The Battle (39 page)
Authors: Alessandro Barbero
I
ronically, the attack on Plancenoit, delivered by Blucher with the bulk of his troops and at the cost of dreadful losses, was not what convinced Wellington that the Prussians were finally and unequivocally coming to his aid. The duke felt that conviction only when he saw other masses of Prussian troops pour onto the battlefield much closer to him than Plancenoit, in the area around Papelotte, and especially when he realized that this time they were not going to disappear into the woods to the south but were going into action against the French right wing. Finally accepting Bulow's suggestions, the Prussian command had ordered the last army corps leaving Wavre, Count von Ziethen's I Corps, to march along the more northerly road, following the course of the River Smohain and ending near the small group of houses that formed the village of the same name, right in the middle of the sector that Prince Bernhard's Nassauers had been defending against Durutte's men all day long. Lieutenant Colonel von Reiche, I Corps's chief of staff, had barely reached this spot, ahead of the column, when an extremely agitated Muffling approached and informed him, "The Duke was most desirous of our arrival and had repeatedly declared that this was the last moment, and if we did not arrive soon, he would be compelled to retreat." Together, the two went in search of General von Ziethen. Having found him, Muffling repeated that there wasn't a moment to lose. Ziethen, however, like Bulow before him, had little desire to send his men blindly forward along that little sunken lane, where they could suddenly find themselves in the path of the French offensive. An officer sent to assess the situation reported that there were signs of disintegration all along Wellington's line and that wounded soldiers and stragglers were thronging to the rear; the troops defending Papelotte and Smohain were also losing ground to the enemy. Should the Prussians continue to advance, they ran the risk of landing right in the middle of a defeat.
While Ziethen hesitated, another officer came galloping up from the south. Major von Scharnhorst, son of the famous reformer of the Prussian army, fallen two years previously in the wars of liberation, was an aide-de-camp on Bulow's staff. The major reported that the attack on Plancenoit was failing, that IV Corps needed help, and that by Blucher's orders Ziethen was to march his troops southwest and join the Prussian assault on the village. Reiche, who had just returned from a reconnaissance of his own, during the course of which he had formally promised immediate support to the officers of the Nassau forces engaged at Papelotte, tried to protest, but his commander signaled to the vanguard to turn for Plancenoit. Among the exhausted Allied troops deployed along the chemin d'Ohain, men who had withstood the bombardment of the Grande Batterie for hours and hours and were finding it increasingly difficult to stave off the infiltrations of enemy skirmishers, the sight of yet another Prussian column turning away from them and heading south as though withdrawing caused consternation.
Meanwhile, Muffling and Reiche continued the discussion with Ziethen, pleading with him to change his mind. Both of them were aware that Prussian reinforcements were indispensable to Wellington; moreover, Muffling knew that the duke was already on the verge of exasperation over the lack of Prussian support, that in general the British officers knew nothing about the action at Plancenoit, and that the Prussian army, despite all its efforts, was in danger of losing face before its ally. Faced with their insistence, Ziethen eventually assumed responsibility for ignoring the order to go to Bulow's aid and proceeding according to the original plan. His columns resumed their march toward Papelotte, and soon they began to engage the French skirmishers who were once again putting heavy pressure on the exhausted Nassauers: The
tirailleurs
had penetrated the perimeter of Papelotte and driven the defenders out of Smohain.
Ziethen's corps could not have started marching before two o'clock in the afternoon, and the column it formed on the narrow, muddy lane was so long, and so slowed down by sheer numbers and bad terrain, that in fact only its vanguard arrived in time to go into action before nightfall; only the three regiments of Steinmetz's First Brigade took part in the combat, and they had taken such losses at Ligny two days before that the three of them together could not field even four thousand muskets. But these newly arrived troops, supported by several artillery batteries, were nonetheless more than sufficient to stop Durutte's advance, all the more so because one of that general's two brigades had just been sent in the direction of La Haye Sainte to take part in the final offensive against the center of Wellington's line. Durutte was left with only four battalions, perhaps fifteen hundred muskets, and these had no chance of standing against the fresh forces deployed by the Prussians.
In the confusion of twilight, and in a part of the battlefield as thick with woods and hedges as the area around Papelotte, there was no lack of further incidents involving "friendly fire." As they were advancing toward Smohain in open order, the Prussians, suddenly seeing a mass of soldiers, apparently wearing French uniforms, running toward them, opened fire at once on their presumed assailants. In reality, these men were Nassauers fleeing from Smohain, and Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar was in their midst, trying to bring some order among them. When he realized that the troops firing on him and his men were Prussians, the prince galloped off in search of their commander and was fortunate enough to come across General von Ziethen almost at once. Verbally assaulted by a foreign officer in excellent German, and unaware that he was speaking to a prince, Ziethen took offense and replied curtly, "My friend, it is not my fault if your men are dressed like Frenchmen."
On the high ground above Papelotte, the last regiment of Steinmetz's brigade, the First Westphalian
Landwehr,
was advancing with its skirmishers out ahead, moving toward the line held by Pack's men. The latter were so nervous that they too, seeing a large number of unknown troops bearing down upon them, opened fire without further ado. But the officer in command of the first patrol quickly managed to get himself recognized, and before long, the Prussians were shaking hands with Pack's Scotsmen and Best's Hanoverians. The junction of the two Allied armies had finally been accomplished. Without losing time, the guns of one of Ziethen's horse artillery batteries mounted the crest and took up positions alongside Wellington's battalions, while two other batteries deployed a few hundred yards from Smohain and began firing point-blank at the buildings that the
tirailleurs
had just occupied.
The French disbanded under this unexpected fire, but Durutte, a tough warrior, managed to get his men under control, and a new, bloody combat erupted amid the enclosures, hedges, and tree-shaded lanes around Smohain. The Brandenburgers of the Twelfth Regiment were resupplied with ammunition before going into action. Private Johann Karl Hechel later recalled, "Each of us received 80 cartridges, borrowed from another unit's munitions wagon, because ours had got bogged down far to the rear. We ate a few bites there, on our feet, and then we went forward to meet the enemy." While they proceeded along the road to Smohain, taking cover behind the row of poplars that bordered it, the regiment's skirmishers were targeted from behind by the men of the Westphalian
Landwehr,
who had mistaken them for French troops; advancing farther, the skirmishers found the enemy stationed along the final stretch of road—a sunken lane that descended toward the village—drove them off after a short, sharp clash, and burst in among the first houses of Smohain.
Hechel jumped a low hedge, looked around, and saw many wounded men lying on the ground. One was an enemy soldier, unable to move, who kept crying out a single word,
"Italiano! Italiano!"
Hechel, the son of a schoolteacher, spoke to the man in French and asked him if there were more of his comrades up ahead, to which the other replied,
"Oui, Monsieur."
More Prussian soldiers arrived and wanted to finish off the poor fellow with their bayonets, but Hechel told them to leave him alone; the Frenchman clung to him and kissed his hand. Advancing among scattered corpses, Hechel saw a dead Prussian sergeant with a gold chain hanging from his breast pocket. He bent down to seize this prize, and at that moment a musket ball whizzed past his ear.
The hand of the Lord is upon me,
thought the devout Protestant, as a familiar Bible verse came into his mind almost immediately: "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?"
Returning to the sunken lane, Hechel took up a position among the skirmishers, who were engaged in a lively firefight with a French unit stationed a stone's throw away. Hechel joined in until he felt a sudden pain in his lower abdomen; his eyes glazed over, and he staggered, crying out, "Comrades, I'm wounded!" Two men swiftly caught him under the arms and carried him to the rear; "a third picked up my knapsack and followed us. He didn't at all mind getting away from the firing." An officer ran over to them and asked where they were going. "It's not true that this man is wounded," he exclaimed, because no blood could be seen. The men lowered Hechel to a sitting position and unbuttoned his pants; blood and intestines came pouring out. With a horrified gesture, the officer ordered Hechel's two comrades to carry him to safety. "As for you," he said to the man holding Hechel's knapsack, "throw that thing down and get back to your post!" Hechel's account bears witness to the stubbornness with which Durutte's men (among them the ex-prisoners of the Eighty-fifth Ligne) continued to resist, even in that hour of extremity, still defending the ground that they and the enemy had fought over all day long; but the disproportion between the two forces was such that the inevitable outcome of the battle could be only a matter of time.
At Le Caillou farm, where Napoleon's imperial equipment and all his baggage had stopped, his worried valet, Marchand, was listening to the rumble of artillery and trying to deduce from it the progress of the battle when Ali the Mameluke, one of the emperor's most devoted servants, came galloping up, looking for something for his master to eat. Ali, who was in reality a quite normal Frenchman, a former employee in a notary's office, stopped briefly, barely long enough to tell Marchand "It looks bad" and declare that the Prussians were arriving on the battlefield, before putting spurs to his horse and galloping away. Seized by evil premonitions, Marchand sought out General Fouler, the director of the imperial stable. The general told Marchand not to repeat their conversation to anyone, but had it been up to him, the emperor's baggage and belongings would not have been allowed to remain so close to the battlefield. Only an order from the emperor could move them, however, and Marchand took solace in the thought that the emperor's personal carriage, filled with gold and diamonds, was even farther forward, near La Belle Alliance, and was someone else's responsibility.
A
ll the eyewitness accounts left by men who were in the Allied infantry squares between six and seven in the afternoon greatly resemble one another, and together they give the impression that Wellington's line would simply have collapsed, without the need of a French infantry attack, had the intense artillery bombardment gone on half an hour longer. In fact, however, the French batteries were using up their last rounds of canister, and they would not have been able to keep firing for another half hour. In the morning, no 6-pounder gun had been accompanied by more than three caissons of munitions, enough for a couple of hours of sustained fire. When La Haye Sainte fell and all available guns were hastily brought forward, most of the caissons were probably already empty. The enormous expenditure of ammunition on the part of the French artillery in the last moments was not made, and could not have been made, with a view to sweeping aside the British and German infantry; the aim was only to weaken the enemy as much as possible in anticipation of the final attack. The junior officers in the middle of the tumult may not have known this, but Napoleon knew it, and Wellington knew it equally well; otherwise, he would not have been able to remain so calm while the shattered bodies of his generals and aides-de-camp fell all about him in an unprecedented slaughter.
The emperor had to attack, and he decided to do so all along the line and with his entire infantry, including those troops who had fought all day and had now reached the limits of their endurance. On the left, Reille's corps was fully engaged in the siege of Hougoumont, and even though there was little hope of capturing the chateau, the
tirailleurs
ensconced in the park had to maintain pressure on the exhausted garrison. Farther to the right, d'Erlon's regiments, overwhelmed and routed by the British heavy cavalry, had had several hours in which to catch their breath and reorder their ranks, and a large number of stragglers had been rounded up and compelled to go back into line. On the main road, the French threw together a picket line made up of a few infantrymen and mounted lancers. Corporal Canler, one of the pickets, later recalled, "[My comrades and I were] ordered to allow only wounded men to pass through; all soldiers still able to bear arms were to be turned back. In less than an hour, we stopped more than 400 fugitives."
After the rout of d'Erlon's corps, the men in Kempt's and Pack's brigades had remained unoccupied for some time, and many of them left the line with impunity and busied themselves with "rifling the pockets of the dead, and perhaps the wounded," as a British officer remarked. At least one colonel, troubled by such a breakdown in discipline, had to resort to the flat of his sword to persuade his recalcitrant men to return to their posts. The same officers—at least those who knew French—began to read the letters they found in the knapsacks of their dead enemies. Contrary to their expectations, the British officers found that these letters "developed a great deal of proper and good feeling, and were, upon the whole, not only interesting, but argued an advanced state of morality and education which quite surprised us." A few officers even conversed with the French wounded who had been left lying on the ground in enemy territory; some of them "had just been liberated from our prison-ships by the closing of the war in 1814. They were exceedingly cautious in disclosing their sentiments on the state of affairs, not knowing how the day might end."
This interlude, however, did not last long, and soon Kempt's and Pack's troops were obliged to deal with the pressure exerted by a growing number of skirmishers advancing into no-man's-land, while on the low ground at the bottom of the slope the divisions of Quiot and Marcognet once more deployed into attack formation. Farther to the left, Donzelot's division, in spite of the losses it had suffered, still had enough
tirailleurs
inside the enclosure of La Haye Sainte to support the offensive with its fire. Finally, while one brigade of Durutte's division was engaged to the limit in the struggle for Papelotte, the other, commanded by Pegot, was almost intact, and the emperor ordered it to move up alongside La Haye Sainte in order to take part in the coming attack.
All along the front, from Hougoumont to Papelotte, swarms of
tirailleurs
went forward one more time, no longer bent only on engaging the enemy skirmishers and defending their own positions, but once again trying to drive off their adversaries and clear the way for the attack columns. All the artillery batteries that still had some ammunition in their caissons kept up their fire on the ridge as long as they could, and all the infantry battalions formed up shoulder to shoulder behind their officers and prepared to advance against the enemy positions. Given the situation, the number of men who participated in the final offensive is impossible to calculate, because virtually all the men in I and II Corps who were still capable of holding a musket were required to take part.
Yet no offensive could have succeeded with only such worn-down troops as these. After taking fire for several hours, even units that had suffered a limited number of casualties and continued to maintain a perfectly ordered appearance would have experienced a significant loss in morale. These troops had few cartridges remaining in their pouches, and little would have been required—a shell exploding in their midst, a cry of panic coming from who knew where, the impression that other units were retreating—to stop their reluctant advance in its tracks, despite all the exhortations of their officers, and to cause the men to start disbanding and turning back.
Only with fresh reserves, therefore, could an offensive be carried out successfully; for this reason, the last attack ordered by Napoleon in the evening of the Battle of Waterloo is known as the attack of the Imperial Guard. The emperor knew he could achieve the decisive breakthrough he had sought from the beginning only by sending in those Guard battalions that constituted the last fresh reserves available to him. With this in mind, clearly the Prussian advance on Plancenoit, despite being stalled, made a decisive contribution to reducing the probabilities of a Napoleonic victory. That morning, the emperor, envisioning a breakthrough, had kept at his disposal a strategic reserve of thirty-seven battalions; by evening, twenty-five of them were engaged in the combat with the Prussians and one was left behind at Le Caillou. Napoleon had eleven remaining battalions, and of these, six were Middle Guard and five Old Guard, a total of some six thousand men, all veterans. Half an hour earlier, a little more than a thousand of their comrades had driven the Prussians out of Plancenoit. Napoleon aimed his remaining forces at Wellington's center.
Not long before, the men of the Imperial Guard had remained at their leisure on both sides of the Brussels road, waiting for their moment to come, as it had in so many other battles, most recently the one at Ligny two days before. They had not been completely out of danger, because there was no place on the battlefield where a cannonball did not arrive from time to time, and a man could be cut down while peacefully sitting on his knapsack and smoking his pipe. In the early afternoon, shortly after the grenadiers of the Old Guard had taken up their positions, a ball had killed one of their
vivandieres,
a woman from Elba named Maria, who had taken up with a Guard veteran on the island and wished to accompany him in his new adventure. Despite such risks, there had nevertheless been precious little for the men of the Guard to do all afternoon; they had even had time to dig a grave for Maria, bury her, and mark the spot with a wooden cross and a nailed-on epitaph. By evening, their hour had come.