The Making Of The British Army (31 page)
Read The Making Of The British Army Online
Authors: Allan Mallinson
Waterloo today – despite the huge memorial mound of which the duke complained in later years – is remarkably as it was that day in June 1815, Sunday the eighteenth. The ridge is not high, but there is a pronounced slope, which was rather more pronounced 200 years ago.
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It was not so much an obstacle to the French advance as an elevation which gave the defenders a slight psychological advantage and, more importantly, Wellington the opportunity to work his favoured tactical trick of concealment behind the crest. The ridge itself is just short of 3 miles long, about two-thirds of which Wellington was able to occupy with infantry. He posted two brigades of cavalry on the left (east) flank,
and another on the inner right, with his heavy cavalry (two brigades) in the centre, and his artillery interspersed with the infantry. Indeed, in essence the deployment was little different from that at Edgehill and the other battles of the Civil War – except that it was a far longer line. But there were three man-made features which gave the position its real strength. First of these were the villages of Papelotte, Frichermont and La Haye, all clustered at the foot of the slope on the left flank, and Braine l’Alleud on the extended right. Garrisoned by the Dutch and Belgians, these villages gave a solid pinning to both ends of the position, and since Wellington had no idea how steady his allies might be in the open, the solid cover of masonry gave him some assurance that they would stand and fight. Second, at the foot of the slope on the right inner flank was the little chateau of Hougoumont which might act as a rock breaking up the waves of an attack on that flank. It was exposed, however, and once under attack would be difficult to support, and so into Hougoumont Wellington put several companies of the Guards, with some German riflemen and a few Dutch Nassauers – 1,500 men in all. Finally, in the centre, halfway down the slope on the high road, was the little farm of La Haye Sainte. This might have the same effect as Hougoumont in breaking up an attack on the centre, and it would certainly be useful cover to the French if they could take it. Wellington therefore placed a battalion of the King’s German Legion (about 400 men) inside the farm courtyard, with companies of the 95th Rifles in some sandpits across the road. His red-coated infantry and the rest of the KGL he placed in the centre and right of the line, where he expected the main weight of the attack to fall, and his untried Dutch-Belgians and Hanoverians on the left.
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The arguments continue to this day about what or who won Waterloo: the earth was too wet for the French artillery, the French marshals were faint-hearted, the Prussians arrived in the nick of time; Napoleon’s piles, even. The fact is – as a visit to the battlefield shows at once – that the masterly choice and use of ground was everything.
Thomas Hardy, in that rather strange epic verse-drama
The Dynasts
,
pictures the ridge of Mont St Jean, and the ridge opposite on which the French were camped, the night before the battle:
CHORUS OF THE PITIES
…
And what of these who to-night have come?
CHORUS OF THE YEARS
The young sleep sound; but the weather awakes
In the veterans, pains from the past that numb;
Old stabs of Ind, old Peninsular aches,
Old Friedland chills, haunt their moist mud bed,
Cramps from Austerlitz; till their slumber breaks.
CHORUS OF SINISTER SPIRITS
And each soul shivers as sinks his head
On the loam he’s to lease with the other dead
From to-morrow’s mist-fall till Time be sped!
(The fires of the English go out, and silence prevails, save for the soft hiss of the rain that falls impartially on both the sleeping armies.)
Hardy uses the term ‘English’ as it was used loosely in his time: there were Scots, Irish and Welsh regiments the length of the ridge, and half of the allied army had German or Dutch or French (Walloon) as their first and perhaps only language.
There was no patrolling during the night, and little movement at Mont St Jean other than ammunition waggons and the odd commissary’s sparse load of rations, nor any forward movement by the French, exhausted as they were by the battle at Ligny and the following march. Only sentries keeping sodden watch.
As the trumpets and bugles blow reveille, Hardy describes the scene in his ‘stage directions’:
THE FIELD OF WATERLOO
An aerial view of the battlefield at the time of sunrise is disclosed …
The sky is still overcast, and rain still falls. A green expanse, almost unbroken, of rye, wheat, and clover, in oblong and irregular patches undivided by fences, covers the undulating ground, which sinks into a shallow valley between the French and English positions. The road from Brussels to Charleroi runs like a spit through both positions, passing at the back of the English into the leafy forest of Soignes.
The latter are turning out from their bivouacs. They move stiffly from their wet rest, and hurry to and fro like ants in an ant-hill. The tens of thousands of moving specks are largely of a brick-red colour, but the foreign contingent is darker.
Breakfasts are cooked over smoky fires of green wood. Innumerable groups, many in their shirt-sleeves, clean their rusty firelocks, drawing or exploding the charges, scrape the mud from themselves, and pipeclay from their cross-belts the red dye washed off their jackets by the rain.
At six o’clock, they parade, spread out, and take up their positions in the line of battle, the front of which extends in a wavy riband three miles long, with three projecting bunches at Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, and La Haye.
Looking across to the French positions we observe that after advancing in dark streams from where they have passed the night they, too, deploy and wheel into their fighting places – figures with red epaulettes and hairy knapsacks, their arms glittering like a display of cutlery at a hill-side fair.
They assume three concentric lines of crescent shape, that converge on the English midst, with great blocks of the Imperial Guard at the back of them. The rattle of their drums, their fanfarades, and their bands playing ‘Veillons au salut de l’Empire’ contrast with the quiet reigning on the English side.
A knot of figures, comprising WELLINGTON with a suite of general and other staff-officers, ride backwards and forwards in front of the English lines, where each regimental colour floats in the hands of the junior ensign. The DUKE himself, now a man of forty-six, is on his bay charger Copenhagen, in light pantaloons, a small plumeless hat, and a blue cloak, which shows its white lining when blown back.
On the French side, too, a detached group creeps along the front in preliminary survey. BONAPARTE – also forty-six – in a grey overcoat, is mounted on his white arab Marengo, and accompanied by SOULT, NEY, JEROME, DROUOT, and other marshals. The figures of aides move to and fro like shuttle-cocks between the group and distant points in the field. The sun has begun to gleam.
The rain had stopped, and the sun had indeed begun to dry out the armies, if not the ground. The French seemed in no hurry to attack, troops forming up on the ridge opposite Mont St Jean as if for a review. In fact the bands played and Napoleon rode the length of the line raising cheers. There has always been speculation that he delayed the opening of the battle so that his artillery could have greater effect: the drier the ground, the greater the ricochet of the solid shot. But this seems unlikely: time was the one commodity that Napoleon had always said was not his to dispose – ‘Ask of me anything but time,’ he told his marshals – and therefore it was not to be squandered. The truth is
probably that his officers could not muster the army into its battle positions any more quickly (they had been dog-tired), and that Napoleon and his gunners made the best of this with the consolation that ‘at least the ground is drying out with every minute’.
The battle is usually divided by historians into five phases. It began just before midday with a colossal bombardment by Napoleon’s massed batteries directed at the centre-left of the allied line, together with a diversionary attack on Hougoumont to tempt Wellington to reinforce that flank at the expense of his centre and reserve. The French ploy was a shade too obvious, however, especially since the attack on Hougoumont was practically unsupported by artillery (which any serious attempt to turn a flank would have needed), and so Wellington simply stood his ground. Indeed, the attack soon began to serve him, for the Guards held out so resolutely, and were supported so deftly by the brigades on the right flank, that they drew in and tied down more and more French – all day, in fact, a sort of mini Spanish ulcer. There were many heroes of that day-long action, but none more praiseworthy than the admirable Corporal Joseph Brewer of the Royal Waggon Train who, when powder was running low, volunteered to gallop his ammunition tumbrel from the ridge, under fire, and into the chateau – which he did, to the cheers of the defenders.
Just before launching his main attack on the allied centre (at about 1.30 p.m.), the second phase, Napoleon learned that the Prussians had withdrawn not east and out of supporting range, but north towards Wavre. He therefore formed a defensive right flank, and this would draw increasing numbers of troops from his reserve for the rest of the day – just as Hougoumont drew in more and more of Ney’s left wing. Meanwhile, the great juggernaut that was the assaulting corps – 16,000 men, a quarter of Napoleon’s whole force, under the comte d’Erlon – began its march in column towards the ridge and to the east of La Haye Sainte.
They had 1,300 yards to march, over wet, loamy earth, through corn 6 feet high,
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and in full view of the allied guns now being rapidly run forward along the chemin d’Ohain. The preliminary bombardment by the massed battery had done some damage to Wellington’s troops, but
not nearly as much as Napoleon hoped or supposed (for he could not see the defenders behind the crest of the ridge), and the allied infantry now came forward in line two deep and began volleying into the densely packed columns which were already under a galling fire from the skirmishers – especially from the 95th Rifles in the sandpits. Unsupported by artillery, and with the cavalry on their flanks unable to influence the fighting to their front, the French columns began to waver and then turn tail – but not before the French cavalry had cut up a battalion of Hanoverians sent to support La Haye Sainte, forcing the nearby battalions on the ridge to form square (a salutary reminder that it did not do to make a mistake in front of French cavalry) and allowing the assaulting columns almost to gain the crest. Seeing this, Uxbridge, without waiting for orders, launched his two heavy cavalry brigades – the Household and the Union (so-called because it consisted of English, Scots and Irish dragoon regiments) – at the French right flank, driving them off and turning the repulse into rout. But Uxbridge’s cavalry galloped on too far, cutting up some of the grand battery, and were in turn cut up by French lancers. They were saved from complete disaster only by a counter-charge from the light dragoon brigade on the far left of the allied line.
Skirmishing continued throughout the afternoon along the whole length of the ridge and in front of the three anchor points of Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, and the villages on the left of the allied line. But the next real challenge came from the massed French cavalry. In this third phase of the battle some 7,000 assorted horsemen -
cuirassiers
, dragoons, hussars and lancers – but with little horse artillery and no supporting infantry, came on in a great host towards the allied centre-right between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont. The allied infantry formed squares to meet them. In fact the squares were largely oblong-shaped, with the defenders forming the sides in two ranks, the front kneeling – a bristling hedge of bayonets and a fair length of musketry. Outside the squares, the gunners fired until the last safe moment and then ran for the cover of the nearest square, racing back out to their guns again as soon as the French had swept past.
A sort of stalemate thus developed: the French horsemen galloped – and trotted, and even walked – about the ridge with impunity, but in turn could do no harm. The infantry, secure in their squares save for the occasional plaguing artillery (though some did suffer badly from the French guns), could do nothing to send them back. Uxbridge’s
heavies were in no state to mount much of a counter-attack, and Wellington (who with his staff had to keep taking refuge in a handy square as he rode about the field) had given express orders to his cavalry brigadiers on the flank not to leave their places. The attacks continued for an hour and more, until at about half-past four Wellington was heard to say, ‘The battle is mine, and if the Prussians arrive soon there will be an end to the war.’ This was optimistic, and no doubt deliberately so, but soon afterwards cannon fire to the east signalled that the Prussians were indeed making progress.
Things were looking distinctly shaky for the allies on the ridge, however, where casualties were mounting terribly, and Wellington had to do a deal of realigning and reinforcing. Then, at about six-thirty, disaster threatened as La Haye Sainte fell to a coordinated attack by French infantry, cavalry and artillery – the fourth phase, and the only decent piece of French coordination in the entire battle – which made the allied centre look distinctly vulnerable just as the duke was managing to stabilize the battered inner flank above Hougoumont. The infantry casualties in the centre, just behind the crossroads, had also been rising alarmingly, for the ground here was not so favourable to the defenders, offering less shelter. The 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment alone had lost 400 men to the grand battery before firing a single musket, and their brigadier now sent a note to Wellington asking if his brigade, by this time down to a third of its starting strength, could be relieved for a while. He received one of the ‘backs to the wall’ orders that in desperate moments have often screwed the British army’s courage to the sticking post: ‘Tell him’, said Wellington to an aide-de-camp, ‘that what he asks is impossible: he and I, and every Englishman [sic] on the field, must die on the spot we now occupy.’
