The Age of Elegance (37 page)

Owing to the skilful way in which Colborne had placed and handled it, its casualties during the French cavalry charges and the long hours of bombardment had been extraordinarily light.

As the second and westernmost column of the Imperial Guard after passing by Hougoumont pressed up the slope towards Mart-land's unbroken line, the drummers beating the
rummadum, dum-madum, dum
,
of the
pas de charge,
Colborne, who was stationed in the centre of Adam's brigade to the right of the Guards, took a sudden decision. Without orders either from the Duke or any superior officer, he moved his battalion forward out of the line for a distance of three hundred yards, and then, as it drew level with the leading company of the advancing French column, wheeled it to the left with the order, "Right shoulders forward." He thus laid it on the flank of the French.
By
doing so he took the risk both of leaving a gap in the line behind and of having his men cut to pieces by cavalry —a fate he had experienced when, as one of Stewart's brigade commanders, he had moved up the hill at Albuera.

The reward of his daring was decisive. The Imperial Guard, taken by surprise, halted and poured a volley into the 52nd which brought down a hundred and forty of its men. But the British reply of this grave Roman battalion was decisive. It seemed as though every bullet found its mark. So heavy were the casualties in the dense, astonished column that the Imperial Guard did not wait for the 52nd to charge. It broke and fled. As it did so, the 52nd resumed its advance eastwards across, and at right angles to, the British front, with the two other battalions of Adam's brigade—the 95th and 71st —moving up on Wellington's instructions on either flank. A few hundred yards on they encountered another French column reforming—the first that had attacked—and dealt it the same treatment and with the same results. Gradually, as the recoiling units of the French army streamed back across their path from the impregnable plateau, the British Light Infantry inclined to the right towards La Belle Alliance. Round them, out of swirling smoke, scattered units of British and French cavalry appeared in charge and countercharge.

For from the ridge above them, starting from the right, the whole British line had begun to advance as Wellington, hat raised high in air, galloped westwards from one tattered, enduring regiment to another. The time for which he and they had waited had come.

"Who commands here?" he shouted to Harry Smith, Lambert's brigade major. "Generals Kempt and Lambert, my Lord." "Desire them to form column of companies and move on immediately." "In what direction, my Lord?" "Right ahead, to be sure."
¹

It was now nearly dusk. But, as the French cannonade ceased and the smoke began to drift from the ridge, the setting sun cast a ray of light along the glinting British line, now motionless no more, and on the accoutrements of the defeated columns in the plain. The whole French army was suddenly dissolving with the landscape: entire regiments leaving their arms piled and taking to their heels. From the east the Prussians were pouring in a great flood across the battlefield, and to the south-west, where the Old and Young Guard were still fighting fiercely to keep Napoleon's life-line open, Billow's men had swept through Plancenoit and were approaching the
chaussee.
"I have seen nothing like that moment," wrote Frazer of the Artillery, "the sky literally darkened with smoke, the sun just going down and which till then had not for some hours broken through the gloom of a dull day, the indescribable shouts of thousands where it was impossible to distinguish between friends and foe."

In that final advance, with little groups of French gunners and horsemen and the last unbroken squares of the Old Guard fighting gloriously to give their Emperor time to escape, a few score more fell, among them Lord Uxbridge, who, riding forward by the Duke's side, had his leg shattered by a shell. Most of the British regiments were so exhausted that they halted in the plain between the ridges. Only the cavalry and Adam's brigade, following the retreating squares of the Imperial Guard, proceeded through the heart of what had been the French position.

As Ziethen's Prussian cavalry from the east and Vivian's and Vandeleur's British from the north met at La Belle Alliance, the union of the armies, fought for so fiercely during three days and nights, was consummated. Shortly after nine o'clock the two men whose good faith, constancy and resolution had made it possible, met on the spot where Napoleon had launched his attack. They were both on horseback, but the old Prussian embraced and kissed his English friend, exclaiming, "Mew
lieber Kamerad"
and then,
"Quelle

¹
"I never saw his Grace so animated," Smith added. Smith, I,
272-3.
See Becke,
222-30;
Cotton,
125-35, 305-6;
Ellesmere,
183-4;
Fortescue, X,
391-2;
Gomm,
361-2, 367-73
: Gronow, I.
73» 89-90;
Houssaye,
221-32;
Jackson,
69-70;
Kennedy,
140-50;
Leeke, I,
passim;
Moorsom,
256-65
;Robinson,
611-14;
Siborne,
passim;
Tomkinson,
311-15;
Chesney,
210-13.

affaire!"
which, as Wellington observed, was about all the French he knew.

Then, in weariness and darkness, Wellington turned his tired horse towards Waterloo and the ridge he had defended. He rode in silence across a battlefield in which 15,000 men of his own army, including a third of the British troops engaged, and more than 30,000 Frenchmen lay dead, dying or wounded. The sound of gunfire had ceased, but, to the south, trumpets could be faintly heard as the tireless Prussian cavalry took up the pursuit of their inexorable enemies. As their infantry, many of whom had marched fifty miles in the past two days, debouched from Plancenoit into the Charleroi highway, where the 52nd, with its tattered colours, was halted by the roadside, they broke into slow time and their bands played "God save the King."
¹

¹
Leeke,
67;
Moorsom,
267;
Jackson,
57-9;
Tomkinson,
315;
Gronow, I,
200;
Simpson,
129;
Stanhope,
245;
Picton,
98;
Gomm,
370-1, 375-6.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Portrait of the Victors

"Great Britain
...
in peace as in war, still watches for that liberty in which alone the genius of our isles lives, moves and has its being; and which, being lost, all our commercial and naval greatness would instantly languish like a flower, the root of which had been eaten by a worm; and without which, in any country, the public festivals and pompous merriments of a nation present no other spectacle to the eye of reason than a mob of maniacs dancing in their fetters."

T

hree
weeks after the battle, while Brussels stank with gangrene and the trampled Waterloo cornfields were heavy with death, a British army entered Paris for the first time since Agincourt. Groups of Guardsmen and Highlanders squatted under the trees or gaped at the boulevard puppet-shows, scarlet sentries paraded before sunlit facades, the Bois de Boulogne with its bivouacs looked like a fair. The Emperor had fled into the south-west to seek a boat, it was said, for America, and the exiled Bourbon—
Louis le Desire
no more but
Louis
Inevitable
—returned with his baggage-train to the Tuileries.
So
did his patrons, the rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia, and their paymasters, the robust aristocracy of Britain, from stout Sir Watkin Willia
ms Wynn, who crashed catastroph
ically through the flimsy chairs of France, to little Lady Caroline Lamb in a purple riding habit primed for an attack on the victor of Waterloo. Even Dr, Keate, the flogging Headmaster of Eton, was seen eating ices on the boulevards and dining with his former pupils, the young officers of the Guards.

During those rejoicing weeks while dukes, statesmen, bankers, fashionable litterateurs and society hostesses rattled over the
pavie
in their carriages and packed the hot, grubby theatres and gambling saloons,
¹
the victors showed their strength.
At
one review a hundred and sixty thousand Russians, superbly caparisoned, paraded before

¹
Croker, I,
63-4;
Gronow, II,
15;
Lady Shelley, I,
94-5, 107;
Brownlow,
124-5, 129-33;
D'Arblay, III,
381-2;
Broughton, I,
305;
Stanley,
197;
Harriet Granville, I,
57,
66,
74;
Williams,
258.

the Emperor of the North. A millennium of drill sergeants and Christian warriors under God's hereditary vicegerents was now, it seemed, to banish for ever the era of atheist mobs and revolutionary levies. The Russians kicked out their toes like rampant bears, the Prussians goose-stepped by like turkeys, the white-coated Austrians like supers at a German opera, the French royal guards pirouetted with the little steps of turnspits in the performance of their duty. All moved stiffly, with high, rigid collars and limbs that seemed mechanically jointed.
¹
Only the British, taught in the school of John Moore, used the free and natural gait of man. As, with stained, shabby uniforms and bullet-ridden banners, they marched down the Champs-filysees past their chief—motionless on his horse like a Roman Emperor in all save pomp—they so impressed the Czar that he ordered the adoption of their system of drill by his Army.

Yet the British puzzled foreigners even more than they impressed them. While others meticulously rehearsed their reviews, they staged theirs without any preparation at all. The Czar having asked to see a representation of Salamanca, the Duke gave a few orders to the Deputy Quartermaster-General who, after a cursory look at the ground, passed them on without comment to the General Officers. The troops marched on to the field without even a plan of operations. The English seemed only interested in problems as they arose. They would not be troubled with theories, even those of their own victories.
²

They had another peculiarity. They did not apparently think of themselves as conquerors. Wherever they moved, the Prussians, and to a lesser extent the Russians and Austrians, left a trail of shattered homes and trampled corn. They lived at free quarters on their enemies,
³
helping themselves to their best; at Epernay the Prussians watered their very horses on champagne. The Cossacks kept French crowds in order at a review by charging with drawn swords; a Prussian regiment, held up by traffic, knocked the coachmen off their boxes with their musket-butts. Blucher's officers entering a coffee-house would order out the natives with oaths of
"Faites place aux Vainqueurs
;" their commander levied a contribution of
a hundred million francs on Paris and, when it was not paid, arrested

2
Blücher
quartered himself in Napoleon's bedroom at St. Cloud where he encouraged his dog to "bivouac" in and soil a magnificent sofa. Simpson,
141
.

the bankers and shut up the Bourse. The beautiful Bridge of Jena was only saved from his engineers by a platoon of Coldstream Guards.
¹

Having suffered no depredations in their own country, the British behaved as they were used at home. When they came to a field of wheat, to the amazement of the natives, they broke rank and carefully followed the footpath in Indian file; when they had to requisition a house, they helped the inhabitants to remove their furniture. They quartered themselves in uncomfortable barracks or tents, paid on the nail, and often through the nose, for what they consumed, and, after the first few days, only entered Paris on passes. The least injury to civilian property was mercilessly punished.

For, though snobbish about many things, the islanders did not seem so about winning battles. Soldiers had a very modest place in their scale of values. Their rich milords and ladies behaved as though they had bought the earth, but their troops walked about the conquered capital as if they were in London, where soldiers were subordinated to the civil law. When French veterans muttered
sacre boeft
ake
under their breath, or trod on their toes, they looked the other way and even sometimes apologised. As to lampoons of themselves, these peaceable warriors seemed to enjoy them as much as the French. A ranting attack on foreign tyrants in the theatre only elicited from Wellington an expression of regret at his inability to understand French political allusions.
²

"Douc
es comme demoiselles!
¹
was the general verdict. It was hard to believe that these were the fellows who had chased the first troops in Europe from Spain and had now defeated the Emperor himself. There was quite a competition among French housewives to invite them to their homes. The Highlanders were particular favourites, though their kilts at first caused some consternation and even scandal among the ladies.
³
They helped with the household chores, played with the children and rocked the cradles. A soldier returning to his

¹
Thereafter, to his Allies' fury, Wellington kept a British sentry posted on it. See Stanhope,
119;
H. M. C. Bland Burges,
345;
Festing,
197-8;
Creevey,
Life and Times,
93-5;
Croker, I,
62-4;
Lady Shelley, I,
99, 104, 107,
no,
160;
Colchester, II,
554;
Brownlow,
172-5;
Costello,
198-9;
D'Arblay, III,
379, 384;
Gronow, I,
93-4, 98-9, 130-1, 206-7;
II,
39-40;
Broughton, I,
309-11, 316;
Williams,
314-16.

²
Stanhope,
217-18;
Kincaid,
Random Shots,
240;
Tomkinson,
323*
Broughton, I,
302-3, 316;
Creevey,
Life and Times,
93;
Colchester, II,
551;
Gronow, I,
92-3;
II,
15-16;
Brownlow,
129;
Smithy I,
294;
Harriet Granville, I,
62-4.

³
"C'est vrai! actuel
lement rien qu'un petit jupon—m
ais comment!'*
remarked one excited Frenchwoman, lifting her hands and eyes,
"petit jupon—et comment!"
Stanley,
197.
See Simpson,
11-12;
Brownlow,
129;
Gronow, I,
80-1;
Bury, II,
15;
Gomm,
376;
Broughton, I,
312.