To War with Wellington

by Peter Snow

  The Rifles, way over on Wellington’s left flank at Quatre-Bras, had a hard time of it too. It was a day of vicious fighting. Kincaid reckoned it would end with the two sides where they had started, but then to his and Jonathan Leach’s delight reinforcements came up and helped them to press forward. The Rifles ‘gained a considerable portion of the positions originally occupied by the enemy, when darkness obliged us to desist’. The boisterous Irishman Ned Costello had his trigger finger torn off by a musket ball and had to spend two nights in great pain on the road back to Brussels. ‘To sleep was impossible with the anguish of my shattered hand and the groans of my fellow sufferers.’

  Nearly every soldier saw friends killed or wounded at Quatre-Bras. One young officer, Ensign Deacon, was told by Tom Morris that he was wounded. ‘God bless me – so I am,’ said Deacon and rushed off to try and find his wife who was with the regiment’s baggage train. Somehow they missed each other. She had already been told about his wound and was frantically trying to find him on the battlefield. She was, said Morris, ‘in the last state of pregnancy’. She spent the whole night searching for him and then headed for Brussels in worsening weather ‘faint, exhausted and wet to the skin, having no other clothes than a black silk dress and light shawl’. She reached Brussels two days later, found her husband and ‘the next day gave birth to a fine girl which was afterwards christened Waterloo Deacon’.

  The Battle of Quatre-Bras was quickly overshadowed by Waterloo, but it was one of the hardest-fought and most critical contests of the war. Both sides claimed victory. It was more like a draw. Ney’s attacks made it impossible for Wellington to go to Blücher’s help, as he had hoped. But the extra Anglo-allied reinforcements rolling in all day had allowed Wellington to resist Ney’s attacks, and in the end to outnumber him and even force him back. The toll was high: Wellington lost 4,700 men of the 36,000 he had fielded at Quatre-Bras, Ney lost 4,300 of his 34,500. But for one massive piece of French mismanagement Wellington might well have been defeated.

  A large force of 20,000 men under Count d’Erlon was sent to reinforce Ney early on. It would have given him a decisive edge over Wellington’s hard-pressed units. But Napoleon suddenly switched orders to D’Erlon just before he arrived at Quatre-Bras and told him to go east to help smash Blücher. No sooner had D’Erlon and his men reached the other battlefield than Ney, desperate for reinforcement, ordered them back to rejoin him. This idiotic see-saw left D’Erlon too late to join either battle. Ney wrote later that D’Erlon’s men didn’t rejoin him till nine o’clock that evening. He said, with pardonable exaggeration, ‘Thus twenty-five or thirty thousand men were absolutely paralysed and were idly paraded, during the whole of the battle … without firing a shot.’ Napoleon, in his ham-fisted attempt to rewrite history in exile on St Helena, refused to accept culpability for any of this. He blamed Ney for attacking with too little too late.

  The bloodiest of the day’s two battles was at Ligny, where Blücher was roundly defeated. Wellington hadn’t exactly endeared himself to his Prussian ally when they met that morning. Wellington took one look at Blücher’s exposed positions and observed, ‘if my troops were so disposed I should expect them to be beaten’. Typical blunt Wellington. He was even more so in an aside to Sir Henry Hardinge, his liaison officer with the Prussians. ‘If they fight here they will be damnably mauled.’ In the event Napoleon’s guns played havoc with Blücher’s forces, which were posted in full view of the French on forward slopes around Ligny. French cavalry and columns of veteran infantrymen then battered the Prussians into a humiliating retreat.

  Blücher himself narrowly escaped death. His horse was shot and fell on him. French cuirassiers rode past without recognising him in the failing light. Then he was nearly trampled by Prussian cavalry pushing back the French. Finally with the help of his ADC he was ‘dragged out … bruised and half unconscious and almost fainting’ and rescued from the battlefield. The doughty old field marshal was saved just in time to make the most critical strategic decision of his campaign: to stand by Wellington or to desert him? The issue was stark, the debate within the Prussian high command dramatic and emotional. Blücher later described to Henry Hardinge the row he had had with opponents on his staff. Hardinge, who was Wellington’s liaison officer with the Prussians, was also a victim of Ligny. ‘I passed that night with my amputated arm lying with some straw in his [Blücher’s] ante-room,’ he recalled. ‘Next morning Blücher sent for me in, calling me Lieber Freund, etc., and embracing me. I perceived he smelt most strongly of gin and of rhubarb. He said to me, Ich stinke etwas, that he had been obliged to take medicine, having been twice rode over by the cavalry.’ Blücher then went on to describe the highly charged debate in which he and his chief of staff, Count von Gneisenau, had bitterly opposed each other. The night before the Prussians had withdrawn north to the town of Wavre, nine miles east of Waterloo. Blücher wanted to stay there to be within reach of Wellington. Gneisenau was for abandoning Wellington and moving off to the east to preserve the Prussian army. He mistrusted and disliked Wellington for failing to rescue the Prussians at Ligny. Besides, if Wellington were now defeated, Gneisenau argued, they, the Prussians, would be utterly destroyed. Blücher won the argument. He was determined that Wellington would not be defeated, and he would do his damnedest to make sure he wasn’t. The decision was made: Wellington would not have to face Napoleon alone. It was the first of many debts he would owe to Gebhard von Blücher.

  At Quatre-Bras that morning Wellington still knew nothing of Blücher’s defeat. He sent an ADC, the trusty Alexander Gordon, soon after dawn to find out what had happened at Ligny. At 7.30 Gordon was back, leaping off his sweating horse and reporting sotto voce to Wellington that Blücher had been battered by Napoleon and suffered up to 20,000 casualties. The field marshal had not abandoned the campaign but had withdrawn to Wavre. The Prussians were badly scarred but not destroyed.

  Wellington now felt he had no choice. Quatre-Bras was a poor defensive position, as the day before had shown. If he stayed there now, several miles in advance of the Prussians, he would be exposed to attack by Napoleon and Ney on two fronts. He defined his plight with blunt realism: ‘Old Blücher has had a damned good hiding and has gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles to the rear. We must do the same. I suppose they’ll say in England that we have been licked. Well I can’t help that.’ After two nights of virtually no sleep and with much of his world collapsing around him, Wellington was acting, as always, like a man making a difficult move at chess.

  At 9 a.m. on 17 June Wellington received a message from Blücher asking whether he was determined to meet Napoleon in battle. He replied: ‘I still hold to the original intention of a united offensive against the French army, but now I must get back to the position at Mont St Jean where I will accept battle with Napoleon, if I am supported by one Prussian corps.’

  The certainty with which Wellington pronounced his strategy that morning – to fight Napoleon at Waterloo – is perhaps the most singular example of how he was able to make a colossal decision with such cool confidence. He must have been – at least for some time that morning – racked by anxiety at the sheer scale of what was at stake. Napoleon, one of the ablest battle tacticians of all time, was determined to do battle with him with an army at least 20,000 men stronger than his. That army was all French, fortified by a core of experienced veterans utterly devoted to their Emperor. Large parts of Wellington’s Anglo-allied army were of dubious loyalty and morale. Without Prussian help the odds against him would be overwhelming. He had no reason to doubt Blücher’s good faith and he knew how devoted he was to the cause of destroying Napoleon. Wellington was demanding a lot of his Prussian allies who had been trounced by the French only the day before. He must have been haunted by memories of the ludicrous unreliability of General Cuesta during the Talavera campaign in Spain. But in the end he had little choice. Waterloo was the last place he could stand before Brussels and to lose the city would be a devastating setback. Napoleon would still have to fac
e vastly superior numbers of Austrians and Russians who were preparing to crush him, but the blow to Britain’s and Wellington’s prestige would be disastrous.

  With his mind made up, Wellington now had to orchestrate a withdrawal to Mont Saint-Jean, the ridge just south of the village of Waterloo, as discreetly as possible. A quick advance by Napoleon would catch his men exposed at Quatre-Bras or in the vulnerable first stage of withdrawal. But Wellington relied on the Emperor’s long-standing habit of allowing his men a good night’s rest after a major encounter. By 10 a.m. Wellington’s force began to move. Mobile units like William Tomkinson’s light dragoons would stay to the last and help secure the army’s rear. Tomkinson had spent the night bivouacking with his squadron and slept a lot better than his brother Henry, who had never bivouacked in the open air before. When Henry awoke to the sound of men discharging and cleaning their muskets, he thought the enemy was attacking and ran for his horse. William was told of the retreat early by Fred Ponsonby, who, being a commanding officer, was often at Wellington’s headquarters. Ponsonby told him he ‘regretted that they were obliged to retire’. Tomkinson observed that the French did not move a man in pursuit until late in the day when only the British cavalry remained at Quatre-Bras. There were few clashes. The biggest was at the small town of Genappe, where the main street remains to this day a very narrow thoroughfare, and some French lancers blocked the road. It was the first test for Wellington’s new cavalry commander Lord Uxbridge. He had the unfortunate experience of ordering his own regiment, the 7th Hussars, against the French, and watching them being beaten back. The long reach of the French lances made the hussars’ sabres ineffective. To Uxbridge’s shame and embarrassment he had to appeal to the superior weight and skill of the Life Guards to clear the road of the French.

  Mercer and his Royal Horse Artillery battery were involved with Uxbridge in the retreat too. At one stage they found themselves caught in a narrow lane with the enemy hard on their heels. Uxbridge called out, ‘Make haste, make haste! For God’s sake, gallop or you will be taken!’ But there was no scope for any galloping. Mercer suddenly found the narrow lane blocked by French cavalrymen, and the last he recalled of Uxbridge was a cry of ‘By God we are all prisoners’ before the cavalry commander made his escape, ‘dashing his horse at one of the garden banks, which he cleared, and away he went, leaving us to get out of the scrape as best we could’. Mercer reckoned there was only one way out: he shouted to his men, ‘Reverse by unlimbering,’ and the men rapidly unhooked their guns from their carriages, and somehow manhandled the guns around so that they were facing the other way. It was hard enough to swivel a gun round, and ‘the very reversing of the limber itself in so narrow a lane, with a team of eight horses, was sufficiently difficult and required first rate driving’.

  By this time there was heavy rain and ‘away we went helter skelter – guns, gun detachments, and hussars, all mixed pêle-mêle, going like mad, and covering each other with mud, to be washed off by the rain, which … now came down … in splashes instead of drops, soaking us anew to the skin, and, what was worse, extinguishing every slow-match in the brigade.’

  In the course of the day Mercer came to see much of the army’s so-called ‘rocket’ group. Its commander, Major Edward Whinyates, an enthusiast for the weapons invented by Sir William Congreve just ten years earlier, was very keen to prove their worth. Mercer watched them fire, with initial success, at some enemy gunners who were chasing them. The rocket men placed a rocket in the road on a little iron stand. ‘The order to fire is given … the fidgety missile begins to splutter and wriggle its tail for a second or so, and then darts forth straight up the chaussée.’ It destroyed the enemy gunners successfully, but ‘the rocketeers kept shooting off rockets, none of which ever followed the course of the first. Most of them, on arriving about the middle of the ascent, took a vertical direction, whilst some actually turned back upon ourselves – and one of these, following me like a squib, actually put me in more danger than all the fire of the enemy throughout the day.’ Wellington considered the rocket group little more than a joke. A few days earlier he had ordered the rockets put into store and the group’s horses handed over to other units. A senior officer pleaded with Wellington: ‘It will break poor Whinyates’ heart to lose his rockets.’ To which Wellington replied: ‘Damn his heart, sir: let my order be obeyed.’ Since then, the Duke had relented. Hence the absurd firework display on the road from Genappe.

  As the day wore on the rain got worse, and it is astonishing that Wellington succeeded in collecting all his men on the ridge just south of Waterloo by late evening. Fred Ponsonby’s horses were sinking into mud up to their fetlocks. When George Farmer and another squadron of horsemen finally arrived, the rain had ‘reduced the face of the country to a state of swamp; and as our bivouac was formed in a ploughed field … at every step which you took, you sank to your knees and your foot, when you dragged it to the surface again, came loaded with some seventy pounds of clay …’ Farmer and his lads were so cold and wet they raided a local village and returned with a pile of furniture they had grabbed to use for firewood.

  While Mercer’s troops were searching for a place to camp on the battlefield, ‘a man of no very prepossessing appearance came rambling amongst our guns’ and chatted to Mercer about the day. Mercer described him as dressed in a shabby, drab old greatcoat and a rusty round hat. ‘Finding some of his questions rather impertinent, [I] was somewhat short in answering him and he soon left us.’ Mercer was astonished to hear later that it was Sir Thomas Picton checking out the ground on which his division was taking up position on the ridge. The night that followed was dreadful. Mercer’s gunners stowed themselves away beneath their gun carriages using the painted covers as additional shelter. Mercer himself and some other officers and soldiers crammed together into a small tent, ‘all perfectly still and silent, the old Peninsular hands disdaining to complain before their Johnny Newcome comrades, and these fearing to do so lest they should provoke some such remarks as “What would you have done in the Pyrenees?” Or “Oho my boy! This is but child’s play to what we saw in Spain.”’ Mercer and a few others found they were so wet they couldn’t sleep, so they gathered round a fire under a large umbrella and lit up cigars.

  Wellington had his men retire behind the ridge at Waterloo that evening so that the French wouldn’t know exactly where they were. He was furious when some of his gunners – against his express orders – responded to the French artillery and gunfire echoed across the shallow valley between the two sides. Napoleon was now sure that this was where Wellington would make his stand. Many French units were slow to move up, but neither side was in any doubt that the decisive battle for Europe would be fought the next day – on Sunday 18 June.

  Whatever was going on behind Wellington’s calm exterior, he showed little sign of emotion in a remarkable talk with the man designated as his deputy, Lord Uxbridge. Wellington had always ignored – with typical arrogance – the duty any commander should have to provide for the possibility of his own death or incapacity in battle. The classic example of this took place that evening before the Battle of Waterloo when Uxbridge rather diffidently asked to see him.

  Uxbridge had sought the advice of another senior commander, reminding him that if anything happened to the Duke he would find himself commander in chief and he would like to know how Wellington planned to go about the battle the next day. ‘I have not the slightest idea what are the projects of the Duke. I would give anything in the world to know the dispositions which, I have no doubt, have been profoundly calculated.’

  Uxbridge was advised to go and put his worry to the Duke himself. So off he went and explained delicately that he would like the Duke to share his plans with him. Wellington listened quietly without saying a word. Then he said calmly, ‘Who will attack the first to-morrow, I or Bonaparte?’ ‘Bonaparte,’ Uxbridge replied. ‘Well,’ continued the Duke in the same unemotional tone, ‘Bonaparte has not given me any idea of his projects; and as my plans
will depend upon his, how can you expect me to tell you what mine are?’ Uxbridge bowed and made no reply. At which the Duke ended the meeting by touching Uxbridge on the shoulder in a friendly way and saying, ‘There is one thing certain, Uxbridge, that is that, whatever happens, you and I will do our duty.’ He then shook him warmly by the hand. Uxbridge bowed again, and then left.

  18

  Hard pounding

  Waterloo, morning 18 June 1815

  WATERLOO, SUNDAY morning, 3 o’clock, June 18th 1815. My dear Lady Frances,’ wrote the Duke of Wellington to his Brussels lover from his first-floor room at his headquarters. ‘I think you ought to make your preparations … to remove from Brussels … We fought a desperate battle on Friday in which I was successful though I had but very few troops. The Prussians were very roughly handled and retired in the night which obliged me to do the same to this place yesterday.’ He then pointed out that any fighting at Waterloo might expose Brussels to the French. ‘I will give you the earliest intimation of any danger that may come to my knowledge; at present I know of none.’ Cool and balanced as ever, Wellington recognised that the coming battle would be the greatest challenge of his life.