The Battle (8 page)

TEN

ON THE BRUSSELS ROAD

Sergeant Costello, of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, had suffered a shattered right hand at Quatre Bras, but the cries of the seriously wounded men who were being transported to Brussels in wagons prevented him from sleeping even more than his own suffering did. Searching for a familiar face, a number of people, mostly women, crowded around each vehicle as it passed with its load of wounded. Costello, with his arm in a sling, thought he heard an outburst of Homeric laughter, approached the wagon it seemed to have come from, and asked the men inside to tell their tale. One of them—whom Costello recognized—explained that he had seen a woman he knew well, the wife of a comrade, as she was drawing near the wagon, and had mimicked her husband's voice so well that she mistook him in the darkness. Believing he was her husband, she handed him a bottle of liquor and kept walking anxiously alongside the wagon, trying to get a good look at his face. Finally, the man gave the empty bottle back to her, accompanying it with a wish that her husband might not be wounded at all. The woman's disappointment and anger had been greeted with loud laughter by all the soldiers present, and Costello did not fail to join in their merriment, complimenting his friend on his spirit of initiative.

Soldiers at Waterloo were not infrequently accompanied by their wives, and just about everything imaginable was part of an army's train. When Major Harry Smith landed in Belgium, he was accompanied by his Spanish wife, Juana, a brother who was with him as an army volunteer, two servants, one chambermaid, six horses, and two mules. A certain number of rank-and-file soldiers also had permission to bring with them, and to maintain at the army's expense, their wives and children, who otherwise would have ended up on the street. When the Forty-second—the Black Watch—embarked in Ireland for the voyage to Ostend, every company was allowed to bring along four women, each of whom was entitled to half rations. Having arrived in Flanders, the regiment had to board barges to continue the voyage on the canal, and orders came down limiting each company to only two women. Without much ceremony, the others were returned weeping to a barracks, but they all managed to escape and quickly rejoined their husbands. If the proportions were the same in every regiment, many thousands of women must have followed Wellington's army to Belgium, and many more joined them after the troops disembarked. Jack Parsons, a grenadier in the Seventy-third Regiment, collected a Flemish girl and brought her with him all the way to Waterloo; at dawn on the day of battle, waking from a bad dream and afflicted by dire premonitions, he asked his captain to help him make a will in which he left the girl his back pay, all that he possessed in the world.

In the first days of the campaign, women and children had stayed close to their respective husbands and fathers, sometimes running the same risks as they did. During the retreat from Quatre Bras, some riflemen from the Ninety-fifth found a woman lying dead with a musket ball in her head and a living child in her arms; they gathered up the little boy and carried him along until they found his father and turned his son over to him. But the night before the Battle of Waterloo, the duke ordered all noncombatants sent back behind the lines so as not to interfere with the army's operations. Not everyone obeyed. Elizabeth Watkins, a five-year-old child, claimed to have remained on the field, together with her mother, throughout the battle, helping her tear cloth into strips for bandages; she was still alive, and she still remembered, in 1903. Most of the women and children, however—like most of the other civilians, servants, workmen, and peddlers— thronged the high road in the darkness, headed for the relative safety of Brussels.

In order to be rid of anything that might encumber his army's mobility the following day, Wellington also ordered that all baggage, whether conveyed in wagon trains for the regimental rank and file or privately transported for officers, was to be sent back to Brussels and from there directed to Antwerp. This multitude of vehicles and beasts of burden joined the crowd of refugees who were already packing the road, fleeing from the imminent devastation of what had been, until a few days ago, a tranquil stretch of countryside. Terrified by the soldiers' destructiveness, all the country people in the region had left their homes and hastened into the forest of Soignes, with their pitiful household goods piled on carts and whatever animals had escaped requisitioning. Numerous wagons loaded with bread, victuals, and rum for the troops tried to make their way to the front against the tide of refugees but had to be abandoned in the middle of the road; the horses pulling these wagons had been requisitioned by Wellington's officials from the local peasantry, and in the general confusion the owners of the beasts had managed to reclaim them and run off into the forest. This seems to have been the coup de grace as far as the road was concerned. Soon it was transformed into an immense jam, a mass in which it was almost impossible to move. That night, the men of Sir John Lambert's brigade, on the march from Brussels to Waterloo, had to clear a path for themselves by roughly dumping abandoned or stuck vehicles into the nearest ditches, thus preserving from total strangulation the only line of retreat available to Wellington's army.

ELEVEN

LETTERS IN THE NIGHT

T
he fear that the enemy might resume his march and slip away in the night prevented Napoleon from sleeping. The emperor's servants had prepared a camp bed for him in one of the rooms in the farmhouse of Le Caillou, and a fire was burning in the chimney. Shortly after dinner, the emperor lay down to rest, but before one o'clock he was awake again. Unable to fall back asleep, he went out, accompanied by a single aide-de-camp, reached the bivouac area on foot, and walked along his entire line, examining the horizon. In the intervals between one downpour and the next, the soldiers of both armies had managed to light fires, and thousands of glimmering beacons distinctly marked out their positions in the darkness. Sometime later, Napoleon seemed to recall the scene: "The forest of Soignes looked as though it were in flames; the horizon was aglow with the fires of the bivouacs. The most profound silence reigned." About two-thirty in the morning, when he reached the woods around Hougoumont, the emperor heard the sounds of a column on the march and grew worried; should the enemy withdraw, Napoleon had decided, he would awaken his troops immediately and take up the pursuit in the darkness. But the sounds faded away almost immediately, and the rain started up again, harder than ever.

At least, that was the story the emperor told in his memoirs. Unfortunately, there is no trace of this thrilling nocturnal reconnaissance in the accounts left by his servants, all of whom agree that the emperor did indeed sleep very little, because the traffic along the road was quite noisy and officers were continually arriving at Le Caillou to give reports or request instructions, but nonetheless he remained in the house until morning. Marchand, his valet, saw him walking around undressed, absently trimming his fingernails with a pair of scissors and looking out the window at the rain that continued to thrash the countryside. Around three in the morning, the emperor actually did decide that a reconnaissance was necessary, but he sent one of his orderly officers, General Gourgaud, and he was under the covers again when the general returned to report that the roads were in terrible condition and the ground impracticable because of the rain, so there would be no hurrying to get an early start.

At three in the morning, in his room in the Waterloo inn, the Duke of Wellington was awake, too. He had gotten out of bed a little while before, ordered candles brought to his table, and begun writing many letters. Their tone proves that the duke was well aware of the risks he was running by accepting battle at Waterloo, and that he hadn't yet received the reassuring note in which Blucher promised to join him in force the next day. Wellington wrote a long letter in French to the Due de Berry, brother of King Louis XVIII, who was still in exile in Ghent. The duke advised his correspondent that the French court would do well to go to Antwerp and take refuge in the citadel; that way, should the Allied army be forced to evacuate Belgium, the royal party would be able to board an English ship. Wellington wrote to the governor of Antwerp, ordering him to prepare his fortress for a state of siege and to deny access to everyone but the Bourbons and civilians fleeing from the enemy. He wrote to Sir Charles Stuart, the British ambassador in Brussels, recommending that he see to the maintenance of calm among the numerous English who were in the city: "Let them all prepare to move, but neither in a hurry nor a fright, as all will yet turn out well." Finally, the duke wrote a note to Lady Frances Webster, a young woman in whose intimate company he had spent time during the preceding weeks in Brussels.

Exactly how far their intimacy went has remained a matter of debate ever since. Lady Frances was a charming twenty-two-year-old, married to an officer in the Hussars who publicly betrayed her, and she had quickly learned to avenge herself for her husband's infidelities; on the other hand, she was in the eighth month of a pregnancy, a fact that the duke's biographers have found sufficient to clear him of all suspicion. However, their Victorian zeal seems excessive when one considers that the preceding year, in Paris, Wellington had conducted one love affair with Giuseppina Grassini, a singer at the Opera, and another with Mademoiselle Georges, the most famous actress at the Comedie Franchise, both of whom had already passed through Napoleon's bed.

Whether or not they formed a liaison, the addressee of the last letter Wellington wrote before he called for his horse and set off to rejoin his troops in the pouring rain was Lady Frances Webster: "As I am sending a messenger to Bruxelles, I write to you one line to tell you that I think you ought to make preparations, as should Lord Mountnorris,
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to remove from Bruxelles. We fought a desperate battle on Friday, in which I was successful, though I had but few troops. The Prussians were very roughly handled, and retired in the night, which obliged me to do the same to this place yesterday. The course of the operations may oblige me to uncover Bruxelles for a moment, and may expose that town to the enemy; for which reason I recommend that you and your family should be prepared to move to Antwerp at a moment's notice." It is not at all clear from this letter whether the duke had really made a final, definite decision to give battle, or whether an inner voice was warning him that he would do better to get his army out of there before it was too late.

The sky began to lighten around four o'clock. Napoleon was still at Le Caillou, his fear that the enemy would evacuate his position under cover of night unfounded; several officers sent to reconnoiter, as well as a few spies who had got close to the enemy's bivouacs, confirmed that the English had not moved. The emperor's chief concern was that the bad weather might continue, thus preventing him from pressing his advantage and destroying the army that had been so incautious as to stop and wait for him. But when he saw, low on the horizon, the red disk of the sun beginning to peek through the clouds between one squall and the next, the emperor grew calm, convinced that this dawn heralded a great day "Tonight," he said, "we shall sleep in Brussels."

Among the dispatches that arrived during the night was one written at ten the previous evening, from Marshal Grouchy. He had been charged with pursuing the defeated Prussians and had taken with him most of the troops that had fought at Ligny. The emperor's instincts told him that the Prussians were retreating eastward after their rout, intent on sheltering in the fortresses of Liege and Namur, and that for at least a couple of days they would not be heard from again. But Grouchy's dispatch forced Napoleon to consider a problem he had already decided not to waste time on, for the marshal informed the emperor of his cavalry's reports that at least one of the two Prussian columns had headed north, in the direction of Wavre. To the southeast, however, on the road to Namur, Grouchy's cavalry had also surprised some retreating Prussians and captured wagons and guns. So the marshal was, for the moment, unable to say in what direction the bulk of the Prussian army was marching, but he had no doubt that this information would soon be his. In any case, should it turn out that the forces marching toward Wavre were of any considerable size, Grouchy pledged himself to follow hard on their heels and prevent them from joining Wellington.

The dispatch was dated from Gembloux, a small town northeast of Ligny. In itself, the fact of the marshal's presence there was not at all strange, given that Napoleon himself had ordered him to pursue the Prussians in that direction. Nevertheless, it is unclear how Grouchy thought he could start from Gembloux and be able to stop enemy columns that were marching in the direction of Wavre, since they were necessarily closer than he was to the battlefield at Waterloo. Had Napoleon accorded any importance to those columns and studied the situation on his map, he would have felt some uneasiness. But the emperor was convinced that Blucher, after his defeat at Ligny, would be careful not to risk his already battered army a second time, and he believed that the mere appearance of Grouchy's vanguard in pursuit of the Prussians on the road to Wavre would cause them to accelerate their retreat. Napoleon therefore concluded that there was no need to worry on that score and, serenely confident, did not even bother to send Grouchy a reply.

In the dawning light, Napoleon began to feel weary; too many hours on horseback the previous day, followed by a bad night, were taking their toll. One of his staff officers, Colonel Petiet, had already noticed that the emperor was unable to spend as much time in the saddle as he used to in the past: "As soon as he dismounted from his horse to study maps or listen to reports or send messages, his staff people would set up a crude little wooden table, accompanied by a chair in the same style, and he would remain seated there for long periods of time." It's impossible to know with certainty if at Waterloo Napoleon was suffering from bladder pains, or perhaps from hemorrhoids, as many have hypothesized; but the emperor's physical movements had been a source of alarm to Petiet from the moment he saw him after his return from Elba: "His corpulence, his dull, pallid complexion, and his stiff gait made him seem quite different from the General Bonaparte I had known at the beginning of my career." While day was breaking outside, Napoleon warmed himself by the crackling fire in his room, called for the latest ministerial dispatches from Paris, and grew absorbed in reading them, almost as if by doing so he might drive away all thoughts of the work awaiting him.

The Duke of Wellington had just mounted his horse and was riding out of the village of Waterloo with his entourage when a Prussian officer approached him with a message from Blucher. Wellington asked Baron von Muffling to assist him, and together they deciphered the dispatch, in which Blucher promised to come to the duke's aid with twice as many troops as he had requested. The previous collaboration of the two commands had left much to be desired, and Wellington was inclined to blame the Prussians' slowness for the late warning he'd received of Napoleon's advance. "Blucher picked the fattest man in his army to ride with an express to me, and he took thirty hours to go thirty miles," Wellington remarked. With the latest dispatch, however, the duke had written confirmation that his allies had no intention of abandoning him. Had he doubts about the advisability of giving battle at Waterloo, they must have fallen away at that moment; nevertheless, it remained to be seen whether Blucher would manage to keep his promise, and to keep it within a reasonable amount of time, because the arrival of his reinforcements would mean the difference between victory and defeat.