The Battle (29 page)

FORTY-FIVE

THE GREAT FRENCH CAVALRY ATTACKS AGAINST THE

ALLIED SQUARES

Faced with this enormous force of cavalry massing but a few hundred yards away, the infantry stationed along the ridge could do nothing but stay in their squares and wait. Gradually, as the attacks developed, Wellington sent more and more reserves into the line of battle; in the end, he would have hardly any left. The three infantry battalions of the Brunswick contingent's Second Line Brigade moved up behind Halkett's squares; Adam's British brigade formed four squares in support of the squares formed by Maitland's and Du Plat's brigades; Detmers's brigade of Netherlanders, called back from the extreme right, deployed four of its battalions in the same area of the field; and even Vincke's brigade, with its four battalions of Hanoverian militiamen, was withdrawn from the extreme left and redeployed in two squares as a reserve force in the center, on the reverse side of the slope a" little south of Mont-Saint-Jean farm. Over the course of that afternoon, a total of thirty-six squares—of which twenty were German, twelve British, three Dutch, and one Belgian—faced the charges of Napoleon's cavalry.

To protect them from the artillery bombardment, the squares were deployed on the reverse slope, where only rebounding cannonballs and blindly fired shells could strike them. Insofar as possible, the squares were positioned in a checkerboard pattern to maximize the effect of their fire. The idea was that whenever a squadron of French cavalry, cresting the ridge and confronting a square, should decide against charging and ride past or around, it would find itself faced with another and end up caught in a crossfire. Although fire from infantry squares had little effect, in the long run a situation of this kind was destined to take a toll on the attackers without leading to any tangible result. Wellington and his British and German generals anticipated such an inconclusive struggle as they peered through their telescopes at the French cavalry, massing at the foot of the slope. According to contemporary military theory, their expectations were correct: in a manual published in Paris in 1813, General Thiebault declared, if infantry formed two lines of squares deployed at the proper intervals and supported by artillery, "I cannot imagine what cavalry would be able to accomplish against them."

Napoleon later tried to dissociate himself from the great cavalry attacks against the Allied squares; he let it be understood that they had been carried out without his authorization, or at least too soon. But such a large movement could not have been undertaken a few hundred yards from the emperor's chair without an explicit order from him. More likely, Napoleon was unable to appreciate the depth of the infantry masses that Wellington had deployed on the back side of the ridge, and believed he could achieve a decisive breakthrough, as had happened at Eylau, where a cavalry charge, involving more or less the same number of sabers, had broken up the Russian line. That Napoleon believed this is demonstrated by a few sentences that Las Cases recorded on St. Helena not a year later, when the emperor confessed his regret that Murat, who had commanded his cavalry in so many battles, had not been with him that day. Murat would have succeeded, Napoleon said, "and with that, perhaps, he would have given us the victory. For what was it that we needed to do at certain points in the battle? Smash three or four British squares."

If Napoleon was responsible for not having verified in person the solidity of the enemy line, which was formed in such a way that his own manuals would have shown him the impossibility of breaking it, then the person who was perhaps to blame for not having properly explained the situation to him was his representative in the field, Marshal Ney. But "le
rougeaud",
"the Redhead," as his troops called him, was anything but a student of military theory, and he laughed at manuals. Ney spent the day engaged in urging his squadrons forward, saber in hand, and in getting horses shot under him, each time emerging miraculously unscathed; apparently, he too believed a breakthrough was possible. If the cavalry, observing a wavering square, perhaps one made up of recruits, could have managed to get among them and scatter them in a rout, a breach would have been opened in Wellington's line; and if the same sequence could be repeated in several neighboring squares, the breach would have become impossible to close.

In the beginning, the squares were not alone in facing the tide of advancing cavalry, even though in the end everything really did come down to that. There were six or seven Allied artillery batteries posted on the crest of the ridge, and much farther forward, almost at the bottom of the slope, every officer who commanded a square maintained a line of skirmishers, continually engaged in exchanging fire with the corresponding enemy line. The artillery officers and the officers in charge of the light companies all had received precise orders should the enemy cavalry advance— to keep firing until the last possible moment and then to abandon their positions and take refuge in the nearest square, since neither a line of skirmishers nor a battery of guns had the least possibility of holding off attacking cavalry. Repulsing the attack was the job of the squares; when that was accomplished, the gunners were to return to their pieces and open fire on the retreating cavalry. Then, using caution, the line of skirmishers could also be reestablished.

In fact, the attack of the French cavalry was carried out with such violence and with such a numerous force that many skirmishers, surprised in the open, were slaughtered before they had time to retreat. When Macready, the young officer who commanded the light company of the Thirtieth Regiment, assembled his men for roll call the morning after the battle, he discovered that, of the fifty-four troops present in the ranks the previous day, only ten remained; he didn't know, he said, whether to laugh or cry. Later, Macready went over the battlefield, searching for any of his men who might still be alive. The youth was able to find only one, and that one so severely wounded that he would not survive long. He was "a good religious soldier," Macready wrote, with "life enough left in him to give me the disgusting details of their butchery."

The artillery, too, found that obeying the instructions they had received was not easy. In a letter written some time afterward to Lord Mulgrave, master-general of the ordnance, Wellington himself, still frothing with rage, alluded to their difficulties. "The French Cavalry charged, and were formed on the same ground with our artillery, in general within a few yards of our guns. We could not expect the artillery men to remain at their guns in such a case. But I had a right to expect that the officers and men of the artillery would do as I did, and as all the staff did, that is to take shelter in the Squares of the infantry till the French cavalry should be driven off the ground, either by our cavalry or infantry. But they did no such thing; they ran off the field entirely, taking with them limbers, ammunition, and everything; and when in a few minutes we had driven off the French cavalry, and could have made use of our artillery, we had no artillerymen to fire them; and, in point of fact, I should have had NO artillery during the whole of the latter part of the action, if I had not kept a reserve in the commencement."

The same thing happened to the British artillery that had happened to the Grande Batterie a short while before, further testimony to the terrifying impact on gunners of a cavalry charge. In at least two cases at Waterloo, the battery commanders themselves, seeing the cavalry advance, gave the order to limber up the guns and transport them to the rear. One of these, Captain Sinclair, had already lost four guns in a clash with the French in Spain two years previously, and the consequences for his career had been distinctly negative. There was no lack of extenuating circumstances, but Wellington remained furious. A few months later, when there was talk of giving the artillery officers who had been present at Waterloo a cash reward, the duke expressed his unequivocal opposition to the idea.

Having routed skirmishers and artillery, the French cavalry was in possession of the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge. The uphill charge had surely tired their horses and disordered their ranks, and then, in front of them, were Wellington's squares, each one formed by a troop of a few hundred men crowded close together around a flag or banner, all with fixed bayonets, those in the first two ranks down on one knee, the others on their feet. We do not know exactly what orders the cavalry generals had been given, nor whether Marshal Ney had ridden that far with them (though in all probability he had), but they could scarcely have been told anything other than that they had to break up those squares. At that moment, they were more than three thousand strong, the cavalry of the Grande Armee, the most famous mounted force in the world. The officers of the cuirassiers, of the
chasseurs a cheval,
and of the lancers dressed the ranks of their men, brandished their sabers, and led them forward.

For almost all the squares, the first attacks were the ones that came closest to causing panic. Many soldiers in the British and German squares were young recruits under fire for the first time. An officer of the Royal Engineers who had taken refuge in one of the squares remarked, "The first time a body of cuirassiers approached the square into which I had ridden, the men—all young soldiers— seemed to be alarmed. They fired high and with little effect, and in one of the angles there was just as much hesitation as made me feel exceedingly uncomfortable." Private Morris of the Seventy-third wavered for a moment when a "considerable number of the French cuirassiers made their appearance, on the rising ground just in our front, took the artillery we had placed there and came at a gallop down upon us." Morris was so awestruck by the sheer size of the men and the horses, by the shining helmets and the steel cuirasses, that he thought, "we could not have the slightest chance with them."

The same sentiment prevailed among people who were much more experienced than the nineteen-year-old Morris. In the yard at La Haye Sainte, Major von Baring ordered his fusiliers to fire at the serried ranks of cavalry riding past the farm, but he watched the enemy horsemen continue their advance "without even noticing" this fire and boldly attack the squares. "I could see all this going on, and I'm not afraid to admit that my heart sank more than once," Baring later recalled. Some distance away, on the high ground behind Hougoumont, Captain Mercer was still talking with Colonel Gould when he saw the enemy cavalry come back up the slope and overwhelm the guns of the batteries posted in the first line, and for an instant he had the impression that the infantry squares, too, had disappeared under the countless whirling sabers. "The only objects were a few guns standing in a confused manner, with muzzles in the air, and not one artilleryman," Mercer wrote. "And now we really apprehended being overwhelmed, as the first line had apparently been. 'I fear all is over,' said Colonel Gould, who still remained by me. The thing seemed but too likely, and this time I could not withhold my assent to his remark, for it did indeed appear so."

But if the squares were not broken or at least pushed back, the capture of the guns meant nothing, and a charge against a line of squares, more than just blind momentum, rather resembled a risky psychological game. The French cuirassiers were assembled in plain view on the crest of the ridge, little more than a hundred yards away from the nearest squares, far enough that it would have been useless for the infantry to start shooting at them. When a squadron had chosen its objective and was ready to move, it set out at a walk, superior officers in front, their sabers unsheathed. If, at this point, the men in the square started to fidget a bit too much, the cuirassiers' officers could risk accelerating the pace to a trot, which meant that the infantry had time to fire one volley only. Should that volley be fired badly—too soon or too high—the cavalry could pass to a gallop, and then the infantry soldiers, in all probability, would lose their nerve and clear off, and the inevitable result would be a massacre. However, if the infantry, kept in place by the blows and curses of its officers and sergeants, remained steadfast and held its fire until the last possible moment, the cavalry would usually slow its pace, veer to the right or left before impact, and ride off in search of another target. In this case, the soldiers in the squares could shoot with impunity, and the cavalry would receive the full force of the infantry's fire.