The Battle (9 page)
Authors: Alessandro Barbero
"VERY FEW OF US WILL LIVE TO SEE THE CLOSE OF THIS DAY"
T
he day was just beginning to dawn. Inside a radius of a few kilometers, almost 150,000 men—blue with cold, bristling with several days' growth of beard, dressed in wet uniforms whose colors were already starting to fade, and encrusted with mud from head to foot—were bustling around the remains of their bonfires, trying to revive the embers doused by the rain. All the wood, straw, and water that could be found in the area, in the villages and at the farms, had already been conveyed to the bivouacs; fences had been torn down, doors and windows burned, stables and haylofts emptied. Slowly, blood began to flow back into extremities, and even men who had awakened stiff with cold and unable to move gradually got back on their feet. The men dried and cleaned the barrels and flintlocks of their muskets, then fired them to be certain they were back in working order; the rattle of isolated gunfire that rang out everywhere reminded the more seasoned warriors of a skirmish between outposts. Hygienic conditions must have been frightful, and yet we know that many soldiers—perhaps more than would be the case today—took the opportunity of those first hours of light to shave and perhaps even to put on a fresh shirt, "because soldiers," as a French officer said, "don't like to fight when they're dirty."
Captain Verner of the Seventh Hussars had spent the whole night in the saddle, as had all the members of his squadron, sitting astride their horses in a field of rye so tall they almost disappeared in it; from this advanced position, the captain and his comrades were charged with covering the right wing of the Allied army This order had mightily displeased the captain when he received it the previous evening, because his men had been severely engaged during the retreat from Quatre Bras. Naturally, however, he'd obeyed without a word and followed the regiment's sergeant major in the pitch dark to the place where the picket would take up its position. After having remained there all night, on horses sinking up to their knees in mud and with rainwater running into their boots, the Hussars were glad of the dawn, but then it revealed to them that their position was, in fact, only a few meters from their own front line and so their all-night vigil had been perfectly useless. Verner declared that he had never seen his men so weary and depressed, not even during the hardest moments of the war in Spain.
In the center of Wellington's deployment, the regiments of Sir Colin Halkett's brigade were trying to shake off their nocturnal torpor. The men of the Thirtieth Regiment had eaten no warm food for three days. The day before, they had started to cook their rations during a halt in the retreat, but almost at once the march began again in great haste, and they had poured out the soup and meat in the fields. Since then, no supply wagon had caught up with them, and so they had been compelled to face the night without anything to eat, except for whatever remained of the three and a third pounds of bread issued to each of them two days before. In the morning, the regiment's officers realized that their men—most of whom had been under fire for the first time at Quatre Bras—were "almost petrified with cold, many could not stand, and some were quite stupefied."
Farther left, the men of Sir Denis Pack's brigade—also known as the Scottish Brigade—were no better off. "Men and officers, with their dirty clothes, and chins unshorn, had rather a disconsolate look in the morning," reported one. Many officers who had been wounded two days before at Quatre Bras but had refused to abandon their men "were unable to hold out any longer, and were persuaded to go to Brussels about eight o'clock in the morning." In case they should not survive the battle, those who remained wrote their last wills in pencil on slips of paper and entrusted them to their wounded comrades. "Kempt's and Pack's brigades had got such a mauling on the 16th, that they thought it as well to have all straight. The wounded officers shook hands, and departed for Brussels."
General Desales, the I Corps artillery commander, had yielded his lodgings to his superior officer, Count d'Erlon, and had therefore spent the night in bivouac drenched to the skin. Eager to change his clothes and put on dry linen, the general wandered among the artillery wagons until he found an open, abandoned coach, climbed in immediately, disrobed, and put on whatever dry items he could find in his bags. Desales was famous for having constructed bridges over the Danube in record time during Napoleon's Wagram campaign. As a result of his service, he was raised to the rank of baron and granted an estate worth four thousand francs a year. Like many other French officers, Desales had adapted fairly well to the return of the Bourbons in 1814; he had, after all, been born at Versailles, the son of a former servant of the royal family. ("I sucked in love for the Bourbons with my mother's milk, and besides, when I was a child, I saw them every day") Napoleon's unexpected return and Louis XVIII's precipitous flight had convinced Desales that he should present himself to the emperor and ask to reenter his service on condition that he be allowed to keep the general's rank to which he had been promoted after the emperor's abdication. Napoleon, who very much needed technical experts, recognized Desales's rank, and the general commanded the forty-six guns of I Corps's artillery.
On the ridge behind the Papelotte farm at the extreme left of the Allied line, the three Hussar regiments of Sir Hussey Vivian's brigade were laboriously getting themselves back in order after a disastrous night, during which their horses, frightened by the thunderclaps and the lightning, had prevented everyone from catching as much as a wink of sleep. The officers of the Tenth Hussars took refuge in a small farmhouse, lit a fire in the chimney, and stood about naked as their uniforms dried. The prince regent was the honorary colonel of this cavalry regiment, which was at the time quite fashionable and known to London gossips as "the Prince's Dolls"; its select company included the Duke of Rutland's son, the Earl of Carlisle's son, and the grandsons of four other lords. But all the officers were new to the regiment, and so they hardly knew one another. The previous year, Colonel George Quentin, commander of the Tenth, had appeared before a court-martial, accused of cowardice in the face of the enemy All the officers in the regiment at the time backed up this accusation; nevertheless, Quentin was acquitted, and afterward the officers were transferred en masse. But the colonel wasn't exactly popular among his new officers, either. When they were putting their clothes back on, one of them, Captain Wood, noticed with satisfaction that "Old Quentin" had burned the soles of his boots and was having great trouble getting them on his feet again.
At the chateau of Hougoumont, abandoned the previous day by proprietor and peasant alike, Private Matthew Clay of the Third Foot Guards began searching through the empty buildings, looking for something to eat. He found a piece of stale bread and a boiling-pot with a pig's head in it, but the meat wasn't completely cooked, and Clay found it too revolting even to taste. After consuming the bread, he decided to adjust his clothing. Like all his comrades, he was soaking wet, but the previous day he'd come across the corpse of a German soldier and had had the foresight to remove the dead man's underwear, so now he could at least put on something dry. He changed his undershirt and underpants, slipped back into his still-damp red coat, and went looking for a bit of dry straw to sit on while he waited for his orders.
The men of the Eighty-fifth Ligne
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had spent the night in the mud, with no shelter from the rain. Because it had been formed in the Normandy port towns of Granville and Cherbourg, the Eigvcvchty-fifth included a great many former prisoners of war, men who had been captured in Spain and subsequently released from the hellish pontoons, the prison-barges where the British segregated enemy captives. In the opinion of Captain Chapuis, none of these veterans could wait to come to grips with the Inglisman and pay them back for the mistreatment suffered at their hands; the men of the 85th Ligne, Chapuis thought, would sooner die than be taken prisoner a second time. As he looked around that morning, however, the captain could discern little of the combative spirit that had animated the troops when they set out for the war. At roll call, the gloomy silence in the ranks was a sign that the miserable night had left the men exhausted and that they would need a few hours of genuine rest before they could march against the enemy.
Sir Augustus Frazer, commander of the Allied horse artillery, slept under a roof in the village of Waterloo and arose feeling fairly well rested. At the first light of dawn, he sat down and wrote a long letter to his wife, in which he gave her an account of what had happened at Quatre Bras and tried to imagine what would take place later that day. Occasionally, his distress at the losses recently suffered by his troops broke through his confiding, serene tone: "Our own wounded we brought off on cavalry horses, except such as could not be found in the standing corn, poor fellows! In these scenes, not in the actual rencontre, one sees the miseries of war. I saw Henry Macleod last night, free from fever and pain, and doing well. He has three pike stabs in the side, a graze in the head, and a contusion on the shoulder. Poor Cameron I hear is dead, but I am unwilling to believe it.—Adieu. In all these strange scenes, my mind is with you, but it is tranquil and composed, nor is there reason why it should be otherwise. All will be very well. God bless you."
In Captain Mercer's troop, a corporal sent in search of ammunition returned instead with a cart full of food and drink. After distributing and consuming the rum on the spot, the gunners put some oatmeal on the boil and improvised a porridge they called "stirabout." When Mercer saw that the cart contained meat as well, he refused to eat the gunners' pap and gave orders to prepare a soup. As Mercer's officers waited for their meal, they too speculated about what would happen that morning. No one could exclude the possibility that the Allied troops would continue their retreat in a little while, heading north along the main road to Brussels just as they had done the previous day, with the French hard on their heels. Since he had nothing to do, Mercer took a walk around the cavalry bivouacs, listening to the soldiers' chatter: "Some thought the French were afraid to attack us, others that they would do so soon, others that the Duke would not wait for it, others that he would, as he certainly would not allow them to go to Brussels." After a while, the captain returned to his battery, hoping that the soup would be ready, only to learn that the order to stand to arms had been given and the soldiers had thrown everything away.
A little to the rear of Mercer's position were the fusiliers of the Second Battalion of the Ninety-fifth Regiment. Having received permission to plunder the surrounding farms, they broke up whatever wood they found and built a fire that would serve to dry their clothes and cook the few farm animals the peasants had left behind. Upon entering a farmyard, a group of fusiliers found the body of one of their comrades and immediately concluded that he had been poisoned, although it is much more probable that he had simply drunk himself to death. Beside themselves with rage, the fusiliers began systematically to destroy everything on the farm. They went down into the cellar, broke open the casks, and filled their canteens with wine. Then, since the dead man belonged to a company just arrived from England and fitted out with new uniforms, while their company had been in Flanders for more than a year and their uniforms were reduced to tatters, the soldiers agreed to strip the corpse and divide the deceased's clothing.
In the fields near La Belle Alliance, the soldiers of the Twenty-eighth Ligne, having disassembled, dried, and oiled their muskets and changed their flintlocks, were preparing a meal. The previous evening, as they scoured the area, they had seized a sheep, which they prudently decided to keep in reserve for the following day. A corporal who had been an apprentice butcher before enlisting slaughtered the animal, skinned it, and chopped it into pieces. Then the meat was put on the boil, together with a certain amount of flour, which another corporal, Canler, had found who knows where. Barely eighteen years old, Canler had known no other life except the army: The son of a soldier, he had lived with his father in the field, and at fourteen he had signed up as a drummer boy. Although a survivor of many bad soups, Canler noted that this one was particularly disgusting, because there was no salt and the cook had had the bright idea of adding a handful of gunpowder for flavor. Nevertheless, the men were so hungry that they all ate their soup, including the company captain and lieutenant, who came up and claimed their rightful portions.
A commissariat wagon loaded with gin stopped behind the Seventy-third Regiment's position, and two men from each company went to draw the gin ration for their unit. Private Tom Morris was one of them, and while he was waiting his turn someone pointed out to him a gigantic cavalry soldier, from the Second Life Guard, who was commanding a lot of space and guzzling vast quantities of strong drink. Morris observed him admiringly, for this was the famous Shaw, one of the best prizefighters in England. When Morris returned to his company, he discovered that the gin ration had been calculated to supply all the men whose names were on the rolls, without subtracting those whom the carnage at Quatre Bras had killed or put in the hospital. As a result, after the gin rations were distributed, the private was left with a goodly amount of liquor. Morris, who was not yet twenty years old, and Sergeant Burton, who was over fifty, took advantage of their opportunity and prepared themselves a double ration of grog. Then Burton ordered his comrade to put a little gin aside for after the battle; Morris, however, considered this idea not worth the trouble. "Very few of us will live to see the close of this day," he objected. But the old sergeant had a presentiment of good fortune: "Tom, I'll tell you what it is: there is no shot made yet for either you or me."