The Battle (40 page)

FIFTY-NINE

"
VOILA GROUCHY!"

Carried along on a surge of enthusiasm, the advance of I Corps once again jolted the infantry of Picton's and Alten's decimated divisions. Up to that moment in the skirmishers' combat, the French had sent in their
tirailleurs
"in far greater numbers, and consequently doing more execution." But the Royal Scots officer who was responsible for this account added that the French were better armed and trained, and on the whole much more effective in this type of fighting. "The French soldiers, whipping in the cartridge, give the butt of the piece a jerk or two on the ground, which supersedes the use of the ramrod; and thus they fire twice for our once. I have occasionally seen some of our 'old hands' do the same. It was astonishing to find how galling the fire of the enemy proved to be, and how many men we lost." When the French made their final push, the line of British skirmishers was no longer capable of standing against them. "About this time our ball cartridge was all expended, and no supply being at hand the skirmishers were called in, seeing which, those of the enemy came on in the most daring manner step by step. The ammunition cart was brought as quickly as possible to the height, and the horses being withdrawn, it was left there for us." But every man sent to the cart for ammunition was killed or wounded; finally, a sergeant heaved a barrel full of cartridges onto his shoulder and ran back down the slope toward his comrades. Although he too was wounded and fell before reaching his goal, he managed to roll the barrel the rest of the way down the slope, and the men of his unit, their ammunition store thus replenished, were able to hold their ground.

Under fire from
tirailleurs
perched on the roofs of La Haye Sainte, the riflemen of the l/95th were forced to take refuge in the sunken lane. D'Erlon's infantry, however, no longer had sufficient force to make a bayonet charge and settled down instead to a prolonged firefight. Captain Leach, who was commanding the Ninety-fifth's riflemen at this point, related that the entire French line, all along the front of Kempt's brigade, went down on one knee and kept up an uninterrupted fire. "The distance between the two hostile lines I imagine to have been rather more than one hundred yards," he wrote. "Several times the French officers made desperate attempts to induce their men to charge Kempt's line, and I saw more than once parties of the French in our front spring up from their
kneeling position
and advance some yards towards the thorn hedge, headed by their Officers with vehement gestures, but our fire was so very hot and deadly that they almost instantly ran back behind the crest of the hill, always leaving a great many killed or disabled behind them."

In the course of that firefight, the riflemen of the Ninety-fifth began to worry about being flanked on the right, as the advancing French were making steady progress along the cobblestones of the main road. These were the men of Pegot's brigade, probably the freshest troops in the entire sector; the German soldiers in front of them, the remaining infantrymen of Kielmansegge's and Ompteda's brigades, were compelled to give ground and began to disband. After the evacuation of La Haye Sainte, Major von Baring's men had taken refuge in the sunken lane a few hundred yards from the farm, and they were once again running short of ammunition. As the major rode back and forth behind his troops, trying to keep up their morale, his third horse was suddenly killed, and man and beast crashed to the ground. Baring was stunned by the fall and trapped under the animal's carcass. His men, believing him to be dead, left him there; sometime later one of them, perhaps with robbery on his mind, approached the major, discovered that he was still alive, and helped him get out from under his horse.

Still dazed and limping on a heavily bruised leg, Baring dragged himself to the rear, offering gold to anyone who would procure him another mount; but no one paid any attention to his pleas. Finally, a British soldier found a riderless horse and helped the major into the saddle. In great pain, Baring returned to the battle line, where he was informed that Sir Charles Alten had been gravely wounded. To his further consternation, the major noticed that there were but a few men in the positions formerly occupied by Ompteda's brigade, and when he reached the sunken lane, he found it empty: even his riflemen, having exhausted their ammunition, had fled to the rear. At this point, a solitary French dragoon appeared on the scene, and Baring, trembling with anger and humiliation, had to gallop away in order to avoid capture. One of the officers of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, whose position was in the sunken lane a few dozen yards to the east, suggested to Captain Leach that they should concentrate a part of their force on their extreme right, in order to keep the
chaussee
under fire. But the captain replied that the Twenty-seventh Regiment, formed up in square near the northeast corner of the crossroads, behind the l/95th, would have to suffice for their defense on that side, "for the French are gathering so fast and thick in our
front
that we cannot spare a single man to detach to the right."

To support his wavering center, Wellington called back Vivian's and Vandeleur's cavalry from their rearward positions on his extreme left; together, the two brigades could still count nearly two thousand sabers. When they arrived behind La Haye Sainte, after having spent a great part of the day in relative calm, the brigades' officers were so shocked by what they saw that they became convinced that the battle was going very badly for the Allies. Sir Hussey Vivian declared that he had never seen such a sight: the ground literally covered with the dead and dying; cannonballs and shells flying around more thickly than musket balls; and the Allied forces, or at least part of them, in retreat. Colonel Murray, commander of the Eighteenth Hussars, confirmed Vivian's assessment: "The ground was strewed with wounded, over whom it was barely possible sometimes to avoid moving. Wounded or mutilated horses wandered or turned in circles. The noise was deafening, and the air of ruin and desolation that prevailed wherever the eye could reach gave no inspiration of victory."

Fragments from bursting shells and the fire from the
tirailleurs'
muskets came thick and fast, and Vivian later lamented, "No words can give any idea of it (how a man escaped is to me a miracle), we every instant expecting through the smoke to see the Enemy appearing under our noses, for the smoke was literally so thick that we could not see ten yards off." Major Luard of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons corroborated this description: "The fire became every moment hotter, and from the rapid way in which it approached us, appeared as if the Enemy was carrying the hill by which we were partially covered, and I confess I thought at that moment the day was going hard with us, that the Infantry were beaten, and that we (the Cavalry), by desperate charges, were to recover what they had lost."

That proved unnecessary, because Sir John Lambert brought the remaining two battalions of his brigade forward and aligned them with the Inniskillings on the other side of the
chaussee.
Deployed in a two-deep line, Lambert's men, 1,000-1,200 strong, covered a line more than three hundred yards wide, before which the French advance in the La Haye Sainte sector eventually stalled and turned into a confused, static firefight. Major Browne of the Fortieth saw the French advance as far as the farm and stop, but he was unable to tell whether the enemy troops were a disordered column or a multitude of skirmishers: "I think they had been driven back from their attempt to ascend the hill, partly by our fire, and partly by that of the troops on our right; but the cloud of smoke in which we were almost constantly enveloped prevented me from discovering their object in remaining there thus exposed, which they did in the most dauntless and daring manner; as fast as they fell their places were supplied with fresh troops." At one point in the fight, the
tirailleurs
occupying the knoll above the sandpit ("who whilst laying down, appeared to shoot their objects with great precision," as another officer of the Fortieth noted) tried to advance, but the fire from the British line quickly put an end to this attempt.

While d'Erlon's men, from Papelotte to La Haye Sainte, committed themselves to this persistent firefight, Reille's troops on the other side of the battleground had likewise obeyed orders and undertaken their last assault on Hougoumont. The skirmishers seized the orchard almost immediately, and once again the survivors of the garrison were obliged to barricade themselves inside the walled perimeter of the chateau. Adam's brigade, having moved down the slope all the way to the hedgerow enclosing the grounds of the chateau, came under fire from the
tirailleurs
in the orchard a short distance away and from artillery that had been brought up to within a few hundred yards. Colborne, the commander of the Fifty-second, saw some of the Hougoumont defenders take to their heels and thought that the chateau would not resist the French attack this time. Should Hougoumont have fallen, the already weakened position of Adam's brigade would have become untenable, and the British generals decided the brigade should fall back. Adam withdrew his men to a position behind the ridge, where most cannonballs would fly over their heads, and sent to the rear all the wounded who could walk. This withdrawal left several batteries exposed, which moreover were running short of ammunition, so the gunners spontaneously decided that there was no point in remaining there. They were in the act of abandoning the guns when Sir Augustus Frazer plunged into their midst and energetically persuaded them to return to their posts.

Shortly thereafter, a French deserter galloped up the slope to warn the British that the Imperial Guard was preparing to attack them. The narratives of this episode differ so widely in detail that they again serve to illustrate the difficulty in trusting eyewitness accounts. According to Colborne, the deserter was a colonel of cuirassiers who approached the ranks of the Fifty-second shouting,
"Vive le Roi!"
and then personally addressed to him these alarming words:
"Ce
sacre Napoleon est la avec les Gardes. Voila Vattaque qui sefait."
According to Major Blair, General Adam's brigade major, the deserter was a Hussar officer who approached Blair while he was conversing with Frazer behind the Fifty-second's lines, and warned him that the Imperial Guard would attack within half an hour; Sir Augustus galloped away to notify the duke, and Blair stayed behind and guarded the prisoner for a while. Then, realizing that the Frenchman's warning was being verified before his eyes, Blair ordered a sergeant to escort him to the rear. In a letter to his wife, Frazer confirmed having spoken with the man and said he was an officer in the cuirassiers, but confessed that he did not understand whether the officer was a deserter or a prisoner. Frazer asserted that he handed the Frenchman over to Adam, charging him to transmit the information to the duke.
³²

Adam's infantry, deployed in four-deep lines thirty or forty yards behind the crest, could not see what was visible to Blair, who was on horseback at the farther edge, namely the Imperial Guard infantry, immediately recognizable by their enormous bearskins, as they occupied positions all along the relatively level ground between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. Young Ensign Leeke, who bore the colors of the Fifty-second, took advantage of this interval to look about him and analyze his own sensations. There was a strange smell in the air, the smell of ripe, trampled grain, mixed with the odor of gunpowder. All around him were dead or wounded horses, some of them—including the most horrifically mutilated—still trying to eat the crushed wheat and rye. A dead cat triggered a memory of home, and the boy became pensive for a while before he noticed that a cannonball was rolling down the slope, right at him. It reminded him of a cricket ball; "so slowly [did it move] that I was putting out my foot to stop it, when my coulour-sergeant quickly begged me not to do so, and told me it might have seriously injured my foot." In fact, the ball would probably have taken it off.