Chapter 3
THE DUKE OF Wellington strongly disapproved of all attempts to turn the battle of Waterloo either into literature or history. His own account of it in his official dispatch was almost dismissive and he advised a correspondent who had requested his help in writing a narrative to ‘leave the battle of Waterloo as it is’. The Duke’s attitude rested in part on his disdain for sensationalism, in part on a well-founded doubt about the feasibility of establishing a chain of cause and effect to explain its outcome. ‘The history of the battle’, he explained, ‘is not unlike the history of a ball! Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle lost or won; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.’
The Duke’s wishes were disregarded, as they were bound to be, from the start. Waterloo, it seemed to contemporaries, had reversed the tide of European history and almost anyone who had taken part in the battle and could still hold a pen found a word-hungry readership. Official thanksgiving determined, moreover, that the style writers adopted should be heroic and declamatory from the outset. For the first time in the history of the British army, each veteran of the battle was awarded a commemorative medal. He was to be known as a Waterloo Man and his single day of service on June 18th, 1815, was to count two years for pension. This alone was sufficient to convince even the most unimaginative private soldier that he had survived an extraordinary event; officers were in no doubt of it from the moment the battle closed and many of their letters, written on the spot to relieve the anxieties of relatives for their safety, strike a note of triumph which was taken up by almost every professional who made Waterloo his subject. Even the French, by some strange translatory process, managed to make an epic out of the defeat. And the two most distinguished literary figures whose imaginations were captured by Waterloo – Byron and Victor Hugo – turned their feelings into poetry.
Remarkably the results – Childe Harold and Les Châtiments – are still thrillingly readable. But the cumulative effect of treating the battle as a drama seen and felt as such by the participants in the heat of combat, has been to cover the human experience and military facts with a thick sedimentary deposit of romance. Even Siborne, whose methodological approach to the battle was impeccable, felt compelled to conclude his ponderous history in a sunburst of adjectives:
Such was the termination of this ever memorable Battle – a Battle remarkable for the spectacle it afforded, on the one hand of a bravery the most noble and undaunted; of a passive endurance, the most calm, dignified, and sublime; of a loyalty and patriotism, the most stern and inflexible: and on the other, of a gallantry in assault the most daring and reckless; of a devotion to their Chief, the most zealous and unbounded; and, lastly, of a physical overthrow and moral annihilation unexampled in the history of modern warfare. Such was the consummation of a victory, the most brilliant in its development, the most decisive in its operation, and the most comprehensive in its result, of any that had occurred since the bringing to the termination so long and so ardently desired by the suffering and indignant nations of Europe.
Generations of writers, for whom the overthrow of Napoleon had little and eventually none of the moral and political significance it did for Siborne and his contemporaries, nevertheless followed him in seeing the victory as a deliverance from tyranny. The visual imagination of writer and reader was meanwhile fed by an outpouring of brightly coloured canvases from the studios of an army of successful salon painters – Dighton, Phillipoteaux, Raffet, Bellangé, Caton Woodville – paintings which by their combination of photographic observation of detail with defiance of physical laws anticipate the work of the Surrealists. Much of the prose imagery in the constantly retold story of Waterloo – flashing sabres, dissolving squares and torrents of horseflesh – has its counterpart, often, one suspects, its origin, in the vision of artists who saw the battlefield, if at all, only as tourists.
Recently a number of writers have shown impatience with the ritually dramatic approach. David Howarth, in A Near Run Thing, was remarkably successful in narrating the battle largely through the reminiscences of combatants and eyewitnesses. Jac Weller, a specialist with a highly original eye, attempted and very largely achieved an ambitious project: to recount the battle ‘from no more information than Wellington had at any one time’. He is an expert on weapons and his book also provides a valuable yardstick of the degree of damage armies could inflict on each other and the sort of harm individuals could suffer on the battlefield. But neither book is wholly satisfactory. Howarth’s individuals remain individuals, leaving the reader uncertain as to how representative each was of his rank, how typical his experience of the day. Weller makes a marvellously imaginative attempt at generalization; but, having called his book Wellington at Waterloo, ultimately and inevitably imprisons himself within the confines of the biographical approach.
What the ‘human experience’ and ‘military facts’ of Waterloo demand of the historian is some combination of Howarth’s and Weller’s methods, a co-operative effort between the former’s heart, the latter’s head. The wonder is that it has not yet been attempted. For the military archaeology of 1815 – systems of drill, types, ranges and effects of weapons, mechanics of command, rates of movement across country – lies ready to be rediscovered, as Weller has demonstrated, only just beneath the topsoil of the past. And rich deposits of personal reminiscence have been open to prospectors for over a century. Indeed these deposits exceed in value those relating to any other battle outside the twentieth century. For besides the memoirs written at leisure by a host of British, French, German, Dutch and Belgian veterans, and the letters dashed off spontaneously by survivors the day or week following, and besides also the official documentation of the campaign, there exists, for the British army, an archive which was to have no counterpart until GeneralS. L. A. Marshall inaugurated ‘after-action reporting’ in the American army during the Second World War. The quality of this archive is magnificent, its origin decidedly eccentric. Captain Siborne, its collector, conceived in the 1830s the idea of constructing an enormous model of Waterloo ‘at the crisis of the battle’ and was granted permission by the Commander-in-Chief to circularize surviving officers for evidence. The result might have been a hodge-podge. He was, however, a methodical man and required his correspondents to answer a precise list of questions. Naturally, not all kept within the rules he laid down, while others did so too strictly, but the overall result was to provide a sort of Argus-eye view of Waterloo from the British side. The collection has provided the principal source for all subsequent accounts and treatments of the battle. Siborne himself wrote an enormous and unreadable history based upon it; most regimental histories’ Waterloo chapters are little more than thinly rewritten versions of their own officers’ letters to Siborne; and jackdaw-flocks of anthologists, attracted to Waterloo by the easy pickings his work provides, have filled scores of their pages with ‘finds’ lifted unacknowledged from his.
The material undoubtedly exists then for a human history which would also be a military history of Waterloo. All the more is this true because so many of the sources remain curiously untouched. For Waterloo has, above all other battles, most consistently been dealt with in ‘win/lose’ terms. It was, as we have seen, the culminating fifteenth of Creasy’s Decisive Battles and a majority of writers have followed or anticipated him in seeing their principal task as one of explanation: an explanation of how Wellington won and Napoleon lost (or was cheated of victory or would have won if X had happened; ‘after an exhaustive reading of Waterloo literature, I flinch’, writes Weller, ‘when I come upon a sentence which begins with either “if” or “had”.’). Moreover, the participants, to a remarkable degree, subordinate the story of their own doings to the larger story of the downfall of Napoleon. And Siborne, whose work is so rich in information about human behaviour on the battlefield, collected it incidentally while pursuing a much narrower – if absolutely fundamental – purpose: the fixing of exact locations and precise times as links in a chain of cause-and-effect. But it is precisely because so much of the human information comes to us incidentally that we can value it so highly; and because it is, in comparison with what we know of Agincourt, so plentiful that we can hope to reconstruct with some authenticity what the battle was like for those who took part in it.
The Campaign
To begin at the beginning of the campaign – which only briefly antedates the battle itself. Napoleon, defeated by the combined armies of Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia in 1814 and exiled to Elba, returned to France on March 1st, 1815. It very quickly became clear to Louis XVIII, whom the Allies had restored to the throne, that his armies’ loyalty did not belong to him and on March 20th he left Paris for Ghent in Belgium. Napoleon entered Paris the same day. He hoped that the Allies would acquiesce in his resumption of power but a week earlier they had agreed between themselves to go to war, and to this agreement they stuck. While Napoleon set in hand the reconstruction of the Grande Armée, much of which had been demobilized at the Restoration, the Allies sealed plans for the concentration of four large armies of their own on France’s eastern and north-eastern borders. An Austrian army of 200,000 was to enter France through Alsace-Lorraine, to be followed later in the summer by a Russian army of over 150,000; a Prussian army of over 100,000 was to march into southern Belgium; and an Anglo-Dutch army, formed on a British nucleus already in the Low Countries, was to concentrate in the north. When in position, the four armies were to advance simultaneously into France.
Napoleon could not hope to match these numbers. He had found only 200,000 men actually under arms on his return and, recognizing that Louis XVIII’s abolition of conscription had been too popular a step to revoke, had to resort to exhortation and illegalities to add to them at all. His inferiority in strength limited him to a choice between only two strategies: a Fabian one of defence and delay which, if protracted long enough, might persuade the Allies to make peace with him out of sheer frustration; or a spoiling offensive against the already forming British and Prussian armies in Belgium which, if successful, might deter the Austrians and Russians from subsequently risking defeat in detail themselves. His natural inclination being for the offensive, and the British and Prussians scarcely outnumbering him, he decided for the second. It had the added attraction over the first of averting another foreign invasion of the national territory within eighteen months.
He was not, however, strong enough to tackle the British and Prussian armies combined. His plan required therefore that he should bring one of the two Allies to battle before the other and in such a fashion that the unengaged army should not come to its neighbour’s assistance until it was too late. The difficulty was to choose which to attack first. A study of their lines of communication supplied the answer. The British army’s base was in the Belgian ports, the Prussian’s in the Rhineland. Whichever was attacked would tend to fall back on its base and hence away from the other, to whose lines of communication its own ran at right angles. An attack on the British might provoke the Prussians into coming to their assistance; but Napoleon thought it most unlikely that Wellington would risk endangering his communication with the channel ports to help Blücher. This line of reasoning determined that he should strike at the Prussians first.
Napoleon’s reading of personal and national character was unfair to the British and to Wellington, for the Duke was determined to fight it out in harness. But the initial stage of the campaign seemed nevertheless to bear out Napoleon’s view. So successful was he in assembling his army on the Belgian border without the Allies being able to fix its exact whereabouts that, on June 16th, he managed to concentrate the greater part of his force against the unsupported Prussians at Ligny, and to beat them. The British, rather ominously, did make an appearance late in the day on the extreme western flank of the battle at Quatre Bras, but were contained and repulsed by a detached French force and fell back, as Napoleon had predicted and desired, northwards. The Prussians meanwhile made their escape, apparently eastward.
So far, splendid. Strategically, the campaign was won. It now remained only to tie up the tactical loose ends by defeating the British; and a British army a great deal less formidable than that which had fought him in Spain. Less than half of it was British at all, the remainder being German, Dutch and Belgian, while many of the British regiments were composed of inexperienced troops.
Its cavalry nevertheless covered its retreat efficiently throughout June 17th and when darkness lifted next day Napoleon found it deploying for battle in a strong position across the main road to Brussels just south of the Forest of Soignes. Its front measured about six thousand yards across and its flanks were well protected – to the east by the farm buildings and cottages of Papelotte, Frichermont and La Haye, to the west by the village of Braine l’Alleud. The centre of the position was reinforced by two strongly built farms, La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont. British possession of those farms made a frontal attack unpleasant to contemplate. But to manœuvre his way round the position, with an unlocated Prussian army somewhere on his right, was perhaps even more dangerous, and certainly very time consuming. Napoleon therefore decided to make his attack a frontal one.
There was no question of the British attacking him. Although the two armies were almost equal in number at about seventy thousand each, so many of Wellington’s German and Dutch-Belgian soldiers were politically or militarily unreliable that he could not contemplate using them in any other than a static role. The King’s German Legion, an emigré force of Hanoverian regulars which had fought the campaign of the Peninsula, was stout-hearted enough to be trusted anywhere; British officers and soldiers willingly conceded K.G.L. regiments to be the equal of their own. But many of the Hanoverian regiments proper were undertrained and inexperienced, while the Dutch-Belgians were suspected, on sound evidence, of preferring Napoleon to their own recently restored Prince of Orange. Wellington therefore disposed them where they could get into least trouble, putting most of the Dutch-Belgians into Braine l’Alleud at one end of his line and La Haye and Papelotte at the other. The irreducible minimum needed to thicken out his line in the centre he sandwiched between British or German regiments of dependable quality. His army thus deployed, generally on the crest of a gentle forward slope, he waited to see where and how Napoleon would open the attack.
Napoleon chose to attack about eleven o’clock against the Chateau of Hougoumont, which was garrisoned by the Foot Guards. This, the first of five phases into which historians conventionally divide the battle, was intended as a diversion, to draw reserves from Wellington’s centre where he meant to make his main attack. The Guards, however, proved capable of holding the Chateau – an immensely strong building – without assistance; while the French commander entrusted with the assault quite forgot his diversionary role and committed greater and greater numbers of soldiers in an attempt to capture it outright. The fight for Hougoumont thus became, as ‘territorial’ struggles often do, a battle within a battle, which continued to rage until the French attackers were forced to break it off by the general retreat of their army from the field.
The second phase of the battle, d’Erlon’s infantry attack, had therefore to be launched against the British centre unweakened at any rate by any withdrawal of men. It had however been subjected to the fire of a ‘grand battery’ of about eighty guns for over half an hour when, at about quarter to two, four French divisions began crossing the shallow valley which separated the two armies. Two important outworks of the British line were quickly captured – Papelotte and ‘The Sandpit’, used by the British riflemen as a skirmishing-place – but La Haye Sainte, though by-passed, did not fall. As the French, in thick columns, approached the crest of the ridge, however, a Dutch-Belgian brigade, which had suffered heaviest from the cannonading, ran away. A counter-attack by British infantry, led by General Picton, restored the line and a charge by two brigades of British heavy cavalry – the Heavy and Union Brigades – then drove the French off in disorder.
The third phase, which began about four o’clock, consisted of a series of French cavalry charges against the section of the British centre that had not been attacked by d’Erlon. The decision to charge was made by Ney, Napoleon’s battlefield commander, who had misinterpreted movement behind the British line to mean that it was giving way. In fact the section of the British line which the French cavalry struck was well-prepared to receive them. It formed square and drove off charge after charge. The horsemen who survived this hour eventually retired, pursued by British cavalry, with whom they entered into a running fight. Napoleon, aware that the vanished Prussians were now approaching the battlefield, hastily sent Ney the armoured cavalry of the Imperial Guard and two other divisions of cuirassiers. They also were beaten by the British and Hanoverian squares, as too were some infantry, launched into the battle as an afterthought about six o’clock.
The artillery of both armies had played a vital attritional role in the second and third phases. The fourth phase, however, was almost wholly an affair of infantry. It was quite brief and stands out as a separate episode because it centred on a clear-cut French success – the first of the day. This was the capture of La Haye Sainte, abandoned by its King’s German Legion garrison because they had run out of ammunition. Its loss put the section of British line behind it in great danger and Ney almost succeeded in breaking through with another infantry attack. But he was now running out of soldiers, the reserve being fully committed against the Prussians, while Wellington, a thriftier commander, could still produce sufficient to reinforce the threatened front. Soon after half past six the situation in the centre was restored.
The crisis now shifted to the French side. Napoleon was heavily engaged on two fronts and threatened with encirclement by the advancing Prussians. He had only one group of soldiers left with which to break the closing ring and swing the advantage back to himself. This group was the infantry of the Imperial Guard. At about seven it left its position at the rear of the battlefield and ascended the slope just to the east of Hougoumont. The British battalions on the crest fired volleys into its front and flank – the flank fire of the 52nd Light Infantry was particularly heavy and unexpected – and, to their surprise, saw the Guard turn and disappear into the smoke from which it had emerged. On the Duke of Wellington’s signal, the whole line advanced, behind the charging horses of the remaining British cavalry. The battle of Waterloo was over, almost – the Prussians were still locked in combat with the French on the east flank – and Napoleon had been beaten.
The Personal Angle of Vision
It is probably otiose to point out that the ‘five phases’ of the battle were not perceived at the time by any of the combatants, not even, despite their points of vantage and powers of direct intervention in events, by Wellington or Napoleon. The ‘five phases’ are, of course, a narrative convenience. But it is nevertheless important to emphasize, before turning to look at the battle in terms of the experience of the men in the line, how very partial indeed was the view most of them got of it. An extreme example is provided by the case of the 27th Regiment, the Inniskillings. They, having been employed on the line of retreat during the night of June 17th–18th, did not get into bivouac until about eleven on the morning of the battle. There, around Mont St-Jean, about three quarters of a mile from the front, they lay down to sleep. Many were still sleeping when at about three o’clock, after the battle had been in progress for four hours, they were ordered forward to the La Haye Sainte crossroads. Near that spot they formed columns of companies and stood, occasionally having to form square, until the general advance was ordered over four hours later. During those four hours, over 450 of the regiment’s 750 officers and men were killed or wounded, in almost every case by the fire of cannon several hundred yards distant or by the musketry of French skirmishers in concealed positions. So heavy were the casualties among the officers (only one out of the eighteen went untouched) that very little about those four hours was ever written down. But it seems unlikely that any Inniskilling had eyes or thoughts for much but the horror that was engulfing him and his comrades; and though, when formed in square, the men in the rear face would have been protected from direct fire by those in the four ranks of the front face forty feet behind them, their view would have been of the one sector of the battlefield where fighting was not going on, while their nerves would have been taut with the expectation of a cannon ball in the back. To have asked a survivor of the 27th what he remembered of the battle, therefore, would probably not have been to learn very much.
Many of Siborne’s correspondents prefaced their replies to him with a warning of how incomplete or unbalanced their view of the day had been. Thornhill, A.D.C. to Uxbridge, the cavalry commander, wrote that he had been so busy with the ‘prompt and direct transmission of his orders’ that he had ‘little time to contemplate passing events irrelevant thereto’; Robbins of the 7th Hussars noted that up to the moment when he was hit, at the very end of the day, ‘we never scarcely saw an enemy’, although the regiment changed position three times and was usually under fire; and during its one direct encounter with the French cavalry, he ‘was too much occupied with my own men to have been able to pay much (attention) to what was going on around us’. Browne, a lieutenant of the 4th Regiment, a neighbour of the Inniskillings but less exposed than they were to the enemy’s fire, developed this point explicitly: ‘the smoke, the bustle, which I fear is almost inseparable to Regiments when close to the enemy, and more particularly the attention which is required from the company officers to their men, intercepts all possibility of their giving any correct account of the battles in which they may be engaged.’ Pratt, the lieutenant commanding the light company of the Inniskillings – which skirmished to the regiment’s front and was therefore spared its terrible ordeal of standing motionless to be cannonaded – makes the same point in a more graphic way:
I think you will readily agree with me that a young Subaltern officer … harassed and fatigued after two days’ previous marching, fighting and starving … was not likely to take particular notice of the feature of the ground over which he was moving, or to direct his observations much beyond the range of what was likely to affect himself and the few soldiers immediately about him.
There were other causes, besides the preoccupations of duty, which deprived men of a coherent or extended view of what was going on around them. Many regiments spent much of their time lying down, usually on the reverse slope of the position, which itself obscured sight of the action elsewhere. Mercer, whose set-piece description of the field in his Journal is one of the most enthralling passages in Waterloo literature, transmitted a flatter, if more convincing recollection to Siborne, in a paragraph which describes the situation of his battery in the early afternoon:
Of what was transacting in the front of the battle we could see nothing, because the ridge on which our first line was posted was much higher than the ground we occupied. Of that line itself we could see only the few squares of infantry immediately next to us, with the intervening batteries. From time to time bodies of cavalry swept over the summit between the squares, and, dispersing on the reverse of the position, vanished again, I know not how.
A few feet of elevation, therefore, made the difference between a bird’s-eye and a worm’s-eye view; indeed, Sir John Colborne, commanding the 52nd Light Infantry, was ‘persuaded that none but mounted Officers can give a correct account of the Battle’ (not an opinion, as we have seen, borne out by the experience of the cavalrymen). But even on the crest of the position, physical obstacles could limit the soldier’s horizon very sharply. In many places, at least at the beginning of the battle, the crops of wheat and rye stood tall enough for the enemy to approach to within close musket shot undetected. At Quatre Bras, ‘the rye in the field was so high’, Llewellyn of the 28th Regiment remembered, ‘that … the Enemy, even in attacking our Squares, were obliged to make a daring person desperately ride forward to plant a flag, as a mark, at the very point of our bayonets.’ At Waterloo, a longer battle, the crops were eventually trampled flat (‘to the consistency of an Indian mat’, Albemarle of the 14th Regiment noted) but earlier in the day the light company of the 51st Regiment, on the far west flank of the position, was fired on by French infantry which had got unscathed to within forty feet of their line under cover of the standing grain; while Lieutenant Sharpin, of Bolton’s battery, got his first inkling of the approach of the Imperial Guard in the ‘crisis of the battle’ when he ‘saw the French bonnets just above the high corn, and within forty or fifty yards of our guns’. Again, the men in the rear or interior of dense columnar formations, of the type adopted by the Guard in their advance, would have glimpsed little of the battle but hats, necks and backs, and those at a distance of a few inches, even when their comrades at the front were exchanging fire with the enemy. And almost everyone, however well-positioned otherwise for a view, would for shorter or longer periods have been lapped or enveloped by dense clouds of gunpowder smoke.
Smoke not only limited visibility (though that was one of its primary effects, of which more later); it also played tricks with vision. Cathcart, one of Wellington’s A.D.C.s, remembered the Guard as ‘black looking columns’ which ‘loomed through smoke and fog’; to the 1st (British) Guards, who stood in their path, the Imperial Guardsmen looked ‘with their high bonnets … through the smoky haze … like a corps of giants’; and an officer of Picton’s division, observing the clash of the two corps d’élite from a distance, recalled that ‘the slanting rays of the setting sun, reaching us through the medium of the smoke of the guns, rendered the atmosphere a camera obscura on a giant scale’ in which individual figures appeared magnified and sooty black.
Yet despite distance, smoke and inconvenient features of terrain obscuring their line of sight, many combatants confidently recorded detailed accounts of longer or shorter episodes and even precise identifications of personality. Albemarle, of the 14th Regiment, saw Jérôme Bonaparte and his suite riding across the front before the opening of the cannonade; soon afterwards Vivian, who commanded the Hussar Brigade, was convinced he saw Napoleon ‘with a large suite of Officers … amongst the Columns forming in front of the British left’. A very large number of British officers and soldiers saw Wellington, often at close hand, heard him speak, or even exchanged words with him. Lieutenant Drewe of the Inniskillings passed under his balcony in Waterloo village, from which the Duke was watching his troops march up, some time after six o’clock in the morning. About ten he was west of Hougoumont, where some panicky Nassauers shot at him after he had ordered them back into position, and he remained in the vicinity until after the opening of the French attack on the chateau itself. In the early afternoon he was in the centre, during the succession of attacks launched by d’Erlon, sometimes near ‘his tree’ – an isolated elm on the crest of the ridge near the La Haye Sainte crossroads – sometimes in the interior of a square. After the repulse of d’Erlon’s attack he visited the companies of the 95th Rifles in The Sandpit, just east of La Haye Sainte, having followed the 1st Battalion, King’s German Legion, which he had sent to their support. Later in the afternoon he was mostly behind the right centre, while it was under assault from the French cavalry: Rudyard, of Lloyd’s battery, saw him frequently near the square of the 33rd and 69th Regiments. Calvert, a major in the 32nd Regiment, saw the Duke east of the crossroads during the attack on La Haye Sainte – he estimated the time at five o’clock, but it would have been later – and he was quite close to the farmhouse itself (and ‘much vexed’ Cathcart, one of his A.D.C.s, noted) when its defence collapsed. During the final phase, that of the attack of the Imperial Guard, many soldiers recalled seeing him, perhaps because death and wounds had so reduced his entourage that he at times rode alone or with only a single companion: Gawler, of the 52nd Regiment saw him riding unaccompanied to the east of Hougoumont and Hunter Blair, brigade major of the 3rd Brigade, exchanged words with the only staff officer then following the Duke (a Sardinian liaison officer who spoke no English). But the Duke was also more conspicuous at the end of the battle because it was at that stage that he mostly directly involved himself as a commander. Though ‘Up Guards and at ’em’ is a fictitious ascription, he certainly did give orders directly to Maitland, commanding the Guards Brigade, and later to the 52nd Light Infantry. After the retreat of the Imperial Guard, he rode east along the whole line, his approach being signalled by cheers which rolled from battalion to battalion. In the general advance which followed, he made his way behind the leading columns to La Belle Alliance, where he and Blücher met, at some time between nine and ten. Soon afterwards he rode back to his headquarters in the village inn at Waterloo, to go to sleep on a mattress on the floor because a staff officer was dying in his bed.
This chronology of the Duke’s movements on the day of Waterloo, besides providing an index of the temperature of the battle at any time – for he always managed to be present where the fighting was hottest – also allows us to calculate what he did not see, and so in a sense to estimate how distorted his view of events was in comparison with that of other combatants less free than he to move about. Thus we can safely say that he did not see what was going on inside Hougoumont (though he issued a most pertinent order based on his observation of the spread of flames inside the building) and he can have known little of what was going on around Papelotte, since he scarcely crossed to the east of the battlefield. He did not witness the culmination of the Union Brigade charge, since that occurred deep within the enemy’s positions, nor did he preside over the ordeal of the Inniskillings at the crossroads, being frequently occupied elsewhere. But to say that he did not experience close infantry combat, of the sort the Guards waged in Hougoumont, or a cavalry charge, of the sort led by Ney during the afternoon, or prolonged cannonading, of the sort undergone by the Inniskillings, is not to say that his view of the battle was any less ‘real’ than that of those who did. It was a view purchased at great personal risk (at least two officers – Gordon and de Lancey – suffered mortal wounds by his side) which was the price paid by almost everyone for the privilege of wearing a Waterloo Medal, and therefore typical. It was a longer view than most had: the Inniskillings, as we saw, missed the first four hours of the battle, while he had been busy about the field long before it began; it was much more varied than that granted to the majority: the 1st/95th Rifles, for example, spent all their time in action at or near The Sandpit, while he was constantly back and forward the thousand yards between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. In that respect his view, like his role on the battlefield, was highly individual. While junior officers and common soldiers naturally used his comings and goings as points of reference in their memory of the day, his personal chronology of the battle would have turned on quite different events. At what they were we cannot guess (though he recalled to an interrogator long afterwards that he had taken his cloak on and off ‘fifty times’ – an intriguing example of the sort of irrelevant detail which sticks in a mind subjected even to the greatest distraction). But by attempting to see how his view differed from his soldiers’, how theirs differed one from another’s, the cavalryman’s from the gunner’s, the man’s in the rear rank of a square from the skirmisher’s to his front, the wounded man’s from that of the man left untouched, we offer ourselves the best chance of comprehending the character of the battle as a whole.
The Physical Circumstances of Battle
We ought to take account, nevertheless, as a prologue to consideration of individual experiences of the battle, several common factors which helped to determine its human context. The first of these was fatigue. It is a fairly safe generalization that the soldiers of most armies, at least before the development of mechanical transport, entered battle tired, if only because they had had to march to the field under the weight of their weapons and kit. The English army at Agincourt was certainly very tired, and hungry, cold and wet into the bargain. So too were both armies on the morning of Waterloo. Both had been on the march the whole of the previous day, carrying fifty to sixty pounds per man, had fought the day before that, and had been living on rations issued the day before that again. They had slept in the fields on the night of June 17th–18th, when it had streamed with rain, and had woken to an overcast and breakfast-less morning. For many of the British regiments we can calculate their state of deprivation with almost clinical precision. The 2nd Battalion, 30th Regiment had left Soignies at two in the morning of June 16th and marched the twenty-two miles to Quatre Bras, which they reached at 5 p.m. On the following day, having left forty men dead or wounded on the field – a comparatively light toll, for seven regiments suffered worse at Quatre Bras than at Waterloo and eight, including these seven, lost between one hundred and three hundred men on an average regimental strength of six hundred – the 2nd/30th retreated to the Waterloo position. They went supperless and breakfastless, so that ‘between the midday meal on the 15th and the morning of the 19th the men received somewhat over two days’ bread rations (four pounds) and two days’ meat (one pound) but had had no time to cook the latter. An attempt had been made to cook during the halt at Braine le Comte, but the march was resumed before the cooking was finished, and the soup and meat poured out on the roadside.’1 Less hungry perhaps than the men of this regiment but more footsore were those of the 1st/40th. They had left Ghent, at half an hour’s notice, very early in the morning of June 16th, marched thirty miles that day and twenty-one the next, to arrive at Waterloo at 11 a.m. on June 18th. Thus they had covered fifty-one miles in a little over two days and nights, with two brief halts of a few hours. The other two battalions of their Brigade had done likewise; since one of them was the Inniskillings, it prompts speculation whether the men of that regiment were not helped to endure the horrors of ‘their’ battle by the semi-anaesthesia of extreme physical tiredness.
These feats of endurance were not isolated. Adam’s Brigade had spent nearly two days on the road; the 71st Regiment, which belonged to it, had left Leuze early on June 16th, without food, and marched for thirty-six hours, with no halt longer than thirty minutes, to reach Waterloo in time for the battle. The men had then sat on their packs throughout the night of the 17th–18th and the breakfast they got when the sun rose was the first meal they had eaten for two days. The soldiers of the 4th Regiment were so tired on the morning of the 18th that they could scarcely keep awake; they, brigaded with the Inniskillings and with the same march behind them, also slept through the first four hours of the battle, lying down in the open about a thousand yards behind the firing line.
They would have slept a great deal better than the soldiers of the regiments which, having fought Quatre Bras, got into their Waterloo bivouacs before darkness fell. For rain and cold in the night of June 17th–18th made sleep almost impossible. Captain Cotter of the 69th Regiment ‘preferred standing and walking to and fro during the hours of darkness to lying upon … mud through which we sank more than ankle deep’. Albemarle of the 3rd/14th noted that the rain lifted for an hour at sundown, was heavier again after dark, with thunder and lightning, and that, after much standing about, he eventually threw himself down ‘on the slope of the hill … it was like lying in a mountain torrent’. He nevertheless slept soundly until two in the morning when his soldier servant called him. Simmons, a lieutenant of the 1st/95th Rifles, ‘smeared an old blanket with thick clayey mud’ and lay down under it on some straw. He kept quite warm. But next morning in Macready’s regiment, ‘we were almost petrified with cold, many could not stand, and somewere quite stupefied.’ The Highlanders of the 92nd, Peninsula veterans, slept in fours under their ‘united blankets’, but were roused at midnight by a false alarm and stood to arms for some time. The troopers of the Scots Greys were constantly disturbed by their horses which, frightened by the thunder, kept stepping on their masters where they lay at their heads. Captain Wood, of the 10th Hussars, remembered that ‘everyone was wet through. We had a shower that came down like a wall. Our horses could not face it and all went about. It made the ground up to the horses’ fetlocks.’
The Quatre Bras regiments fared no better for food, moreover, than those which had had the long march. Leeke, an ensign of the 52nd Light Infantry, breakfasted on a ‘half-mouthful of broth and a biscuit’ which was all the food he got until the battle was over. Five officers of the 32nd, who had had no food since late on June 15th, shared a fowl and a handful of biscuits for supper on June 17th and appear to have got no breakfast. Mercer and his officers, who had also shared a fowl for supper on June 17th, made the serious mistake next morning of not eating ‘stirabout’, prepared by the gunners from some freshly-delivered oats, but of waiting for meat to be cooked. Like the 30th’s meal, two days before, its cooking had to be abandoned when the stand-to sounded, so that he and they fought the battle without food.
Besides being hungry and travel-worn the combatants at Waterloo were also rain-sodden. The regiments that had spent the night marching lay down to sleep in wet clothes and probably woke up to fight the battle still very damp. Those which passed the night in the fields, though they slept worse, or had no sleep at all, generally found means to dry out after sunrise. A young officer of the 32nd, who had woken wet through, managed to get into a shed where there was a fire and the men made large fires outside. The light company men of the 3rd Foot Guards, who had spent the night ‘cramped sitting on the side of the wet ditch’ south of Hougoumont, got a fire going ‘which served to dry our clothing and accoutrements’, and Leeke of the 52nd found a fire large and hot enough to get some sleep by. Wood, the 10th Hussar, an officer whose Waterloo letter breathes the authentic cavalry spirit, ‘got into a small cottage close to our bivouac … most of us naked, and getting our things dry at the fire … Old Quentin burned his boots and could not get them on.’ Other cavalrymen, too, found their clothes spoiled by the wet. The Greys’ scarlet jackets had run into their white belts overnight and Sergeant Coglan of the 18th Hussars attempted to dry his clothes by hanging them on the branches of trees. The Assembly was sounded before he had succeeded and he dressed in the saddle, ‘crying out to those I had charge of to mount also’. Waterloo day was overcast, rather than sunny, so those who, like Coglan, failed to get near a fire at the beginning presumably stayed damp until well after midday. Houssaye’s ‘kaleidoscope of vivid hues and metallic flashes’, his ‘bright green jackets … imperial blue collars … white breeches … breastplates of gold … blue coats faced with scarlet … red kurkas and blue plastrons … green dolmans embroidered with yellow braid, red pelisses edged with fur’ must have covered many limp stocks, sticky shirts and clammy socks.
How much better were the armies prepared for battle spiritually and mentally than they were physically? Of religious practice, which played such an important part in the English army’s preparations for Agincourt, there seems to have been little or none before Waterloo. Chaplains, so numerous in medieval French and English armies, had almost disappeared from those of the nineteenth century (and were not to reappear until the more pious reigns of Victoria and Napoleon III). The great Napoleon’s seems to have had none, its soldiers being among the last French citizens to parade the irreligiosity of the high Revolution. Wellington’s army, indifferent rather than hostile to religion, had one chaplain per division, but as a group they were neither esteemed nor influential. He indeed had had chaplains appointed principally to combat the spread of Methodism, which he regarded as subversive of military hierarchy. But even of informal private prayer, to which Methodism in particular exhorted its followers, there is almost no mention in Waterloo memoirs. Leeke, a man of deeply religious temperament who subsequently took Anglican orders, recollected that ‘my first thought of what would become of my soul in case I should be killed’ did not occur until quite late in the battle. Bull, commander of one of the Royal Horse Artillery batteries, had made a habit in the Peninsula of holding prayers with his gunners, and may have done so before Waterloo, but it was not remarked upon; nor do any of the regimental histories record the holding of religious service before the battle, even though June 18th was a Sunday, and at least one of the regimental commanders – Colborne of the 52nd – was well-known for his personal devoutness.
The most likely reason for this failure either corporately to observe the sabbath or to make private spiritual preparation was the uncertainty prevailing, in two very tired armies and until late in the morning, as to whether there was to be a battle at all. The commanders, of course, were separately resolved to give battle – Napoleon from the outset, Wellington from shortly before dawn, when he received assurance of Blücher’s intention to come to his support – but neither was certain of the other’s frame of mind and until both made their intentions clear their subordinates could only speculate whether June 18th would be a day of fighting or marching. Mercer, who made a little promenade among the soldiers bivouacked near his battery position, heard a variety of opinions. ‘Some thought the French were afraid to attack us, others that they would do so soon, others that the Duke would not wait for it, others that he would, as he certainly would not allow them to go to Brussels.’ An officer of Picton’s division recalled that his brother officers were ‘generally gay and apparently thinking of anything but the approaching combat’; but it was hindsight which allowed him to write ‘approaching’, for the moment he described was still one of waiting for orders.
Gibney, assistant surgeon of the 15th Hussars, found ‘waiting for orders … tedious work’. ‘We were anxious to be put in motion’, he wrote, ‘if it were only to circulate our blood.’ The English army before Agincourt had also found the prolonged wait physically tiresome and emotionally frustrating. To its soldiers, the decision for battle had come eventually as a welcome release, and the sounding of the Assembly may have evoked the same response from the men of both armies on June 18th. For in assessing their readiness for battle, it is important to remember that a very high proportion were experienced soldiers. While the appetite for battle grows with eating only in the most unusual individuals, most veterans would probably rather fight today than tomorrow if the intervening nightis likely to be wet and the battle in any case unavoidable. Keppel, an ensign in the 14th Regiment, though not a veteran, probably spoke for many when he summarized his feelings during the long period of waiting as ‘wishing the fight was fought’.
The 14th was alone among the British regiments of Wellington’s army in being wholly unblooded. For the seven other non-Peninsula regiments had just fought Quatre Bras, where indeed three of them – the 2nd/1st Guards, the 2nd/69th and the 33rd – had suffered heavy or very heavy casualties. Of course, many of the Peninsula regiments now contained sizeable contingents of young soldiers, but the majority of their officers and sergeants would have had experience in Spain. The raw Hanoverian regiments, however, for the most part lacked veteran leadership. Wellington had therefore so divisioned, and where possible, brigaded, the army that no very long section of his line would be held by inexperienced troops.
Napoleon’s ingenuity had been less taxed than his opponent’s. His army was nationally homogeneous and composed to a very high degree of professional soldiers. The Old Guard contained none but veterans of long-service; but even in the line regiments the majority of men had seen action, and had handled their weapons under fire. They would thus have learnt not only how to bear the fatigues of campaigning but would also have been familiar with the two other most oppressive characteristics of the battlefield: smoke and noise. Smoke had been quite absent from the atmosphere at Agincourt, for the few cannon present had fired only once or twice, if at all. The black powder weapons with which the artillery and all private infantrymen fought at Waterloo discharged smoke in dense, whitish-grey clouds, which hung low, needed a brisk breeze to disperse them and therefore usually obscured the front of any unit heavily engaged. We get some idea of how seriously smoke hampered visibility by a number of incidental remarks set down by combatants. Thus Lieutenant Wilson, of Sinclair’s battery, which was in position four hundred yards north-west of La Haye Sainte, found ‘the smoke so dense’ during d’Erlon’s attack that he could ‘not see distinctly the positions of the French’ (by which he must have meant those actually in combat with the British), ‘being at that time ordered to direct my fire over the dead bodies of some horses in front’. Ingilby, another gunner whose battery stood on the extreme left of the English line and who enjoyed a good lateral view, interspersed his narrative to Siborne with such caveats as ‘the thick rolling fire of the musketry, adding to the smoke from the Artillery, I could not perceive the further result’ and ‘it was only occasionally when the wind freshening and partially cleared away the smoke, that other charges … and movements in both Armies … could be distinguished.’ Eventually his battery limbered up to follow the French off the battlefield: ‘For some while we could see nothing whatever from behind the Infantry (which advanced slowly step by step) on account of the dense smoke from their musketry.’
Infantry memoirs certainly suggest that smoke clung more densely around them than around the artillery (an artillery salvo consumed more powder; infantry volleys followed each other more rapidly) and several regimental histories claim that their squares were enveloped in thick smoke for most of the day. The 1st/4th King’s, in square near the La Haye Sainte crossroads, could not make out the farmhouse, though they were less than four hundred yards from it at the time of the French assault which carried the place. They were warned of the assault by sound, not sight; when they advanced, at the end of the battle, ‘the movement carried them out of … darkness’ in which they had stood ‘for a great part of the day’. The 18th Hussars’ commanding officer, Murray, remembered that, at their advance at the end of the battle, ‘we burst from the darkness of a London fog into a bright sunshine.’ And Vivian, commanding the Hussar Brigade, described the smoke at the time of the great French cavalry attacks on the right-centre as ‘literally so thick we could not see ten yards off’. Smoke, moreover, had an effect on other senses than sight. Gronow described the interior of the square of the 3rd/1st Guards at about 4 p.m. as so thick with smoke and the smell of burnt cartridges that he nearly suffocated (Leeke also remarked upon ‘a peculiar smell … arising from a mingling of the smell of the wheat trodden flat down with the smell of the gunpowder’). Mercer, going into action at three, ‘breathed a new atmosphere – the air was suffocatingly hot, resembling that issuing from an oven. We were enveloped in thick smoke …’
But if smoke oppressed the senses, the noise of Waterloo assaulted the whole being. At Agincourt noise would have been chiefly human and animal and would have overlaid the clatter of weapon-strokes. There was still a good deal of perceptible human noise at Waterloo: an officer of Picton’s division had remembered the noise of the army preparing for battle as similar to that of the ‘distant murmur of the waves of the sea, beating against some ironbound coast’. Once the battle got under way there was cheering – Leeke, like several others, mentions hearing ‘continued shouts of “Vive l’Empereur”’ at the time of the Imperial Guard’s attack, shrieking – the 32nd ‘set up a death howl’ when the French reached within forty yards of their line, and confused shouting – an officer of the 73rd describes a French advance as ‘very noisy and evidently reluctant’. There were cries of pain and protest from the wounded – though here the testimony is contradictory, Mercer being pierced ‘to the very soul’ by the scream of a gunner whose arm had just been shattered, Leeke insisting that the wounded kept unnaturally silent. And there were of course shouts of command. There was also music: Gronow, Leeke and Standen recall hearing the beating of the pas de charge (which, one of Picton’s officers says, was called by his men, who remembered it from Spain, ‘Old Trousers’) and there was piping in the squares of the Scottish regiments. The 71st’s pipers played and re-played ‘Hey, Johnnie Cope’ and Piper McCay of the 79th stepped outside the square under French fire to play ‘Cogadh na sith’.
But it was weapons which made by far the loudest and most insistent noise at Waterloo. Some of the sounds were incidental and unexpected. Lieutenant Wyndham of the Scots Greys remarked on the ‘extraordinary manner in which the bullets struck our swords’, a phenomenon which, as we know from an eighteenth-century memoir, set up a weird harmonic vibration; something of the same sort was produced by shot hitting bayonets, quite a frequent occurrence, though that could also sound like a stick being drawn along park railings. Leeke noted the ‘rattle’ which grape made when striking arms and accoutrements and Gronow, in an often quoted simile, likened the impact of his Guardsmen’s musket-balls on the breastplates of Kellermann’s and Milhaud’s cuirassiers to ‘the noise of a violent hailstorm beating upon panes of glass’. These were sounds which could only be caught at close range, however, for at any distance they would be drowned by the much louder and pervasive crash and rumble of firearms and artillery. Several witnesses nevertheless make a point of recalling the whistle and sigh of projectiles over their heads and above the noise of the cannonade: Mercer described it as a ‘mysterious humming noise, like that which one hears of a summer’s evening proceeding from myriads of black beetles’; to an officer of Picton’s division it was a ‘whistling’ and ‘familiar music’, to a sixteen-year-old officer of the Scots Greys, hearing it for the first time, a ‘whizzing’ with ‘really something rather grand about it’. Brave sixteen-year-old words! Mercer’s medical officer, also for the first time ‘hearing this infernal carillon about his ears, began staring round in the wildest and most comic manner imaginable, twisting himself from side to side, exclaiming, “My God … what is that? What is all this noise? How curious! – how very curious!” and then when a cannon-shot rushed hissing past, “There! – there! What is it all?’” But these upper-register notes penetrated the sound-storm only because they were intermittent, heard at close-hand and spelt danger. The sonic constant was the ‘roar’, ‘rumble’, ‘crash’, ‘thunder’, ‘boom’ of gunfire – few who were subjected to it attempt to define its quality precisely. But that is not surprising; for though the nearby explosion of shells and the firing of musket volleys were sonically different from each other, and both different from the more distant discharge of artillery, the differences tended to be drowned by the sheer volume of noise. That volume was very great indeed. Murray, a matter-of-fact cavalryman, described it simply as ‘deafening’; Gibney, assistant surgeon of the 15th Hussars, said the noise was ‘so loud and continuous … that you could hardly hear what was said by the person next to you’ (he was speaking particularly of the opening cannonade); Mercer, at the end of the day, was ‘almost deaf’ – and we may take him quite literally. As a battery commander whose guns fired about seven hundred rounds each (an astonishing figure) he had been at the focus of enough prolonged noise to have suffered damage to his hearing; so too had many front-rank infantrymen, whose ears had been only inches away from the muzzles of the rear-rank men during sustained bouts of musketry.
There were other circumstantial ingredients of battle beside fatigue, hunger, smoke and noise. Many combatants mention the wetness of the ground which, though doing much to reduce the effect of artillery by shortening the ricochet of solid shot and allowing shells to bury themselves, made for squalor underfoot. The 40th Regiment, on the ridge near La Haye Sainte, had trampled itself ‘almost knee-deep’ in mud by the end of the day, through the frequency with which it had formed from square to column on the same spot. We must also remember that the men, not being able to leave the ranks, would have had to relieve themselves where they stood. But all these circumstances, though intrusive enough to have been thought worth recalling by many Waterloo men, are of course in the last resort circumstantial. What sticks in the forefront of survivors’ memories is combat itself: their own and their comrades’ behaviour, the action of the enemy and the effects of the weapons they faced. Is it possible, from the reams of testimony they have left, to discern in these dozens of transient individual experiences any pattern of human activity, any concrete ‘reality’ of battle in this, the apogee of black-powder warfare?
Categories of Combat
Even to begin to do so requires first that we separate out the various categories of man-versus-man and man-versus-weapon encounters which went to make up the totality of the conflict. Compared with Agincourt, the variety of encounter was greater; but not that much greater. Henry V’s army had been composed of missile-firing infantrymen and armoured cavalrymen, most of the latter dismounted and fighting on foot, some in the saddle and bearing lances; there had also been a few cannon on the field. Napoleon’s army consisted of missile-firing infantrymen and of cavalrymen, some of the latter armoured, and some lancers; he also had 250 cannon, and it was the presence of these weapons which explains – in crude terms – the altogether greater lethality of nineteenth- over fifteenth-century armies. It was also artillery which principally served to multiply the number of potential man-to-man and man-to-weapon encounters. At Agincourt there had been, in practice, only three types of encounter: single combat (hand-to-hand fighting between individuals, whether mounted or on foot); missile-firing infantry versus cavalry; and missile-firing infantry versus infantry (strictly, in their case, dismounted cavalrymen). At Waterloo there were seven sorts of encounter at least: single combat; cavalry versus cavalry; cavalry versus artillery; cavalry versus infantry; infantry versus infantry; missile-firing infantry versus missile-firing infantry; and artillery versus artillery (virtually a one-sided exchange, for Wellington had forbidden his gunners to fight artillery duels).
Single Combat
Single combat, which at Agincourt had generally occurred between dismounted men and often been deliberately sought out – as by the French noblemen who went to challenge Henry – was at Waterloo exclusively the affair of cavalrymen, and arose as a result of cavalry charges losing impetus and formation. This needs immediate qualification. Several instances of single combat between dismounted men are recorded. Gawler, of the 52nd, bluntly describes how one of his light infantrymen, challenged by a French officer, ‘parried his thrust, closed with him, threw him on the ground and keeping him down with his foot reversed his musket in both hands’; despite ‘a groan of disgust from his surrounding comrades’ he then ‘killed him with one thrust of his bayonet’. This took place in the closing stage of the battle, however, when the troops had left their defensive positions and were advancing in comparatively loose formation. During the really desperate passages, the demands of discipline denied individual infantrymen that freedom of movement within or from the ranks which is the basis of single combat.
The skirmishers, operating in front of the close-packed columns, had such an independent role. But its proper performance required them to avoid coming to close quarters with the enemy (the instructions to the 30th Regiment’s skirmishers were quite precise on that point). So although numbers of cavalrymen, for example, were singled out for attack by sharp-shooters (Colonel Muter of the 6th Dragoons saw a ‘French soldier on his knees, deliberately taking aim at the Adjutant … and sending his bullet through his head’: one of Picton’s officers ‘could distinctly see a French soldier level his piece’ at an officer of the Greys, ‘fire, and bring him rolling to the ground’), they died without warning or the chance to defend themselves. Single combat – hand-to-hand, blow-for-blow, face-to-face – demands, by definition, equality of risk and foreknowledge of the consequences. It also appears to presuppose consent by both parties (it was in that that chivalry saw its glory). Was consent usually or often given at Waterloo? And if so, was it given freely, or under the compulsion of a ‘him or me’ situation? Cornet Gape of the Greys wrote to his mother of their first charge, ‘The men were only too impetuous, nothing could stop them, they all separated, each man fought by himself’; and the famous Corporal Shaw of the Life Guards certainly sought out opponents – he was ‘very conspicuous, dealing deadly blows all round him’. But the Greys had not seen battle since 1794 and Shaw, a champion boxer in an age when boxing was a branch of the blood sports, was also probably crazed with drink. What seems to have happened in experienced regiments is that, their charge having failed to break (i.e., frighten away bodies of cavalry in their path, and the men finding themselves intermingled with the enemy, individual soldiers struck out, in drill-book fashion, at those near enough to threaten them. Lieutenant Hamilton of the Greys provides a convincing account of what was probably a common experience:
one of the red lancers put his lance to my horse’s head, I made a cut at his arm as I passed him; and as I did not look behind me to see whether I had struck him or his lance, I should not have known that I had struck his arm, had I not in recovering my sword thrown the blood on my white pouch belt. On inspecting my sword I saw that I had succeeded in wounding the lancer and possibly thus saved my own life. My fears were, when I saw him thrust at my horse’s reins, that he would shoot me with his pistol, having heard of the red lancers sometimes doing so.
Self-defence in a moment of danger was not the only motive for individual fights. The sight of an enemy regiment’s standard or a party bent on capturing one’s own provoked men to extremes of ferocity. Sergeant Ewart of the Greys – probably the most famous of Waterloo heroes – found himself near the Eagle of the French 45th Regiment, during the confused fighting which followed d’Erlon’s attack. He struck at its bearer who ‘thrust for my groin – I parried it off, and … cut him through the head … one of their Lancers threw his lance at me but missed … by my throwing it off with my sword … I cut him through the chin upwards, which cut went through his teeth. Next I was attacked by a foot soldier, who, after firing at me, charged me with his bayonet; but… I parried it and cut him down through the head.’ And a sudden turning of tables could also lead to a deadly duel. Leeke, at the end of the battle, saw a French cuirassier chasing a German light dragoon ‘The latter was retreating at speed … with his head down on his horse’s neck and his sword over his own neck [but] watching his opportunity … on finding himself near his friends [he] suddenly pulled his horse up upon his haunches, and dealt the curaissier a blow across the face; he wheeled round and engaged the [German] in single combat, who managed to strike him again on his face, so that he fell over on one side and was pierced under the arm and killed.’ Little chivalry there; even less in the experience of General Vivian who, with his right arm in a sling, was attacked by a cuirassier ‘I was fortunate enough to give him a thrust in the neck with my left hand … and at that moment I was joined by my little German orderly, who cut the fellow off his horse.’
Cavalry versus Cavalry
Do these instances tell us anything about the character of mass cavalry combat at Waterloo? Both popular impression and copy-book drill – and the initial charges in the two great series, British and French, were launched copy-book style – supposed cavalry versus cavalry charges to mean the meeting of dense formations at high speed. Moreover at least two British cavalry officers maintained that this was what happened. Waymouth, of the 2nd Life Guards, informed Siborne that ‘the (Heavy) Brigade, and the Cuirassiers too, came to the shock like two walls, in the most perfect lines’ and Wood of the 10th Hussars, writing to a friend, was at pains to refute ‘(what) the English papers say, “The Light Dragoons could make no impression on the French Cuirassiers.” Now our regiment rode over them. Give me the boys who will go at a swinging gallop for the last seventy yards, applying both spurs when you come within six yards. Then if you don’t go through them I am much mistaken.’ Wood, however, did not actually complete his charge, being badly wounded before it got under way, while Waymouth was really retailing the witness of a comrade. Common sense tells us, too, that cavalry coming ‘to the shock like walls’ and ‘at a swinging gallop’ will achieve nothing but a collapsed scrummage of damaged horses and men, growing bigger as succeeding ranks are carried on to the leading ones by their own impetus. A little inquiry reveals, in any case, that formations were much less dense and speeds much lower than casual testimony, and certainly than the work of salon painters, implies. The British cavalry were too few in number to cover much expanse of ground and though French cavalry formations were fairly dense at Waterloo, their leaders attempted, even during the charges into the ‘funnel’ between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, to keep an interval between the squadrons, while regiments and squadrons themselves were formed in line. This meant that the 120 men of the squadron were formed in two ranks, one close behind the other, but that the succeeding squadron rode, if possible, a hundred yards behind. In theory the squadron could be manœuvred at a gallop, say at over twenty miles an hour, but it would very shortly lose cohesion if it was, as stronger horses outstripped weaker; and in any case distances and gradients on the Waterloo field make it seem unlikely that high speeds were achieved with any frequency. The ‘classic’ encounter of the 2nd Life Guards and the French Cuirassiers, described by Waymouth, was as near as anything seen during the battle to a straightforward collision, in that the two bodies met head-on and in motion. But the French had come a long way, over fifteen hundred yards and the last stretch uphill; while the British, though having a shorter distance to cover, had had to negotiate a succession of obstacles – first the road on the top of the ridge, ‘too wide to leap, and the banks too deep to be easily passed’ (Waymouth), and then ‘the enclosure of the farm of La Haye Sainte’ – before they could get to the French. Acceleration into a ‘swinging gallop’ by either side appears, under the circumstances, to have been an unlikely conclusion to their advance. Indeed, Waymouth reveals that the ‘shock’ took the form of a ‘short struggle’ with swords, and that it was success in the sword fight which allowed the British to penetrate the French line. In other words, the two lines must have been almost stopped dead when they met, and the British able to penetrate the French line because they found or created gaps in it.
Confirmation of this surmise can be found in the testimony of other witnesses. Morris, a sergeant in the 73rd, relating his view of events during the great French cavalry attacks of the afternoon, writes that ‘the Life Guard boldly rode out from our rear to meet (the cuirassiers). The French waited, with the utmost coolness, to receive them, opening their ranks to allow them to ride in.’ Consent – the vital precondition for single combat proper – is thus made to appear equally necessary if cavalry formations were to fight each other in any effective fashion. When they did so, of course, they did not fight as formations, but as individuals or small groups. Morris continues his account with a description of the sort of fighting to which this ‘opening of ranks’ and ‘allowing entry’ led. ‘I noticed one of the Guards, who was attacked by two cuirassiers at the same time … he disposed of one of them by a deadly thrust in the throat. His combat with the other lasted about five minutes.’ We are back with single combat again.
Indeed, unless cavalry action resolved itself into a complex of single combats, it was pretty harmless to the participants. Mercer recalls watching two lines of French and British light cavalry skirmishing with each other on ground between the armies, on the evening of June 17th. ‘The foremost of each line were within a few yards of each other – constantly in motion, riding backwards and forwards, firing their carbines or pistols, and then reloading, still on the move … I did not see a man fall on either side; the thing appeared quite ridiculous; and but for hearing the bullets whizzing overhead, one might have fancied it no more than a sham fight.’ He has an equally dismissive account of cavalry’s occasional mutual harmlessness even in the performance of its true shock role. It refers to an encounter during the afternoon cavalry battle. ‘A Regiment of Cavalry (I think of the German Legion) … formed up to attack a [French regiment]. The French, immediately aware of this danger, wheeled to the left into line, and, both advancing to the charge, literally came into collision at full gallop. The shock appeared tremendous, yet there was no check, each party passing through the other, and closing their files immediately on being clear.’ In another account, his explanation of what occurred is still more revealing:
There was no check, no hesitation, on either side; both parties seemed to dash on in a most reckless manner, and we fully expected to have seen a horrid crash – no such thing! Each, as if by mutual consent, opened their files on coming near, and passed rapidly through each other, cutting and pointing, much in the same manner one might pass the fingers of the right hand through those of the left. We saw but few fall. The two corps re-formed afterwards, and in a twinkling both disappeared, I know not how or where.
The cavalry in both these cases, however, were fresh – so too, more importantly, were their horses – and had kept their formation and their heads. Cavalry could, it must be emphasized, suffer very grievously at the hands of other cavalry when nerves failed, horses were blown or weapons markedly unequal. The French Lancers, armed with a weapon which gave them an advantage in reach of many feet over their British opponents, frequently killed or wounded opponents without being touched themselves. The Cuirassiers who gave way before the charge of the Life Guards near La Haye Sainte sought an escape down the sunken road and ‘the 1st Life Guards made great slaughter amongst the flying Cuirassiers who had choked the hollow way’ – a ready-made demonstration of Ardant du Picq’s view that the most dangerous course in war is to retreat when in close contact with the enemy. It produces a situation the exact opposite of that obtaining in single combat by consent, and appears to stimulate an almost uncontrollable urge to kill among those presented with a view of the enemy’s backs. It is this urge which made it so perilous for cavalry to overextend a charge, finding themselves at the end of it alone or scattered, on blown horses, and deep within the enemy’s positions. Hence the heavy casualties suffered by the Scots Greys who, carried away by success and inexperience, rode right across the valley separating the two armies after their repulse of d’Erlon’s attack. ‘Our men were out of hand,’ wrote one of the staff officers present.
Every officer within hearing exerted themselves to the utmost to reform the men; but the helplessness of the Enemy offered too great a temptation to the Dragoons, and our efforts were abortive. It was evident that [his] reserves of Cavalry would soon take advantage of our disorder … If we could have formed a hundred men we could have made a respectable retreat, and saved many; but we could effect no formation, and were as helpless against their attack as their Infantry had been against ours. Everyone saw what must happen. Those whose horses were best, or least blown, got away. [Most of the rest] fell into the hands of the enemy … It was in this part of the transaction that almost the whole of the loss of the Brigade took place.
The Greys in fact lost nearly two hundred men and over two hundred horses in this short space of time, chiefly through being ridden down by French Lancers, who spared no one, mounted, unhorsed or even disabled. Ponsonby, the Brigade Commander, was among those killed, and lost his life because of a false economy. He had left his best charger, worth far more than the government compensation fund would pay if it were killed, behind the lines and chosen to ride instead an inferior hack. The French Lancers caught him struggling to safety over heavy ground, easily rode him down, and speared him to death.
Cavalry versus Artillery
Cavalry were also vulnerable to other cavalry which happened to be accompanied by horse artillery, even if the two bodies of horsemen were otherwise evenly matched. The 7th Hussars, in the retreat to Waterloo, had charged a body of French light cavalry ‘but could make no impression … we did not give ground, nor did they move. This state of things lasted some minutes, when they brought down some Light Artillery’; these guns knocked over several of the British and swiftly persuaded their commander to order the rest away. On the battlefield itself, however, mobile artillery was not usually a threat to cavalry, being too valuable to risk in detached action, when it might easily be captured. At Waterloo, as in most other pitched battles of the period, the artillery draught horses were sent to the rear once the guns had been brought up, and the gunners then fought where they stood, usually among or slightly in front of the infantry. This static artillery, for all that its crews looked so exposed to charging swordsmen, was one of two agents of destruction from which cavalry had most to fear (the other being steady infantry formed in square), and the British gunners at Waterloo were certainly responsible for a very large proportion of the deaths and wounds which the French cavalry suffered. Rudyard, an officer of Loyd’s battery of 9-pounders, wrote of the afternoon attacks to Siborne:
The Cuirassiers and Cavalry might have charged through the Battery as often as six or seven times, driving us into the Squares, under our Guns … In general, a Squadron or two came up the slope on our immediate front, and on their moving off at the appearance of our Cavalry charging, we took advantage to send destruction after them, and when advancing on our fire I have seen four or five men and horses piled up on each other like cards, the men not having even been displaced from the saddle, the effect of canister.
This extract invites a short commentary, since it is highly descriptive of what the artillery did during the battle. Rudyard is telling us that guns were posted some distance, perhaps twenty or thirty yards, in front of the infantry (a position unthinkable a hundred years before or after); that they were firing a multiple projectile, consisting of ‘a number of small cast iron spheres in a sheet metal can which disintegrated on discharge’ (canister), at an operational range of about a hundred yards or less; that the French who survived the salvoes, of which they had to stand perhaps two or three as they approached, actually rode past and round the guns, whose crews fled before them to the shelter of the infantry squares; the cavalry, then subjected to the square’s musketry, lost whatever impulsion it had left and, on seeing the British cavalry to the square’s rear, turned and retreated, leaving the guns, which it had no means of removing, where they stood, to be re-manned by their crews and used against the backs of the cavalrymen as they withdrew. Why the artillerymen were able to stand by their guns so long is explained by Mercer in another place: he estimated the pace of the Horse Grenadiers’ advance as a brisk trot (‘none of your furious galloping’), noted that the impact of his battery’s first salvo, fired at sixty yards, brought it down to a walk, and that the second and subsequent salvoes piled up such ‘heaps of carcasses’ that the survivors either could not get past them or, if they did, fell individually victim to his fire and that of the squares to his rear. Nevertheless some escaped by spurring their horses between the guns and riding through the intervals between the squares and back again; while others died without coming within striking distance of the artillery, for Mercer’s guns were double-shotted, and the round-shot which followed the canister in the same discharge smashed deep into the French formation, striking several horses or men in succession. Little wonder that ‘the survivors struggled with each other’ and that he ‘actually saw them using the pommels of their swords to fight their way out of the mêlée … pushing furiously onward, intent only on saving themselves … until the rear of the column, wheeling about, opened a passage, and the whole swept away at a much more rapid pace than they had advanced.’ Even so they were not at once out of danger. The gunners in front of the 14th Regiment who, ‘at the [French cavalry’s] approach, had thrown themselves at the feet of our front rank men, returned to their guns and poured a murderous fire of grape into the flying enemy … When the smoke cleared … the matted hill was strewed with dead and dying, horses galloping away without riders and dismounted cuirassiers running out of the fire as fast as their heavy armour would allow.’
Thus the cavalry versus artillery fight at Waterloo turned out to be almost wholly one-sided affairs. Even when the French horsemen notionally took possession of the British guns, they were unable to remove them, having with them neither harness nor limbers with which to tow them away. That they did not try, or succeed in, spiking them either (that is, driving a spike into the touch-hole by which they were fired) has always caused puzzlement; the probable explanation is that the act required a man to dismount, something which no cavalryman, whether out of braggadocio, stupidity, caste-pride or self-preservation, seemed prepared to do in the face of the enemy.
Cavalry versus Infantry
How much more successful were the cavalry’s encounters with infantry? To this a clear-cut answer is more difficult to offer, for such encounters were more varied in character. Cavalry could do infantry very great harm, using ‘harm’ in a military rather than human context. The regiments of the Union Brigade which charged the flank of d’Erlon’s Corps, at a moment when it was under fire and attempting to deploy from column to line, reduced it to a purposeless crowd in a few instants. ‘As we approached at a moderate pace,’ wrote Evans, a staff officer of the Brigade, ‘the fronts and flanks began to turn their backs inwards; the rear of the Columns had already begun to run away … In going down the hill the Brigade secured about 2,000 prisoners, which were successfully conducted to the rear … The enemy fled as a flock of sheep across the valley – quite at the mercy of the Dragoons.’ Shelton, an officer of the 28th Regiment who followed these dragoons on foot, ‘distinctly saw them charge the heavy Reserve Column, and break it. The greater number of the French threw down their arms when broken by cavalry.’ (Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons saw these muskets later ‘in two lines nearly as regularly as if laid on parade’.) Some did not. ‘Many’, recalled Marten of the 2nd Life Guards, ‘threw themselves on the ground until we had gone over, and then rose and fired.’ But in neither case did many of these infantrymen suffer personal injury. To lie down was usually enough to put one beyond a swordsman’s (though not a lancer’s) reach, and those who shammed were already safely behind the cavalry, whose attention was focused on the enemy lines to which their impetus was carrying them; those who offered a genuine surrender had it readily accepted, for this was early in the battle, when there was clearly much fighting ahead, and no time or motive for casual slaughter. At the end of the day, however, isolated bodies of infantry whose nerve had gone and who could no longer expect support from the rest of the army, suffered wounds and death when trying to escape or even surrender. Duperier, a ranker-officer of the 18th Hussars, came late in the evening on ‘a regiment of infantry of the franch, nothing but “vive le Roy”, but it was too late beside our men do not understined franch, so they cut a way all through till we came to the body of reserve when we was saluted with a voly at the length of two sords. We tacked about and had the same fun coming back.’ Murray, commanding the regiment, got in among a mob of the fugitives, one of whom thrust at him with his bayonet; ‘his orderly was compelled to cut down five or six in rapid succession for the security of his master’; not a story, one feels, which would convince a court of inquiry.
But even that late in the day, French infantry which ‘would stand’ could see off British cavalry without trouble. Taylor, of the 10th Hussars, saw, at about the same time as Duperier was massacring the unfortunate French turncoats, ‘about thirty of the 18th … gallantly, though uselessly, charge the square on the hill, by which they were repulsed’. And indeed if the story of Waterloo has a leitmotiv it is that of cavalry charging square and being repulsed. It was not absolutely inevitable that horsemen who attempted to break a square should fail. The 69th Regiment, caught before it had properly formed square at Quatre Bras, had had three of its companies sabred by French cavalry, and lost one of its colours (the disgrace was the greater because it had also lost a colour at Bergen-op-Zoom the year before). And at Garcia Hernandez in 1812, Bock’s Dragoons of the King’s German Legion had broken clean into a regiment of French infantry standing securely in square and delivering fire. What happened on that occasion, however, helps to explain why the event had no counterpart at Waterloo – was, indeed, one of the rarest occurrences in contemporary warfare. It came about because one of the dragoon horses, moving on a true course and at some speed, was killed in mid-stride, and its rider with it; continuing the charge for several paces, the pair of automatons did not collapse until directly above the bayonets of the front rank. Carrying these down, they opened a gap through which a wedge, and then the remainder, of the regiment followed. The dead horse had done what living flesh and blood could not; act as a giant projectile to batter a hole in the face of the square. The feat of breaking a square was tried by the French cavalry time and again at Waterloo – there were perhaps twelve main assaults during the great afternoon cavalry effort – and always (though infantry in line or column suffered) with a complete lack of success. Practice against poorer troops had led them to expect a different result: a visible shiver of uncertainty along the ranks of the waiting musketeers which would lend their horsemen nerve for the last fifty yards, a ragged spatter of balls over their heads to signal the volley mistimed, then a sudden collapse of resolution and disappearance of order – regiment become drove, backs turned, heads hunched between shoulders, helot-feet flying before the faster hooves of the lords of battle: this, in theory, should have been the effect of such a charge. This process was more nearly realized in many places along Wellington’s front than the magnitude of the ultimate cavalry debacle suggests. ‘The first time a body of cuirassiers approached the square into which I had ridden’ (it was the 79th Regiment’s) wrote a Royal Engineer officer, ‘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.’ Morris, a sergeant of the 71st, testifies to the power of the psychological shock-waves emitted by these mounted onsets. ‘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. Their appearance, as an enemy, was certainly enough to inspire a feeling of dread – none of them under six feet; defended by steel helmets and breast-plates, made pigeon-breasted to throw off the balls. The appearance was of such a formidable nature, that I thought we could not have the slightest chance with them.’ In every case, however, almost exactly the same sequence of events served to break the impetus of the cavalry’s advance and to transfer the psychological advantage from attackers to defenders. First of all, the cavalry changed direction or decelerated or even stopped as they came within effective musket-shot of the square. Sometimes they didso because the protective artillery, or a well-timed and well-aimed volley, had knocked down horses in the leading ranks. Leeke, of the 52nd, describes them coming on ‘in very gallant style and in very steady order, first of all at the trot, then at the gallop, till they were within forty or fifty yards of the front face of the square, when, one or two horses having been brought down, in clearing the obstacle they got a somewhat new direction, which carried them to either flank … which direction they all preferred to the charging home and riding on to our bayonets’. Eeles of the 95th:
kept every man from firing until the Cuirassiers approached within thirty or forty yards of the square, when I fired a volley from my Company which had the effect, added to the fire of the 71st, of bringing so many horses to the ground, that it became quite impossible for the Enemy to continue their charge. I certainly believe that half of the Enemy were at that instant on the ground; some few men and horses were killed, more wounded, but by far the greater part were thrown down over the dying and wounded. These last after a short time began to get up and run back to their supports, some on horseback but most of them dismounted.
Sometimes the stop happened because the leaders hoped to trick or panic the square into firing before its shots could take proper effect, meaning to ride in during the fifteen-second delay necessary for re-loading. The Duke himself recalled watching squares which ‘would not throw away their fire till the Cuirassiers charged, and they would not charge until we had thrown away our fire’; but, as he knew, the trick would not work against soldiers, like the British, who were trained always to keep half the fire of the regiment in reserve. Sometimes the French stopped simply because they feared to go forward, often when they had already entered the narrow, deadly killing ground immediately in front of the square and the safer course would have been to go on rather than back. Reynell, commanding the 71st, refers to these ‘repeated visits from [the] Cuirassiers. I do not sayattacks, because these Cavalry Columns on no occasion attempted to penetrate our Square, limiting their approach to within ten or fifteen yards of the front face, when they would wheel about, receiving such fire as we could bring to bear upon them, and, as they retired, en passant, that from the neighbouring square.’
Injurious though it was for cavalry to flinch or turn away from squares which had fire in hand, the results of riding round them, Red Indian fashion, or loitering with intent to terrorize were worse. For the infantry’s fear of the cavalry seemed dissipated by the smoke of their first discharge. The Royal Engineer, sheltering with the 79th, noted how quickly moral superiority shifted:
No actual dash was made upon us. Now and then an individual more daring than the rest would ride up to the bayonets, wave his sword about and bully; but the mass held aloof, pulling up within five or six yards, as if, though afraid to go on, they were ashamed to retire. Our men soon discovered they had the best of it, and ever afterwards, when they heard the sound of cavalry approaching, appeared to consider the circumstance a pleasant change (from being cannonaded)!
Macready, of the 30th, remembered that his men ‘began to pity the useless perseverance of their assailants, and, as they advanced, would growl out, “here come those d——d fools again”’. Confident in, even elated by their ability to outface the French squadrons (at Quatre Bras, after their second dispersal of a French charge, there had been ‘a good deal of laughter and handshaking’ in the 30th’s square), the British infantry began to inflict on them heavy casualties whenever they were foolish or badly enough led to linger within range. Saltoun, commanding the Guards light companies, ordered them to fire at a group of French cavalrymen who then ‘rode along the front of the 52nd with a view of turning their right flank, and were completely destroyed by the fire of that regiment’. The 40th Regiment, alerted by an experienced sergeant who called out, ‘They are in armour. Fire at the horses’, brought down cuirassiers in swathes. ‘It was a most laughable sight to see these guards in their chimney armour – trying to run away, being able to make little progress and many of them being taken prisoner by those of our light companies who were out skirmishing.’
This reference to casualties among the horses should remind us that the French troopers were engaged in a dual battle of wills – not only with the British musketeers but also with their own mounts. Gronow, an intensely acute observer in one of the Foot Guards’ squares, describes how ‘the horses of the first rank of cuirassiers, in spite of all the efforts of their riders, came to a standstill, shaking and covered with foam, at about twenty yards distance … and generally resisted all attempts to force them to charge the line of serried steel’; much the same thing happened in front of Mercer’s battery, where a ‘confused mass stood before us … vainly trying to urge their horses over the obstacles presented by their fallen comrades.’ As the casualties increased and the going on the slope up to the British positions deteriorated, and as the litter of carcasses grew to form a tide-mark around the edge of the squares’ killing zones, it became more and more difficult to force the horses to face fire. The less resolute French units drew off a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards, leaving their skirmishers to loose off their pistols at the British infantry, or trot up and down firing their carbines. It was a perfectly fruitless, almost pathetic proceeding. Indeed, the question poses itself to the modern reader whether sympathies – given that sympathy is an appropriate emotion – over the conflict between cavalry and squares are not misplaced. On the face of it, the predicament of the storm-wracked battalions (Mercer’s analogy for the attack of the cavalry on Wellington’s chequer-board of squares was that of ‘a heavy surf breaking on a coast beset with isolated rocks, against which the mountainous wave dashes with furious uproar, breaks, divides and runs, hissing and boiling, far beyond up the adjacent beach’) is breath-catching. But, as Jac Weller has shown by careful analysis of formation-widths, the number of cavalrymen in an attacking line was always much lower than the number of infantrymen with whom their onset brought them face to face. If the average strength of a battalion was about five hundred, it would, formed four deep, present in square a face about sixty feet across, opposing about 140 men to the approaching French cavalry. They, because of the greater bulk of their horses, could present no more than about eighteen men on the same width of front, with another eighteen immediately behind, and it was these thirty-six who would take the brunt of the square’s fire. But even though they would suffer worst by the first volley, the full strength of the squadron to which they belonged was only a hundred and twenty; and if its moral power failed to disarm the infantry – as it always did fail at Waterloo – then each horseman theoretically became the target for four infantrymen. Viewed like this, ‘Here come those d——d fools again’ seems an appropriate judgment on the character of the conflict.
Artillery versus Infantry
Indeed, even the best cavalry could normally hope to break good infantry only with the help of artillery. Hence the existence of ‘horse artillery’ or ‘galloping guns’, whose task was to accompany cavalry to within charging distance of the infantry and, from just beyond musket-shot, to open gaps in the square so large that its members were either stunned into passivity or driven to flight. But Waterloo, at least so far as the use of artillery was concerned, was not a normal battle. The ‘ratio of men to space’, particularly of cavalrymen to space in the ‘funnel’ between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte where, during the afternoon, about ten thousand French horsemen were milling about on a front only eight hundred yards wide, was so high that room for artillery to accompany the cavalry to within charging distance, let alone to unlimber when it got there, could not be found. The result was that the infantry versus cavalry combats were reduced to exactly no more than that – very much to the infantry’s advantage and safety.
Furthermore, the near approach of cavalry caused the French gunners bombarding the British line from long distance to cease firing, for their own horsemen obscured the view as they breasted the slope on the British side of the valley, and risked becoming the recipients of their shot; thus, as Leeke wrote – and many other infantrymen expressed the same sentiment – ‘the charges of cavalry were a great relief to us all … at least I know they were to me.’ For though the eighty-odd guns in Napoleon’s ‘grand battery’, seven hundred yards distant from the British line, could not do any particular infantry formation the same concentrated harm as could a ‘galloping battery’ firing grape or canister into it from close range, the arrival of their solid cannon-balls was so frequent, the effect of the balls on human flesh so destructive, the apprehension of those temporarily spared so intense that the cannonade came as near as anything suffered by the British at Waterloo to breaking their line. Wherever and whenever he could, the Duke positioned his battalions just on the reverse of the crest, in what soldiers call ‘dead ground’, often allowing them to lie down, so that most of the balls skimmed their heads. But many battalions had nevertheless to spend some of the day under direct fire. Bylandt’s Dutch-Belgians, east of La Haye Sainte, were demoralized by it and decamped; the Inniskillings, who stood their ground, drew their wounded into the square, threw their dead out and closed their ranks, were destroyed.
Even in the shelter of the crest, some battalions suffered casualties. Reed, of the 71st, reported that French artillery on the left of Hougoumont ‘were able to throw in a fire among us as we lay down under the slope of the hill, by which we suffered some loss, I think fifty men’, and the 1/95th was ‘annoyed’ by cannon-shot which ‘rolled over the hill behind which we were posted’ (Leeke’s sergeant prevented him from trying to stop one of these shot which came ‘rolling down like a cricket ball’ with the warning that it would have seriously injured his foot). When the approach of French infantry or cavalry forced them to their feet, making them solid targets, even a single hit by a French gun could cause awful injury. Leeke, who had watched mesmerized while a French gun-crew several hundred yards distant sponged out, loaded, rammed and fired, apparently straight at him, and had even glimpsed the ball leave the muzzle, saw the four men in file next to him fall dead or mutilated two seconds later. In the neighbouring square of the 71st a round shot killed or wounded seventeen; and the 40th Regiment, though in open column, suffered a succession of horrors, described by Lieutenant Hugh Wray:
We had three companies almost shot to pieces, one shot killed and wounded twenty-five of the 4th Company, another of the same kind killed poor Fisher, my captain, and eighteen of our company … and another took the 8th and killed or wounded twenty-three … At the same time poor Fisher was hit I was speaking to him, and I got all over his brains, his head was blown to atoms.
When artillery of either side found the opportunity to ‘co-operate’ with other arms, that is, make its attack simultaneous with infantry or cavalry action against the same enemy formation – something difficult to achieve, as we have seen, because of the danger it ran of hitting its own men – the effect of its fire was magnified. For the threat offered by the presence of enemy soldiers close at hand forced a defending formation to stand up and stand still; and this ‘standing to be cannonaded, and having nothing else to do, is about the most unpleasant thing that can happen to soldiers.’ ‘Take us out of this,’ demanded some men in Picton’s division of their officers, ‘are we to be massacred? Let us go and fight them.’ The French, who managed to send some guns forward with d’Erlon’s corps, unlimbered them within 120 yards of the 32nd Regiment and ‘opened sad gaps in its square’. Bull’s battery, supporting the Scots Guards against the Imperial Guard near Hougoumont, exploded howitzer shells ‘to such an extent in the midst of those fine fellows that [Maitland] could distinctly see, above the smoke of these explosions, the fragments of men, Grenadier caps, muskets and belts.’ In both these cases, the artillery wrought the slaughter it did because the infantry that formed its target, being at close quarters with other infantrymen, were unable to shelter from its fire.
Infantry versus Infantry
This conflict of infantry with infantry, though it occupied nearly everywhere at Waterloo a much shorter span of time, continuous or intermittent, than that between artillery and infantry or cavalry and infantry, was, in ‘result’ terms, the crucial element of the battle – a statement which can be made with fair safety of almost every battle fought in the period between the eclipse of the armoured horseman in the fourteenth century and the rise of the armoured fighting vehicle in the twentieth. For the action of cavalry and artillery against infantry was subsidiary and preliminary; during its course, the role of infantry was indeed ‘to be massacred’, if that could not be avoided. Naturally, it behoved a commander to shield his infantry as much as possible from cannonading or cavalry charge. But since infantry was (and is) the only force with which ground could (and can) be held (physical occupation being ten points of the law in war, and infantry the bailiff’s men), it could never be withdrawn from ground whose possession was held vital simply to avert loss of life. (Wellington, asked by Halkett at a particularly critical moment that ‘his brigade, which had lost two-thirds, should be relieved for a short time’ sent the message ‘Tell him what he asks is impossible: he and I, and every Englishman on the field must die on the spot we now occupy.’) But, per contra, infantry which refused to yield ground required by the enemy, despite the menaces of his cavalry and the efforts at massacre by his artillery, had ultimately to be attacked by other infantry.
But ‘ultimately’ did not necessarily mean ‘after every other method had failed’; it could also mean ‘because trial and error had recommended it’. In point of fact, the attack of the Imperial Guard was essayed at the end of the day because every other means had failed. But the infantry attack on Hougoumont, at the beginning of the battle, was decided upon because other methods were judged unprofitable, while the constant skirmishing between the light infantry troops of both sides, who operated in front of the two battle lines, was an element in the fighting whose necessity was ordained by experience.
It was their extreme skill in skirmishing that had enabled the French, in the early battles of the twenty years’ war, to inflict heavy loss on infantry without sending their own to close quarters. Eventually their enemies had grasped the need to oppose skirmishers with skirmishers, and the special formations raised by the British – the 95th Rifles and their own and the K.G.L. light infantry – had learnt to achieve the same standards as the French. Most of these regiments had, at Waterloo, to stand in the line which held the ridge; but they detached companies to their fronts to provide a covering screen, of which the specially trained light companies of the ordinary infantry regiments also formed part. Pratt, a lieutenant commanding the light company of the 30th Regiment, provides an account of his day at Waterloo which perfectly demonstrates the duties of skirmishing light infantry. His instructions from the adjutant were: ‘“To cover and protect our Batteries. To establish ourselves at all times as much in advance as [prudent]. To preserve considerable intervals … for greater security from [artillery] fire. To show obstinate resistance to [enemy light] Infantry, but to attempt [nothing against] Cavalry, but to retire … upon the Squares in our rear … When the charge was repulsed, to resume our ground”!’ He carried out these orders faithfully, ‘creeping down the hill to nearly its foot’ where he carried on ‘a desultory fire’ with the French light infantry, interrupted by ‘frequent advances and retreats’ to his own square or more often a K.G.L. or Hanoverian. ‘Towards the close of the day I found myself for the last time near the bottom of the slope with the few Light Infantry troops that were remaining.’ They were ‘gradually retiring before the overwhelming force opposed to them’. The moment to which he refers was just after the loss of La Haye Sainte; he was then wounded and ‘ceased to be an eye-witness of what took place afterwards’. But by that time, the importance of the role of light infantry was almost played out. The ‘crisis’ of the battle – the clash of heavy infantry with heavy infantry – was upon the armies.
But the battle had also begun with just such a clash: that between the Foot Guards and Jérôme’s Frenchmen for possession of Hougoumont. Here is an example of a command decision for an immediate infantry attack in preference to other methods – one of our meanings of ‘ultimately’. It was for Napoleon a necessary decision (though in ‘result’ terms probably a bad one), for the strong, loopholed walls of the chateau threatened death to any cavalry which came near and were fairly proof against even heavy field artillery. But, if necessary, it was also a desperate decision, the solidity, size and complexity of Hougoumont and its outbuildings, and the strength of its garrison making it almost impregnable to infantry as well. The French did, at one moment, manage to break open the gate to the central courtyard, but the British defenders succeeded in shutting it behind the small party which gained entry and then hunted them down until all, but a drummer boy whose life was spared, were dead. The extreme ferocity of this episode testifies to the special character of the Hougoumont battle. It has often been called a ‘battle within a battle’ and, in that it was fought for the greater part of the day by two strong detachments which took almost no part or interest in anything else which was happening on the field, that description is accurate. Modern students of aggression theory would probably be more struck, however, by its intensely ‘territorial’ quality. And, tautological though the concept of ‘territoriality’ is in this context, the behaviour of the defenders of Hougoumont, and of the smaller La Haye Sainte, was indeed wholly directed throughout the several hours the fighting lasted in those places to preserving the absolute integrity of very precise boundaries: at La Haye Sainte, those of the farmyard and garden, at Hougoumont of the chateau, walled garden and orchard. Given, however, that men are going to fight for walled enclosures, the choice of what they will and will not defend is pretty narrowly determined by the configuration of those enclosures themselves. Moreover, intra-specific fighting (that is, fighting between members of the same species) for territory is in animals, on the observation of whose behaviour modern aggression theory is based, highly ‘ritualized’. Title to property is all in nature: the title-holder usually has only to simulate an attack on the interloper, and he to rehearse a conventional gesture of submission and beat a retreat, for hostilities instantly to cease. But title is not all in war. The practice of ritualized attack, defence and submission certainly goes on – one thinks of the demand of the German commander of the Cherbourg Arsenal on June 27th, 1944, that a tank should be produced to fire a token shot at the main gate to make respectable his capitulation, and, for all their bloodiness, one would also recognize a strong ritual element in the cavalry attacks on the squares at Waterloo (‘Now and then an individual more daring then the rest would ride up to the bayonets … wave his sword about and bully’). It is probably also the case that human attackers concede to human defenders a certain claim – which one would call moral but for the ambiguity implied – to their territory, be it a mere shell-pocked hilltop or water-logged trench, that would provide an additional explanation of the tendency for the ‘defensive’ to prevail over the ‘offensive’ in warfare and a reason why surprise – which allows the claim-jumper to stoke the fires of his acquisitiveness while the defender drowses over the deeds – is so much valued as a tactical achievement by aggressive commanders. But that is about as far as ‘territorial’ theories of behaviour can be pushed in a battlefield context. The offensive usually fails in war only after real fear has been excited, real humiliation inflicted, real blood spilt. Indeed, almost the exact contrary of the situation which observers have perceived in nature prevails on the battlefield: there it is proprietorship which is fictive, combat which is in earnest.
One principle of animal behaviour which does seem to be applicable, however, to human combat is that which its promulgator, the zoologist Hediger, called the critical reaction. He derived it from his observation of the response of animals to threat, which he saw was determined by the distance at which the threat was offered. Beyond a certain distance – which varies from species to species – the animal would retreat, within it he would attack. He called the two distances ‘flight distance’ and ‘critical distance’ and, in the sort of instantly illuminating example after which all communicators strive, explained that ‘lion-tamers manœuvre their great beasts of prey into their positions in the arena by playing a dangerous game with the margin between flight distance and critical distance.’ There is some evidence (besides ordinary self-knowledge) to suggest that instinctual judgments of critical and flight distances also impinge on human behaviour; it has, for instance, been found that some abnormally violent men consistently underestimate the distance separating them from other human beings, consequently investing inoffensive gestures with menace and subjecting those who make them to apparently unprovoked assault. Soldiers certainly play games with critical and flight distances. The advice of Sun Tsu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war, that confrontations with the enemy should begin by the donning of fearsome masks and the uttering of dreadful threats, and that only after these preliminaries had failed to put him to flight should recourse be had to the use of weapons themselves, contains an implicit recognition of the critical reaction; and a great deal of primitive warfare – foot-stamping, spear-waving and drum-beating – clearly takes place safely outside the two sides’ critical distance. Indeed, it is probably true to say that the more primitive the peoples involved in warfare, the less they will be prepared to violate critical distances. But even ruthless modern commanders have shown themselves ready, in certain circumstances, to respect critical distance when it served their purpose: the displays of overwhelming air- and sea-strength mounted by the Americans during the Second World War offshore of Japanese-held islands they intended to invade – the wheeling and massing of landing-craft, the circling and swooping of aeroplanes – had as part of their purpose, vain though it may have been, the intimidation of the defenders; and the grand review of his army organized by Napoleon on the morning of Waterloo itself, out of range but within sight of the Allies, a proceeding without parallel in his generalship, seems to have been intended to frighten the Belgians, perhaps also the British, into leaving their positions.
But, if we really want instances of the influence of critical and flight distances on the fighting at Waterloo, the place to look is in the records of the defence of the two strongpoints. At La Haye Sainte the garrison, when their ammunition ran out, were rushed by French tirailleurs who broke into a central passageway in the buildings. At first many of the intruders were killed with the bayonet, and their bodies used to barricade the entry, but their comrades then managed to scale the roof and, by firing down into the mass of the defenders, force them to run. At Hougoumont, as we have seen, the French were less lucky when they broke in; the garrison still had ammunition, were able to hold off those who would have followed the storming-party until the gates had been closed, and then massacred those inside. There had been a similarly bloody struggle a little earlier across the wall of the formal garden, which had resulted in the death of every Frenchman who got inside. There are, no doubt, several ways of describing what went on during these moments at those three points; but one at least is to say that the French had triggered among the British a critical reaction, compelling them instinctually to strike to kill. If that were the case, it would help to explain why accounts of the fighting in the confined spaces of La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, though in one sense so abhorrent, are in another so comprehensible, so easy to accept. Walls, passageways and corners bring men suddenly face to face with each other, restrict their room for manœuvre and bar their line of retreat. If the stories of La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont are familiar to us, or seem almost déjà vu, it is not necessarily because we are reminded by them of more recent fights in the ruins of Stalingrad or Hué. The nature of the fighting at all these places would be as readily grasped by a time-traveller from Tancred’s Jerusalem or Achilles’ Troy, just as its exigencies will be understood by anyone whose stomach has jumped at a creak on the turn of a darkened stairway in an unfamiliar house.
The encounter which eludes the comprehension of the modern reader, though also between infantry and infantry, is a different one. It is the Queen’s Move of black-powder warfare, the head-on clash of heavy infantry, at close-range, in close-order, over levelled musket barrels. Discounting the attack which led to the fall of La Haye Sainte, since it really took the form of a skirmish on a gigantic scale, supported by light artillery run forward for the event, there were only two of these Queen’s Moves on Wellington’s front. The first is known as d’Erlon’s attack, the second as the ‘Crisis’ – the attack of the Imperial Guard near Hougoumont at the very end of the battle. In both, very large and dense masses of French infantry advanced across the whole width of the valley separating the two armies to within a few yards of the British line, exchanged fire with it for a very brief period, then turned summarily about and fled.
What makes episodes of this sort so difficult for the modern reader to visualize, if visualized to believe in, if believed in to understand, is precisely their nakedly face-to-face quality, their offering and delivery of death over distances at which suburbanites swap neighbourly gardening hints, their letting of blood and infliction of pain in circumstances of human congestion we expect to experience only at cocktail parties or tennis tournaments. The descriptions, nevertheless, are unequivocal. Mountsteven, an officer of the 28th Regiment, who remembered ‘looking over the hedge … and admiring the gallant manner the French officers led out their Companies in deploying’, estimated that they were at about thirty or forty yards when ‘we poured in our fire, sprung over the fence and charged. The Enemy ran before we could close with them, and, of course, in the greatest confusion.’ An officer of a neighbouring regiment, the 92nd, thought the distance was twenty yards and ‘could hardly believe, had he not witnessed it, that such complete destruction could have been effected in so short a time’. Reports from the brigades on the other flank which defeated the Imperial Guard are similar in tone and content. Dawson Kelly was with the 73rd Regiment,
when the last attacking column made its appearance through the fog and smoke, which throughout the day lay thick on the ground. Their advance was as usual with the French, very noisy and evidently reluctant, the Officers being in advance some yards cheering their men on. They however kept up a confused and running fire, which we did not reply to, until they reached nearly on a level with us, when a well-directed volley put them into confusion from which they did not appear to recover, but after a short interval of musketry on both sides, they turned about to a man and fled.
Powell, of the 1st Guards, standing directly in the path of the main French column, saw the Grenadiers:
ascending the rise au pas de charge shouting ‘Vive l’Empereur’. They continued to advance until within fifty or sixty paces of our front, when the Brigade was ordered to stand up. Whether it was from the sudden and unexpected appearance of a Corps so near to them, which must have seemed as starting out of the ground, or the tremendously heavy fire we threw into them, La Garde, who had never before failed in an attack, suddenly stopped. Those who from a distance and more on the flank could see the affair, tell us that the effect of our fire seemed to force the head of the Column bodily back!
Another Guardsman, Dirom, confirms his account: ‘The French Columns appeared staggered … convulsed. Part seemed inclined to advance, part halted and fired, and others, more particularly towards the centre and rear of the columns, seemed to be turning round … On our advance the whole of the French Columns turned round and made off.’
The facts then are not in dispute. The French approached to within speaking distance of the British, were halted by their fire, failed to overcome it with their own, and retired. In practice, there was a little more to their attacks than these eyewitness accounts reveal. Both were preceded by a good deal of heavy skirmishing, and accompanied by some close-range cannonading, from guns which the French infantry brought along with them. But in so far as ‘pure’ infantry encounters were possible on Napoleonic battlefields, that is what these two episodes were.
How are we to explain the suddenness and completeness of the collapse of French endeavour in each case? The French outnumbered the British and were fresh (‘[They] showed no appearance of having suffered on their advance, but seemed as regularly formed as if at a field day,’ wrote Dirom of the Imperial Guard). Both formations were composed of excellent and deeply experienced soldiers. Both were well led – five generals marched in front of the Guard and Ney, le plus brave des braves, disentangled himself from the fifth horse he had had killed under him that day to walk beside them. Both had had their attacks more than properly ‘prepared’ – that is, preceded by multiple cavalry charges or prolonged bombardment or both. Both delivered something more than simple ‘columnar’ assaults, in that the commanders of each formation attempted to deploy their men, once British musketry struck, into the sort of linear arrangement which would allow them to fight fire with fire. Yet it was British, not French fire which prevailed and, in prevailing, led to a collapse of the French which was not partial, but total. How so?
Some things have been left out of account. First, there was a heavy British artillery fire brought to bear on both d’Erlon’s corps and the Imperial Guard, which caused severe casualties and must have weakened resolve before they came within musket-shot of their infantry opponents. Second, the recoil of d’Erlon’s corps was hastened and then completed by a very powerful British cavalry charge, while another, in weaker strength, accelerated the retreat of the Guard. Third, the two attacks were not without some initial or local success. D’Erlon’s Corps unhinged Bylandt’s Brigade of Belgians from their place in the line, while the 3rd and 4th Grenadiers of the Guard shook the British 30th and 73rd Regiments and broke the Brunswick and Nassau contingents, which had to be prevented from retreating by British cavalry. Nevertheless, the two attacks resolved themselves essentially into conflicts of infantry against infantry and culminated in a clear victory of British over French: at the focus of the Imperial Guard’s attack, of five battalions (52nd, 33rd, 69th Regiments and 2/1st and 3/1st Guards) against five (1/3rd and 2/3rd Chasseurs, 1/4th and 2/4th Chasseurs and 2/3rd Grenadiers); at the focus of d’Erlon’s attack, of seven battalions against twenty-four.
To say that it was done by superior musketry is not to explain very much, though the mechanics are easy enough to describe. The British battalions, formed two, in some cases four deep, were in line: thus a strong battalion, like the 52nd Light Infantry, presented a front of 250 men, with three equal rows behind them, to the enemy. Their fire would have been effective – that is, would have achieved a significant percentage of hits – at over a hundred yards, but commanders, as was normal, reserved it until the enemy were much closer. When they had fired, they could reload in about twenty to thirty seconds; but, after the discharge of the first volley, it was habitual in British battalions to fire by platoons or by ranks, so that part of the unit was reloading while another fired. Overall, the result was the same: the projection at the enemy of about two thousand heavy leaden musket balls every minute.
The French, initially at least, were in column, a fact which makes their collapse easier for us to understand. For columns were, by definition, much deeper than lines. The men in the battalions of the Imperial Guard were probably formed nine deep, and the battalions ranked closely one behind the other; the same arrangement in d’Erlon’s Corps did much to nullify the three-rank formation he had adopted for his battalions. Thus, whether broad like d’Erlon’s or narrow like the Imperial Guard’s, the columns’ fate was to be overlapped and outflanked by any British battalion; the main column of the Imperial Guard met five, two to its front, two on one flank and one on the other. D’Erlon, who had foreseen that his columns risked being literally engulfed in fire, had hoped to avert the danger by deploying his broad columns into lines of equal width to Wellington’s as soon as they reached musket-shot. But the British beat him to the draw. The Imperial Guard, whose commander had taken no such precaution, was caught in narrow column and so deprived of even a theoretical chance of equalling the weight of musketry to which it was subjected. For columnar formation, of course, effectively disarmed the majority of soldiers confined within it. Only those at the very front and along the margins could use their weapons; those in the interior, even if they glimpsed the enemy, could not raise their muskets to fire.
Thus both d’Erlon’s men and, six hours later, those of the Imperial Guard, were ‘beaten in the fire fight’, in that those at the front and along the flanks were outnumbered by the British soldiers opposite and suffered fearfully disproportionate casualties. Even so, the French suffered nothing like the total of loss to which they were mathematically liable. Each British battalion ought, at fifty yards, to have sent each of its shots home, which means for example that the whole of the Imperial Guard’s main column should have been destroyed by their opponents’ opening volley. But, far from this being the case, many of the foremost French soldiers survived the first blast: Shelton, of the 28th, remembered that one of d’Erlon’s columns ‘attempted a deployment to their right’ after his regiment had given it ‘a very steady volley’ and Dawson Kelly, with the 73rd, credited the French he met in the ‘Crisis’ with returning the British fire at least for ‘a short interval’. Not only does this tell us something about the marksmanship of the period – that even at fifty yards a large proportion of musketeers clean missed their target – it reinforces suspicions that many musketeers did not aim at all, or at least did not aim at a particular human target. This is borne out by the recollection of a Waterloo officer that the word of command generally used was ‘Level’ rather than ‘Aim’. But the deliverance from seemingly certain death of so many Frenchmen at the head of the columns also draws attention to another and more significant phenomenon. Although it was they who had suffered most from the British fire, it was also they who did what little was done to counter or return it effectively. The men at the rear did nothing, or did nothing useful. Indeed, it seems safe to go further. It was at the back of the columns, not the front, that the collapse began, and the men in the rear who ran before those in the front.
We can assemble several hints that this was in fact what happened. Colborne, commanding the 52nd, ‘observed the Enemy in great confusion, some firing, others throwing away their packs and running to the rear’; and unless the men at the front were prepared to run through the fire of their own rear ranks, we must suppose it was they who were firing, those behind who were making off. Dirom is absolutely specific: after the British Guards had delivered their volley, ‘part [of the French column] seemed inclined to advance, part halted and fired, and others, more particularly towards the centre and rear of the Columns, seemed to be turning round.’ Sir de Lacy Evans, who had charged d’Erlon’s column with the Union Brigade six hours before, had noticed the same phenomenon: ‘As we approached at a moderate pace the fronts and flanks began to turn their backs inwards; the rear of the Columns had already begun to run away.’ In other words, those least immediately threatened were the soonest off. It was behaviour such as this, rather than direct British action, that rendered useless the most critical French attacks of the day, and led to Napoleon’s defeat. How can we explain it?
It is tempting to apply the concept of ‘critical’ and ‘escape’ distances to the situation; but probably too mechanistic. ‘Critical reaction’ is an explanation of individual rather than mass behaviour. More rewarding is an attempt to visualize the difference in conditions prevailing at the open face and in the closed interior of the French columns. At the front were the officers – Mountsteven had seen and admired ‘the gallant manner of the French officers’ during d’Erlon’s attack; Dirom remembered ‘the Officers of the leading Divisions (of the Guard) in front waving their swords’; Dawson Kelly described ‘the Officers being in advance some yards cheering their men on’. If there were officers in the heart of the columns, they were prevented by the press from setting any heartening example to their men, were indeed hidden from them and, like them, deprived of a view of events. The men at the front could see their officers, see the enemy, form some rational estimate of the danger they were in and of what they ought to do about it. The men in the middle and the rear could see nothing of the battle but the debris of earlier attacks which had failed – discarded weapons and the bodies of the dead and wounded lying on the ground, perhaps under their very feet. From the front came back to them sudden crashes of musketry, eddies of smoke, unidentifiable shouts and, most important, most urgent, tremors of movement, edging them rearward and forcing them, crowd-like, in upon each other. Crowdlike too, in their leaderlessness, in their lack of information, in their vulnerability to rumour, they would have needed very little stimulus, and what that little was we cannot guess (‘without any very apparent cause’, Dawson Kelly remarked [his italics] of the fight on his front) to transform them from an ordered mass into a suddenly fugitive crowd, and so carry them off the battlefield. Canetti, in his weird, inchoate book Crowds and Power, provides a poetic vision of what may have happened next and why:
The flight crowd is created by a threat. Everyone flees; everyone is drawn along. The danger which threatens is the same for all … They feel the same excitement and the energy of some increases the energy of others … So long as they keep together they feel that the danger is distributed … No one is going to assume that he, out of so many, will be the victim and, since the sole movement of the whole flight is towards salvation, each is convinced that he personally will attain it … Everyone who falls by the way acts as a spur to the others. Fate has overtaken him and exempted them. He is a sacrifice offered to danger. However important he may have been to some of them as a companion in flight, by falling he becomes important to all of them … The natural end of the flight is the attainment of the goal; once this crowd is in safety it dissolves.
This appeal to the action of the irrational is defensible on three grounds. First a physical one: the men in the front of a stricken formation cannot, as we saw at Agincourt, run away until those behind them have opened the road. Second, there is eyewitness evidence of crowdlike behaviour at the rear of the French columns during both d’Erlon’s and the Guard’s attacks: a 52nd officer, writing years after the event, used the analogy ‘making off like a mob in Hyde Park when a charge is made towards them’ to describe the Guard’s flight. Third, crowds are implicit in armies. Inside every army is a crowd struggling to get out, and the strongest fear with which every commander lives – stronger than his fear of defeat or even of mutiny – is that of his army reverting to a crowd through some error of his making. For a crowd is the antithesis of an army, a human assembly animated not by discipline but by mood, by the play of inconstant and potentially infectious emotion which, if it spreads, is fatal to an army’s subordination. Hence it is that thebitterest of military insults contain the accusations of crowdlike conduct – rabble, riff-raff, scum, canaille, Pöbel – and the deepest contempt soldiers can harbour is reserved for leaders whose armies dissolve between their fingers – Cadorna, Kerensky, Gough, Gamelin, Perceval.
Many armies begin as crowds, like Lincoln’s militia of ‘ninety day volunteers’ or the British ‘New Armies’ of 1914, and the transformation of such a crowd into an army is in itself enough to win a soldier a lasting title to fame. Kitchener, his reputation otherwise demolished, is still accorded respect for his triumphs of army-building in 1914–15 and Carnot and Trotsky, the latter even less of a general than the former, enjoy the posthumous title of military leader solely for having provided their respective revolutions with disciplined soldiers, recruited from the mobs which had destroyed the old order.
Many armies, beginning as crowds, remain crowdlike throughout their existence. The great medieval hosts, tenuously bound together by links of kinship and obligation, were formidable only by reason of their size and because of the very variable military skills of their individual members. Tactically quite unarticulated, they were vulnerable to the attack of any drilled, determined, homogeneous force. Clive and Gordon, at the head of quite tiny European, or European-style, armies were consistently able to disintegrate the vast oriental armies they met because the latter were really not very much more than feudal crowds of retainers and followers who not only outnumbered but actually impeded the quite small nucleus of genuine fighting men they contained.
The replacement of crowd armies by nuclear professional armies was one of the most important, if complex, processes in European history. Its complexities are such as to require a literature rather than a paragraph for examination; but one ramification demands emphasis: the singularity of the institution which the process produced. Whatever its origin – whether it was, like the British army, forged by civil war from a bumpkin militia, or, like the Russian, hammered out of a conscripted serfdom by foreign mercenary officers – the standing army which emerged in most European states during the seventeenth century stood alone and apart, both among the other components of the state’s apparatus and in the experience and imagination of the people it policed. Over no other group of subjects did the state exercise so rigorously, so minutely, so continuously its power; within no other group – except the religious orders, the newest and most ‘progressive’ of which, the Society of Jesus, was itself deliberately military in organization – were actions and attitudes regulated so scrupulously by code and timetable. Nor would they be, until industrialization and compulsory education, bearing their tainted gifts of factory discipline and textbook learning, came to transform the life of urbanized populations two centuries later. Even then, the army would remain for civilians a model of conformity and purpose, particularly for the leaders of the movements which, fathered by industrialism, then became its foe. Educated by the steady failure of ‘their’ crowds to overcome armies in the streets after 1830 – a failure which became absolute after 1871 – the men of revolution, whether violent or gradualist, made it their ambition to give to their followers the same advantages of order, command, pliability, enjoyed by the forces on which their class-enemies – a new name for a new idea – regularly called to frustrate their aims. Their transformation of the fickle and spontaneous crowd into the disciplined, mass political party was to be as important an achievement for the future of states as, in its time, had been the creation of standing armies. As important but less remarkable; for Maurice and Gustavus had nothing, except the fragmentary advice of classical writers and the unsavoury example of mercenary companies, on which to base their norms of military excellence. Bebel, Juarès, Guesde, the creators of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière had in the organization of their own national armies examples of the degree of centralization and quality of staff-work necessary for the mobilization of the latent power of the proletariat. The second generation of mass political parties, populist and anti-Marxist, like the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists, would actually adopt the structure and dress of armies (the language of the mass political party, as Baudelaire had remarked, had been militarized for half a century) and, in Germany at least, eventually precipitate the most fundamental of political crises by demanding that the army transfer its functions to the party-in-uniform. The idea would have been even more repellent than it was to the generals had they realized that it had respectable socialist roots in the pre-1914 programmes of the S.P.D. and the S.F.I.O.
But perhaps its roots stretched even farther back than that. The evaporation of the Revolution in revolutionary France is one of the most puzzling vanishing tricks in modern European history. A great deal has been done to demystify it; and perhaps too much should not be made of the role of the Armies of the Republic in absorbing both the wild men and wild ideas of 1792. Nevertheless, the existence of those armies and their continued success abroad was a factor in reconciling the libertarians and perhaps even the radicals to the stultification of the revolutionary movement at home after 1794. For one of the great unexpressed ideas of the Revolution was that ‘Militarism is Theft’: by its very existence, the standing army deprived free men of their right to protest, to demonstrate, to heckle, to jostle, to intimidate, to riot-all rights which it could be imagined had been freely exercised before the king had possessed soldiers to repress them. Napoleon’s appropriation of the army cap-stoned his seizure of power and made possible his inauguration of a regime more effectively repressive than any administered by the king. Yet Napoleonic repression did not appear to be the betrayal it was because the army, which was the Empire’s ultimate guarantee, remained in mood and ethos a creature of the Revolution. To the end it was anti-Bourbon, anti-clerical, egalitarian, open to talents. Thousands of young Frenchmen might seek to avoid serving beneath its standards. But as long as the standards were tricoloured, as long as they proclaimed Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, those who still cared could console themselves with the belief that the Revolution lived. The army, that extraordinary organism, which marched with a million synchronized legs to a single word of command, rose and ate and slept by the clock, practised punctuality, moved in unison to the tap of a drum, spoke a private language of command and submission, owed a wider loyalty than to family and place, which resembled, in short, no other institution under the wide skies of France, had been, in its white coats, both symbol and agent of the power of kings; dressed in blue, it stood for the victories of the Bastille, of the Tuileries, of the Champ de Mars, and embodied, at however submerged a level, the principle of the sovereignty of the people.
What happened, therefore, on the lower slopes of the ridge beneath Hougoumont on the evening of June 18th, 1815, was of crucial importance in more respects than one. The agonized incredulous cry, ‘La Garde recule’, did not only speak Napoleon’s defeat – though that it certainly did: Wellington’s order to the commander of the 52nd, ‘Go on, Colborne! Go on! They won’t stand. Don’t give them a chance to rally’, demonstrated his recognition that the disintegration of Napoleon’s last reserve sealed his victory. But the reduction of the Guard to a fugitive crowd was also the reversal of the most powerful current in recent European history. The Revolution had made itself manifest by the Parisian crowd’s defeat or subversion of the royal army in July, 1789; the metamorphosis of the Guard into a crowd, its spirit crushed, its solidarity broken, its militancy extinct, its only motive self-preservation, its only purpose flight, marked, as effectively as anything else we can point to, the restitution of power to its former owners. Louis XVIII at least got the point. After his second restoration, daring what he had not risked in 1814, he disbanded every regiment in the army and remade it in a new and different style.
From a strictly military point of view, however, the crowdlike behaviour of the Guard at the end of the battle, even though we wish to explain it and cannot (for the concepts of anomie and ‘collective neurosis’ fashionably applied to crowd behaviour by social psychologists certainly have no place in a consideration of fugitive soldiery) is of less interest than that of those from whom they ran. For although the suddenness and completeness of the Guard’s collapse implies a long and terrible preliminary ordeal, it had in fact suffered little in comparison with many British regiments, which had been under fire for five, six or seven hours before it issued from its place of shelter near La Belle Alliance.
What had made these regiments stand? And it is important to emphasize that ‘stand’ is used precisely. Regiments, sub-units, individuals were allowed to, and did, take cover: Saltoun, halted by the Duke while marching his Guards light companies out of Hougoumont orchard, ordered them to lie down ‘according to an invariable custom’; the Royal Scots, at the time of d’Erlon’s second attack ‘were moved forward to the hedge … ordered to form line and lie down’; the Life Guards lay down before their great charge; the 3/14th were ordered to lie down in square, the men lying ‘packed like herrings in a barrel’; and the men of a regiment of Picton’s division, lying down behind the ridge during the afternoon, spent the time reading letters scattered from the packs of Frenchmen killed during d’Erlon’s attack. But unless so ordered, to lie down, or even to duck, was thought at best cowardly, at worst a dereliction. Leeke draws an illuminating distinction in the case of one of the 52nd’s new sergeants, who escaped a cannon-ball ‘by stooping just as he saw it in line with him at some little distance; this was quite allowable when his comrades were lying down at their ease.’ Shortly afterwards faced himself by the same predicament, he ‘thought, Shall I move? No! I gathered myself up, and stood firm, with the colour in my right hand’ (the shot was the one which killed the four men next to him). And later still, when an explosive shell fell in the middle of the 52nd’s square, one officer called out ‘Steady, men!’, another, ‘I never saw men steadier in my life’, ‘the shell burst, and seven poor fellows were struck by the fragments.’ Men who flinched were reproved: when a shell passed over a column of the 52nd, the men ‘instantly bobbed their heads’; Colborne, the commanding officer, shouted, ‘“For shame, for shame! That must be the 2nd Battalion (who were recruits), I am sure”. In an instant every man’s head went straight as an arrow.’ Mercer too had chided his gunners ‘for lying down when shells fell near them until they burst’ and found himself compelled to stand ‘looking quite composed’ when, some time later, one fell at his feet, luckily to explode harmlessly.
His attitude towards taking cover would have been dictated by the soldier’s code of honour, whose tenets are implied by the disdain he reveals for the conduct of one of the military doctors: ‘a shot, as he thought, passing rather too close, down he dropped on his hands and knees … and away he scrambled like a great baboon, his head turned fearfully over his shoulder as if watching the coming shot, whilst our fellows made the field resound with their shouts and laughter.’ But the infantrymen, who would have shared his code, had a stronger motive in forcing their men, and themselves, to stand still. For the whole purpose of enemy artillery fire was to make men break formation. When, out of self-preservation, they did, it could have disastrous results. The 30th and 73rd, ordered ‘in an evil moment’ to march under cover of a bank from the fire of a pair of French guns accompanying the Guard’s attack, became ‘disordered by our poor wounded fellows clinging to their comrades thinking they were being abandoned’ and by bumping suddenly into some other British soldiers. On this occasion, ‘fortunately the enemy took no advantage of it.’ At other times and places, sudden confusions of this sort precipitated a charge by horse or bayonets which could lead to the defeat of a whole army.
So what was it that, even during moments of disorder and peril like that just described, could prompt men ‘jammed together and carried along by the pressure’ to make an effort to stand, ‘good-humouredly laughing … struggling to get out of the mêlée, or exclaiming “By God, I’ll stop, Sir, but I’m off my legs’”? Alas, the ‘motivation to combat’, individual or collective, of the private soldier of this period is almost impossible to analyse, for we know so little about him. Simple courage should not be discounted, nor the wish to stand well in the opinion of comrades. But the line infantryman, as opposed to the sharpshooter or horse-trooper, had little opportunity to display the initiative which would have called attention to his bravery. His was the unspectacular duty of standing to be shot at. What sustained him?
Not all did stand. The non-British troops of Wellington’s army, in particular some of the Dutch–Belgian and minor German contingents, shirked more or less flagrantly; most cavalry of these nationalities refused to charge, or even ran away; a lot of the infantry drifted out of the battle or had to be kept in place by coercion. The men in the right face of the 14th Regiment’s square, ‘irritated by the … conduct’ of some Belgian cavalry which first refused to charge and then ran away, ‘unanimously took up their pieces and fired a volley into them’. The Duke of Cumberland’s Hussars, a volunteer regiment of rich young Hanoverians, galloped away from d’Erlon’s attack to Brussels with the news that Wellington was beaten. The Brunswickers, who had fled through the night from the noise of Mercer’s hoofbeats at their heels on the road from Quatre Bras, gave way at the sight of the Guard, but allowed themselves to be rallied by the Duke, who led them back into the line; earlier some Belgian infantry had been spotted by a 16th Light Dragoon ‘firing their muskets in the air, meaning to move off in the confusion’; they were also steadied by the Duke. No British regiment actually ran away. But some gunners panicked during d’Erlon’s attack and some regiments were occasionally less than perfectly steady. Individuals went absent. A troop shoemaker of the 16th Light Dragoons, an old soldier but ‘deranged’, disappeared on the morning of June 18th and reappeared in the evening. ‘The men … did not resent his leaving them, knowing the kind of man and his weakness.’ Another from the same troop who, it was thought, ‘had got away during the advance to plunder, was reported to me [Tomkinson] by the men and booted by them the morning following the action.’
It may not have been for slackness that he was kicked round the troop. Looting appears to have been so universal an activity, so energetically practised even during the battle itself, in the firing line and in advance of it, that it may have been for taking unfair advantage that his comrades punished him. Certainly we ought to consider the possibility that it was the prospect of loot which helped to keep men in place, handy, as it were, for the fruit as it fell. At the height of the battle an officer of Picton’s division ‘saw (the truth must be told) a greater number of our soldiers busy rifling the pockets of the dead, and perhaps the wounded, than I could wish … with some exertion we got them in. Those of our own regiment the Colonel beat with the flat of his sword as long as he had breath to do so. The fellows knew they deserved it; but, they observed, someone else would soon be doing the same, and why not they as well as others?’ Such a one was seen by Seymour, Uxbridge’s A.D.C., who found himself unhorsed beside Picton at the moment he was killed, repelling d’Erlon’s attack; ‘from (Picton’s) trousers’ pocket a Grenadier of the 28th was endeavouring to take his spectacles and purse.’ A little later, when the 44th Regiment was charged from the rear by a French straggler, one of the privates unhorsed him with a single shot in front of the regiment, ran forward to kill him and swiftly robbed his body before rejoining the ranks.
Soldiers have always looted; indeed, the robbing of the enemy, particularly an enemy killed in single combat, and, for preference, of an object worthy of display for its intrinsic or symbolic value – the finery or weapons of the vanquished – has always provided an important motive for fighting. But an economic motive operates too. The capture of a ransomable captive had offered the medieval warrior one of the few chances then available of making a sudden fortune. Ransom had long since lapsed as a practice and its institutionalized substitute, prize money, offered nothing like the same rewards, even though it accrued by right and not by hazard: Waterloo prize money for privates amounted to £2.11s.4d. Very much larger sums than that – which equalled forty days’ pay – were to be found, however, on the bodies of the dead and wounded, for the only safe storage for valuables in an army without bankers was about the person. Officers knew very well what would happen to their coin and watches once they were hit; hence the fund of stories – beloved, if misunderstood, by Victorian readers – of stricken officers sending for their best friends to receive their trinkets. Sir William Ponsonby was handing a locket to his A.D.C. when both were speared by the French lancers; Howard, of the 33rd, was ‘sent for … repeatedly’ by his friend Furlong ‘who was wounded dangerously’ and, when Howard could not be found, ‘said he must die and therefore sent his watch’. Furlong recovered, and so could reclaim the keepsake; but that evening ‘plunder was for sale in great quantities, chiefly gold and silver watches, rings, etc., etc. Of the former’, wrote an officer of Picton’s division, ‘I might have bought a dozen for a dollar a piece (but) I do not think any officer bought … probably reflecting (as I did) that in a few days’ [they expected another battle] ‘our pockets would be rifled of them as quickly as those of the French had been.’
This selling of loot at prices far below its value tends to demolish the notion that the hope of plunder sustained the ordinary soldier’s steadfastness. Were there other factors?
Drink may certainly have been one of them. Tiredness, I have suggested, helped to inure the soldier to fear, and much of the army was tired. But many of the soldiers had drunk spirits before the battle, and continued to drink while it was in progress. Shaw, the slashing Lifeguardsman, was, in the opinion of Sergeant Morris who watched him guzzling gin at about noon, drunk and running amok when he was cut down by the French cuirassiers; Morris himself took three canteens full of gin ‘for the wounded’, but shared some of it with a friend; Sergeant Lawrence’s officer, in the 40th Regiment, kept running to him during the battle for a swig at his spirits flask; and Dallas, the commissary of the Third Division, hailed by his general with the demand, ‘My brave fellows are famished for thirst and support, where are the spirits you promised to send them?’, managed to get a cart forward and rolled a barrel into the middle of a square, where it was broached, and the contents distributed, during the closing stages of the battle itself.
Almost every regimental memoir refers to drink being distributed. But we should probably not think of alcohol having more than an indirect effect in keeping the ranks unbroken. Much more positive, in the case of those soldiers who wanted or tried to run, was the simple mechanism of coercion. Most of the reports we have are of British soldiers, particularly British cavalry, acting to prevent the non-British contingents leaving position. The 10th Hussars stood behind some Brunswickers during the French cavalry attacks and ‘kept their files closed’ to prevent them leaving the field; the 11th Hussars did likewise, and the 16th Light Dragoons; Vivian stood his hussars ‘10 yards behind infantry which were running away. They returned to line, our cavalry cheering them, and began firing again,’ Duperier, the ranker-officer of the 18th Hussars, had passed ‘the Belgun troope, which I saw of my own eyes, officers behind them lethring away (as the Drover did the Cattle in Spain) to make them smell the gunpowder’. Later, during the Imperial Guard’s attack ‘We … formed line close to our infantry’ (these may have been British) ‘close to their tails and them almost nose to nose with the french … to pass the time away I done like the Belgum officers, every one that faced about I laid my sword across his shoulders and told him that if he did not go back I would run him through, and that had the desired effect for they all stood it.’
But other officers, beside the Belgians, could be brutal with their own soldiers. Mercer noticed that the ranks of the Brunswickers ‘presented gaps of several file in breadth, which the Officers and Sergeants were busily employed filling up by pushing and even thumping their men together; whilst these, standing like so many logs … were apparently completely stupefied and bewildered’. (Could they have been drunk?) ‘I should add that they were all perfect children. None of the privates, perhaps, were above 18 years of age.’ The French manhandled their men. Leeke saw ‘a French officer strike, with the flat of his sword, a skirmisher, who was running … to the rear’ and an officer of the French 45th Regiment was ‘thrusting a soldier forward’ at the moment when the Union Brigade charged into them.
Even though we have only the most indirect references to British officers coercing their soldiers, we should not suppose that they did not do so. Indeed, the very formation of the square, merely tactical as it may seem, concealed a strong coercive purpose. Infantry in line, particularly if formed four deep, offered just as much fire to cavalry as when in square. In line, however, the ratio of officers to ‘attacked length’ was altogether lower than in square, for there all the officers were grouped in the centre and could turn in an instant to consolidate whichever face of the square was attacked; moreover the weapons they and the sergeants carried, swords and halberds, though of little offensive value, were exactly what was needed to keep individual soldiers, or groups of them, from running away. In one of General Lejeune’s paintings of a Napoleonic battle in which he fought, he has actually portrayed a French sergeant pushing against the back of one of the French ranks, using his halberd horizontally in both hands to hold the men in place. It is not improbable to think of British sergeants having done the same at Waterloo.
But to see the square as a disciplinary device only is to underrate its overall importance, and to miss sight of two elements, perhaps the most important, acting on the British ‘will to combat’: group solidarity and individual leadership. Nothing better conveys the significance of the group to the individual under the stress of battle at Waterloo than the pathetic little incident recounted by Albemarle of a bugler of the 51st Regiment. He had been out skirmishing and, returning, mistook the 14th’s square for his own. ‘Here I am’, he was heard to exclaim, ‘safe enough’; at that instant of apparent homecoming, a cannonball took off his head. The point is, of course, that he had probably been safer out skirmishing, for the French did not waste cannon-shot on strays; indeed, the ball which killed him was followed by two more which disarmed six men and fatally wounded a sergeant. But though objectively more dangerous a post than a skirmishing line – at least in most circumstances – a square felt safer. Indeed, if one were wounded, it was altogether safer, for one would be dragged into the centre of the square and carried by the bandsmen to the rear when conditions permitted, something for which a skirmisher could not hope; it was the prospect of abandonment which caused panic among the 30th’s wounded when their square moved. But even when a square was under fire, and men falling fast, those untouched seem to have drawn strength to stand from the proximity of their comrades and from the square’s existence, tangibility, configuration, stepping sideways to close the gaps even though that improved their chances of being hit. ‘What is that square lying down in front?’, Sir Alexander Cadogan is said to have asked during the attack on La Haye Sainte, to receive the answer, ‘That is the position from which the 30th and 73rd have just moved.’ They had left three hundred dead and wounded on the ground where they had stood.
Symbolizing the square’s integrity, and that of the regiment which formed it, were the colours. Each regiment carried two, a Union Jack as the King’s Colour, another of the regimental facing colour – blue, yellow, green, white – as the Regimental Colour. The modern colours have shrunk to modest proportions. Those carried at Waterloo were enormous, six feet square, and requiring considerable physical strength to handle in any sort of wind. They were carried by the two most junior officers of the battalion, each escorted by two senior sergeants, and these posts were the most dangerous which could be held in action. Sergeant Lawrence of the 40th, ordered to the colours at four in the afternoon, recalled his reluctance: ‘This … was a job I did not at all like; but still I went as boldly to work as I could. There had been before me that day fourteen sergeants already killed and wounded while in charge of these colours, with officers in proportion, and the staff and colours were almost cut to pieces.’ A contributor to the New Statesman, writing in October 1973, affected to believe that ‘all the stories of deeds of heroism in defence of military colours can only have been so much myth-making.’ The record of Waterloo certainly does not bear that belief out. It might today seem more promising – it would certainly be more fashionable – to look for an explanation of the square’s rockfast steadiness in terms of their alignment on some territorial landmark or boundary. And there were indeed such features on the field, particularly in the centre, where the position was traversed by hedgerows and embanked roadways. Significantly, few memoirs make mention of these features or, when they do so, make much of them. The colours, however, are mentioned frequently and their importance as a rallying-point and source of inspiration explicitly emphasized. More indicative of their importance, because the point is implicit, are the many accounts of extraordinary heroism displayed in defence of, or attempts to capture, colours. Several Frenchmen virtually committed suicide in hopeless and quite unnecessary efforts to carry British infantry colours back to their lines. Belcher, carrying the Regimental Colour of the 32nd Regiment, found himself close to a French officer who had been unhorsed during d’Erlon’s attack. Instead of running off with his men, who were then retreating, the Frenchman, Belcher writes, ‘suddenly fronted me and seized the staff, I still retaining a grasp of the silk. At the same moment he attempted to draw his sabre, but had not accomplished it when the Covering Colour-Sergeant, named Switzer, thrust his pike into his breast, and the right rank and file of the division, named Lacy, fired into him. He fell dead at my feet.’
There are yet more hair-raising stories of British officer’s bravery in defending the colours they were carrying. Ensign Christie of the 44th was charged by a Frenchman whose lance ‘entering the left eye, penetrated to the lower jaw … Christie, notwithstanding the agony of his wound … flung himself upon (the colour)’ wrestled it away from the Frenchman and fell to the ground on top of it. He survived his terrible injury, dying of fever in Jamaica in 1833. Volunteer Clarke, carrying the new Regimental Colour of the 69th – it had lost its previous Regimental Colour at Bergen-op-Zoom the year before – saved the regiment from inextinguishable shame at Quatre Bras by a courageous tenacity which ought to have cost him his life. Isolated when the regiment was caught half-formed in square, he received twenty-two sabre wounds, but hung on to the colour and killed three French cavalrymen with his own sword. During this mêlée, the King’s Colour was lost, so that the 69th was narrowly spared having to fight at Waterloo without colours at all. Clarke was only sixteen, having volunteered for the campaign as a Sandhurst cadet.
Important to both British endurance and French élan as were the actions of groups and symbols or at Waterloo, it is vain to seek explanations of their motive power, for the solidarity of groups and the power of symbols is not inherent or self-made. They derive from the influence of those who lead and those who manipulate; in the case of armies, from the officers. To suggest that their example and leadership was crucial at Waterloo may seem a boringly conventional view to advance. The facts nevertheless seem to bear it out. What else are we to make of the experience of the 40th Regiment? They had arrived at Waterloo dead tired after a march of fifty-one miles in forty-eight hours; three weeks before that they had disembarked from America, having been six weeks at sea. During the day of Waterloo, they lost nearly two hundred soldiers dead and wounded out of seven hundred, and fourteen out of thirty-nine officers. ‘The men in their tired state,’ Sergeant Lawrence wrote, began to despair during the afternoon, ‘but the officers cheered them on continuously.’ When the French cavalry encircled them ‘with fierce gesticulations and angry scowls, in which a display of incisors became very apparent’ the officers would call out, ‘Now men, make faces!’ and at the very end of the day, when the men ‘were dreading another charge’, the officers kept up the cry they had been making throughout the afternoon, ‘Keep your ground, my men,’ adding the promise, ‘Reinforcements are coming.’
This may not sound very original stuff – though ‘Make faces’ is – but the baldness of Lawrence’s account implicitly makes the point that it was upon the officers’ behaviour that the men’s depended. We do not understand unfortunately the basis of the relationship between officers and men in Wellington’s army (the power of corporal punishment which the former held over the latter certainly makes it different from that in the modern British army) and it may be that what is always at bottom an emotive tie would defy analysis. We can however infer from the way in which memoirists refer to their soldiers that the relationship was not a personal one of the closeness which the modern British subaltern is encouraged to establish with his platoon. Soldiers, in the memory of the officers who led them, are always simple surnames –’my orderly (a man named Dwyer)’, ‘a young soldier … whose name Penn now forgets’, ‘statement by—— Aldridge, late Corporal’, ‘a Private (Penfold; I forget his Christian name)’ – and neither their doings nor their sufferings appear to have required particular recollection. Macready of the 30th, describing the death of one of his soldiers, does recall that the man ‘uttered a sort of reproachful groan’, at which he ‘involuntarily exclaimed, “By G——, I couldn’t help it” ‘, but that sense of intense responsibility for their soldiers as individuals, which becomes so characteristic of the British officer’s attitude later in the nineteenth century, is quite lacking. Given the social distance then prevailing between classes, and the extreme class difference between officers and men, it is perhaps foolish to expect to find anything like it. But if leadership was not founded upon personal sympathies, upon what did it then depend?
Modern theorizing on military leadership makes much of the officer’s need to impress his men by his ‘professional’ and ‘technical’ competence. And several Waterloo officers do mention well-judged exercises in military technique by themselves or others; Maitland recalls his withholding the fire of the Guards brigade until the French were within twenty paces; Macdonald, of the Royal Scots, relates a conversation with his brigade commander – ‘“Do you think you can hit those fellows out there?” “No, but more to the right I think I could”‘; and Mercer describes gauging the speed of the French cavalry charges so as to unleash his salvo with maximum effect. But officers are equally ready to admit to lapses or improprieties in military technique. Saltoun, writing of the handling of 1st Guards in the ‘Crisis’, says ‘The word of command passed was “Halt, front, form up”, and it was the only thing that could be done’, though it was not an order in the drill book; Davis, of the same regiment, complacently describes its most un-regulation formation of line from square at a moment of danger in the afternoon; and Mountsteven of the 28th, relating how his regiment responded to d’Erlon’s attack, wrote ‘as to “the right wing being wheeled by sections to the left, etc”, I can assure you nothing half so regular came within my notice’ – a comment which many modern military historians whose battle-narratives read like choreographic notations might think on with profit.
Mere technical competence, then, undoubtedly ranked lower in the officer’s system of values than other attributes. What were these other attributes? Courage, of course, stood at the head of the list. But we should be careful about judging what the contemporary officer thought courageous and what not. Participation in single combat, the apogee of achievement for the medieval warrior, seems to have lost much of its glamour. We cannot yet imply, as we can of the officer a hundred years later, that he thought killing almost degrading of his rank. But it is significant that he had begun to carry weapons of very little lethal value; and the infantry officer at least seems to have looked on himself as a director rather than agent of violence. Captain Wyndham, inside Hougoumont, on seeing a French Grenadier climbing the gate, ‘instantly desired Sergeant Graham, whose musket he was holding while the latter was bringing forward another piece of timber, to drop the wood, take his firelock and shoot the intruder’. Death, indeed, is something about which some Waterloo officers freely admit feelings of disgust or remorse. Ensign Charles Fraser, ‘a fine gentleman in speech and manner’ could raise a laugh when a French cannon-ball, beheading the unhappy bugler of the 51st, ‘spattered the whole battalion with his brains, the colours and ensigns in charge coming in for an extra share’, by ‘drawling out, “How extremely disgusting”’, but that was a deliberate display of hauteur. By contrast Albemarle of the same battalion, recounting a somewhat similar incident, comes close to making the sort of revelation one would not be surprised to find included in a modern psychiatric casebook:
As I was rising from the ground, a bullet struck a man of my company, named Overman … He, falling backwards, came upon me with the whole weight of his accoutrements and knapsack, and knocked me down again. With some difficulty I crawled from under him. The man appeared to have died without a struggle. In my effort to rejoin my regiment, I trod upon his body. The act, although involuntary, caused me a disagreeable sensation whenever it recurred to my mind.
In a more conventional, but still revealing vein, Leeke recalls shedding tears at the sight of the first two soldiers of the 52nd to be killed on June 18th, while one of the most common ingredients of officers’ post-battle letters are very tender and concerned listings of the wounds received by their fellows. Wray, of the 40th, wrote:
Poor Major Heyland (who commanded) was shot through the heart, and poor Ford was shot through the spine of his back but did not die for a short time after he was carried away. Poor Clarke lost his left arm, and I am much afraid Browne will lose his leg, he is shot through the upper part of the thigh and the bone terribly shattered. There are eight more of our officers wounded, but all doing well except little Thornhill, who was wounded through the head. Anthony … got his eighth wound and is doing well.
Here we approach perhaps as close as we are going to get to the officer’s central motivation. It was the receipt of wounds, not the infliction of death, which demonstrated an officer’s courage; that demonstration was reinforced by his refusal to leave his post even when wounded, or by his insistence on returning as soon as his wounds had been dressed; and it was by a punctiliousness in obeying orders which made wounds or death inevitable that an officer’s honour was consummated. Officers, in short, were most concerned about the figure they cut in their brother officers’ eyes. Honour was paramount, and it was by establishing one’s honourableness with one’s fellows that leadership was exerted indirectly over the common soldiers. ‘Two of our officers’, wrote Albemarle, ‘were not on terms; the one saw the other behaving gallantly, he ran up to him and cried, “Shake hands and forgive all that has passed; you’re a noble fellow”.’ The criteria of honour are best conveyed by the cases of Major Howard of the 10th Hussars and Lord Portarlington of the 23rd Light Dragoons. Howard, at the very end of the day, was ordered to charge a French regiment. He asked another officer what he thought of his chances, ‘who said that without the co-operation of infantry it was better not as the Square was well formed … Major Howard said that having been ordered to attack he thought it a ticklish thing not to do it, and gave the order accordingly.’ Grove, of the 23rd Light Dragoons, saw him ride forward: ‘we nodded to each other … and a very fine handsome fellow he was; but heevidently looked as if his time had come.’ A few moments later, ‘he gave the order [to charge] and did it with effect, though the enemy stood well, the [British] Officers being wounded close to their bayonets and Major Howard falling so that a man in the ranks [stepped forward and] struck him with the butt end of his musket’ (in fact he beat his brains out). Howard’s open-eyed ‘going upon his death’ seems to have epitomized for most Waterloo officers what honourable conduct was, for he is picked out for mention more than any other British soldier present and his kinsman, Byron, who made a pilgrimage to his grave, wrote a funerary ode for him. Portarlington, by contrast, attracted obloquy – even if much of it was of his own imagining. The commanding officer of the 23rd, he had left his regiment for Brussels, probably to enjoy himself, the night before the battle and was not back by the time the battle started. Very late in the day he arrived on the field to find his regiment already heavily engaged, and in a frenzy of shame joined in a charge by the 18th Hussars, in which he lost his horse. Numbers of excuses were made for him – that he had been ‘dangerously ill with spasms and a violent bowel attack’, that he had been ‘prevented from joining his regiment in time to command it’ – but gossip could not be stilled and he was obliged to resign his colonelcy in September, 1815. Pathetically, he repurchased a commission as an ensign but the army would not forget and he died, unmarried, penniless and broken in spirit, in a London slum in 1845.
And what could any excuse be worth when Portarlington’s part is compared with that of Picton – painfully wounded at Quatre Bras but concealing his suffering to die at the head of his division near La Haye Sainte; or Uxbridge, who, in Duperier’s words, ‘got a ball in the lage [leg] which fracted the bone so much that he was forced to leave us, but he don it so well that nobody saw it – I suspected it from his slow pace and his shaking hands with Lord Vivian’; or some unnamed officers of Picton’s division who, having ‘been wounded on the 16th but refused to retire’ could not be persuaded to do so until the evening of the 17th; or Bull, the gunner officer, who ‘feeling much pain and losing a good deal of blood … went to the rear to have (his) arm tied up’ but was back within half an hour; or the six officers of a regiment in the Fifth Division who ‘had been wounded, gone to the rear, been bled, bandaged and returned in time for the final advance’; or the wounded officers of the 10th Hussars whom a comrade remembered meeting as they rode up from the rear through the twilight, with bandaged heads and splinted arms, to take their places again at the head of their men? Besides these displays of constancy and disdain for preserving a whole skin, Portarlington’s frivolous expedition to Brussels and his recklessly ill-disciplined effort to recover his good name do indeed look tawdry. The others demonstrated that they were men of honour. He had not.
In its starkness, the concept of honour acted out by the Waterloo officers had about it much of what we think of as classically Heroic. This is particularly true in that, to apply Professor Finley’s test, it contained no ‘notion of social obligation’. Eighty or a hundred years later, the British officer’s principal motivation would be defined in terms of ‘duty to the regiment’, the regiment into which many had been born and to which all were attached for the length of their service lives. But the modern regimental system had not been invented by Waterloo. Officers were still independent gentlemen, holding rank by cash purchase, which provided a rough measure of their family status, and swapping regiments almost at whim. They demonstrated their fitness to hold whatever rank they enjoyed by their conduct in battle, or course, but their behaviour, good or bad, reflected on themselves, not on the regiments to which they belonged. Yet the Waterloo officers’ concept of honour differed from that of Homer’s heroes in two important respects. As Professor Finley explains, for the Homeric hero ‘there could be no honour without public proclamation, and there could be no publicity without the evidence of a trophy’. Worthwhile trophies could be won only in single combat, and single combat could be concluded only by violent death – and a death in which the victor exulted. There is little or nothing of this at Waterloo. The facts of death in battle are invested, by those who recount what they witnessed, or even perpetrated, with a tinge of Romantic regret, caught at goodness knows how many removes from Young Werther and the poetry of Schiller; while on the acquisition of trophies, which meant the personal possessions of the dead, there was something approaching a taboo. Honour, so absolutely concrete in Homer, wasfor the British officer of 1815 an almost wholly abstract ideal, a matter of comportment, of exposure to risk, of acceptance of death if it should come, of private satisfaction – if it should not – at having fulfilled an unwritten code.
Hence, in a way, it is that the most perceptive of all the comments about Waterloo is the best known and apparently the most banal; that it was ‘won on the playing-fields of Eton’. The Duke, who was an Etonian, knew very well that few of his officers were schoolfellows and that football bears little relation to war. But he was not speaking of himself, nor was he suggesting that Waterloo had been a game. He was proposing a much more subtle idea: that the French had been beaten not by wiser generalship or better tactics or superior patriotism but by the coolness and endurance, the pursuit of excellence and of intangible objectives for their own sake which are learnt in game-playing – that game-playing which was already becoming the most important activity of the English gentleman’s life. Napoleon had sent forward each of his formations in turn. They had been well led; many of the British speak with admiration of the French officers’ bravery. But they had not been able to carry their men with them the final step. Each formation in turn had swung about and gone back down the hill. When at last there were no more formations to come forward, the British still stood on the line Wellington had marked out for them, planted fast by the hold officers had over themselves and so over their men. Honour, in a very peculiar sense, had triumphed.
Disintegration
In the last hour of the battle which followed the Imperial Guard’s flight, the order which the tension of combat had imposed on both armies dissolved. Among the Allies, disorder manifested itself in a rash of accidental killings and woundings as units stumbled unrecognized upon each other in the gathering dark. Among the French, it took the form of a panicky or craven capitulation as regiments found their line of escape from the field impeded or threatened.
Accidental wounding is one of the major hazards of battle, and the desire to avoid it one of the principal reasons underlying the professional soldiers’ much derided obsession with drill. For among close-packed groups of men equipped with firearms, one’s neighbour’s weapon offers one a much more immediate threat to life than any wielded by an enemy. Lieutenant Strachan, of the 73rd, had been killed by the accidental discharge of a musket in the ranks on the retreat from Quatre Bras; and, without strict obedience to the sequence of ‘Load – Make Ready – Level – Fire’, many others would have met the same end on the field itself. As it was, Colonel Hay of the 16th Light Dragoons was shot by British Infantry during the repulse of d’Erlon’s attack (the 10th Hussars suffered several casualties from a battery of British artillery when riding in pursuit of some French cavalry who were the gunners’ real target), and the 52nd fired by mistake on the 23rd Light Dragoons following the repulse of the Guard (they managed to kill their own Colonel’s horse). Lieutenant Anderson overheard the colonel of the 23rd complain, at the sight of a ‘considerable number’ of his troopers lying dead or unhorsed around the 52nd, ‘It’s always the case, we always lose more men by our own people than we do by the enemy.’ This was an exaggeration. But there are numerous authentic accounts of losses by ‘friendly’ fire – or even ‘friendly’ swordcuts – at Waterloo. Mercer describes at length how he suffered from a Prussian battery which mistook his men for French, inflicted on them more casualties than they had suffered throughout the day’s fighting and were at length only silenced by the arrival of a Belgian battery – ‘beastly drunk and … not at all particular as to which way they fired’ – who in their turn mistook the Prussians for the enemy. Among the cavalry, the 11th Hussars nearly charged the 1st King’s German Legion Hussars, who were forming up to charge them (until they ‘recognised them by their cheer’) while the 10th and 18th Hussars did ‘exchange cuts’ with a regiment of Prussian cavalry, killing or wounding several. Tomkinson, of the 16th Light Dragoons, reveals in an aside of his own how woundings could occur even between people well known to each other: a Frenchman had feigned surrender and then fired; ‘Lieutenant Beck-with … stood still and attempted to catch this man on his sword; he missed him and nearly ran me through the body. I was following the man at a hand gallop.’
This incident occurred among a crowd of Frenchmen, most of whom were trying to surrender or who had given way completely to panic. Their behaviour, which Tomkinson describes in detail, was remarkable, shedding light on one of the most obscure of all battlefield transactions – how soldiers get their offer of surrender accepted. Leeke remarks gnomically, ‘soldiers of a defeated army can never feel quite sure that their lives will be spared by any of their enemies whom they may fall in with’; and certainly by this time, on the other side of the battlefield, the Prussians were enthusiastically bayoneting whatever French wounded they came across. Earlier in the battle, with much of the French army still at hand and full of fight, the French had surrendered easily when compelled to do so – a simple throwing down of weapons or cry of ‘Prisonnier!’ being token enough-and had felt free to make a break back to their lines if opportunity offered (though this could result in their being killed, as some escaping French cuirassiers were by a company of the 51st at two in the afternoon). However, at the end of the battle, Tomkinson and others found that isolated Frenchmen, whether individually or in groups, and presumably because they knew they could hope for no succour from their own side, abandoned every vestige of soldierly bearing in their anxiety to be taken captive. Murray, of the 18th Hussars, described how the infantry of the Guard ‘threw themselves down, except two squares, which stood firm, but did no good. The sneaking prisoners we had taken holloaed, “Vive le roi” … On charging, not only did the infantry throw themselves down, but the cavalry also from off their horses, all roaring “pardon”, many of them on their knees.’ Tomkinson, with the 16th, also found that ‘many of the infantry immediately threw down their arms and crowded together for safety … We were riding in all directions at parties trying to make their escape.’ He goes on next to describe a phenomenon which may help to explain those extraordinary ‘piles of dead’ at Agincourt: ‘The enemy were lying together for safety – they were a mass some yards in height – calling out from the injury of one pressing upon the other, and from the horses stamping upon their legs.’ Can it be that, in extremes of fear, men will not only press together for protection – or its semblance – but actually fall together to the ground in heaps? Do we not, in our memories of childhood, recall the sense of immunity we derived from burrowing together in scrums at a parent’s simulated rage, those deepest inside feeling safest? And if menin extremis call, as they are so commonly reported to do, for their mothers, why should not their actions, as well as their cries, revert to those of infancy?
Aftermath
The collection of prisoners occupied the last minutes of twilight. The pursuit of the remnants of Napoleon’s army, a work chiefly done by the Prussian cavalry, lasted into the night. The British took almost no part in it: ‘having been nearly twelve hours under arms, ten under fire and, perhaps, eight hours hotly engaged in some shape or other’ as one officer puts it – and his was the common experience – most of Wellington’s men were too tired, as much by the nervous as physical strain of the day to do anything but slump down to sleep. Many of the private soldiers, like Lieutenant Keowan’s servant, slunk away to loot – there are several accounts by wounded British officers of their being plundered, and might be more if the looters had not killed a number of their victims; but sleep was what the survivors wanted most, often more than food. Keowan, before making a bed of straw for himself and another officer so that they ‘should not be taken for dead by plunderers’, found a ‘hind leg of some animal’ and washed down its shreds with ‘some water tinged by blood’, all that could be found; ‘such was the wine we drank at our cannibal feast.’ But the majority, under whatever cover they could find – an officer of the 52nd sent his servant back to take a blanket from one of the packs shed by the Imperial Guard near Hougoumont – simply dropped wide to the sky. One of Picton’s officers fell asleep the instant the halt was sounded and did not think of food until later in the night, when he woke to eat some chops cooked in the breastplate of a dead cuirassier (meat fried in a breastplate was very much à la mode in the Waterloo campaign, rather as rats spitted on a bayonet were to be in 1871 or champagne exhumed from chateau gardens in 1914).
‘About four o’clock’, his account goes on, ‘we sat up and conversed. We talked of the battle, our minds more and more filled with what they would say about us at home than anything else. There was no exaltation! None! We had, many of us, when in the Peninsula, tried the mettle of French soldiers – we concluded the campaign just begun, and looked forward to have another desperate fight in a day or two, therefore we determined not to holloa until we got out of the wood.’ Others beside were reliving the battle. Keowan, asleep under the bloody overcoat of a dead French dragoon, was disturbed by ‘the shrieks of the dying and the agitation of our minds, for the waves will roll high, after the storm has ceased, and as much of the fight recurred to me as I had time to dream of.’ This manifestation of battle shock has a parallel in René Cutforth’s description of nights spent in a hut full of newly captured prisoners during the Second World War, which were disturbed for several weeks by the shrieks and gabblings of men dreaming through their experience of recent combat. And an expression of battle shock in a different form is conveyed by Lieutenant Hamilton’s account of how he spent his evening:
Upon entering a house at Waterloo, we found every room in it filled with the dead or dying. I was glad to get a chair, and sat down at a table in a large room, in every corner of which were poor creatures groaning. The master of the house having brought us a piece of bread and a bottle of wine, we began to talk over the events of the day; and as he had for years been a soldier of Bonaparte’s himself, we found no lack of subjects … after we had finished our bread and wine, which we enjoyed very much, notwithstanding the room was full of poor wounded human beings, we retired to a hayloft for the night, which we passed in perfect repose.
Such indifference to the sufferings of the wounded all about him can only be explained by the action of some mental defence-mechanism; and it may be that the instant and almost universal slumber which overtook the army was itself a collective defence-mechanism. For, tired as the army was, it cannot have been so exhausted as to be unable to offer even a little first aid to the wounded. Yet there is something amounting almost to a universal and specific insistence in the accounts of survivors that nothing was done at all until daylight, or in many cases for some time afterwards. Heartless as this sounds, it accords with what we know of much human behaviour in disaster situations, where the greater the scale of the devastation and loss of life, the more profound is the survivors’ feeling of helplessness and frustration, from which they seek escape by inactivity. All battles are, in some degree, and to a greater or lesser number of the combatants, disasters. Waterloo was a disaster of very considerable magnitude. Within a space of about two square miles of open, waterless, treeless and almost uninhabited countryside, which had been covered at early morning by standing crops, lay by nightfall the bodies of forty thousand human beings and ten thousand horses, many of them alive and suffering dreadfully. The French, who might have helped in their relief, had fled; many of the Prussians were hot on their heels; those British who were left contemplated the spectacle and closed their eyes. They knew how little a regiment which had entered the battle with only three surgeons, had lost a third of its strength and had no wheeled transport to evacuate the graver cases could do to alleviate distress. Not until next morning were they prepared to put their inadequacy to the test.
The Wounded
The less seriously wounded of Quatre Bras had been conveyed from the field to Brussels on the horses of the 7th Dragoon Guards, which had been detached on ambulance duty at the Duke’s orders. Those who could not stand the jolting had eventually been collected in carts. The Waterloo wounded were, from the following morning onwards, collected up by their own regiments, the slighter cases treated by the regimental surgeons, the more serious brought into Brussels for hospital care. Extra transport, most of it local, was drafted to evacuate the wounded the regiments could not handle. In general, the British were evacuated first. Some of the French were evacuated as promptly as some of the British; but there were still Frenchmen left when all the British had gone. Some lay out two days and three nights, not being collected until June 21st. Shock and loss of blood had by then killed most of the seriously wounded and – where water had not been available – dehydration even the lightly wounded.
Some of the wounded had been evacuated during the battle: Howard of the 33rd wrote home that ‘we were charged so furiously that we could scarcely send our wounded officers to the rear and much less the men’ – a neat revelation both of contemporary military medical practice and class distinction. The wounded were taken off by the regimental bandsmen who, being non-combatant, had no other duty on the field; they were notorious as plunderers. The less seriously wounded were expected to walk back; the more seriously wounded might be carried on a door, as was the colonel of the 15th Hussars; mounted officers rode, as did Ellis, commanding the 23rd Regiment, when hit in the chest by a musket ball. He asked the rear rank of the square to open, rode out, was thrown when his horse jumped a ditch, then picked up and put in a shed, which caught fire. ‘Exhausted by so many shocks, he soon after expired.’
The character of the wounds presented to the surgeons when the sufferers, sooner or later, were brought to them was fairly monotonous. A few of the patients were suffering simply from shock: Leeke described how ‘a young lad … of our company was struck by a cannon shot and was borne off motionless and white as a sheet. [We] concluded he was dying. Two or three days afterwards I could scarcely believe my eyes, when I saw him walk into the bivouac. The shot had carried away his pouch …’ and the fright shocked him insensible. But Leeke also testifies to the effect of a real cannon wound: ‘Woods … was struck down by a ball full on the knee. He was removed into the centre of the square. I observed the limb above the knee quickly swell till it became the size of the body.’ Leeke himself suffered a freak wound, when a piece of skull from a man killed in front of him struck his left thumb where it rested on the staff of the Regimental Colour, so hard that next morning it was ‘black and sore’; and he witnessed the result of another: two soldiers walking rearward appeared to have been hit by a cannon-ball passing between them ‘for they were both struck in exactly the same place, about four inches below the shoulder, the wounded arm being attached to the upper part by a small portion of skin and flesh, and being supported by the man taking hold of the hand of that arm by the other hand’. There were numbers of sword and lance wounds to be treated and some bayonet wounds, though these had usually been inflicted after the man had already been disabled, there being no evidence of the armies having crossed bayonets at Waterloo (or in any other battle, come to that). Most of the sword and lance wounds were suffered by cavalrymen, though not all cavalrymen’s wounds by any means were by edged weapons. The list of wounds suffered among the twenty-two officers of the 13th Hussars bears this out: two were mortally wounded by musket balls, one killed by a cannon shot; one was wounded by a shell splinter in the hip, two wounded by musket balls in the head, of whom one was also bruised in the groin by a grapeshot which flattened his watch, one was wounded in the arm by a musket ball, wounded in the hand (cause unspecified) and bruised on the side by a sabre (he did not leave the field), one was thrown from his horse and stunned, one hit by a spent ball on the jaw, two wounded – probably in cut-and-thrust – with sword-cuts on the hands.
In the infantry regiments, the majority of the wounds suffered were by missiles. Cannon-ball wounds were by far the worst; they took off heads, killed and wounded several men in line, killed a man and his horse; to be hit by a cannon ball, unless in the limbs, almost certainly meant death. Grape shot ranked next in lethality, but were not necessarily lethal: Lieutenant Doherty was ‘struck by a grape shot in the stomach, and instantly afterwards by a musket ball through the head’ but lived to write of it in 1834. Musket balls, though much the lightest of missiles, killed easily: Canning, one of the Duke’s A.D.C.s ‘received a musket shot in the centre of the abdomen, and, although perfectly collected, could hardly articulate from pain … Raised to a sitting position by placing knapsacks around him … a few minutes terminated his existence.’ Because of the low velocity of musket-balls, men could be seriously wounded by them without being knocked over. Hence the reports we have of wounds suddenly appearing on the body of whoever the reporter was talking to or looking at: Dawson Kelly was talking to General Halkett when the latter ‘received a wound in the face, the ball passing through his mouth’ and Hamilton, of the Greys, caught sight of a Royal Dragoon ‘whose cheek, just as I looked at it, opened, while I felt a ball pass close to my lips’.
To be wounded in any of these ways was horrible enough. What made the plight of the wounded man doubly pitiable was that his wounding, unless he could be swiftly evacuated, made his subsequent wounding more, not less, likely. There was a great deal of re-wounding of the wounded at Waterloo, a lot of it mortal and often deliberate. Jackson, one of Wellington’s staff officers, found the Prussians bayoneting the French wounded near Rossomme on the evening of the battle and saved a British Light Dragoon ‘over whose fate they were hesitating … by calling out “Er ist ein Englander”’. The French lancers, whose weapons made it so easy for them to stick a man recumbent on the ground, stuck again and again at the unhorsed survivors of the Union Brigade. Many were brought in with above a dozen lance wounds in their bodies, one with eighteen, who lived. But the British cavalry too were guilty of cutting at the French wounded. An officer of Picton’s division wrote of what he saw in the final advance: ‘Selfish and hardened as men become … we could not look back on the sabre wounds made by our cavalry without regret. Defenceless men … were cut down in the wantonness of triumph. A poor French soldier [was] holding up his cheek nearly sliced off by a sabre-cut … which he was trying to re-unite. He was wounded and disabled besides.’
That much of this wounding was by mounted men of infantrymen or unhorsed cavalrymen prompts one to speculate if some ‘extra-specific’ factor were not at work – if men on horseback may not feel superior to and different from men on the ground, and so feel a reduced compunction about killing them out of hand. Certainly there is little evidence from Waterloo of infantrymen killing defenceless fellow infantrymen, while the traditional and well-known antipathy of infantrymen for cavalrymen – in part the product of the customary use of cavalry in putting down mutiny in infantry regiments – may rest on this cavalry habit of spurning the underdog.
Speculation on what prompted the wounding of the disabled also raises the question of whether it is profitable to apply the concept of ‘cruelty’ to acts committed in the course of combat at all. Surely it is. For although combat subjects human beings to extreme stress, and although much military procedure compels men to kill, as in the ‘load – fire’ sequence, neither the strains nor the circumstances of battle completely extinguish free will, or the possibility of recognition between enemies of mutual humanity. Corporal Dickson’s description of his behaviour during the Union Brigade charge is a straightforward, if remarkably honest, account of cruelty: ‘Then we got among the guns … Such slaughtering! I can hear the Frenchmen yet crying Diable when I struck at them, and the long-drawn hiss through their teeth as my sword went home … The artillery drivers sat on their horses weeping aloud as we went among them; they were mere boys …’ To demonstrate that men can behave better than this during combat, showing a true and quite voluntary generosity, one has only to read of Murray, commanding the 18th Hussars, ordering his men in exactly similar circumstances not to harm some French gunners: of Hughes, the adjutant of the 30th, taking an unhorsed French officer of the 6th Cuirassiers from under his men’s bayonets into the centre of the square for protection; of the sergeant of the 14th Regiment, whose men were about to fire on a French cavalryman who had turned back to lend an unhorsed comrade a stirrup, crying, ‘No … don’t fire. Let him off. He is a noble fellow’; of a French cuirassier dropping the point of his sword on detecting the youth of a Life-Guard boy-trumpeter and another, shown by a Major of the King’s German Legion that he had an empty right sleeve, saluting with his sword and riding on. The story of Waterloo, indeed, is full of instances of quite neutral and normal human contact between people who happened to be wearing different uniforms – of British infantry lying for cover among Frenchmen wounded in the most recent attack and asking their opinion of how the battle would end, of men making faces at each other, exchanging glances, coming to recognize each other as individuals as the tide of battle carried formations rhythmically together and apart. If neutral behaviour and generous action is possible in the heat of battle, so too are outright acts of cruelty. Hence the paradox that among all the suffering at Waterloo, some of it appeals more urgently to our pity than the rest.
Once the shock of the day itself had worn off, the spectacle of the battlefield deeply affected the survivors. The suffering of the horses, which had affected men during the battle when human anguish did not – Albemarle describes how the sympathies of the soldiers of the 14th ‘were excited by the sufferings of some wounded horses which seemed to seek the protection of their square’ – were even more distressing on the morrow. They had suffered the same range of wounds as the human combatants but most could be brought no relief except by destruction. Even for that many had to wait while the wounded soldiers were collected. June 19th was also distressing for another reason: in some regiments, there were almost as many deaths as there had been the day before. For at work now were the principal enemies of the wounded soldier of the period: shock, peritonitis, dehydration, loss of blood – much of it by artificial bleeding. In the 32nd Regiment, which had lost twenty-eight killed in the battle, another eighteen men died on June 19th; between June 27th and July 28th twenty-three more were to die; and there were to be seven more deaths later, the last on January 16th, 1816. Other victims were to succumb even farther on; an officer of the Foot Guards, who had lost his jaw and tongue in the battle, was to die two years later of malnutrition.
Few detailed case-histories of the care of the wounded survive – if they were made (though Sir Charles Bell, who came out post haste to Brussels with other English doctors and worked heroically in the makeshift hospitals, has left some extraordinary water-colour sketches of the wounds he had to treat). The best is by one of the wounded themselves, Lieutenant George Simmons of the Rifle Brigade. Wounded in the back at the exact moment he was congratulating himself on his apparent invulnerability, he was carried to the rear and had the ball, which had lodged under his right nipple, cut out by the surgeon who then bled him of a quart of blood. He was transferred to Brussels riding on a led horse in acute pain, and billeted on friends. For the next three weeks he was bled several times daily, until he had his servant kill the leeches he was supposed to apply, meanwhile falling for several days at a time into a feverish stupor, then waking to agony for several more. At last on July 14th his wound burst, releasing an enormous quantity of pus, and he began at once to recover. His case has been diagnosed by a modern doctor from the symptoms described as ‘a sub-phrenic abscess with a swinging fever’; the treatment he received was almost exactly the converse of what would be applied today, when he would be transfused instead of bled, and medicated with antibiotics as a preparation for operating to drain the abscess. In the light of his experience, it does not perhaps seem so unfortunate that Doctor Bell could write on returning from the hospital for French prisoners, ‘The second Sunday [i.e. June 25th], many [wounded] not yet dressed’.
By then, the armies were far away. The young officers who, like Macready, had wondered on the evening of Waterloo if the day would be dismissed merely as an ‘action’ or dignified with the name of a ‘battle’ had had their minds set at rest; so too had those who had expected to have to fight again within a day or two. June 18th had clearly brought victory in plenitude, and the leaders were already discussing what the victory should be called. General Vivian had written home to express the hope that every British combatant should receive a medal with Mont St Jean inscribed upon it. Blücher had proposed the appropriateness of La Belle Alliance. Wellington had decided upon Waterloo, since it came more easily off English tongues. Ensign Howard, of the 33rd, writing home from Paris on July 3rd, announced, ‘I have often expressed a wish to see a general engagement. I have – and I am perfectly satisfied.’
1 From A History of the Thirtieth Regiment by Lieutenant-Colonel Bannantyne (Littlebury, 1923).