The Battle (27 page)

PART THREE

"A Stand-up Fight
Between Two Pugilists

FORTY-TWO

"IT DOES INDEED LOOK VERY BAD"

Sir Frederick Ponsonby was an involuntary witness to this type of combat. When he regained consciousness, he found himself wounded and immobilized in a sector of the battlefield patrolled by enemy skirmishers. One of these threatened to kill him and demanded his money; Ponsonby let himself be searched, the man found what he was looking for, and he went away. A second skirmisher with the same intentions arrived on the scene but left disappointed after an even more meticulous search of the colonel's person. Finally, an officer passed his way at the head of a group of soldiers, gave Ponsonby a swallow of brandy, ordered one of his men to put a knapsack under the colonel's head, and then departed, apologizing for leaving him there: "We must follow the retreating English." Still later, another
tirailleur
came by and decided to use the immobile Ponsonby as a screen. He stayed for a long time, reloading and firing over the colonel's body again and again, "and conversing with great gaiety all the while." At last he went away, but not before assuring Ponsonby that he should not worry: "You'll be happy to hear that we're going to withdraw.
Bon soir, mon ami."

The French artillery also kept stubbornly pounding the enemy position. As soon as the cavalry fighting subsided, Napoleon concerned himself with returning the Grande Batterie to action. Fortunately for him, the Imperial Guard, which was lined up along the main road, had such a quantity of guns and so many caissons that his forces were able to reconstitute the battery quickly. The officers recruited infantrymen from nearby formations to give the gunners a hand in maneuvering their pieces, and the firing recommenced with the same intensity as before. The Allied counterbattery fire was equally intense, despite Wellington's orders, and General Desvaux de Saint-Maurice, the Guard's artillery commander, was killed by a cannonball while overseeing the placement of his 12-pounders. The interruption in the bombardment had been so brief that no one on the Allied side of the battlefield had even noticed it—a further inducement to reevaluate the significance of the British cavalry charge against the guns of the Grande Batterie.

As far as the Duke of Wellington could tell with his telescope, the French reserves formed a mighty force, even though some units were moving toward the Fichermont wood to take up new positions, anticipating the long-awaited Prussian advance. By way of contrast, his own defensive line, despite its success in repulsing d'Erlon's attack, was starting to become perilously thin: Picton's battalions, commanded by Kempt after Sir Thomas's death, were at the end of their strength, and Alten's troops—against whom a great part of the murderous enemy fire had been directed—were hardly in better shape. Therefore, all the infantry units still being held in reserve behind Wellington's center were ordered into the battle line to fill up the gaps opened by the French attack.

Sir John Lambert's brigade, more than two thousand muskets strong, took up a position behind La Haye Sainte. His three veteran regiments were recently arrived from America, where they had taken part in Sir Edward Pakenham's campaign in Louisiana, including the disastrous Battle of New Orleans, in which that general, Wellington's brother-in-law, had met his end. Their officer corps was considerably reduced, so much so that the Irish troops of the Twenty-seventh Regiment (also called Inniskillings) were commanded by a captain; but a healthy infusion of recruits had filled out their ranks. Two days before, Lambert's men had still been in Ghent; they had spent most of the previous night marching through the forest of Soignes, forcing a passage for themselves through the refugees who thronged the road. When they reached the village of Waterloo, the men of Lambert's brigade sank down to sleep in the fields and stables. A short time later, half awake and stupefied with exhaustion, they were marched in great haste and under artillery fire along the final stretch of the main road until they came to the Mont-Saint-Jean crossroads. The Inniskillings went into position behind what was left of the l/95th (whose troops had retaken the sandpit and the knoll behind it), and Lambert's other two regiments deployed farther to the rear. In order to offer a less conspicuous target to the enemy artillery, the men were ordered to lie on the ground, where many of them would soon have fallen asleep had the appearance of a few squadrons of enemy cavalry not compelled them, from time to time, to get to their feet and form square.

Farther right, Colonel von Kruse's Nassau contingent, nearly as strong as a brigade with its three battalions—almost 2,500 bayonets—was ordered to advance into the front line and take up a position between the squares of Kielmansegge's brigade and those formed by Halkett's troops. The Nassauers, almost all of them inexperienced recruits, wearing their characteristic green uniforms, massed into squares around their flags of pale yellow silk. Theoretically, the position they occupied was in dead ground behind the ridge, where the terrain should have protected them from the artillery bombardment; in fact, however, bombs and shells rained down on them so thickly that it seemed the French had managed, somehow or other, to see them after all. The colonel decided that if his men were offering too visible a target, it was the fault of the white cloths covering their shakos, and he ordered these covers removed. It was true that the shakos cost the treasury money, and also true that it was better not to ruin them, but in so grave a situation, potential damage to headpieces seemed a trivial concern.

Wellington also sent a part of the reserves into line on his right wing, where the pressure against the Hougoumont stronghold showed no signs of letting up. Masters of the no-man's-land around the chateau, the
tirailleurs
occupied a dominant position from which they were able to keep the interior of the compound under fire while remaining hidden in the tall grain; they "never distinctly showed themselves," observed one of the defenders. But "they annoyed us very much by firing at the door which communicated between the courtyard and the garden, and of which they could see the top." The duke ordered the First King's German Legion Brigade, commanded by Colonel Du Plat, to advance slowly in square—thus avoiding surprises from enemy cavalry—and send his light companies into the farm buildings. Shortly thereafter, the same orders were transmitted to Colonel Olfermann, who since the death of the Duke of Brunswick at Quatre Bras had taken over command of the Brunswick contingent, which was deployed in reserve in the same sector. Olfermann sent forward his five battalions of light infantry, at least one of which still included a number of veterans of the wars in Spain. Having halted in square on the high ground behind the chateau, these troops also began sending in skirmishers in twos and threes, as needed, in order to maintain a constant volume of fire from the walls of Hougoumont and keep Reille's skirmishers pinned down.

Between three and four in the afternoon, of the 83 infantry battalions that constituted Wellington's army, the duke had 60 in line, and of these, 17 had by then been severely mauled. He still had 23 battalions in reserve, the minimum he would have needed to maintain his optimism. For his part, Napoleon had so far engaged 57 of his 103 battalions, of which a goodly number were so battered that they could no longer be used in an offensive; but the emperor still had 46 fresh battalions, among them the 22 of the Imperial Guard. The emperor, therefore, also had reason to be optimistic, all the more so because the hypothesis of a Prussian offensive against his right wing had not yet materialized. The outcome of the battle was, in truth, hanging by a thread.

The enormous number of
tirailleurs
in action in no-man's-land, together with the intensity of an artillery bombardment the likes of which none of them had ever experienced, had caused an unusual pessimism to spread among the British officers. While Captain Mercer was speaking with his superior officer, Colonel Gould, the latter confessed that he found their situation desperate. Not the least of his reasons was his belief that the only road through the forest would be bottled up in an instant. "It does indeed look very bad," Mercer concurred. Then, trying to say something encouraging, he suggested that the duke, in one way or another, would get them out of their present difficulties. "Meantime gloomy reflections arose in my mind, for though I did not choose to betray myself (as we spoke before the men), yet I could not help thinking that our affairs
were
rather desperate, and that some unfortunate catastrophe was at hand. In this case I made up my mind to spike my guns and retreat over the fields, draught-horses and all, in the best manner I could, steering well from the highroad and general line of retreat."

The rumors flying around Brussels during the late afternoon and evening, gradually increasing as the first wounded officers arrived from the battlefield, were likewise indicative of a mood that was anything but optimistic. A Member of Parliament, one Mr. Creevey who found himself in the city with his entire family, breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the prisoners from d'Erlon's corps arriving, escorted by a squadron of the Life Guards; but then he ran into another parliamentarian, who had been on the battlefield and who assured him that the battle could not have gone worse for the Allied side. A wounded soldier whom he met shortly thereafter confirmed this gloomy assessment, declaring that the French were advancing so irresistibly that he knew not what could stop them. Creevey next went on to the home of an acquaintance, where he found a young officer, wounded and on the point of collapse, who predicted that the enemy would enter Brussels that evening. Deeply agitated, Creevey was returning home when a message reached him from a friend, Sir Edward Barnes, Wellington's adjutant general; Barnes had been wounded, and he requested that the Creeveys put him up in their house. The bearer of the message, Major Hamilton, assured Creevey that the battle was lost, declared that Sir Edward, even though he was known in the army as a "fire-eater," was of the same opinion, and advised Creevey to leave Brussels at once. Each of these viewpoints, of course, was conditioned by personal experience and in some cases by the shock of wounds received; nevertheless, taken together, they confirm that the morale of the British officers on the battlefield was low.

However, the emperor, too, was beginning to find himself in a tight spot. The defeat suffered by d'Erlon's troops limited Napoleon's possibilities: With I Corps decimated, he could no longer consider maneuvering against the enemy's left wing. Because of the way the battle had gone thus far, and because of the position of his reserves, which had reached the battlefield by the Brussels road and were massed between Le Caillou and La Belle Alliance, Napoleon had no other choice but to concentrate his efforts against the center of Wellington's line. In other circumstances, perhaps he would have been able to maneuver his troops, but there was not enough time—no more than six hours of light remained—and the terrain, trodden into a quagmire by so many shoes, would no longer allow him to move troops and guns quickly enough. Maneuvering was out of the question, but the emperor still had enough troops to get the job done; he would have to take Hougoumont or La Haye Sainte, or if possible both, and then make a breakthrough in the center of the enemy's line.

When Wellington saw that the French were preparing to attack his center once again, he permitted himself an unflattering remark about Napoleon: "Damn the fellow, he is a mere pounder after all," he muttered, almost disappointed to discover that his adversary, in the end, had not proved equal to his fame. Like many English gentlemen, the duke was an ardent enthusiast of the pugilistic sport, and it was natural for him to fall into the language of boxing when describing a battle. In a letter to a friend a few days later, he wrote, "Never did I see such a pounding match. Both were what boxers call gluttons."
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