The Battle (37 page)

At this point, the generals observing the action from the ridge behind La Haye Sainte began to lose their heads. Sir Charles Alten rode up to Colonel von Ompteda and ordered him to recapture the farm with the only battalion he had left that was still near full strength, the Fifth KGL. The idea of descending the slope with a single battalion, exposed both to the enemy infantry, which was now entrenched behind the walls of La Haye Sainte, and to the cuirassier squadrons that were patrolling the area, struck Colonel von Ompteda as so risky that he did the unthinkable: He objected to the order and told his general that he thought the situation precluded an advance. The Prince of Orange, who outranked both of them even though he was only twenty-three years old, curtly ordered Ompteda to obey. "Well, I will," the colonel replied, and summoned Colonel von Linsingen, the battalion commander, and murmured to him, "Try to save my two nephews." Like many senior officers in a period when patronage and nepotism of the most blatant sort were the order of the day, Ompteda had procured officers' commissions in his unit for a couple of his nephews, aged fourteen and fifteen; evidently he was afraid that he was about to get them killed.

Until this moment, Lieutenant Wheatley of the Fifth KGL had remained in square with the rest of his battalion, comforting himself with frequent pinches of tobacco and mental recitations of some of Robert Southey's verses. ("But 'twas a famous victory"). Suddenly, the order came to deploy into line and advance at a walk; when his men were some sixty yards away from the enemy, Ompteda had the bugler sound the charge and urged his horse into the midst of the thick line of French skirmishers. The
tirailleurs
scattered, and Wheatley had just taken off in pursuit of a drummer boy, who was trying to escape by jumping a ditch, when French cavalry appeared on the battalion's flank and charged home. Wheatley heard someone cry out, "Cavalry! Cavalry!" but paid no attention, determined as he was to seize the drummer boy, who was caught in some brambles; but as the lieutenant reached out for his prey, a blow to the head with the flat of a sword knocked him unconscious to the ground. Colonel von Ompteda was encircled by enemy infantry, and the French officers, amazed by his courage, shouted to their men to take him alive; but Ompteda, who was by then, like his colleagues, beside himself, started aiming saber-strokes at the heads of the men surrounding him, and someone lost patience. When Lieutenant Wheatley regained consciousness, the colonel lay dead two steps away from him, with his mouth open and a hole in his throat, and Wheatley himself was a prisoner. Colonel von Linsingen had seized the commander's two nephews and hauled them to safety; the rest of the battalion had been cut to pieces, and its standard had been lost.

Captain Kincaid, who was stationed a short distance away with the survivors of the l/95th Rifles, witnessed the destruction of the Hanoverian battalion. From where he stood, it seemed to him that their doom had come upon them with lightning swiftness. The cuirassiers came within range of Kincaid's men, who were about to open fire on them when some British light dragoons appeared. These horsemen went among the enemy, but apparently without much enthusiasm. "A few on each side began exchanging thrusts; but it seemed likely to be a drawn battle between them, without much harm being done," Kincaid wrote. In the end, the riflemen lost patience and started firing into the melee, and the cavalry on both sides cleared off in a moment. In an impotent rage, Kincaid watched the retreating cuirassiers as they leaned down from the saddle, saber in hand, and stabbed at the wounded Allied soldiers who were lying on the ground.

This and other firsthand accounts leave the impression that the French cavalry, despite the effects of an entire afternoon of continuous combat, still retained a capacity for action that their Allied counterparts had by then lost. Sir Colin Halkett, in an effort to raise the spirits of the few remaining men in his battalions, tried to lead a Netherlands cavalry regiment deployed behind them in a charge; but after a few steps the Dutch-Belgians stopped, refusing to go any farther, turned their horses around, and headed back. Halkett's infantry squares, formed nearby, grew indignant at this behavior and started firing at the retreating horsemen, bringing many down from their saddles. General van Merlen's Second Light Cavalry Brigade, composed of the Belgian Fifth Light Dragoons and the Sixth Dutch Hussars, conducted themselves more honorably, charging the French artillery that was taking up positions beside La Haye Sainte; but the results were no better. Van Merlen, whom Napoleon had created a baron of the empire barely three years before, was killed when a cannonball struck him in the abdomen, and his brigade fell apart: Colonel Van Boreel, who commanded the Hussars, tried to take over command of the brigade, but the survivors of the Fifth Light Dragoons refused to obey a Dutchman and joined another light brigade, which was commanded by the Belgian Baron de Ghigny.

By this point, the Netherlands Cavalry Division was so badly damaged that it could no longer be considered operational: Ghigny's brigade had lost more than half of its men. The division commander, Baron de Collaert, seriously wounded by a shell fragment, had been compelled to leave the battlefield. His division, which was the last cavalry reserve available behind the center of Wellington's line, was for all practical purposes useless, and the French cavalry, although crippled by their losses and weakened by fatigue, remained masters of the field. Sir James Kempt, in command of the division that had been Picton's, watched in consternation as La Haye Sainte fell into the hands of the enemy. Kempt was about to order Sir John Lambert to counterattack with the Twenty-seventh and recapture the farm, but almost at once he was compelled to the realization that it would be impossible for the Twenty-seventh or any other regiment to abandon their formation in square, because the enemy cavalry had them surrounded.

FIFTY-FIVE

THE ADVANCE OF THE FRENCH ARTILLERY

After every cavalry charge up to this point, Lieutenant Pratt, commander of the light company of the Thirtieth Regiment, had successfully led his men out of their square and returned to a more advanced position, almost at the bottom of the slope. But once the French artillery advanced, his every attempt to move his troops forward was greeted with a regular barrage of case-shot. Pratt tried to stand fast, but he was well aware that before long he would have to retire and leave the enemy master of no-man's-land. "It was at this period that I was wounded," he noted, "and, of course, I ceased to be an eye-witness of what took place afterwards." The Seventy-third, which formed a single square with the Thirtieth, had no more skirmishers to send out, and so the captain who was in command of the regiment at that moment asked for volunteers willing to make a foray out of the square with him. Tom Morris and his brother William, together with a few others, agreed to accompany him, but they were hardly out of the square before case-shot felled almost all of them. The two Morrises, the only members of the party to emerge unscathed, took the captain by the arms—one of his legs was broken—and carried him to the rear.

Ensign Macready, who had taken over command after Pratt was wounded, decided that the few men remaining in his unit would be of more use inside the square, where they could fill the gaps made by the canister. After some time, "French artillery trotted up our hill, which I knew by the caps to belong to the Imperial Guard," Macready reported, "and I had scarcely mentioned this to a brother officer, when two guns unlimbering at a cruelly short distance, down went the portfires and slap came their grape into the square. They immediately reloaded, and kept up a most destructive fire. It was noble to see our fellows fill up the gaps after each discharge." As Macready had supposed, his men were much needed in the square, however guilty the young officer may have felt for exposing them to danger like that. "I had ordered up three of my light bobs [infantrymen], and they had hardly taken their places when two falling sadly wounded, one of them (named Anderson) looked up in my face, uttering a sort of reproachful groan, when I involuntarily said, 'By God! I couldn't help it.'" Lieutenant Rogers, who was in the same square, remembered those two French guns very well: "Every discharge made a regular gap in the square. It surprised me with what coolness our men and the 73rd closed them up."

The conduct of the noncommissioned officers, particularly those veterans who had fought in Spain, contributed decisively to keeping their men at their posts. Sergeant Major Ballam of the Seventy-third was pale as a corpse when he addressed the commander of the regiment, murmuring, "We had nothing like this in Spain, sir." And yet, having watched one of the men duck from time to time when the balls flew too close, Ballam stepped over to him and bawled him out: "Damn you, sir, what do you stoop for? You should not stoop if your head was off!" The man, a thin-skinned fellow, took this reprimand badly. A few moments later, a ball hit the sergeant major in the face, killing him instantly and the soldier leaned over his disfigured corpse and exclaimed, "Damn it, sir! What do you lie there for? You should not lie down if your head was off!"

Slightly farther east, the officers of the 1/1 st Nassau, which had already been nearly overwhelmed by a cuirassier charge, watched horrified as a French battery boldly advanced to within three hundred yards and opened fire on the square with case-shot. In the course of a few minutes, the battalion took so many casualties that the commander, Major von Weyhers, ordered his recruits to charge with fixed bayonets and capture the French guns. Dazed by the din and the smoke, the Nassauers had barely started moving when the major was cut down by case-shot. His men halted and hesitated; then most of them turned back, but two companies started firing a disordered volley at the French gunners. An instant later, a squadron of cuirassiers appeared from behind the guns and overwhelmed the Nassauers, cutting them down with their sabers. The Nassauer officers, whose professionalism must have been truly extraordinary, managed to halt the flight of the survivors and form them back up into something that once again resembled a square.

Wellington's artillerymen also noticed, even though it seemed impossible, that the enemy fire had become still more intense. Captain Samuel Bolton, on horseback amid his guns, was talking with Lieutenant Sharpin, who was standing beside the captain's horse with his hand on one of the stirrups. Sharpin later recalled, "The shot from a French Battery at that time flew very thick among us." A ball passed right between the two officers, and Bolton, with admirable coolness, "remarked that he thought we had passed the greatest danger for that day." Scarcely had he spoken when another ball struck the ground in front of him and bounded up, smashing the horse's shoulder and crushing the captain's chest. Man and beast collapsed in a single heap, and when the gunners succeeded in pulling Bolton out from under the animal's carcass, the captain was dead.

Another French battery advanced to a position on the flank of Captain Mercer's battery and opened fire from less than five hundred yards away. "The rapidity and precision of this fire was quite appalling," Mercer reported. "Every shot almost took effect, and I certainly expected we should all be annihilated. Our horses and limbers, being a little retired down the slope, had hitherto been somewhat under cover from the direct fire in front; but this plunged right amongst them, knocking them down by pairs, and creating horrible confusion. The drivers could hardly extricate themselves from one dead horse ere another fell, or perhaps themselves. The saddle-bags, in many instances were torn from the horses' backs, and their contents scattered over the field. One shell I saw explode under the two finest wheel-horses in the troop—down they dropped." Under the pressure of the French fire, Mercer's battery was literally pushed back, because his guns recoiled with every shot, and his surviving gunners were too exhausted to haul them forward again. In the end, Mercer noted, his pieces "came together in a confused heap," well back from their original position and "dangerously near the limbers and ammunition wagons, some of which were totally unhorsed, and others in sad confusion from the loss of their drivers and horses, many of them lying dead in their harness attached to their carriages." Later, when the order came to change position, Mercer did not have enough horses left to move his guns.

Only the extraordinary discipline of the artillerymen made it possible for some batteries to maintain their positions. Captain Rudyard, who served in Major Lloyd's battery, described the scene: "The ground we occupied was much furrowed up by the recoil of our Guns and the grazing of the shot, and many holes from the bursting of shells buried in the ground. As horses were killed or rendered unserviceable, the harness was removed and placed on the waggons, or elsewhere. Our men's knapsacks were neatly packed on the front and rear of our limbers and waggons, that they might do their work more easily. Every
Gun,
every carriage, spokes carried from wheels, all were struck in many places." Rudyard much admired the fact that the Duke of Wellington, the Prince of Orange, and their staffs were often in the rear of the battery under fire, taking the same chances, running the same risks. "I saw the fore-legs taken from the horse of one of his Highness's A.D.C.'s at the shoulders, and [he] continued rearing for some time with his very fat rider, dressed in green. My own horse was shot through by a 9-pounder shot behind the saddle flap, and did not fall for some time."

The Allied line was exposed not only to artillery fire but also to the musketry of a multitude of
tirailleurs,
who became masters of all the dominant positions behind La Haye Sainte, from the farm itself to the mound overlooking the sandpit, all of which had been occupied that morning by British and German fusiliers. "We began to be annoyed also by a well-directed fire from behind a small hillock, almost in the heart of our position," one of the officers in Pack's brigade later recalled. "A knowing, enterprising fellow, holding the post of La Haye Sainte, which we had lost, had sent a strong detachment, which got to the hillock under cover of the brow, and opened a kind of masked battery upon us." The fire of these
tirailleurs
took a heavy toll, especially on the Twenty-seventh Regiment, the Inniskillings, who had been stationed in the most exposed place of all: in the northeast corner of the crossroads, barely two hundred yards behind La Haye Sainte and right beside the knoll on whose top French skirmishers had been posted. The Inniskillings remained there, formed up in square, until the evening, obedient to Sir James Kempt's orders to not abandon their position at any cost; only their presence in that spot prevented the enemy from penetrating deep into the center of the Allies' defensive line. In three or four hours, without ever moving a step, the regiment lost more than two-thirds of its men, the highest casualty rate of any battalion that fought at Waterloo. According to Kincaid, by seven in the evening "the twenty-seventh regiment were lying literally dead, in square, a few yards behind us." At that point in the battle, the regiment was commanded by a lieutenant, and eight of his ten companies were commanded by sergeants.

During the course of those few hours, remarkable things happened in the Twenty-seventh's square, one of which involved a soldier's pregnant wife, who had stayed with him rather than take shelter in the rear; she busied herself with caring for the wounded until a shell fragment struck her in the leg. Her husband fared worse: He lost both arms. In British military historiography, the tragedy of the Inniskillings has come to symbolize the most inhuman aspect of Waterloo: As John Keegan has suggested, the men must have been extremely tired, having marched some fifty-six miles in the previous seventy-two hours and slept very little, and their exhaustion may have helped them endure the horror to which they were subjected. Twenty years later, when Captain Siborne started building his grand model of the Battle of Waterloo, Sir John Lambert insisted that the knoll where the French skirmishers were stationed had to be represented, "as it was so important in that part of the line, and so honourable and fatal to the 27th Regiment, which kept its formation and lost more men and Officers than any Regiment during the day, and would otherwise have afforded an opportunity to the Enemy to have made an impression in a very serious part of the Line."

A great number of Wellington's generals and aides were killed or wounded in this particular phase of the battle, particularly in the area behind La Haye Sainte. The duke's secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, who was at his side a short distance behind the crossroads, was struck in the arm by a musket ball fired from the roof of the farm and had to be carried to a field hospital, where the surgeons cut off the injured limb. One of the aides-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Canning, was preoccupied with keeping some German troops in line—they were on the verge of disbanding—when a musket ball penetrated his abdomen; a witness reported that the colonel, "although perfectly collected, could hardly articulate from pain." Canning was "raised to a sitting position by placing knapsacks around him," but "a few minutes terminated his existence." Another of Wellington's aides, Sir Alexander Gordon, who was also the duke's personal friend, had a leg shattered by a cannonball while he was encouraging a Brunswick square that had begun to waver; he was carried back to Waterloo and his leg amputated, but he did not survive the night. The quartermaster general, Sir William de Lancey, a young man of thirty-four whom Wellington had described as "the idlest fellow I ever met," was struck off his horse by a cannonball that passed so close to him it caused serious internal injuries; although no trace of the damage could be seen on his person, he was to die a few days later in the arms of his wife, whom he had married only two months before the battle. Having watched one of the squares in General Kielmansegge's brigade backing up under a pelting fire of canister and ordered the general to put a stop to this retreat, Sir Charles Alten was wounded by a shell fragment and obliged to leave the field; Kielmansegge took over command of the division, or what was left of it, but soon afterward he too was wounded; Colin Halkett became their new commander—though by this point almost nobody remained for him to command. A little farther to the west, a cannonball had pulped the right arm of the commander of the Guards Division, Major General George Cooke.