds whose effect it would be impossible to describe.5
The importance of bugle-calls, especially in cavalry charges, cannot be overstated as a means of officers communicating with their men.
If any crack in the badly damaged Anglo-Allied line had taken place, it is certain that it would have been punished badly by the French, since a large body of cuirassiers had been positioned in the dip between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte directly the latter had fallen, out of sight of the Allied guns.
The Anglo-Allied brigades had both been very badly mauled, and the gap between General Sir Colin Halkett’s right and Major-General Sir James Kempt’s right was a danger area for Wellington, just as it provided Napoleon’s only genuine opportunity for victory of the whole day. A strike by the Imperial Guard there at the correct psychological moment might well have broken Wellington’s line and split his force in two, but even then it is doubtful that there were enough fresh French troops capable of exploiting the opportunity to the full. ‘History,’ wrote the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl in his book Napoleon: For and Against, ‘is an argument without end,’ and the debate about whether Napoleon might have prevailed with a superhuman push against Wellington’s centre will certainly not end soon.
Wellington was quick to recognise the danger point in his line and close it. ‘I shall order the Brunswick troops to the spot, and other troops besides,’ reads one of the surviving orders from this critical period to a subordinate commander. ‘You go, and get all the German troops of the division to the spot that you can, and all the guns that you can find.’As Shaw Kennedy later wrote of this crucial stage:
Of such gravity did Wellington consider this great gap in the very centre of his line of battle, that he not only ordered the Brunswick troops there, but put himself at their head: it was even then with the greatest difficulty that the ground could be held … In no other part of the action was the Duke of Wellington exposed to so much personal risk as on this occasion, as he was necessarily under a close and most destructive infantry fire at a very short distance; at no other period of the day were his great qualities as a commander so strongly brought out, for it was the moment of his greatest peril as to the result of the action.6
Other similar last-minute arrangements saved the day in various parts of the battlefield. When Wellington sent his Acting Quartermaster-General, Major Dawson Kelly, to discover what was the meaning of the confusion he had spotted in the 30th Regiment and the 2nd Battalion of the 73rd, which had been in square formation for the greater part of the day, he received the answer that all the officers had been killed or wounded, and that Kelly would take up the command as the last French attack came up. It was repelled.
Ensign Gronow recorded how it felt to have fought throughout the afternoon, only to find that the Old Guard were being mustered for the attack:
I am to this day astonished that any of us remained alive. From eleven o’clock till seven we were pounded with shot and shell at long and short range, were incessantly potted by tirailleurs [snipers] who kept up a most biting fire, constantly charged by immense masses of cavalry who seemed determined to go in and win, preceded as their visits were by a terrific fire of artillery; and, last of all, we were attacked by la Vieille Garde itself.7
The Prussians were meanwhile in the process of staving in Napoleon’s right flank, even subjecting his possible future line of retreat down the Charleroi road to intense bombardment. With enemy troops at such close proximity, it is hardly surprising that the E
mperor considered it of primary importance for his forces to recapture Plancenoit, a village that consequently saw as much bitter and almost equally prolonged fighting as the two more famous farmhouses of the battle, Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte.
Lieutenant-Colonel Baron Golzio was ordered to retake Plancenoit with two battalions of the 2nd Grenadier Regiment of the Old Guard, about 1,100 men, not using musketfire but only the cold steel of the bayonet. They were supported by chasseurs. Sure enough, in less than half an hour the village was cleared of fourteen battalions of Prussians, who were forced to retreat 600 yards from the village. The great obelisk to the 3,000 Prussians who died in that frenzied defence is a particularly impressive one, even on a battlefield replete with fine memorials.
While the Young Guard returned to occupy Plancenoit, the grenadiers of the Old Guard ill-advisedly pressed home their attack beyond it, even succeeding in capturing some of von Bülow’s guns up a slope outside the village, but once the Prussian commander had spotted that he only faced a small detachment of the Old Guard rather than its entire strength his counterattack drove the grenadiers back into the village, which they and the Young Guard prepared to defend to the end. They had, nonetheless, bought their Emperor the one thing he needed — and the one thing that he repeatedly stated should never be lost in warfare — time.
Napoleon, having in effect won the fourth phase of battle by taking La Haye Sainte, pulverising the Anglo-Allied centre and throwing von Bülow out of Plancenoit, was now able to concentrate on trying once again to break Wellington’s line. The Guard had rallied and General Lobau’s VI Corps was now ready to re-engage. Five thousand men of the Guard were meanwhile fresh and ready for action. The fifth and final phase of the battle was about to begin.
5
The Fifth Phase
NAPOLEON DID NOT have much time in which to unleash the Imperial Guard onto the Anglo-Allied line, as von Zieten’s column had already reached the hamlet of Smohain, thereby allowing Wellington to bring troops in from his left flank to protect his centre. Although the Prussians’ advance on Napoleon’s eastern flank might have been arrested, the same was not true of their forces debouching onto the battlefield further north, where they were connecting with their Anglo-Allied comrades-in-arms. The jaws of the Anglo-Prussian trap were springing shut with every new man of Blücher’s army who arrived on the battlefield.
Waterloo: June 18, 1815: The Battle for Modern Europe Page 7
