The Battle (7 page)
Authors: Alessandro Barbero
T
he minor armies on the Allied side—those of the Dutch-Belgian kingdom of the Netherlands, the electorate of Hanover, and the two duchies of Brunswick and Nassau—provided nearly two thirds of the troops under Wellington's command and shared one characteristic: They had all been constituted—or reconstituted—very recently. Belgium and Holland, annexed to France by Napoleon, had regained their independence only in 1814; later that year, the Congress of Vienna amalgamated them into a single kingdom. Its new army could count on a fairly extensive recruitment pool, because the Low Countries had furnished Napoleon with the obligatory annual conscript levies, and a great many Dutch and Belgian officers had made their careers in the armies of the revolution and the empire. By absorbing these veterans, the army of the Netherlands secured for itself a cadre of excellent officers; however, they had fought under Napoleon's orders for too long not to arouse some suspicions about their current loyalties. Indeed, fears of this sort are understandable when one considers such biographies as that of Jean-Baptiste van Merlen, who commanded an Allied cavalry brigade at Waterloo: At the age of fifteen, he volunteered to join the Belgian revolutionaries in their struggle against Austrian domination; after fleeing to France, he enlisted in the French army, becoming a second lieutenant at nineteen; he was a veteran of the Peninsular War in Spain, where he gained distinction—fighting against the British, no less—as a cavalry commander; and in 1812 he was promoted to general and named a baron of the empire. Like many other Belgian and Dutch officers at Waterloo, Major General van Merlen found himself going into battle for the first time against the army in which he had served all his life.
The armies of Hanover and Brunswick had been reconstituted in 1813, after the two principalities regained their independence from France. Each consisted of recruits commanded by professional soldiers who had fought under the British in Spain and by officers and noncommissioned officers from the former Napoleonic Kingdom of Westphalia, which had been dissolved in 1813. At the time of Napoleon's return from Elba, Hanover was still in the process of organizing a
Landwehr
militia alongside its regular troops; three months later, the task had been rushed to completion. The troops fielded by both the Hanoverians and the Brunswickers in 1815 were rather young and short on experience. The Brunswickers in particular, despite their menacing black uniforms and the death's heads that adorned their shakos, struck the English officers as excessively young.("They were all perfect children," Captain Cavalie Mercer observed.) The average age of the company commanders in the army of Brunswick was twenty-eight, and their battalion commanders averaged thirty, both very youthful by the standards of the age. Moreover, because of grave losses suffered at Quatre Bras, several Brunswick battalions were commanded by captains, and one of the brigades by a major, on the day of the battle.
The mercenary King's German Legion (KGL) was quite different, however. In 1803, after the French invaded Hanover, many soldiers and officers of the Hanoverian army fled to England, where King George caused them to be formed into a unit and maintained in his personal service. In the course of the following years, the KGL had fought under Wellington in Spain and attained such a high degree of professionalism that it was considered equal in every way to the best British units. Yet the effort to assimilate the KGL into His Majesty's army had not been completely successful: Its troops wore English uniforms and were trained, at least in part, according to the British manual of arms, but orders continued to be given in German. Assimilation was more advanced at the officers' level: In 1815 many junior officers were English, while some German officers originally attached to the KGL held command positions in the British army. Karl von Alten ("Sir Charles Alten" to the English), for example, commanded a division at Waterloo.
The experience of the Nassau troops was similar to that of the KGL, but it had been gained on the other side. For years, Napoleon had maintained two infantry regiments recruited from this Rhineland duchy. Incorporated into the French army of Spain, the Nassauers acquitted themselves well. In December 1813, after Wellington invaded southern France, one of these regiments—the Second Nassau, commanded by Colonel von Kruse—deserted to the British; a year and a half later, it was still part of the Allied army in Belgium. The French disarmed and interned the other regiment, the First Nassau, in Spain, but in the course of 1814, the men of this regiment returned home. Kruse had reconstituted the regiment around a nucleus of these veterans, recruiting army volunteers as well as a militia battalion. A third regiment, called the Orange-Nassau, had been recruited by the Prince of Orange, whose principality bordered the duchy of Nassau. Like the Second Nassau, this unit was also built around officers who had served Napoleon in Spain.
All told, these regiments accounted for more than seven thousand men—more than a tenth of Wellington's army—but they by no means constituted a discrete, coherent entity For example, after the Congress of Vienna gave the Prince of Orange-Nassau the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Orange-Nassau Regiment was incorporated into the Netherlands army and wore its uniform. The Second Nassau, though continuing to wear the green uniform of the duchy, also entered into the service of the Netherlands. Therefore these two regiments were united into a single brigade (officially part of the army of the Netherlands, even though the brigade's troops were actually German) and placed under the command of Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. By contrast, the First Nassau, which was mostly composed of barely trained recruits, had joined the army only a few days before the beginning of the campaign and constituted an independent force under the command of Kruse, who in the meantime had been promoted to general. Thus the organizational complexity of Wellington's army precisely reflected the heterogeneity of the political coalition from which it had sprung.
"AS BAD A NIGHT AS I EVER WITNESSED"
L
ike all his comrades, Sergeant William Wheeler, of the Fifty-first Light Infantry, was soaked through, "as wet as if we had been plunged over head in a river." His regiment had camped for the night in a rye field on the extreme right of the Allied line, behind the chateau of Hougoumont, in a no-man's-land where there was always the possibility that an enemy patrol might suddenly appear out of the darkness. The officers, therefore, had forbidden their men to light fires and wrap themselves up in blankets, and so the soldiers remained seated on their knapsacks under the cold rain all night long, smoking incessantly in an attempt to keep warm and stay awake. Wheeler later wrote to his family, "You often blamed me for smoking when I was at home last year but I must tell you if I had not had a good stock of tobacco this night I must have given up the Ghost."
Other factors helped the men of the Fifty-first make it through the night. The previous evening, a man from the nearest village had come to their bivouac, selling bread, cheese, and the local juniper brandy. As it happened, during the march one of the soldiers in Wheeler's squad had picked up a moneybag dropped by a Belgian light cavalryman and had seen fit not to return it. Well aware that such opportunities were not infrequent in wartime, Wheeler's veterans had already agreed to share whatever booty should come their way, and so that night they were able to buy themselves a variety of comforts. Despite this abundance, however, the incessant rain eventually put all of them in a bad humor. Those who had fought in Spain remembered that many great battles had been preceded by storms and thunder and lightning, and all such struggles had been victories; but not even this provided much consolation to men soaked with rainwater and shivering from cold. The only real satisfaction was the knowledge that the enemy was suffering the same misery.
Wheeler and his men had already been drinking and smoking for a while when Sergeant Mauduit of Napoleon's Imperial Guard, also drenched and exhausted, finally arrived at his bivouac. The Guard's march that day had been turbulent and undisciplined. The men had broken into houses, looking for food, and had stopped and plundered supply wagons, laughing in the faces of the outnumbered gendarmes assigned to maintain order along the road: General Radet, commander of the military police, was so disturbed by this behavior that he tendered his resignation that very evening. When night fell, the troops were still on the march and far from the villages where they were supposed to be billeted. In the darkness and the driving rain, some units lost their commanders and no longer knew what direction to march in. The road was so muddy that many men tried to take shortcuts through the fields, only to get lost and wander all night long in search of their units. The veterans of the Guard cursed their commanders, accusing them of not knowing what they were doing; more than one soldier, suspecting the top brass of sympathizing with the Bourbon monarchy, muttered "Treason!" At midnight, Sergeant Mauduit's regiment arrived at a farmyard and received the welcome order to stop there for the night after a heavy day of marching. The men's trousers and overcoats were encrusted with mud. Many had even lost their shoes and were marching barefoot.
In the fields behind the chateau of Hougoumont, Captain Cavalie Mercer was trying to sleep in the field tent he shared with the four other officers in his battery. When he realized that closing his eyes was impossible because the rainwater was dripping through the saturated tent, he and his lieutenant left their comrades and found a hedge that offered a little more shelter. Mercer's companion had an umbrella with him, brought from his home. This piece of equipment had caused him to be the object of merciless ragging, but now it turned out that he'd been right after all; sheltered by the umbrella, the two managed to make a fire and sat down to smoke a tranquil cigar. After a while a German soldier, a straggler or a deserter, passed by and lit his pipe at their fire. The two officers persuaded him to let them have a hen that he'd stolen from some barnyard and immediately put their prize in a cooking pot. Quite soon, however, the other officers exited the tent and claimed their portions, and the meal, shared among so many, turned out to be distinctly frugal.
Captain Duthilt, an aide-de-camp to one of the brigade commanders in Count d'Erlon's corps, watched the troops making camp for the night along the main road, on the heights above the village of Plancenoit. Men and horses were entirely covered with black, oily sludge, which the captain thought could be explained by the nearby coal mines and the fact that the road was used to transport the mineral. Bread was distributed, and in the village—which had been abandoned by its inhabitants—the men cooked their rice as best they could; but there wasn't enough to go around, and as for wine and brandy, the soldiers had to do without them. The day before, in fact, I Corps's supply train had been seized by a sudden panic; many drivers had fled, and many wagons had been plundered. In the midst of a surreal landscape of burst baggage and opened trunks, Captain Duthilt had found his valise, ripped open with a knife and completely empty; he had lost his gear, his papers, and the little money he possessed, and his general and the other aide found themselves in the same situation.
Captain Cotter of the Sixty-ninth Regiment, camped on the ridge behind La Haye Sainte, had given up trying to sleep. The night was too cold—a steady, frigid wind whipped the ridge—and the rain had so flooded the marshy ground that one sank ankle-deep in mud with every step; it seemed to Cotter that lying down in such a bog was out of the question. In his efforts to keep warm, the captain walked back and forth all night, examining the sky for the first signs of dawn, which with all its uncertainties would at least put an end to this particular torture. Inevitably, there came into his mind (and into the minds of who knows how many other British officers that night) the famous scene in Shakespeare's
Henry V
in which the two encamped armies, the night before the Battle of Agincourt, await the morning light; Captain Cotter found himself repeating, more and more nervously, the dauphin's words: "Will it never be day?"
The Second Light Battalion of the King's German Legion, stationed around La Haye Sainte farm, had a somewhat easier time of it than their comrades who were camped out in the open. The rifleman Friedrich Lindau, nonetheless, was mightily displeased with his company's assignment to the orchard, where there was nary a dry spot to be found: "It kept on raining, the orchard was full of mud, and no one was comfortable. Some leaned against a tree or part of the wall, while others sat on their knapsacks; lying down was impossible." Having heard that there was wine in the farmhouse cellar, he went down to see for himself and found a half-full bottle. He filled his canteen with its contents and went out in search of his two brothers, who were serving in other units. As soon as he reappeared, however, his comrades surrounded him and drank all his wine, and Lindau, though he descended into the cellar and refilled his canteen several times, never succeeded in his plan to share a little drink with his brothers. In compensation, all his comrades drank their fill in his company, and the wine helped them bear the night in the muddy orchard.
Not far away, the men of the Seventh Hussars were on their feet next to their horses and passing "as bad a night as I ever witnessed," as Sergeant Cotton later recalled. "We cloaked, throwing a part over the saddle, holding by the stirrup leather, to steady us if sleepy; to lie down with water running in streams under us, was not desirable, and to lie amongst the horses not altogether safe." Finally, one of the Hussars—a comrade of Cotton's, Robert Fisher, a tailor by trade— proposed that they go in search of something they could lie on. Sergeant Cotton went off and returned a little later with a bundle of leaves and stalks obtained from Mont-Saint-Jean farm. The Hussars strewed the cuttings on the ground and lay down on their improvised bed. "The poor tailor," Cotton reported, "had his thread of life snapped short on the following day."
Major Trefcon, chief of staff in a division of the French II Corps, spent a large part of the night sheltered from the rain in an abandoned barn while working with his commander, General Bachelu. The two men received reports from their colonels and brigade commanders, calculated the number of available troops, and took all the measures necessary for going into battle the following day. Then they ate something, divided a bale of straw, and flung themselves down to sleep. During the night, one of the division's two brigadiers, unable to find other lodgings, sought shelter in the barn, and Trefcon had to share his straw with the newcomer. "The soldiers were no less exhausted than we were," the major observed. "They lay down wherever they could. Most of them simply went to sleep in the mud." The difference between recruits and veterans showed in their ability to arrange for a modicum of comfort, even in those exceptional conditions. Almost all the troops in bivouac that night, of whatever nationality, had a blanket to wrap themselves in (although the Scots of the Forty-second Regiment, the Black Watch, had secretly sold the blankets distributed to them after they disembarked in Flanders), but only a resourceful few, veterans who knew all the tricks, smeared their blankets with mud and slept as though covered by some impermeable fabric.