The Age of Elegance (35 page)

Hougoumont, where Jerome and Foy threw ever more troops into the inferno round the blazing but still defiant buildings. Wellington took advantage of the lull to readjust his dispositions. Pack's brigade took the place vacated by Bylandt's Netherlanders, Lambert's brigade came up from the second line to strengthen Picton's battered division, and two more companies of the King's German Legion were thrown into La Haye Sainte. The Prussians were taking far longer to arrive than the British commander had expected. There had been a delay in their start, aggravated by a fire in the narrow streets of Wavre and the fact that Billow's as yet unused corps in the van had the farthest distance to march. After the rains, the cross-country lanes were almost impassable for transport, and Gneisenau, the Prussian Chief of Staff, was reluctant to attack Napoleon, with Grouchy's troops in his rear, until he knew for certain that Wellington was standing fast. Only
Blücher
's insistence —for the old man, oblivio
us of his injuries, was with Bü
low's advance-guard by midday—carried the tired and hungry troops forward through the soggy defiles of the Lasne and the dense woods that lay between it and the battlefield. "I have promised Wellington," he told them as they dragged the guns axle-deep through mire,, "you would not have me break my word!"

Meanwhile, the French gunners had taken up their position again on the central ridge and, soon after three o'clock, reopened their fire. It was more intense than anything the oldest Peninsular veteran had experienced. The range was so accurate that almost every shot told, and after a quarter of an hour Wellington withdrew his infantry a hundred yards farther back from the crest. Under cover of the bombardment, La Haye Sainte in the centre was again surrounded. But Baring's handful of German Legionaries continued to hold the walls, and with Kempt's and Lambert's men standing firm on the plateau above, D'Erlon's mangled infantry refrained from pressing home their assault. They seemed to fear a renewal of the storm of cavalry that had struck their comrades.

Suddenly the battle took a novel and spectacular form. For, mistaking the partial withdrawal of Wellington's infantry for the beginning of a general retirement, Marshal Ney decided to take a short cut to victory by sweeping the ridge with heavy cavalry. Of these—the finest in the world—his master had almost as many as Wellington's British infantry. He therefore ordered forward 5000 of them, including eight regiments of cuirassiers, drawing them up in the plain immediately to the west of the
chaussee
where the slope was easiest.

Wellington watched the splendid spectacle with amazement. It seemed unbelievable that the French would dare to assail a line of unbroken British infantry with cavalry alone. But such was plainly their intention, and, with his own heavy cavalry too weakened to counter-charge in strength, there was a danger that, if Napoleon was able to bring up infantry and guns behind them, the defenders, forced to remain in square, might be blasted out of existence by case-shot. The two divisions to the west of the Brussels road—the
3
rd and 1
st—were ordered to form battalion squares or oblongs
¹
in chequer-wise pattern across the gently swelling, corn-covered plateau. They were aligned so that every face of every square had a field of fire free of the next. Until the attackers appeared over the crest Wellington ordered the men to he down. Behind the twenty squares his cavalry, including the remnants of the two British heavy brigades, were drawn up in support.

Between and a little in advance of the squares Wellington placed his guns, bringing up his last two reserve batteries of Horse Artillery to inflict the utmost damage on the advancing cavalry. As Mercer's men, on the order, "Left limber up, and as fast as you can!" galloped
²
into the inferno of smoke and heat on the plateau, they heard a humming like the sound of myriads of beetles on a summer's evening. So thick was the hail of balls and bullets, wrote their commander, that it seemed dangerous to extend the arm lest it should be torn off. Their orders, in the event of the e
nemy charging home, were to run for
shelter to the nearest square, taking the near wheel of each gun with them.

Mercer disregarded this order—one that could only have been given to gun detachments of the highest discipline and training— not because he doubted his battery's morale, but because he believed that the young Brunswickers in square on either side of him, who were falling fast, would take to their heels if they saw his men run. As soon as the French appeared out of the smoke a hundred yards away—a long line of cuirasses and helmets glittering like a gigantic

¹
The unusual but convenient formation chosen by young Captain Shaw Kennedy, a pupil of Moore and Craufurd, who was acting as chief of staff to Alten's third division. Kennedy,
98-
102.

2
"Ah!" said the Duke as he watched them, "that's the way I like to see horse artillery move." Mercer, I,
313.

wave on the crest of the rye—he ordered his six nine-pounders, doubly loaded with round-shot and case, to open fire. As the case poured into them, the leading ranks went down like grass before a skilled mower. Again and again, when the French charged, the same thing happened, and the Brunswickers who, before the battery's arrival, had stood like soulless logs in their agony and had only been kept at their posts by the gallantry of their officers, recovered heart.

Elsewhere, where the gunners obeyed Wellington's orders, the French cavalry, crowded in a dense mass into the haltmile gap between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, rode over the abandoned guns and swept round the squares beyond. They did not gallop like English foxhunters, but came, as was their wont, at a slow, majestic pace and in perfect formation, their horses shaking the earth. As they appeared the British infantry rose at the word of command, their muskets at the ready and their bayonets bristling like massed gigantic
chevaux de frise.
If the cavalry of the Empire were Atlantic breakers, the British squares were the rocks of an iron coast. The men, many of them rosy-faced youngsters from the plough, were much impressed by the splendid appearance of the hordes of legendary horsemen who suddenly encircled them and even more by their courage, but they were not intimidated by them, as Ney had intended. As their experienced officers and N.C.O.s seemed to regard the newcomers as harmless, in their stolid, unimaginative English way they did so too. The cuirassiers and lancers made a great deal of noise and glitter, brandishing their weapons like pantomime giants and shouting
"Vive L’
Empereur"
but they seemed infinitely preferable to the continuous hail of shot and shell which had poured from the French batteries till they arrived on the ridge.

Short of impaling their horses on the hedges of bayonets, Ney's cavalry tried every device to break the squares. Occasionally little groups of horsemen, led by frantic officers, would dash for the face of one, firing off carbines and pistols and hoping to draw sufficient fire to enable their comrades behind to break in on a line of unloaded muskets. But the British and Hanoverian squares preserved perfect discipline, withholding their fire until they received the word of command and then, with their volleys, bringing down everything before them. The loss of horses was prodigious; the poor creatures lay dead or dying in hundreds, their riders, many of them wounded, making their way in a continuous stream back down the hill, or sprawling in their heavy cuirasses in the mud, looking, as Wellington afterwards recalled, like overturned turtles.
¹

Whenever he judged that the intruders were sufficiently worn down and wearied, Wellington endeavoured to push them off the plateau with his cavalry, or, in default, by edging forward his squares in echelon towards the abandoned guns. He did not hurry, for he was playing for time, and he could not afford to let his light British and Bang's German Legion cavalry encounter the heavier armed cuirassiers until the latter were too exhausted and reduced to retaliate. The foreign Horse which he had brought up from the flanks and reserve to take the place of Ponsonby's and Somerset's lost squadrons proved, most of it, worse than useless, refusing repeated appeals from Uxbridge to charge. One regiment of Hanoverian hussars, led by its colonel,
²
fled as far as Brussels.

Even the British cavalry showed a reluctance at times to charge home in the face of such overwhelming weight and numbers, though several regiments, particularly the
13
th Light Dragoons and the 15th Hussars, behaved with the greatest gallantry. The shock felt by men encountering for the first time the sights and sounds of battle—and such a battle—had in the nature of things a more paralysing effect on cavalry than on infantry whose men in square had the close support of officers and comrades. Once Uxbridge, whose energy and initiative throughout this critical time was beyond praise, was driven into exclaiming that he had tried every brigade and could not get one to follow him, and then, as he rode up to the ist Foot Guards, "Thank God, I am with men who make me not ashamed of being an Englishman."
³
One of the officers recalled how, while Wellington was sheltering in his square, the men were so mortified at seeing the

¹
Someone once asked him whether the French cuirassiers had not come up very well at Waterloo. "Yes," he replied, "and they went down very well too." See Becke, 202-9; Croker, L 330; Lynedoch, 759; Ellesmere, 98-9, 240; Fortescue, X, 370-6; Fraser, 558-9; Frazer, 559; Gomm, 373; Gronow, I, 69-73, 190-1; Houssaye, 204-14; Jackson. 48-51; Kennedy, 19, 20,115-116; Mercer, I, 310-11; Picton, 81-2, 85-6; Siborne, 1-12; Tomkinson, 305.

²
"The Aide-de-Camp . . . seeing that the Hanoverian would not advance, said, 'As you do not attend to the order given, I have another from the Duke of Wellington wnich is
that you fall back to the rear of the Army.'
This the Hanoverian readily complied with, saying it was very considerate of the Duke when engaged in so much action to think of his Corps with so much care. Accordingly this Corps retreated, and it was from them that a report reached Brussels that the French had gained the victory." Farington, VIII, 19-20. See also
Hamilton of
Dalzell
MS., 73; Frazer, 560-1; Siborne, 14, 18-19; Stanhope, 221; Tomkinson, 296.

³
From a copy of a letter of Captain (later General) Horace Churchill of 24th June, 1815, kindly communicated by Brigadier C. E. Hudson, V.C., C.B., D.S.O., M.C. "All that Churchill says in censure," wrote Napier of this letter, "was the common talk of the Army at the time." See
Hamilton of
Dalzell
MS., for a cavalryman's criticism, and Gronow, I, 73; Tomkinson, 318. Lord Uxbridge afterwards wrote in glowing terms of the conduct of the British cavalry as a whole. Siborne, 12, 16-17.

cuirassiers deliberately walking their horses round them that they shouted, "Where are our cavalry? Why don't they come and pitch into these French fellows?" Such resentment failed to take into account the hopeless numerical inferiority of the Allied cavalry after its earlier losses, and was based on an incomplete view of the battlefield. All the hard-pressed infantrymen could see, amid clouds of thick, eddying smoke, was the outer face of the square on either side, and the hordes of encircling French Horse. They could not realise that the very presence of the decimated English squadrons in their rear helped to sustain the wavering morale of the Netherlanders and Brunswickers, and that the memory of their earlier, and heroic onslaught accounted for Napoleon's failure to follow up his cavalry with infantry and subject their squares to case-shot at close range.

Five times in two hours the French horsemen were driven from the plateau; five times, after rallying in the plain they returned. Whenever they disappeared the British gunners ran out of the squares and reopened fire, while Napoleon's guns resumed their cannonade. Some time after five o'clock Ney brought up the last cavalry from the second line—Kellermann's two divisions of cuirassiers and the heavy squadrons of the Imperial Guard. At one moment more than 9000 Horse assailed the ridge in a compact phalanx. This immense body was packed in the 800 yards front between the
chaussie
and the British bastion at Hougoumont, where the ground was a morass piled with dead horses. The front ranks, including most of the senior officers, were completely wiped out by the English batteries, and the weary mounts could only proceed at a walk. Yet they still continued to return.

Throughout this time and during the bombardments which preceded each assault the British infantry patiently endured their fate. They seemed in their steady squares to be rooted to the ground. Though it would have been hazardous in the extreme to have manoeuvred with some of the young second British and Hanoverian landwehr battalions, they showed themselves, under their fine officers and N.C.O.s, as capable of standing fire as the oldest veterans. Theirs, as Harry Smith said, was no battle of science; it was a stand-up
fight between two pugilists, m
illing away till one or the other was beaten. Inside each suffocating square, reeking with the smell of burnt cartridge and powder, it was like a hospital, the dead and dying strewing the ground. The sufferings of many of the wounded were indescribable; one rifleman bad both legs shot off and both arms amputated, but continued to breathe as he lay amid his comrades. Few cried out in their pain, and, when they did so, their officers immediately quieted them;
¹
it was a point of pride with Englishmen of all classes to take punishment without murmuring. Their stoicism was equalled by that of the French cavalry, who won the ungrudging admiration of the entire British army.
²

Nor was less courage shown by the defenders of Hougoumont. The flank companies in the burnt-out mansion among the charred remains of their comrades, the Coldstream lining the hedge and garden wall, the
3
rd Guards in the orchard, all lived that day up to the highest tradition of the Brigade of Guards. They had made up their minds to die sooner than yield. Three times the wood was taken and retaken; every tree was riddled with bullets, and in the orchard alone more than two thousand bodies were crowded together. "You may depend upon it," said Wellington, "no troops could have held Hougoumont but British, and only the best of them."

During the last hour of Ney's cavalry attacks the sound of the Prussian guns had been audible on the British ridge in the lulls of firing, though few yet realised its import. By four o'clock, the two leading divisions of Billow's corps had reached the western edge of Paris wood, just over two miles east of La Belle Alliance. Half an hour later, in view of the urgency of Wellington's messages, they went into action without waiting for their supports. Soon after five, when they had advanced to within a mile and a half of the Brussels road, Lobau counter-attacked and drove them back. But at six o'clock, two more Prussian divisions h
aving emerged from the wood, Bü
low again attacked, striking round Lobau's southern flank at Plancenoit, a village less than a mile from the French lifeline.

The situation was growing grave in the extreme for Napoleon. His troops had been marching and fighting almost continuously for four days; their losses during the afternoon had been heavier than in any engagement of comparable scale in his career. Again and

¹
"The rear man made a considerable outcry on being wounded, but on one of the officers saying kindly to him, 'O man, don't make a noise,' he instantly recollected himself and was quiet. This was the only noise . . . which I heard from any wounded man during the battle." Leeke, I,
33.

²
"Never was such devotion witnessed as the French cuirassiers.
...
I could
not help exclaiming when the me
lee was going on, 'By God, those fellows deserve Bonaparte, they fight so nobly for him.' "—MS. Letter of Horace Churchill, 24th June, 1815.