The Age of Elegance (36 page)

again they had seemed on the point of carrying the ridge and sweeping Wellington's international flotsam and jetsam down the Brussels road. Yet whenever the smoke cleared, the stubborn redcoats were seen to be still standing. The Prussian shot, already playing on the
chaussee,
brought home to the Emperor that, unless he could break Wellington's line in the remaining hours of daylight, his doom was certain.

The Emperor descended from the mound on which he had so long watched the battle. Though, like his adversary, still in his middle forties, he had so far taken little active part in the direction of the assault. After a study of the battlefield in the early hours and the issue of orders for the attack, he had delegated tactical control to Ney. Exhausted by the exertions of the last three days, he had spent part of the afternoon in what seemed to onlookers a coma, and had not even intervened to stay the impetuous Marshal's abuse of his cavalry. But he now roused himself, to snatch, as so often in the past, victory from defeat.

He had to fight on two fronts. To the south-east 30,000 Prussians were striking at his communications; to the north 20,000 Britons and as many or more Germans and Netherlanders were still barring the Brussels road. Despite his casualties he still had between 50,000 and 60,000 veteran troops, though of Grouchy's 33,000, wandering somewhere in space to the east,
¹
there was no sign. To clear his flank and gain time for a further assault on the British, he dispatched eight young Guard battalions of the Imperial Guard to reinforce Lobau and recover Plancenoit. Simultaneously he gave Ney peremptory orders to throw in infantry and capture La Haye Sainte.

Conscious that the crisis of the battle was at hand and that the interminable and futile attacks of the French cavalry must now be followed up by infantry, Wellington had already reorganised his line. Taking advantage of the lull after the last charge, he had brought up Clinton's division of Peninsular veterans from its place in reserve to a point at which, standing between the defenders of Hougoumont and Maitland's Guards, they could enfilade any attack on his right. Feeling that Hougoumont was now secure and that, as a result, no threat could develop from that quarter, he also summoned Chasse's Netherlanders from Braine L'Alleud and placed them in

¹
Unknown to him they were at that moment fiercely attacking the Prussian rearguard at Wavre twelve miles away.

rear of his centre. Simultaneously, seeing that Ney's force was spent, he deployed his shrunken battalions from square, forming them four-deep instead of in the normal two-rank line so as to give extended fire-power against infantry while p
reserving sufficient soli
dity to repel what remained of the French cavalry.
¹

Soon after six Ney attacked in the centre with two columns of infantry and cavalry. They were driven back by a terrific fire from the British guns. But the French were fighting magnificently and with the recklessness of despair, and the young Prince of Orange, in charge of the defenders at this point, was without experience of command. Repeating a mistake made at Quatre-Bras, he ordered one of Ompteda's battalions of the King's German Legion above La Haye Sainte to deploy in the presence of cavalry, with disastrous consequences. Their comrades inside the farmhouse were now down to their last round of ammunition
²
and at about six-thirty the key to the British centre was captured. Baring's remaining forty men fought their way back to the ridge with the bayonet.
At
about the same time the eight battalions of the Young Guard, sent to Lobau's aid, recovered Plancenoit.

This double success gave the French, at the eleventh hour, a chance of victory. Throwing sharpshooters and guns forward from the captured farm, they established themselves on the ridge and opened a destructive fire on the left of the
3
rd Division and the right of the
5th.
The Prince of Orange, who had by now completely lost his head, deployed another of Ompteda's battalions in the presence of cavalry with the same disastrous result. A few minutes later Ompteda was killed. His shatte
red brigade and that of Kielman
segge's young Hanoverians had reached the limit of their endurance and were on the point of breaking. Only the gallantry of the Rifles and a charge by the
3
rd Hussars of the Legion prevented immediate disaster.

Had Napoleon been on the spot to exploit the opportunity, he might have turned the gap in the British centre into a chasm. But when, still watching from La Belle Alliance three-quarters of a mile away, he received Ney's urgent appeal for more infantry, he only

²
Through a failure on the Prince of Orange's part, and ultimately on Wellington's, to make adequate provision in time. "The Duke lamented the loss of La Haye Sainte from the fault of the officer commanding there but immediately correcting himself,—'No, in fact it was my fault, for I ought to have looked into it myself.' " Stanhope,
245.
See also Ellesmere,
104, 208-9;
Fortescue,
381-3;
Kennedy,
122-3, 174-5;
Siborne,
32-3;
Tomkinson,
305.

asked petulantly whether the Marshal expected him to make them. At the crisis of his gamble his moral courage faltered; he was not ready to stake everything. And while the twelve remaining battalions of the Imperial Guard waited, unused, "Wellington, summoned from his position with t
he Guards Division above Hougou
mont, galloped to the spot, calling up every remaining available unit.

The British commander-in-chief had received the news with his habitual calm and decision. As all the Allied leaders in the centre had by now been killed or wounded, he temporarily took over command there himself. Leading five young Brunswick battalions into the full storm of the French batteries, he rallied them when they broke under that hurricane of shot and brought them steadily back into line. Meanwhile, Vivian, seeing a new force of Prussians moving up from the east, arrived on his own initiative from the left of the ridge. Uxbridge galloped off to fetch Vandeleur's nth, 12th and 16th Light Dragoons, and Somerset, with the wreck of the Union Brigade extended in single rank to make the utmost show, instilled confidence and pressure from behind into Chasse's Netherlanders.

The bombardment had now reached a new degree of intensity as Napoleon brought up every available gun to reinforce his massed batteries. All along the Allied centre men were going down like ninepins; close by the crossroads 450 of the 700 men of the 27th lay in square where they had fallen. In a neighbouring regiment—the 40th—both ensigns and fourteen sergeants had been killed or wounded round the tattered colours. The 5th Division, 5000 strong when the battle started, seemed to have dwindled to a line of skirmishers. Kincaid with the Rifles began to wonder at that moment whether there had ever been a battle in which everyone on both sides had been killed.
¹
The stream of wounded and fugitives towards the rear was so great that a Prussian aide-de-camp, who rode up from Ziethen's oncoming corps to investigate, returned with a report that the British were defeated and in retreat. No one knew what was happening outside his own immediate vicinity, for in the windless, oven-like, smoke-filled air visibility was reduced to a few yards.

Yet Wellington's grip on the battle never relaxed. Unlike his imperial adversary he was used to commanding comparatively small armies and to attending to every detail himself. In his grey greatcoat

¹
Kincaid,
352.
See Ellesmere,
172-3;
Fortescue, X,
391
-7;
Frazer,
139, 189, 219;
Gomm,
359-360, 366;
Gronow,
1,
212;
Basil Jackson,
75-6;
Autobiography of Sergeant Lawrence,
239;
Simmons,
375
;*Tomkinson,
308.

with cape, white cravat, Hessian boots, telescope and low cocked-hat, he rode continuously up and down the line, often alone and seemingly oblivious of the storm of shot. He neither avoided nor courted clanger, but, knowing that his presence was necessary to keep his young soldiers to the sticking point, showed himself, placid and unconcerned, wherever the fire was hottest. Everywhere he infected men, near the limit of endurance, with courage and confidence. Almost every member of his staff, including De Lancey, his Quartermaster General, had by now fallen, but, though he looked thoughtful and a little pale, he betrayed no sign of anxiety.
¹
Once, chatting with the commanding officer of a square in which he had taken shelter, he was heard to say, "Oh, it will be all right; if the Prussians come up in time, we shall have a long peace." But occasionally he looked at his watch.

"Hard pounding this, gentlemen," he observed, "but we will see who can pound the longest." And when the smoke for a moment drifted away and the scanty lines of red were seen everywhere to be standing, a cheer went up from his tired countrymen that showed him to be justified. The hour for which he had waited had come. For streaming on to the west end of the battlefield from Smohain, driving the French from the environs of Papelotte and La Haye and filling in the two-mile gap between Billow's men before Plancenoit and the left of the British line came Ziethen's Prussian corps. Its intervention was far more decisive than Biilow's earlier but more distant attack on Plancenoit. As the Prussian batteries, adding their quota to the inferno on the ridge,
²
began to shell the ground near La Belle Alliance, Napoleon knew that the end was at hand. Already from his right rear news had come that the Young Guard had been driven out of Plancenoit. The field was closing in as it had done at Leipzig, and the night was little more than an hour away.

Soon after seven the Emperor took his final resolution. He sent two of the magnificent, untouched battalions of the Old Guard to recapture Plancenoit and prevent encirclement. Then, bidding his aides-de-camp announce that Grouchy had arrived from the west, he ordered a general advance of all units. As its spearhead he brought

¹
Afterwards he said that the ringer of God had been upon him, adding simply that it was "a near run thing" and that, if he had not been there, he doubted if it could have been done. Lady Shelley, I,
96, 103, 170;
Creevey Papers,
I,
237.
See Broughton, I,
103;
Castlereagh. X,
383;
Ellesmere,
172-3;
Farington, VIII,
32;
Frazer,
263, 276;
Gronow, I,
69-70;
Guedalla,
275-6;
Hamilton of
Dalzell
MS.,
56-60;
Kennedy,
126-9, 176;
Picton,
88-9, 106;
Jackson,
42-4;
Smith, I,
271;
Stanhope,
183.

²
Mercer's battery was almost cut to pieces by their fire. See Mercer, I,
325-30;
Siborne,
21-2.

forward the remaining battalions of the Imperial Guard, keeping only three as a last reserve. With these he descended the plain, marching at their head towards the British ridge. As he did so the French guns again increased their tempo.

The Guard, fresh from its triumph at Ligny two nights before, advanced with a deeply impressive
elan.
Its men were conscious that they bore the destinies of the world. The two veteran battalions who had been sent to recapture Plancenoit did so in twenty minutes without firing a shot. Those of the Middle and Old Guard advancing against the British were inspired by the personal presence of Napoleon.
At
the foot of the slope, in a sheltered hollow, he halted to let them pass, throwing open his greatcoat to display his medals and repeatedly crying out,
"A
Bruxelles, mes enfants! a Bruxelles!"
They answered with shouts of
"Vive L
'Empereur!"
and pressed forward with solemn tread and shouldered arms. In front of each regimen
t rode a general, Marshal Ney—"L
e
rougeout"
—with powder-blackened face and tattered uniform, directing. Cavalry moved on their flanks and in the intervals between the battalions came field-pieces loaded with case-shot. Ahead went a cloud of sharpshooters.

The Guard went up the hill in two columns, the one moving obliquely up a spur from the Brussels road towards the centre of the British right, the other using, so far as Wellington's dispositions admitted, the sheltered ground between La Belle Alliance and Hougoumont. True to the tactical conception that had dominated the earlier attacks, the frontal blow was to be clinched by a left hook. But with Hougoumont firmly held and Duplat's Hanoverians and Adam's brigade of Light Infantry deployed across the hollow way between it and the ridge, the front on which the attackers could operate was narrower than ever. And, with his unerring tactical sense, Wellington was waiting at the very spot at which his adversary's knock-out blow was aimed: on the right of the Guards Division where it touched the left battalion—the
95
th—of Adam's brigade. Warned of the approach of the Old and Middle Guard by a deserting royalist colonel, he had ordered his men to he down out of fire of the guns and
tirailleurs
until the French appeared; their long vigil of endurance, he told them, would soon be over.

In the general darkness and confusion, and because of the fire from the guns on the ridge, the leading battalions of the first column struck the British line at two points: where Halkett's battered brigade of the 3rd Division was drawn up in front of Chasse's Netherlanders, and immediately to the west where Wellington was waiting with Maitland's
1
st
Guards. As the huge bearskins suddenly loomed out of the darkness, the waiting British sprang to their feet in the corn and poured from their extended line a volley at point-blank range into the head of the advancing columns. The French tried to deploy but too late, and most of their officers were swept down. Then, while they were still in confusion, the British charged, Wellington himself giving the word to the Guards with a quiet, "Now, Maitland, now's your time!"

But though the Imperial Guard recoiled, it did not break. Both parts of the column re-formed and opened fire on the oncoming British, their guns supporting them with case. To the east the remnants of the
33
rd and
69th
were driven back and at one moment almost broke, but were rallied by Halkett. A Dutch battery, behaving with great coolness and gallantry, raked the French column, and Chasse's Belgians, 3000 strong, came up in support. Gradually the attackers, isolated and without support behind them, began to give ground. Meanwhile those opposed to the
1
st
Guards, though driven back for some distance, had also rallied. Maitland ordered his Guardsmen back, but his voice could not be heard above the firing, and some of them, mistaking his intention, tried to form square. In the confusion the two British battalions withdrew in disorder, only to re-form at the word of command with flawless and habitual steadiness on regaining their original position.

But before the battle between the rival Guards could be resumed, it was decided by the action of the most experienced regiment on the British side. Wellington always maintained that, if he had had at Waterloo the army with which he crossed the Pyrenees, he would have attacked Napoleon without waiting for the Prussians: "I should have swept him off the face of the earth," he said, "in two hours."
¹
The first battalion of the 52nd, commanded by John Colborne, afterwards Lord Seaton, had served in John Moore's original Light Brigade; Colborne himself was Moore's finest living pupil. It had gone into action at Waterloo with more than a thousand bayonets, being one of the very few British battalions which was up to strength—"a regiment," wrote Napi
er of its Peninsular exploits,
'never surpassed in arms since arms were first borne by men."

¹
Fraze
r,
38;
Ellesmere,
106;
Kincaid,
356.