The Battle (16 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

THE ATTACK ON

THE NORTH GATE>

Prince Jerome's division, therefore, began to maneuver. Having sent their light companies forward into the wood, Soye's battalions marched in column through the pastures, got past the hedges, and invaded the orchard. The British and German defenders commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Lord Saltoun were forced to abandon the orchard and were chased back into the hollow way that ran in front of the chateau. There, however, Soye's attack came to a halt. The so-called hollow way was deeply entrenched, bordered with thorny hedgerows, and defended by hundreds of muskets, as was the garden wall, and they were equally difficult to get over. Incapable of going forward, the French troops who had passed through the pastures and into the orchard started to engage the defenders in an intense firefight that was unlikely to turn to their advantage. In an attempt to dislodge the defenders from their positions, the French hauled a cannon into the orchard. A worried Lord Saltoun responded by ordering his men to make a sortie and capture the gun, but the withering enemy fire compelled them to scamper back to their covered positions. Their young lieutenant colonel, commanding from horseback and offering the easiest of targets, escaped without a scratch, though in the course of several hours' fighting he had four horses killed under him. The cannon, however, proved less effective than the French had hoped, and the exchange of musketry went on, more or less inconclusively; but the French, being more exposed, suffered greater losses.

During this time, the troops of Bauduin's former brigade were also maneuvering, but over the flat land on the west side of the chateau. Captain Mercer, from his position on the high ground overlooking the Nivelles road, watched the French and British light troops engage in an interminable skirmish amid the tall grain. Under enemy pressure, the British skirmishers were obliged to give ground, not enough to endanger the position, but enough to allow the enemy infantry to maneuver unmolested on the plain. Colonel de Cubieres, who had taken command of the entire brigade after Bauduin's death, had already lost many men in the wood, but he had enough left to try another way His soldiers, less troubled by the British artillery, advanced in the open, went around the west side of the chateau, descended into a sunken lane, and found themselves in front of the north gate. This large wooden portal was the only means of communication between the Hougoumont garrison and the reserves deployed farther to the rear, and therefore it was not barricaded; a short while before, in fact, the Guards had brought an ammunition cart through the gate and into the farmyard.

The appearance of Cubieres and his men before the north gate marked the most critical moment for Hougoumont's defenders, and it is no coincidence that more than one British officer, many years after the battle, still remembered the French commander on his horse, one arm in a sling because of a wound he had suffered at Quatre Bras two days before, urging on his
tirailleurs.

Colonel de Cubieres, baron of the empire, was by birth the Marquis Despans de Cubieres and was, therefore, one of the many young nobles of the
ancien
regime
(no more than children at the time of the French Revolution) who had sided with the emperor and made a career in the Grande Armee. When Napoleon had returned from Elba three months previously, the twenty-nine-year-old Cubieres was second-in-command of the First Legere, and he had been present at the moral crisis of his soldiers, divided between the oath they had sworn to the Bourbons and their old loyalty to the emperor. Very soon after Napoleon's arrival in Paris, the regiment passed in review before him, and he asked who its commander was. Cubieres took a step forward and said, "Sire, it's Colonel de Beurnonville, but he's ill." Napoleon replied, "Beurnonville's not one of ours. From now on, it is you, Colonel Cubieres, who will take command of the 1st Legere." Then the emperor walked away, bringing the colonel's protests to an end with a wave of his hand.

Napoleon's exit line is indicative of an often overlooked aspect of these events—how profoundly ideological was the 1815 Armee du Nord, which had been purged, insofar as possible, of everyone who was not "one of ours." But, even for those times, Cubieres was an exceptional man, and he commanded an exceptional regiment. On May 2 the soldiers, like all French citizens, had been called to vote in a plebiscite on the so-called Acte additionnel, the new constitution that Napoleon had devised for France. In front of his regiment assembled on the parade ground, Colonel de Cubieres declared that he would vote against the constitution because it gave the emperor too much power and could not be the foundation of a genuinely liberal France; furthermore, such a hastily arranged plebiscite was in itself undemocratic; and therefore he, Cubieres, called upon the soldiers of his regiment to vote against the measure. The First Legere was the only regiment in the army to vote against the Acte additionnel, and it did so nearly unanimously. (The sole exception was a captain, who explained, "I love the colonel with all my heart, but when it comes to making constitutions, he's not so clever as the Emperor, who's made plenty of them.") Napoleon was not pleased with the regiment's vote—before very long, all record of it conveniently disappeared—but Cubieres got off with a letter of censure and retained his command.

Lieutenant Colonel Macdonell's two light companies of British Guards were positioned outside the chateau when Cubieres and his men arrived at the north gate. Surprised by the sudden appearance of the French, the Guards beat a hasty retreat, passing through the still-open gate into the farmyard. In the course of this brisk withdrawal, a British sergeant standing very close to Cubieres fired on him and knocked him from his horse. The sergeant sprang into the saddle and urged the beast through the gateway, reaching the safety of the farmyard just before his comrades closed the big door. Cubieres, who was only wounded, managed to rise to his feet and reach safety, and ever after he was convinced that the British, seeing how disabled he was, had deliberately refrained from shooting at him anymore. Many years later, when he was in the service of the pope as governor of Ancona, Cubieres met an officer of the Coldstream Guards, a veteran of Hougoumont, and expressed to him his gratitude for their chivalrous conduct.

While Cubieres was being carried to safety, the situation of his men could easily have become precarious; the only way to get in was to hack through the gate, and one of the officers of the First Legere, Lieutenant Legros, whose bulk and strength had earned him the nickname "l'Enfonceur" ("the Basher"), took a sapper's ax, positioned himself before the gate, and started hacking away. Once a sapper himself, Legros knew how to wield his instrument; soon he smashed through the wooden bar that held the gate closed. Then the rest of the barrier yielded to the pressure of many bodies, and a large number of Frenchmen burst inside. At the beginning of the savage melee that followed, the panicked defenders sought refuge in the surrounding buildings, leaving Legros and his men, for a brief time, masters of the yard. A Frenchman armed with an ax chased a German officer into one of the houses, caught up with him at the door, and chopped off one of his hands.

That morning, Muffling had expressed to Wellington some doubt about the defenders' ability to hold the chateau. The duke's only answer was "Ah, but you don't know Macdonell." At a moment of crisis, the lieutenant colonel proved himself worthy of his fame as one of the army's most formidable warriors. Together with some other officers and a sergeant, the thirty-four-year-old Macdonell was able to fight his way through the enemy, close what was left of the gate, and set another timber in place, after which all the French who had entered the compound were killed, including Legros, except one: Rushing into the farmyard in time to see Macdonell, his face covered with blood, finish barricading the gate, Private Matthew Clay ran into a French drummer boy, whose life had been spared because of his age. Clay took the boy into his care and brought him inside the chateau, to the room where the wounded had been assembled, telling him to stay there and not to be afraid, because no one was going to hurt him.

Meanwhile, the French troops who had remained outside the chateau compound, raked by the defenders' precise fire, were beginning to disperse, while those who tried to climb over the wall were struck down one by one.

But many
tirailleurs,
instead of withdrawing to their own lines, climbed the slope in the direction of the Allied positions, concealing themselves amid the high-standing grain. Directly above them, Lieutenant Colonel Webber-Smith had positioned the six 9-pounder guns of his battery. Like other British artillery commanders, Webber-Smith was completely indifferent to Wellington's orders prohibiting long-range dueling, and he immediately began firing at the French horse artillery batteries on the other side of the plain. The battery was fully engaged in the combat and had already suffered its first casualties when the French skirmishers hidden in the nearby grain suddenly opened fire. In the course of a few minutes, many gunners and horses were hit, and Webber-Smith had to give orders to limber up the guns and abandon the position before it was too late.

At this point Sir John Byng, who commanded the Guards brigade deployed on the rising ground behind Hougoumont, decided to counterattack in force to alleviate the pressure on the chateau's defenders. His two battalions—the Second Coldstream Guards and the 2/3rd Foot Guards—went down the slope in companies, one after the other, and reached the hollow way. Surprised by their arrival, the
tirailleurs
withdrew in disorder, abandoning even the orchard. After a brief fusillade, some of the guardsmen succeeded in entering the farmyard, the rest got into the garden through a small side door, and soon Lord Saltoun's exhausted men were relieved. Notwithstanding the losses suffered by the Allied troops, the chateau was now defended by more than 1,500 muskets, and the chances that the French might overrun it were more and more remote. Not coincidentally, at about one-thirty in the afternoon—precisely when the reinforcements were taking up their positions in and around the chateau— Wellington left the high ground above Hougoumont for the first time and went to oversee the center of his battle line, where the roar of cannon indicated another thickening storm.

TWENTY-SIX

THE GRANDE BATTERIE

After handing Desales the order, La Bedoyere verbally informed him that the emperor was putting him in command of all the artillery deployed in the center. This included not only the three reserve batteries but also I Corps's four divisional batteries, with seven or eight 6-pounders each. All these cannon would form a Grande Batterie of fifty-four guns, which Desales was to deploy in a single line halfway down the slope of La Belle Alliance. This arrangement sounded familiar to Napoleon's generals; the emperor hadn't been an artillery officer in his youth for nothing, and he had always taught that it was necessary to wear down the enemy with a bombardment before attacking him, and that this meant concentrating the highest possible number of guns on the point where the breakthrough was to be made.

A battery was an extremely cumbersome organization. Every 12-pounder piece required about fifteen gunners, many of whom shuttled to and from the ammunition wagons, which for security reasons were parked at least thirty or forty yards to the rear. For every gun, there were two or three wagons, each drawn by four horses, in addition to its limber. This, too, waited at a certain distance, with its six draft horses and their drivers. Each cannon weighed, on average, about a ton, and since there was no mechanism to absorb the recoil, the gun rolled back a couple of yards after every shot and had to be hauled back into position by the gunners. Main strength was also required to carry the cast-iron cannonballs from the wagons to the guns; each ball weighed about ten pounds. Obviously, every gun required a great deal of room to maneuver, so that a French battery with eight pieces, 200 men (gunners and drivers), and almost 150 horses ended up occupying a hundred-yard front, with a depth of around fifty yards. Once the 12-pounders were in position, mired in the sticky mud of the Flemish hills, moving them again was extremely difficult.

The position that Napoleon had chosen for the Grande Batterie presented advantages and disadvantages. The lay of the land, gradually sloping down toward the opposing lines, seemed expressly designed for deploying a great many guns directly in the face of the enemy, with a guaranteed effect on his morale; indeed, the accounts given by the British officers confirm that the arrival of the French batteries, which took up their positions one after the other, was observed with growing uneasiness. Captain Kincaid of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, who was stationed on a little hill a hundred yards behind La Haye Sainte, had been scanning the field with idle curiosity when he realized what was happening in the sector right in front of him, which until a few minutes before had been deserted. From that moment on, he was unable to take his eyes off the "innumerable black specks" which he could see "taking post at regular distances" in advance of the opposing line; "recognizing them as so many pieces of artillery, I knew from experience, although nothing else was yet visible, that they were unerring symptoms of our not being destined to be idle spectators."

Squinting through telescopes, the French artillery officers scanned the enemy position, trying to identify possible targets. A great many batteries could be seen all along the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean, some out in the open, some covered by the hedges that bordered the sunken lane. Behind La Haye Sainte, nothing else was visible; to the right, however, a long line of infantry was in plain sight, deployed on the exposed forward slope of the ridge ahead of and below the British guns. It is doubtful that Desales's artillerymen knew that this line, part of Perponcher's Netherlands Division, represented only a fraction of the enemy's left wing, and that most of his soldiers were deployed farther back, lying on the ground on the reverse slope of the ridge, protected and invisible. Nevertheless, the French regarded this visible fraction as a target more than sufficient to justify the artillery concentration ordered by the emperor.

However, there was such a great distance between the mouths of the guns and the positions they were to attack that the French cannonades seemed more likely to affect enemy morale than anything else. At a thousand yards, not even 12- pounders would fire their projectiles with any great accuracy, while firing 6-pounders at that distance was equivalent to shooting at random. But evidently Napoleon preferred not to risk his guns by sending them too far forward; the great concentration of fire from so many muzzles would compensate for the inaccuracy of their aim. Besides, the task of the Grande Batterie was, above all, to achieve a psychological effect; this is clear from the emperor's order to Desales, in which the latter is expressly enjoined to open fire with all his guns at the same moment, "to astonish the enemy and shake his morale."

One of Napoleon's artillery officers, however, was not content with morale-shaking. General Ruty, the overall artillery commander of the Armee du Nord, joined Desales as he was overseeing the deployment of his guns and observed that it would be a good idea to move the batteries forward during the course of the attack so that they would not have to fire from so prohibitive a distance. In anticipation of such an advance, therefore, Ruty ordered Desales to carry out a reconnaissance in the direction of the enemy lines and identify a suitable position. Convinced as he was "by theory and by practice" that moving so much artillery in the middle of a battle was always dangerous, Desales had his doubts, but nonetheless rode his horse down the slope, and within a few hundred yards, he discovered a spur of ground almost within musket range of La Haye Sainte. The terrain formed a natural platform on which he could deploy his guns in case of need.

His reconnaissance complete, Desales turned back to start the attack, assigning commanders to the different sectors of the Grande Batterie. Desales wanted the most expert of his subordinates, Colonel Bernard, to command the 12-pounder batteries, but the colonel had lost an eye at the siege of Zaragoza and, as he pointed out to Desales, was not the most suitable man for the job; at that distance, the 12-pounders were the only guns one could still try to aim. Therefore, the one-eyed man was given command of the 6-pounder batteries, and Desales put another colonel, younger and still all in one piece, in charge of the 12-pounders. The general then reported to Marshal Ney, who was caracoling impatiently in the center of the deployment, and informed him that, as far as the artillery was concerned, the battle could begin.

When the Grande Batterie opened fire between noon and one o'clock, fierce fighting had been going on around Hougoumont for some time; nevertheless, the roar of all those guns drowned out every other sound, and Desales felt the earth shuddering under his feet. From time immemorial, soldiers in the French army had referred to cannon with a nickname that mingled familiarity and revulsion—
le brutal
—and they were surely right. One of the first shots that struck the little hill where Captain Kincaid was stationed scored a direct hit on the only tree, sending a hail of branches showering down on the battalion's two medical officers, who had set up an aid station in that spot, believing it to be safe. However, Wellington's more experienced soldiers quickly realized that the enemy was carrying on this massive bombardment principally for psychological effect. An officer in Picton's division later recalled, "The greater part, fortunately, went over our heads, carrying one off here and there. This fire was much too high; the old hands said it was meant to intimidate, as usual."

The cannonballs and shells that passed high above the ridge nevertheless came down vertically upon the troops massed in the second line. Perhaps the French batteries at a certain point deliberately began firing as high as possible in order to reach the dead ground behind the ridge, especially after the Dutch-Belgian infantry, initially deployed on the exposed forward slope, hastily withdrew to a more sheltered position. Firing blindly in this way meant that actually hitting someone was a matter of chance, but the bombardment was so intense that the infantry soldiers stretched out on the ground behind La Haye Sainte and behind the chemin d'Ohain all the way to Papelotte nevertheless began to take losses. A few too many shots reached even the reserve cavalry deployed on Wellington's left wing several hundred yards behind the ridge, and Sir William Ponsonby who commanded one of the two heavy cavalry brigades, had his men withdraw and search for less dangerous ground.

Any calculation of the intensity of the fire produced by the Grande Batterie can only be based on statistical averages, which are best treated with suspicion. Desales had twenty-four 12-pounder guns and thirty 6-pounders, to which were added the horse artillery's eighteen 6-pounders. The rate of fire was one shot per minute for the 12-pounders, which were more difficult to return to their positions after recoiling, and two per minute for the lighter guns, for a total of 120 shots per minute. However, the bombardment was dispersed along a front of more than two thousand yards, and the French gunners conscientiously did their best to pound it all. Even General von Vincke, who commanded the Hanoverian militia brigade stationed on the extreme left of Wellington's line, reported that the enemy batteries took up their posts at noon, and despite a distance of two thousand paces, which should have rendered them harmless, they were able to strike the rear of his position, behind his lines, so that the brigade medical station had to be moved farther back.

On average, therefore, one shot per minute was fired for every twenty yards of front. The front, however, was several hundred yards deep; the shots fired with the highest trajectories landed inside this rectangle at random, and the soaked, soft ground stopped projectiles from bouncing very far. This explains why the Allied losses seemed in the long run bearable, despite the fact that the occasional direct hit sent shivers down the spines of all those who had the misfortune to witness it. While Ponsonby's cavalry was withdrawing to a more protected spot, Lieutenant Wyndham of the Scots Grays, a young officer who had joined the regiment barely a month previously, came across five or six Scottish soldiers who were carrying one of their wounded officers to the rear. Wyndham was considerably shaken "when a shell came and fell near them and destroyed nearly the whole [party]." As soon as the French guns began their bombardment, the Allied batteries duly replied, once again ignoring the orders of the duke. Through his telescope, Desales saw that the enemy cannon were protected by the sunken lane as though by a trench and that it would not be at all easy to silence them. The French artillery was more exposed, and the first casualties weren't long in coming: A shell exploded a short distance from Desales, wounding all those around him. Struck in the shoulder by a shell fragment, the general felt himself to see if he was wounded, but to his relief he discovered that the fragment had lodged itself in the collar of his coat; however, his arm stayed numb from the contusion for a long time, and from that point on Desales maintained a healthy respect for the precision of the British counterbattery fire.

Right:
Napoleon Bonaparte.
Painting by
Robert Lefevre.

Below right:
The elderly Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher.

Below:
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, 1814.
Painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Napoleon giving orders to an aide-decamp for Marshal Grouchy on the morning
Above:
of the battle.

Below:
General Reille, commander of Napoleon's II Corps.
Engraving by A. Tardieu

Below:
Jerome Bonaparte, division commander and Napoleon's youngest brother.
Painting,
1808.

Above:
The Duke of Wellington outside his headquarters at Mont-Saint-Jean.
Painting by
J. C. Aylward.

Left:
The ceremonial Eagle, mounted on a pole with the French tricolor.