The Battle (45 page)

SIXTY-SEVEN

NIGHT ON THE BATTLEFIELD

The distribution of any rations whatsoever was out of the question, and everyone had to make do as best he could. Sergeant Lawrence was given the task of turning up some forage for General Sir John Lambert's horse and eventually found a full feed sack that had been abandoned by the French. To his delight, he discovered that the sack contained, along with forage for the horse, a ham and two chickens. Sir John allowed him to keep the food for himself, but he warned Lawrence to keep it well away from the Prussians, "who were a slippery set of men and very likely to steal it if they saw it." Lawrence was in the act of cooking the ham when a crowd of these Prussians passed nearby, and two of them approached him to light their pipes at his fire. The two noticed the ham and casually observed that it looked good. Sergeant Lawrence immediately drew his sword and cut each of them a slice of ham, after which he had the satisfaction of seeing them take their leave without asking for any more. With a full stomach, Lawrence tried to sleep, but he was too worked up and in too much pain to succeed; a shell fragment had flayed his cheek, and the comrade standing directly behind him during the battle had handled his musket badly and scorched the sergeant's face.

Many others did not have enough strength left even to eat, to say nothing of cooking, as was the case with an officer in Picton's division, who fell asleep the very moment after the signal was given to break ranks. When he awoke in the middle of the night, his men were cooking cutlets, using the cuirass of a dead cuirassier as a skillet, and the officer realized he was hungry. He shared in the meal and later remarked that the French breastplates made excellent cooking utensils, but that it was necessary to use those without bullet holes; otherwise, the juices would leak out. Perhaps more wisely, the gunners in Mercer's battery preferred to use cuirasses to sit on. When they found, in a ditch, a piece of meat— tossed there who knew when—they trimmed it with their swords and fried it in a standard-issue frying pan, over a fire made of lance staffs and musket butts; then they gathered a large number of cuirasses around the fire and sat down to eat together.

In conditions such as these, no one felt fastidious. The Fifty-first bivouacked for the night in the orchard at Hougoumont. "This place was full of dead and wounded Frenchmen," Sergeant Wheeler remembered. "I went to the farm house, what a sight. Inside the yard the Guards lay in heaps, many who had been wounded inside or near the building were roasted, some who had endeavoured to crawl out from the fire lay dead with their legs burnt to a cinder." Amid all this horror, a lieutenant of the regiment found a loaf of black bread in the haversack of a dead French soldier; an officer of the Foot Guards, likewise dead, lay beside him, and brain matter had oozed from this man's head, soaking the Frenchman's haversack and, therefore, his loaf of bread as well. The lieutenant cleaned it carefully before consuming it. He had not had a bite to eat since the dawn of the previous day, and he was famished.

Ensign Keowan of the Fourteenth was unable to find his servant, who had gone off in search of plunder. Left alone and obliged to shift for himself, Keowan joined forces with another officer; together, they managed to get their hands on a piece of cooked meat, a former part of some unknown animal, and washed it down with a little bloodstained water: "Such was the wine we drank at our cannibal feast." Then the two prepared a bed of straw, in order that they "should not be taken for dead by plunderers," and lay down to sleep. Even so young an officer as Keowan knew that at that moment the battlefield was filled with soldiers rifling the pockets of the dead—and the wounded, too—and that such men would not hesitate to finish off their defenseless victims in the darkness to put a stop to their complaints. Covering himself with a bloody overcoat taken from the corpse of a French dragoon, Keowan found it hard to fall asleep, as did his comrade, because of "the shrieks of the dying and the agitation of our minds." When sleep finally came, it brought him nothing but visions of the most nerve-racking moments of the fighting.

Staff officers found better accommodation; Lieutenant Jackson, for example, went to dine in the Waterloo inn. The room was full of hungry foreign officers engaged in a lively discussion of the day's events. Fortunately for Jackson, a colleague had reserved a table, and the two sat down to a steaming ragout. "I had not tasted food since early morning," Jackson later recalled, "and before we sat down fancied myself hungry, but not a morsel could I swallow." His fellow officer was in the same condition, but a staff officer in the Netherlands army asked permission to sit at their table and devoured everything by himself, without interrupting for an instant the narrative of his personal impressions of the battle. Overcome by fatigue, Jackson asked for a room; the host offered him the one reserved for Sir William De Lancey, who was then in the hospital. Jackson wearily climbed the stairs, but upon entering the room he was greeted by a groan. Lifting the candle, he saw a French officer lying on the bed, his uniform and boots still on, his head split open by a saber blow, and blood everywhere.

The man told Jackson that he had been taken prisoner early in the battle and asked how it had ended; when he learned of the French defeat, he gnashed his teeth and said that death would be preferable. Then, thinking better of the matter, he went on to say that the French had had their moment of glory, and that it was useless to struggle against destiny. Jackson left him alone, went to the common room, wrapped himself in a blanket, and lay down on the floor. But it was very difficult for him to fall asleep, because the room was still full of foreign officers eating, drinking, and conducting loud discussions. Finally, the lieutenant dozed off and had a terrifying nightmare in which he and the entire British army were running away from the battlefield at breakneck speed, closely pursued by the Imperial Guard, and the wounded French officer threatened him with his saber, accusing Jackson of having lied to him.

Many soldiers had more pressing things to do than sleep. The search for plunder never justified absence without leave, but after such a day, officers were inclined to close one eye. Lieutenant Hay of the Twelfth Light Dragoons sent two of his troopers on patrol and was not surprised when they failed to return, for they were, he said, "two Irish lads, sharp, active, brave soldiers to a fault, but both great scamps and up to any lark, no such words as fear or danger were in their dictionary." When the two later reappeared, they brought with them three French prisoners, whom they had caught in the act of plundering a farm. A fourth Frenchman, a companion of the other three, had fallen to the dragoons' sabers. The indulgent Hay asked no further questions. Some scavengers felt more scruples than others, as is evidenced by the story of a group of troopers from the Eleventh Light Dragoons. These men had dismounted from their horses in search of booty, and while they walked around among the corpses, their spurs kept catching in the clothing of the dead, sometimes becoming so entangled that they tripped and fell sprawling on the mangled bodies. Their corporal, Farmer, confessed that the experience was horrifying; but there was, he said, nothing to be done: "It would be ridiculous to conceal that when the bloody work of the day is over, the survivor's first wish is to secure, in the shape of plunder, some recompense for the risks which he has run and the exertions he has made."

Only rarely did the plunderers concern themselves with assisting the wounded; on the contrary, there was an excellent chance that these, too, would be robbed, if not worse. A wounded British officer regained consciousness in the dark and found himself unable to move; a dead French soldier was lying on top of him, his face disfigured by a dreadful saber wound. The officer held his breath and tried to make no sound while a Prussian soldier searched another British officer lying, still alive, a short distance away; when this other officer resisted the search, the Prussian stabbed him to death. As the villain was about to turn his attention to the first wounded officer, two British soldiers, a private and a sergeant, appeared on the scene. The wounded officer called to them, and the two helped get him out from under the corpse, stood him on his feet, and gave him a mouthful of brandy. When they started to take their leave, the officer told them that he was afraid the Prussian—who was hiding behind a dead horse—would kill him. The sergeant quickly flushed the Prussian out of his hiding place and cut him down, and the private gave the officer a loaded musket for his protection, saying they could not stay with him because they had left their regiment to do a little plundering and could not run the risk of being discovered. "We fought hard enough to allow us a right to share what no one claims, before the Flemish clowns come here by cock-crow."

The nightmare of scavengers also tormented Sir Frederick Ponsonby, who was still lying immobile in the same place he had been in all afternoon, miraculously alive after two squadrons of Prussian cavalry had passed over him at a trot. When he finally came to his senses during the night, a dying British dragoon, having dragged himself to where Ponsonby lay, was crushing him with his weight and clutching his legs. Seized by convulsions, the dying man held on tight, gasping for breath, and all the while air hissed atrociously through the open wound in his side. The night was clear, and Prussian soldiers, bent on looting, were circulating all around; more than one approached and took a look at Sir Frederick, but they let him alone. Finally, a British straggler passed that way and stopped to keep Ponsonby company, freeing him from the dying man and keeping scavengers at bay with a sword he had picked up off the ground, until morning came and the colonel could be loaded on a cart and carried to the surgeons.

Not even those officers who found plundering immoral risked making themselves unpopular by trying to forbid it; the most they could do was to refuse to buy. An officer in Picton's division wrote, "Plunder was for sale in great quantities, chiefly gold and silver watches, rings, etc., etc. Of the former, I might have bought a dozen for a dollar a piece but I do not think any officer bought. . . probably expecting (as I did) that in a few days our pockets would be rifled of them as quickly as those of the French had been." Like him, many were convinced that the battle they had just fought would be only the first in a long campaign. "About four o'clock, we sat up and conversed. 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."

In fact, the viewpoint of the great majority of combatants was limited; they were unable to appreciate the magnitude of the struggle, and that night hardly anyone had a clear idea of what had taken place. The morning after the battle, Kincaid came across an acquaintance and asked what had gone on with him and his unit the previous day. The man replied, "I'll be hanged if I know anything at all about the matter, for I was all day trodden in the mud and galloped over by every scoundrel who had a horse." He had no other story to tell. Macready, who was an inexperienced youth, actually wondered whether what he had seen could really be considered a battle, or whether it might not be classified by historians as a minor clash. After riding over most of the battlefield, Lieutenant Ingilby reported to his colleagues that he had seen so many dead and wounded, and so many abandoned French guns, that he thought the fight they had won must truly have been a great battle; but the other officers suggested that it would be better not to overstate the matter.

After a few hours of sleep, Sir Hussey Vivian presented himself to Wellington around four in the morning. When Vivian reported that the French had left abandoned guns all over the field, this news surprised the duke. "He told me no Returns he had received had at all amounted to what I had described, and I am quite certain he was not at that time aware of the full extent of his Victory."