The Battle (28 page)

Somewhat later, Major Harry Smith also commented on the battle in boxing terms: "It was as a stand-up fight between two pugilists, 'mill away' till one is beaten." And indeed, after d'Erlon's promising maneuver came to such an unexpected and inglorious end, the struggle at Waterloo ceased almost completely to be a battle of movement and was transformed into a series of monotonous and repetitive frontal engagements. This fact explains why all accounts of the battle fell increasingly into repetition and confusion as the afternoon wore on. But given the results of the battle to this point, and especially given the condition of the ground, not even Napoleon could devise a different way of proceeding.

FORTY-THREE

PAPELOTTE

Prince Bernhard had installed his brigade in the two farms of Papelotte and La Haye, in a group of houses a little farther east, which the maps of the period designate as Smouhen or Smohain, the same name as the muddy little stream that rises nearby—and in the old medieval chateau of Fichermont. This seres of four built-up areas extended along a line about three-quarters of a mile long, a boggy landscape of sunken lanes bordered by hedges and shrubs, impracticable for horses and ideal for defense. After posting his skirmishers as far forward as possible in the swampy hollow that marked the boundary of his position, the prince stationed one or more companies in each of the four groups of buildings and held the major part of his forces in reserve, almost as far to the rear as the chemin d'Ohain; from this spot, he could send reinforcements in any direction, as needed.

Durutte's skirmishers had already made contact with the Nassauers' outposts during d'Erlon's ill-fated advance. In the beginning, this was only an exercise in prudence, undertaken by Durutte to protect his own right flank from surprise; but after the failure of the main offensive, the French general concentrated all his efforts on a serious attempt to drive the enemy outposts from the Papelotte sector. Durutte opened fire against the enemy position with the guns at his disposal, apparently one of the Imperial Guards' 12-pounder batteries. The Nassauers, who were in the open, withdrew after the cannonballs began mowing down their first victims, lay down behind the walls and hedges of the farm, and waited. Then Durutte sent his line of skirmishers forward; the German skirmishers stationed among the stubble and in the ditches opened fire; and the combat flared up along the whole front.

Among the houses of Smohain and around the walls of Papelotte, the fighting was no less fierce than it was at La Haye Sainte, but since the position was less important, and especially since British troops were not involved, few eyewitness accounts of what really happened remain. At one point, the men of the Orange-Nassau regiment realized that they were almost out of ammunition; not far away, the men of the Second Nassau still had a good supply but were unable to share it, as they were armed with French muskets and the Orange-Nassau troops carried English muskets. A drummer boy named May, a young lad of fourteen years, ran all the way to the line of Hanoverian troops stationed on the high ground behind them, filled his haversack with cartridges, and ran back to hand them out.

When he had finished the distribution, he went back a second time; a stray ball struck him in the hip, but the force of the projectile was nearly spent, and the boy almost failed to notice it ("I found it later in my underwear"). The third time, Prince Bernhard saw him running down the slope with his haversack full of cartridges and told him that now there were enough, and that he must not expose himself to further danger. May slung his drum back over his shoulder and went to rejoin his comrades.
²⁵

In spite of the fierceness of the struggle, all records suggest that only one of Durutte's two brigades was deployed in the Papelotte sector; skillfully massing the skirmishers of his other brigade, he used it to keep the pressure on Colonel Best's inexperienced Hanoverian infantry, which was occupying high ground a little to the rear. At the end of the day, this brigade was still almost intact before Napoleon transferred it to the La Haye Sainte sector for use in the final offensive. Given that Durutte did not attack Prince Bernhard's three thousand muskets with more than two thousand of his own, it is not surprising that he failed to dislodge the Nassauers from their fortified positions.

Besides, Durutte could not have been expected to do more; after the failure of d'Erlon's offensive, his division was evidently required to perform one role only, namely that of protecting the army's right flank against any enemy initiatives. Turning the Allies' left had been judged impossible as early as that morning, when a cavalry reconnaissance revealed that the Smohain, although a narrow, shallow stream, was very muddy, and that crossing it under enemy artillery fire would be too risky. Therefore, in that part of the field, the goal of the French offensive was only the consolidation of Durutte's positions, and its outlook was essentially defensive. What Durutte did not know was that one of the dirt roads coming from Wavre went through Smohain, and down it were marching the Prussian columns. Had he known this, he would have seen the vital importance of at least seizing the stone bridge that passed over the little stream and occupying the surrounding houses.

FORTY-FOUR

THE SECOND ATTACK ON LA HAYE SAINTE

By the time Major von Baring returned to the yard in La Haye Sainte, he was convinced that holding the farm much longer was unthinkable with only his single battalion, and he requested his superior, Colonel von Ompteda, to send him two more companies of riflemen. These reinforcements amounted to fewer than 150 Baker rifles, which joined perhaps an equal number remaining from Baring's original command; with these troops, the major fortified his position as best he could, except for the orchard, which he decided not to reoccupy He was just in time, because two columns of French infantry, preceded as usual by a swarm of
tirailleurs,
were once again advancing on both sides of the farm and threatening to surround it.

Astonishing the German major with the contempt they showed for his men's deadly fire, the French were at the walls of the farm in an instant, trying to force their way inside. A ferocious combat ensued, particularly around the few loopholes that Baring's men had opened that morning in the wall of the farmyard. The French grabbed the barrels of the defenders' muskets, tried to wrest them out of their hands, and eventually succeeded in gaining control of one of the loopholes. Then a French soldier standing outside the wall started firing into the yard through the loophole, using the loaded muskets that his comrades passed him, one after the other. On the west side of the farm, the French tried to enter the barn, and in a few minutes a great many corpses were piled up in the doorway, which the defenders kept under fire. As more attackers arrived, they used the piled bodies as protection, firing into the farmyard from behind them.

Baring's horse was killed, and the major went down with it. The major's servant, convinced that he was dead, seized the opportunity and abandoned the position at once, so that when Baring rose again to his feet he found that he no longer had either his servant or his spare horse. However, by then a good many other officers had been knocked out of their saddles, and the major soon found a new mount in the farmyard. His servant's bad behavior notwithstanding, Baring was touched by how faithfully his riflemen executed his orders and those of the other officers, in a situation where the probabilities of survival were getting lower and lower: "These are the moments when we learn to feel what one soldier is to another, what the word 'comrade' really means," he observed in his report.

For a long time, a KGL rifleman, Private Lindau, watched an enemy officer on horseback as he trotted back and forth across the fields in front of the farm, urging his men to attack. Lindau waited until the Frenchman drew within rifle range, waited some more, and finally fired. The officer's horse fell mortally wounded, dragging down its rider in the fall. Soon afterward, when the riflemen made a sortie from the main gate of the farm, scattering the French skirmishers who had advanced along the road, Lindau ran to his man and began searching him, quickly ripping away the golden chain that held his watch. But the officer, who was only stunned, raised his saber, hurling insults at the private, who unceremoniously killed him with the butt of his Baker. Then he cut off the bag attached to the officer's saddle and was about to pull a gold ring off his finger when his comrades shouted to him, "Come on, leave that! The cavalry's coming!" Lindau ran for the farm, carrying his booty, and just managed to reach the yard before the gate was bolted behind him.

In fact, during the
tirailleurs'
repeated attacks, French cavalry was always present in force on the slope that led to the farm, passing it several times on the way to harass the Allied squares deployed farther to the rear. How much of this activity was undertaken by the cuirassier generals on their own initiative and how much was ordered by Marshal Ney or even by the emperor himself is unclear. Milhaud's cuirassiers—those who remained after the destruction of the detached squadrons led by Crabbe—were the chief participants in the attack: perhaps some twenty squadrons in all, battle-weary but still almost two thousand sabers strong.

Obviously, this cavalry did not advance all together, nor would it have been possible to do so, given the immense front it covered; the infantry squares deployed behind La Haye Sainte received charges involving several hundred cavalrymen at a time, succeeding one another as regiment after regiment sent a few squadrons forward and held the rest in reserve. Particularly in the case of troops who had received little training, the tension caused by the approach of cavalry often induced men massed in squares to fire too soon, and while the foot soldiers were busy reloading their muskets, the cavalry could take advantage of their mistake by advancing, in the hope that the infantry, aware of being temporarily disarmed, would allow itself to be seized by panic. When the cuirassiers presented themselves before Kielmansegge's squares, his Hanoverian officers strove to prevent their men from firing too early; in one of the squares, Captain von Scriba heard the pistol-armed commander threaten to shoot anyone who fired before the order was given.

Scriba saw the cuirassiers "advance at a trot and stop some 70 or 80 paces away. The temptation to fire was great, but the whole square remained motionless with weapons cocked." The French got jumpy and advanced a little closer, then decided to forgo the charge and trotted away, turning around the corner of the square. At this point, the Hanoverian recruits were ordered to fire. "Led by a brigade general, the cavalry passed at a distance of six paces along the right side of the square, which I commanded," Scriba wrote. "I noticed that all the men on the right side aimed their muskets at the general's horse when the order was given to fire, and he moved away from the danger." As was so often the case, the troops' fire turned out to be ineffective: "The cavalry suffered some losses in this attack, but not so many as I believed it should, given the close range. This made me think that our men were aiming too high. From then on, the officers kept warning them not to."

Sergeant Lawrence, standing with the Fortieth in their square a little to the rear, was unimpressed by the cuirassiers' first charges, though their magnificent helmets and gleaming cuirasses did impress the sergeant and his men, who genuinely believed that the cuirassiers were "Bonaparte's Bodyguard." The British officers, overestimating the enemy's armor, which they were seeing for the first time, ordered their troops to aim not at the riders, but at the horses, and when the cuirassiers came within range, the infantry squares shot down so many of their mounts that the stricken animals impeded the progress of the others and the charge had to be aborted. "It was a most laughable sight to see these Guards in their chimney armour—trying to run away, being able to make little progress and many of them being taken prisoner by those of our light companies who were out skirmishing. 1 think this quite settled Napoleon's bodyguards, for we saw no more of them," Sergeant Lawrence concluded with satisfaction.

However, not all the squares got off so easily, especially when the French cavalry succeeded in coordinating its action with that of the infantry. One of the battalions in Ompteda's brigade, the Eighth KGL, was composed of German veterans of the Spanish wars; under normal circumstances, they could have withstood the cuirassiers' threatening maneuvers indefinitely. But the legionaries got into difficulty when, preparing to fight a solid line of advancing French infantry, they were surprised by the arrival of cavalry. Since a firefight between the two infantry formations—Allied square vs. French line—would have been decidedly unequal, with all the advantage going to the French, Colonel von Schroeder had ordered his men to deploy into line. But just as the troops of the KGL battalion, already under fire and in growing disorder, were trying to obey him, the enemy infantry opened their ranks to allow some cuirassier squadrons to pass through. Caught in the act of changing formations, the battalion was smashed, Schroeder was mortally wounded, and a triumphant cuirassier carried off the battalion's color. Still, the men of the KGL were veterans, and after they had taken to their heels to escape the cuirassiers' sabers, their surviving officers managed to reorder their ranks and lead them back, one way or another, to their position in the battle line; "but now the square was much smaller than before," one of them recalled.

The French had once more seized the initiative; in order to snatch it back from them, the British commanders decided they needed to send in the cavalry again. Somerset's brigade—or what remained of it—had barely had time to redeploy behind La Haye Sainte when one of Lord Uxbridge's aides arrived, carrying the order to charge. The three squadrons of the Blues, the only ones that were still more or less intact, charged down the slope, and once again, through sheer momentum, got the best of the enemy squadrons in front of them and momentarily cleared the field. The French infantry crowded around the walls of La Haye Sainte had to run for cover, and the second attack on La Haye Sainte, like the first, was broken off. But it was clear that there would not be much of a pause; as soon as the French cavalry reordered their ranks, they would advance once more, and the siege would begin anew. Major von Baring's men greeted the retreat of the enemy cavalry with howls of derision from the roofs and walls of La Haye Sainte, but the major had begun to be worried about running out of ammunition; when he ordered a tally, he discovered that they had already consumed more than half their supply. An officer sent back to the brigade command to ask for an emergency delivery was told not to worry; the battalion would be receiving fresh ammunition in a little while.