The Battle (23 page)

When they came to within a hundred yards of the chemin d'Ohain, the brigade halted to allow the retreating infantry to reach safety by passing through the intervals between squadrons. In order to choose the most opportune moment to signal the attack, Ponsonby rode up to a vantage point on the crest of the ridge. The French artillery continued to pound the ridge, and a cannonball that passed too close spooked Sir William's nag; the sudden movement caused the general's cloak, which he was wearing thrown over his shoulders but not fastened, to slide to the ground. Ponsonby saw that the moment he was waiting for had come—the enemy infantry was engaged in crossing the sunken road, which in that sector ran a little below the crest—but he hated to lose his cloak, so he ordered his aide-decamp, Major De Lacy Evans, to give the signal while he dismounted and collected the item. De Lacy Evans took off his hat and waved it, ordering the charge, and the brigade began to move.

While the Inniskillings were beginning to gather speed, many of them saw a man on horseback in civilian clothes waving his hat, too, and shouting, "Now's your chance!" Next to him, likewise on horseback, a boy with one arm in a sling and a bandaged head stood upright in his stirrups, thoroughly excited. The man shaking his hat was His Grace, the Duke of Richmond, who although he possessed the rank of general had been assigned no command in Wellington's army. Nevertheless, he had come to Waterloo to observe the battle, in which three of his sons were serving as aides-de-camp. The boy beside him was Lord William Pitt Lennox, at fifteen the youngest of the three, a cornet in the Blues and aide-de-camp to Sir Peregrine Maitland. A few days before, the teenager had fallen from his horse, breaking his arm, cracking his head, and losing the sight in one eye; but when he learned that Maitland's other aide-de-camp, the eighteen-year-old Lord Hay, had been killed at Quatre Bras, young Lord Lennox had insisted on returning to service, thus demonstrating his adherence to the English aristocracy's code of honor.

That morning, therefore, the boy had presented himself to Sir Peregrine with his slung arm, his bandaged eye, and his cracked skull; but since the general would not permit him to serve in his present state, the fifteen-year-old had resigned himself to watching the battle at his father's side. Whenever the duke, heedless of the bullets that were whistling all around, stopped to converse with one general or another, Lord William had all he could do to steady his frightened horse, which seemed on the point of bolting off and perhaps carrying him into the midst of the French; but he felt immense pride when his father turned to him and said, "I'm glad to see you stand fire so well." Then the cavalry began to move forward, and the boy remained there, tingling with excitement, standing straight up in his stirrups to see what would happen.

THIRTY-SEVEN

THE CHARGE OF THE HOUSEHOLD BRIGADE

In spite of the difficulty of the terrain, the charge was admirably timed. Crabbe's cuirassiers were still scattered about the slippery slope, not having had time to reorder their ranks after their charge, and small groups of them were starting to cross the main road. This in itself presented a formidable obstacle, running as it did between two steep banks, each higher than a man. The French had no hope of resisting the sudden attack; caught between the charging British, who fell upon their left and rear, and the enclosure of La Haye Sainte, which barred the way on their right, they spurred their horses forward, trying to reach the main road. But the passage was so narrow and the road so deeply embanked that many of them were struck down before they could cross it, while others tumbled down the slope, clogging the roadway with a tangled mass of dead and dying horses and men.
¹⁸
Captain Kelly of the First Life Guards, a noted swordsman, charged the colonel of the First Cuirassiers, felled him with a rain of saber blows, and then dismounted to rip off his victim's epaulets, which he kept as a trophy. Kelly remained convinced that he had killed this officer, but in fact the colonel was only stunned. His name was Michel Ordener, and at barely twenty-eight years old he was already a veteran of eight campaigns and a count of the empire. He returned to action shortly afterward, survived the battle, and died in 1862.

Pursuing the cuirassiers, part of the British cavalry came in their turn to the top of the bank that sloped down to the main road. Some of the riders descended into what was by now a shambles of dying men and horses and continued the massacre of the fleeing enemy. Other British cavalry would perhaps have halted before the obstacle presented by the road, but the French skirmishers posted in the kitchen garden at La Haye Sainte, in the sandpit, and on the little knoll behind it started firing on the British with deadly precision, so that their only choice was to push forward. Several hundred cavalry got across the road as best they could, mounted the opposite bank, and clashed with the cuirassiers who had crossed the road a few minutes earlier. The encounter, a saber fight, was brief and exceedingly violent; one of the combatants was Corporal Shaw of the Second Life Guards, the famous boxer. Shaw was one of the best-known men in an army that knew how to appreciate the pugilistic sport. For a man of his enormous stature, he also excelled at wielding his saber, and he was feeling especially bellicose, having swallowed a vast quantity of brandy that morning. Surrounded by French cuirassiers, he was seen slashing and hacking so rapidly that he unsaddled one after another, felling no fewer than nine, or at least that is what was said after the battle. But as he fought, a cuirassier withdrew a little distance from the melee, raised the short carbine issued to all cavalry troopers, took careful aim, and shot Shaw off his horse. The boxer dragged himself to the wall of La Haye Sainte, where he died from loss of blood.
¹⁹

Eventually, however, the surviving cuirassiers were routed, and they scattered in all directions. By that time, they had lost their commander, as Colonel Crabbe had been mortally wounded in the melee. A single cuirassier, isolated from the rest, galloped so far along the ridge that he ended up behind Pack's men, who were deployed in line beside the sunken lane. Enraged at seeing his path obstructed in this way, or perhaps simply because he'd lost his head, the Frenchman charged the infantry, wheeling his saber. Since he was coming upon them from behind, there was a chance that he might get through; but a soldier shot the cuirassier's horse dead, ran out of line, killed the man with a few bayonet thrusts, searched him quickly, stole his purse, and ran back to his comrades.

As they were chasing the cuirassiers, the British dragoons suddenly came upon the flank of Aulard's brigade, which was already having difficulty staving off Kempt's counterattack. Again this time, the psychological effect was immediate and catastrophic: Overrun first by their own fleeing cuirassiers and then immediately afterward by multitudes of British dragoons, whirling their sabers in hot pursuit, the two battalions of the Fifty-first Ligne, which had been in the front line since the beginning of the battle and had already suffered heavy losses, as well as the two battalions of the Nineteenth Ligne, which were deployed to the right of the Fifty-first, allowed themselves to be seized by panic and ran headlong from the field. From the walls of La Haye Sainte, the German fusiliers enthusiastically greeted the arrival of the dragoons, who galloped along the perimeter of the farm, sweeping aside everything in their path. Lieutenant Waymouth of the Second Life Guards had enough time to recognize an officer of the King's German Legion whom he knew by sight, Lieutenant Graeme, at his post on the roof of the piggery. Shortly thereafter, Graeme and his men went down into the courtyard, opened the gate leading to the road, and issued forth to mop up the French, who threw away their weapons and surrendered voluntarily rather than face the saber-strokes of the cavalry.

Captain Kincaid and his riflemen also watched with immense relief as the cavalry rode into the midst of their enemies and put them to flight. The captain was mounted on his mare in a gap in the hedge, and a moment before he had noticed, to his alarm, that some cuirassiers were coming straight at him; but when he tried to draw his saber, he found that the rain of the previous night had rusted it into his scabbard so tightly that he was unable to pull it out. Although Sir James Kempt in person had ordered him not to move from his position, Kincaid was hastily considering the pros and cons of disobeying, when suddenly the cuirassiers were overwhelmed by the British cavalry and thrown back among their own infantry, transforming it at once into a throng of fugitives. Recognizing the helmets of the Life Guards, Kincaid admitted to himself that they were real soldiers, after all, and not—as he had sometimes thought—just manikins good for nothing except parades in Hyde Park. The French column had been routed in an instant. "Hundreds of the infantry threw themselves down and pretended to be dead, while the cavalry galloped over them, and then got up and ran away," Kincaid later recalled. "I never saw such a scene in all my life."

The rout of the French infantry was not total everywhere; some soldiers rose to their feet and started firing at the backs of the British cavalry, and here and there a rider was dragged from his horse and hauled away as a prisoner—for example, Lieutenant Waymouth, who fell badly wounded by a saber blow from a cuirassier and remained a prisoner in enemy hands for several weeks. While Captain Irby of the same regiment was returning from the charge, his horse was killed under him and he was captured and taken away; the next day he managed to escape from a cellar where he and other prisoners had been confined. On the whole, however, the charge had been a complete success, and Aulard's brigade had practically ceased to exist. Over the course of the day, the Fifty-first and Nineteenth Ligne regiments lost a total of seventeen officers killed and twenty-four wounded—that is, nearly half of the regiments' officers, an extremely high percentage.

The other squadrons of the Household Brigade, having driven the cuirassiers toward the
chaussee,
the cobblestone main road, continued charging down the slope with Lord Uxbridge at their head and attacked the skirmishers of Schmitz's brigade, who were stationed near the enclosure of La Haye Sainte. Uxbridge observed that all the enemy troops in his front gave way immediately. As unlikely as it was that a line of skirmishers would have so much as considered standing up to a force of six or seven hundred cavalry, coming down upon them from higher ground at increasing speed, nevertheless, the fire of the French skirmishers, who hid amid the stubble and along the walls of the farm, must have been horribly efficient. Sir Robert Hill, commander of the Blues, saw the commanding officer of the First Life Guards fall dead from a musket shot while leading his men at the beginning of the charge. The colonel of the King's Dragoon Guards was also killed almost immediately, and his body was later found a short distance from La Haye Sainte; in launching the charge, he had cried out to his men, "On to Paris!"

Perhaps the loss of so many officers can partly explain why the British dragoons, having routed Crabbe's cuirassiers, kept on charging, not because they had received precise orders to do so, but from sheer force of momentum. They swept away isolated skirmishers, but they never came upon any objective that could justify prolonging the action. "After the overthrow of the Cuirassiers," Lord Uxbridge wrote, "I had in vain attempted to stop my people by sounding the Rally," but no one heeded the call. As often happened in such cases, the charge had broken up into a vast number of isolated combats, which occasioned a few strange episodes. Lieutenant Story, who had recently returned to service after having been a prisoner of the French for a full seven years, was about to strike an enemy soldier with his saber when the man threw away his musket and begged for mercy, assuring Story that he knew him well. The incredulous lieutenant recognized a French soldier he had known when he was a prisoner in the fortress of Verdun. Story spared him and his companion and sent them to the rear as prisoners.

The net result of the extended charge was that the surviving
tirailleurs
got themselves under some kind of cover, Schmitz's battalions formed square near the orchard of La Haye Sainte, and the cavalry found itself at the bottom of the slope with blown horses—all force of impact gone—and exposed to the accurate fire of the enemy massed on the opposite slope. At that moment, by his own later admission, Lord Uxbridge realized that the commander in chief of all the Allied cavalry should not have been where he was. For the moment, though, his troubling premonitions were quelled by the extraordinary success of the charge, and by shouts of triumph coming from the other side of the main road, indicating that the Union Brigade, whose charge had begun a little later, had met with the same success.