The Age of Elegance (34 page)

Neither Napoleon nor his men doubted their ability to destroy Wellington's army and reach Brussels by nightfall. Their triumph over the Prussians two days before—achieved against superior numbers—had whetted their appetite for glory. They saw themselves, for all their difficulties, on the verge of a new Marengo. Nor was the urgent victory Napoleon needed the key only to political salvation. It would be a revenge for all the humiliations the English had heaped on him. Wellington was the one commander with a European reputation whom he had never beaten and the British the one army. "Because you have been defeated by Wellington," he told his Chief of Staff, Soult, who dwelt on the British capacity for recoil, "you think him a great general! I tell you that Wellington is a bad general, that the English are bad troops and that this will be a picnic!" His only fear was that they would vanish before he could attack them, as they had done on the previous day at Quatre-Bras and seven years earlier under Moore on the Carrion. As, however, they now appeared to be calmly waiting for him, their doom was certain. "We will sleep to-night," he told his officers, "in Brussels."

Owing to the usual dispersal in search of food and plunder the last of the French only reached their battle stations at midday, three hours after the time originally ordered. Napoleon, however, was not hurrying, since to make full use of his superior artillery and cavalry, he wanted the ground to dry. Despite warnings from those who had fought in Spain, he was quite sure that, once he struck in overpowering force, there would be little need to waste time in manoeuvring. Most of Wellington's foreign auxiliaries, he reckoned, would bolt at the start, and the stiff redcoats would then break under the triple shock of his massed bombardment, veteran columns, and discharge of grape at close range. "I shall hammer them with my artillery," he announced, "charge them with my cavalry to make them show themselves, and, when I am quite sure where the actual English are, I shall go straight at them with my Old Guard."
¹

As for the Prussians, he was so convinced that they had retreated eastwards, as he wished, that he never considered the possibility of their appearance on the battlefield at all. After the hiding he had given them at Ligny they were manifestly incapable of further fight for the present. Having detached Grouchy to shepherd them out of Flanders, he felt he could discount them. They could be trusted, as

¹
Foy, 278-9, 345.

in the past, to act selfishly and leave their allies to their fate. It had never been his habit to keep faith with anyone unless it suited him. That a Prussian commander should endanger his army and strain his communications to keep faith with Wellington never occurred to him.

The Emperor, therefore, decided to open his main attack at one o'clock. In the meantime, while he massed eighty field-pieces on a spur of high ground in the middle of the valley opposite and about 600 yards short of the British centre, he ordered the troops on his two flanks to engage the extremities
of the defenders' line at Pape
lotte and Hougoumont in order to distract attention from his impending blow, and probably—though of this there can be no certainty—to clear a way for the use, at the decisive moment, of the sunken hollow leading to the heart of Wellington's right. In that case, however, he was unfortunate in his adversary.

The first shots of the battle were fired at about half-past eleven in front of Hougoumont. After a short preUminary bombardment, four battalions of Prince Jerome's division advanced against the wood to the south of the chateau. During the next hour they succeeded in driving out its not very numerous German defenders. But they then went on to attack the gardens and mansion and in doing so came up against a far more formidable adversary, the four light companies of the British Guards under Lord Saltoun. The attackers not only attracted the close attention of Wellington, but brought upon themselves exceedingly heavy casualties—1500 in the first forty minutes, both from the steady aim of the British guardsmen, firing through embrasures in the walls, and from the accurate fire of Bull's howitzer battery stationed on the ridge behind the house. When the Guards counter-attacked and drove them back, Jerome threw another brigade into the assault and tried to gain a lodgment in the courtyard of the chateau. So furious was his attack that at one moment a detachment of his men broke open the great gate with an axe and swarmed in, only to be surrounded and destroyed inside, while four officers and a sergeant of the Coldstream closed the door behind them by main force. Once again the British counter-attacked with four companies of the Coldstream whom Wellington sent down from the ridge. "There, my lads, in with you," he said as they moved off, "let me see no more of you."

Jerome's answer and that of the commander of the French left,

General Reille, was to undertake—a quarter of an hour before Napoleon's main attack on the centre was due to begin—a third attack on Hougoumont with still larger forces. For every regiment they committed, the frugal Wellington staked no more than a company or whatever smaller force was necessary to hold the position. All the while his guns continued to shell the wood with such effect that, as one unending column of fresh attackers poured into it, another—of wounded—as continuously poured out.
¹

So far Napoleon had been only partially successful. His diversion to the east had made little effect on the Netherlander in Papelotte and La Haye, while the more important one to the west, though occupying Wellington's attention, had failed either to by-pass or capture Hougoumont. It was now one o'clock, the hour at which the bombardment of the Allied centre was due to begin. But before its smoke enveloped the battlefield, Napoleon, watching the preparations from a knoll beside the Brussels road, observed through his telescope a suspicious movement on the high ground towards Wavre, five or six miles to the east. It might—at first it seemed to him that it must—be Grouchy, from whom he had just heard that the Prussians were retiring, not on Liege as both men had thought, but on Brussels. Yet this was scarcely likely, as Grouchy in his dispatch, dated at six that morning, had announced his intention of following them northwards on Wavre. And, as Grouchy, like Napoleon, had been wrong once about the Prussians' movements, there was another and less pleasant possibility.

At that moment, this terrifying suspicion was confirmed. For a Prussian hussar, captured by a French vedette to the west of the battlefield, was brought to Napoleon bearing a dispatch from
Blücher
to Wellington which showed that the troops visible on the heights of St. Lambert were Billow's corps, advancing from Wavre, and that the rest of the Prussian army had spent the night around that town, only thirteen miles away.

Napoleon, in other words, had been "making pictures"—the crime against which he had always warned his subordinates. He had made his dispositions to fight under conditions that did not exist. Instead of having only the English and their feeble auxiliaries to contend with, he would have, if he proceeded with his attack, to face

¹
Stanhope, 47. See also Ellesmere, 105-6; Frazer, 556; Gronow,
1,
198-9; Greville (suppl.),
i, 83;
Cotton, 51-7; Kennedy, 89-92; Houssaye, 187-9; Morris, 229-2.

before nightfall the intervention of another army. The attempt to separate Wellingtons and
Blücher
's forces had failed, at least in any but the most temporary sense. The French must either withdraw— the prudent course—or defeat the British in the next three hours. For after that they would have to contend against two foes.

Being a gambler, and being, both politically and strategically, in desperate need of an immediate victory, Napoleon decided to proceed with the battle. It still seemed unthinkable to him that the breach he was about to blast in the British centre could fail to defeat Wellington, and, with him out of the way,
Blücher
could be dealt with in turn. Indeed, with Grouchy in his rear and his army committed to the muddy defiles between Wavre and Mont St. Jean, the old Prussian might end the day in an even worse disaster than Ligny. Napoleon, therefore, detached part of his reserve to delay the still distant Prussian advance, and ordered the attack on the British to proceed.

The eighty-gun bombardment, which opened at one o'clock, fully came up to expectations. Twenty-four of the guns were Napoleon's great twelve-pounders, with a 2000-yard range. It took away the breath of Wellington's young recruits and militia men, and surprised even Peninsular veterans by its intensity. Captain Mercer, commanding a reserve battery of horse artillery in a hollow several hundred yards and in rear of the British right flank, found, even in that sheltered position, the shot and shell continually plunging around him. One shot completely carried away the lower part of the head of one of his horses. Fortunately the ground was still wet and many shells burst where they fell, while the round-shot, instead of hopping and ricochetting for half a mile or more, frequently became embedded in the mud.
¹

But though very alarming, owing to Wellington's skilful dispositions the bombardment did comparatively little harm except to a brigade of Belgians, whose commander, General Bylandt, misinterpreting his orders, had drawn it up, in the Continental manner, on the forward slope of the ridge. During its half-hour of bombardment in this exposed position it lost one man in four, and, had it not been hastily withdrawn to a less conspicuous position, its loss might have been still greater. When, therefore, at half-past one, D'Erlon

¹
Becke, 168; Cotton, 87-8; Fortescue, X, 360; Houssaye, 203; James, 223; Kennedy, 107; Kincaid, 341; Mercer, I, 294-6; Siborne, 327-8; Tomkinson, 297, 303.

in charge of the French right moved his corps forward to the attack, with all the panoply and terror of a Napoleonic offensive—drums beating at the head of dense column, bearded grenadiers marching four hundred abreast shouting at the top of their voices, and clouds of
tirailleurs
running and firing ahead—the customary conditions for success seemed to have been ensured. Four divisions of infantry— more than 16,000 men—each moving in close column of battalions at a quarter of a mile's distance, tramped down the slope and up the hill against the British centre and left through clouds of sulphurous smoke. Behind came companies of sappers, ready to turn the village of Mont St. Jean beyond the British centre into a fortress as soon as it was captured.

A hail of shot from the artillery on the crest greeted them. But it did not halt the men who had conquered at "Wagram and Friedland. One column, supported by cuirassiers, swept round La Haye Sainte, encircling it and its German defenders and driving back the two companies of the Rifles—the most formidable marksmen in Europe —who were stationed in a sandpit on the opposite side of the
chaussee.
Another, to the west, forced the Dutch out of Papelotte and La Haye and temporarily occupied Smohain. In the centre about 8000 men approached the summit simultaneously. As they did so, Bylandt's Belgians—raw troops who had endured to the limit of their capacity—fired one hysterical volley at the advancing, shouting column and took to their heels, carrying away the gunners of the reserve batteries behind. They never stopped till they reached the Forest of Soignes, where they remained for the rest of the day.
¹

To Napoleon, watching from the knoll near La Belle Alliance, it seemed as though, as at Ligny, his adversary's centre was broken. But it was not a Netherlandish or even a Prussian army he had to dislodge, but a British. As the French bore down on the gap they had opened, Picton deployed Kempt's reserve brigade in their path. It was the famiUar story of every battle of the Peninsular War. "The French came on in the old style," said Wellington afterwards, "and we drove them off in the old style." The 28th, 32nd, 79th Highlanders and the 95th Rifles—all veterans of Spain—held their fire till the head of the column was only twenty yards away. Then, from

¹
"I peeped into the skirts of the forest, and truly felt astonished; entire companies seemed there, with regularly piled arms, fires blazing under cooking kettles, while the men lay about smoking as coolly as if no enemy were within a day's march.... General Muffling in his account of Waterloo, estimates the runaways hidden in the forest at 10,000." Jackson, 47.

their thin extended line, they poured in a tremendous, disciplined volley, and, as the leading French files tried, too late, to deploy, charged with the bayonet. At the moment of his triumph Picton was struck in the head by a bullet and killed.
¹

Farther to the east, D'Erlon's two other divisions reached the summit. Here, after its heavy losses at Quatre-Bras, Pack's brigade— Royals, 44th, 42nd and 92nd Highlanders—could only muster 1400 bayonets. Slowly, against such odds, they began to give ground, while a brigade of French cavalry on their flank, having cut a Hanoverian battalion to pieces, swarmed on to the crest.

At that moment, Lord Uxbridge, waiting behind the British infantry with two brigades of heavy cavalry ready deployed, gave the order to charge. Leading the Household Brigade in person, he drove the astonished French cuirassiers into the ranks of the infantry behind, who, seeing the big, scarlet-coated Life Guardsmen slashing at them, turned and joined in the flight. It was the charge at Salamanca over again. Simultaneously the Union Brigade—consisting of Royal Dra
goons, Scots Greys and Inniskilli
ngs—swept down on another French column. Within a few minutes the flower of D'Erlon's corps was flying across the plain with 2000 British cavalry-after it. "Hundreds of the infantry threw themselves down and pretended to be dead," wrote Kincaid, "while the cavalry galloped over them and then got up and ran away; I never saw such a scene in all my life." More than 4000 were cut down or taken prisoner. Many did not stop till they reached Genappe.

Unfortunately the pursuers did not stop either. The secret of cavalry is iron discipline. It was a secret that the British cavalry, though superlative in dash, physique and horsemanship, had never wholly mastered. According to Hamilton of Dalzell of the Scots: Greys, the troopers had been served with rum before the charge. They followed the French into the heart of Napoleon's position, sabring the gunners of his great battery and riding on to the ridge of La Belle Alliance itself as though they were after a fox. Having charged in the first line, Uxbridge was unable either to stop them or to bring up reserve cavalry in support. When the French cuirassiers and lancers counter-attacked in superior strength, the scattered,

¹
Becke, 195-7; Belloc, 171-3; Fortescue, X, 360-4; Gomm, 351, 358-9; Gronow, I, 188; Horsburgh, 249-51; Houssaye, 193-6; Jackson, 47, 88-92; James, 223, 228-9; Kennedy, 107-12; Kincaid, 344-6;
Random Shots,
206, 273; Siborne, 19; Simmons, 365, 367; Smith, I, 270-1, 277; Stanhope, 221; James, 228-35; Cotton, 59-62.

breathless men and horses were powerless and became themselves the pursued. The flower of Wellington's cavalry—the striking-force of his tactical reserve—having saved his centre, was itself needlessly destroyed. Sir William Ponsonby was struck down at the head of the Union Brigade, and nearly half the personnel of the six splendid regiments which had smashed D'Erlon's columns were killed or taken prisoner. Vandeleur's Brigade, which gallantly tried to cover their retreat, also suffered severely. Those who got back to the British lines were too few to intervene with real effect in the battle again. Some of the weaker brethren never returned to the field at all.
¹

But for this unexpected advantage, there would have seemed little object in Napoleon's continuing the battle. It was now three o'clock. Not only had one of his two corps of front-line infantry become heavily committed to an increasingly costly and still unsuccessful struggle in front of Hougoumont, but the British, contrary to expectation, had repulsed and shattered the other which, untouched at either Ligny or Quatre-Bras, was to have breached and pinned down Wellington's centre until Lobau's reserve infantry, Ney's cavalry and, at the end of all, the Imperial Guard, had destroyed him. Instead, Napoleon now found himself committed to an impending battle on a second front, to avert or postpone which he was forced to detach, under Lobau, the very reserve of infantry which was to have followed up D'Erlon's expected success. With the Prussians approaching from the other side, he dared not commit this now to a left-hook against the British centre, the vital approach to which was still untaken. Apart from the small portion of Reille's corps still uncommitted to the unending fight round Hougoumont, he had no infantry left for a new attack on the ridge except the twenty-four battalions of the Imperial Guard. And these, in view of the growing threat to his flank and the, to him, unexpected revelation of British defensive striking-power, he was not yet prepared to commit. For the Guard was the last card that stood between him and ruin. He kept it, 13,000 strong, the apple of his eye, unused beside him.

For about half an hour there was a pause in the battle, except at

¹
Lynedoch, 760,762-3; Fortescue, X, 365-7; Gomm,
351;
Gronow, I, 78-80,195-6. 204; II,
3;
Hamilton ofDalzell
MS., 50-3, 70-1, 77-8; Haydon, I,
311;
Houssay, 197-200; Kennedy, 110-11; Kincaid, 345; G. W. Picton, 78-80; Lady Shelley, I, 173-4,
183;
Siborne, 7-10, 16-17, 43-4, 72, 77, 81-2; Tomkinson, 300, 304.