Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (53 page)

Very soon, the fighting became intense hand-to-hand combat in and around the manor, where shots seemed to come from “every crack in the stone,” as Victor Hugo put it. The French troops tried to force their way through a gate in the back of the manor, which had been used for supplying the troops. Eventually, a large Frenchman nicknamed L’Enforceur knocked a hole in the defenses and some one hundred Frenchmen streamed into a courtyard. Macdonnell and some fellow Scotsmen managed to close the gate again. The French intruders, trapped on the inside, were slaughtered. The only exception was a young drummer boy.

Undeterred by the lack of success, Prince Jérôme ordered a second attack on the manor, adding another four battalions, despite the protests of General Foy. Prince Jérôme would seize it “at all costs,” an order, he later claimed improbably, that came from Napoleon himself. Progress was slow and brief. The French only managed to capture the forest and the orchard for a time. Even the fire that began to rage on the manor roof in the early afternoon, and soon spread throughout the many structures, did not obliterate the defense. A small, exhausted contingent of twenty-six hundred Allied troops was pinning down a force several times their size.

Indeed, rather than diverting troops from Wellington’s center, the French assault was proving a drain on Napoleon’s main attack. Years later, Wellington attributed the victory at Waterloo to the early action here on the periphery, or, as he put it, “the closing of the gates at Hougoumont.”

One of many mysteries about the Battle of Waterloo was why Napoleon did not begin the attack by firing not only cannons but also howitzers, whose high-arced explosive shells would have likely devastated the walls of the manor. Such a bombardment was routine for this type of action, and would have paved the way for Jérôme’s brave but ultimately ineffective assaults. Was the strange absence of the howitzers due to the fact that the French simply could not see the terrain and did not know how well the manor would be defended? Perhaps they did not even know the manor was there, as the historian Alessandro Barbero suggested. Orders already seemed confused, and miscommunication was rife; individual commanders were taking major decisions into their own hands, with great repercussions.

Meanwhile, just over fourteen miles away near the village of Walhain, Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy, commander of the thirty-three thousand men of the Third and Fourth Corps, was eating strawberries in a requisitioned summerhouse when one of his soldiers rushed in with news that the rumble of the guns could be heard from the west. Grouchy’s assistant, General Gérard, urged that they immediately turn around the armies and march them in the direction of the cannons.

The firing might well be a “rear-guard affair,” Grouchy said. His orders were to advance to Wavre and finish off the Prussians. True, he had written Napoleon earlier that morning, about four o’clock, to ask for further instructions, but no reply had yet arrived. Grouchy reasoned:

The Emperor told me yesterday that it was his intention to attack the English army if Wellington accepted battle…If the Emperor had wanted me to take part in it, he would not have detached my army just when he was preparing to attack the English.

Besides, marching on the muddy, soggy roads, he said, would make it difficult to reach the battlefield “in time to be of any use.” He insisted on obeying the order precisely.

So over the spirited protests of his assistant and several other officers, Grouchy ordered the army to march away from the guns and away from Napoleon, who would very soon need the thirty-three thousand soldiers of the Third and Fourth Corps, who seemed destined to spend the day vainly roaming the countryside in search of the Prussian troops.

A
BOUT ONE O’CLOCK
that afternoon, Napoleon was on the hill near the Rossomme farm, sweeping the plain with his telescope. To the northeast, he saw an object that looked like a dark cloud. Was it an approaching army? Some officers near him claimed it was just a cloud, a cluster of trees, or really nothing at all. Napoleon had seen this sight many times before and knew otherwise.

But was it the French corps under Grouchy returning from their mission of finishing off the Prussians? Or was it the Prussians somehow nearing the scene? Napoleon sent scouts out to investigate. A courier was captured and interrogated, removing the last trace of doubt. It was the Prussians, and it was not just a minor detachment. It was the main Prussian army.

Remarkably, after the Prussian loss at Ligny two days before, Blücher’s chief of staff, Gneisenau, had made a snap decision to retreat north—one of the fateful orders of the entire campaign. Had he retreated in any other direction, which was more obvious given their supply lines, the location of their headquarters, or the vicinity of strategic fortresses, the Prussians would never have been able to arrive on the scene. That morning, when the Prussians were debating whether to link up with the Allies, Gneisenau had argued against it. Blücher, however, overruled him. Having recuperated from his wounds, he was determined that the Prussians would reach the battlefield in time and fight the French.

When Napoleon first learned of the approaching Prussian army, said to be about six to eight miles away, he was not too concerned. “Even now, we have a sixty percent chance of winning,” he said. Napoleon sent messengers to order Grouchy (wherever he was) to return at once. He sent two cavalry divisions, or some two thousand troops, east to distract or lure away the vanguard of the Prussians. In the meantime, he would attack Wellington and win quickly. “A more careful man,” Clausewitz judged, “would have broken off the engagement and retreated.”

Minutes later, however, some eighty-four French guns thundered onto Mont-Saint-Jean, where Wellington had positioned his troops. After the cannons plowed through the defense, Napoleon planned to order Lieutenant General Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Count d’Erlon, and the First Corps onto the weakened center. Then he would unleash his superior cavalry and complete his victory before the Prussians had time to arrive. Parade uniforms were already in knapsacks waiting for the triumphant march into Brussels.

At 1:30 p.m., Count d’Erlon and the sixteen thousand soldiers of the First Corps began to advance, slowly, through the muddy rye fields to attack the Allies. The columns were enormous, spanning some two hundred men or files across, and twenty-four to twenty-seven deep. This was an intimidating formation that showcased the strength of the attackers, and elevated morale, but it was hardly practical. Packing the soldiers so closely together limited movement, flexibility, and visibility, not to mention restricting firepower to the first two or three ranks. The rest of the soldiers—the vast majority—had virtually no offensive potential. Equally problematic, the deep columns presented a frightfully exposed target to British cannons. Napoleon had not chosen this formation for the assault, but neither had he overruled it. The French infantry would pay terribly for this poor choice.

But as the colossal columns marched forward, twenty-seven steps a minute to keep pace with the roll of the drums, some Allied troops, under the Dutch general Willem Frederik Graf van Bijlandt, fled in terror. British veterans hissed, hooted, and nearly fired at their allies as they raced by, calling them cowards and worse. Actually, many of the Dutch and Belgian soldiers in this brigade were suspected of identifying with Napoleon and hardly relished the thought of fighting their beloved emperor. They were also young troops fighting their first battle. Placed out front, too, they had also been more exposed to Napoleon’s cannon salvos than any other troops on the Allied side.

As in all large battles, once it began in earnest, chaos seemed to reign. The thick black smoke of cannons obscured, from many angles, what little coherence might be imposed on the scene, and the low clouds of that overcast morning did not help visibility. In fact, the clouds were so near the ground that they seemed to magnify the roar of the cannons.

That day, some 150,000 men and 30,000 horses would charge, shoot, and hack their way through a muddy plain, not quite three miles long and barely one and a half miles wide. Musket balls struck swords or breastplates like a “violent hailstorm beating upon panes of glass.” Sabers, lances, and grapeshot did their worst. Cannons wreaked even more damage. After the first thirty minutes, there were probably more than 10,000 dead and wounded. There were also the awful sights and sounds of the crying horses. It is no surprise that this battle would inspire one of the first modern efforts to protect animals from cruelty.

During the melee, which soon seemed to shift in favor of France, partly out of sheer force, the commander of the Allied cavalry and horse artillery, Lord Henry William Paget Uxbridge, ordered an attack. Outnumbered by perhaps five to one, the Household Brigade and the Union Brigade charged. It was a resounding success, at least initially. The horsemen sabered many Frenchmen, who turned and fled. Advancing quickly, they seized artillery guns, took some three thousand prisoners, and captured two Napoleonic eagles. The French attack had been repulsed.

True to form, the impetuous cavalrymen had difficulty restraining themselves in their triumph. Soon the brigades had overreached, riding deep into enemy ranks. Napoleon, who saw their vulnerability, ordered fresh lancers and dragoons into the fray. The result was devastating, and the “charge of the heavy brigade” came to an abrupt end. No fewer than a thousand of the twenty-five hundred horsemen perished.

A
S THE DIVERSION
at Hougoumont turned into a quagmire and Count d’Erlon’s attack had been repulsed, Napoleon had to launch his next big offensive against a center that had not been weakened.

Marshal Ney ordered a massive cavalry charge, comprising two brigades of the First Corps, or a total of about five thousand troops. William Gronow, a nineteen-year-old Etonian who fought with the First Foot Guards, described the approach of Ney’s horsemen.

Not a man present who survived could have forgotten in after life the awful grandeur of that charge. You perceived at a distance what appeared to be an overwhelming, long moving line, which, ever advancing, glittered like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight…[as they approached] the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath their thundering tramp. One might have supposed that nothing could have resisted the shock of this terrible moving mass.

British commanders gave the famous order to form a square: “Prepare to receive cavalry.” The soldiers in the front knelt down, readied their bayonets, and formed a human wall, or, as one veteran described it, “a wall bristling with steel, held together by steady hands.” Behind this line, two rows of infantry bit off cartridges, loaded, rammed, and prepared to fire their muskets at the attackers.

Britain’s infantry squares were actually often closer to rectangles, being larger on the front and the rear than on the sides. The formation was based on the assumption that a horse simply will not ride into a wall of bayonets. Indeed, despite contemporary paintings that depict gory cavalry charges, the horses generally stopped at about twenty yards’ distance, no matter how much the riders cursed, or shouted
“Vive l’Empereur.
”

The best approach was to fire artillery into the infantry squares first. Cannon fire was, of course, the infantryman’s nightmare. Unlike the saber, the lance, or the musket ball, the heavy eight-and twelve-pounders mangled bodies, smashed bones, and lopped off heads. Napoleon had planned to open with them, “his beautiful daughters,” as he referred to the twelve-pounders. The problem was that many cannonballs had sunk in the mud rather than richochet through the ranks, and Wellington had protected them well, anyway, on the reverse side of the slopes. The French guns had done much less damage than Napoleon had hoped or expected.

As Wellington issued orders under an elm tree at a crossroads north of the farm of La Haye-Sainte, or riding down the lines encouraging the troops, Napoleon launched attack after attack on the center. The British infantry held firm. Wellington marveled at Napoleon’s lack of finesse in varying his tactics: “Damn that fellow! He is a mere pounder after all.”

One soldier compared the repeated charges of the French cavalry against the British infantry to “a heavy surf breaking on a coast beset with isolated rocks” the massive wave crashes “with furious uproar, breaks, divides, and runs, hissing and boiling.” Losses were heavy on all sides. One British regiment at the center, the Twenty-seventh Inniskillings, lost 450 of its 750 men, and only an estimated 1 in 18 made it through the grueling day without a wound.

The first cavalry charge, as the historian J. Holland Rose noted, came too soon. It was also plagued by the lack of coordination with artillery and infantry—an unsupported cavalry charge against an unbroken infantry square was recklessly ineffective. In fairness to Ney, it is likely that he misjudged the movements behind the Allied line, thinking that the repositioning of the squares a hundred yards back (to avoid the cannons) and the evacuation of wounded and prisoners was actually Wellington in retreat. Ney had suspected that Wellington would attempt to flee since the beginning of battle, and he was sensitive to any sign that indicated it was taking place. He thought he was cutting off the retreat.

But Wellington was not retreating. The infantry, locked into approximately twenty squares, held firm and the slaughter continued.