In approaching this famous action, it is essential to recapitulate
the strategical conditions which determined its result.
I have mentioned them at the outset and again in the middle of this
study; I must repeat them here.
The only chance Napoleon had when he set forward in early June to
attack the allies in Belgium, the vanguard of his enemies (who were all
Europe), was a chance of surprising that vanguard, of striking in
suddenly between its two halves, of thoroughly defeating one or the
other, and then turning to defeat as thoroughly its colleague.
Other chances than this desperate chance he had none; for he was
fighting against odds of very nearly two to one even in his attack upon
this mere vanguard of the armed kings; their total forces were, of
course, overwhelmingly superior.
He did succeed, as we have seen, in striking suddenly in between the
two halves of the allied army in Belgium. He was not as quick as he had
intended to be. There were faults and delays, but he managed, mainly
through the malinformation and misjudgment of Wellington, to deal with
the Prussians unsupported by Wellington's western wing.
He attacked those Prussians with the bulk of his forces; and
although he was outnumbered even upon that field, he defeated the
Prussians at Ligny. But the defeat was not complete. The Prussians were
free to retire northward, and so ultimately to rejoin Wellington. They
took that opportunity, and from the moment they had taken it Napoleon
was doomed.
We have further seen that Grouchy, who had been sent after the
Prussian retreat, might, if he had seen all the possibilities of that
retreat, and had seen them in time, have stepped in between the
Prussians and Wellington, and have prevented the appearance of the
former upon the field of Waterloo.
Had Grouchy done so, Waterloo would not have been the crushing
defeat it was for Napoleon. It would very probably have been a tactical
success for Napoleon.
But, on the other hand, we have no ground for thinking that it would
have been a final and determining success for the Emperor. For if
Wellington had not known quite early in the action that he could count
upon the arrival of the Prussians, he would not have accepted battle.
If, as a fact, he had found the Prussians intercepted, he could have
broken contact and retreated before it was too late.
Had he done so, it would simply have meant that he would later have
effected a junction with his allies, and that in the long-run Napoleon
would still have had to fight an allied army immensely superior to his
own.
All this is as much as to say once more what has been insisted upon
throughout these pages; Waterloo was lost, not upon Sunday, June 18th,
but two days before, when the 63,000 of Napoleon broke and drove back
the 80,000 of Blucher but failed to contain them, failed to drive them
eastward, away from Wellington, or to cause a general surrender, and
failed because the First French Army Corps, under Erlon, a matter of
20,000 men, failed to come up in flank at the critical moment.
We have seen what the effect of that failure was; we have discussed
its causes, and we must repeat the main fact for military history of
all those four days: the breakdown of Napoleon's last desperate venture
turned upon Erlon's useless marching and countermarching between Quatre
Bras and Ligny, two days before the final action of Waterloo was
fought.
This being so, the battle of Waterloo must resolve itself into two
main phases: the first, the beginning of the struggle with Wellington
before the Prussians come up; the second, the main and decisive part of
the action, in which both Prussians and English are combined against
the French army.
This second phase develops continually as the numbers of the
arriving Prussians increase, until it is clinched by the appearance of
Ziethen's corps at the very end of the day, and the break-up of the
French army; this second part is therefore itself capable of
considerable subdivision. But in any large and general view of the
whole action, we must regard it as divided into these two great
chapters, during the first of which is engaged the doubtful struggle
between Napoleon and Wellington; during the second of which the
struggle, no longer doubtful, is determined by the arrival of the
Prussians in flank upon the field.
[Illustration: ELEMENTS OF WATERLOO.]
THE FIRST PART OF THE ACTION
Before the Arrival of the Prussians
The action was to take the form of an assault by Napoleon's forces
against this defensive position held by Wellington. It was the business
of Wellington, although his total force was slightly inferior to the
enemy in numbers,[17] and considerably inferior in guns, to hold that
defensive position until the Prussians should come up in flank. This he
had had word would take place at latest by one or two o'clock. It was
the business of Napoleon to capture the strong outworks, Hougomont and
La Haye Sainte; and, that done, to hammer the enemy's line until he
broke it. That delay in beginning this hammering would be fatal; that
the Prussians were present upon his flank, could arrive in the midst of
the battle, and were both confidently and necessarily expected by his
enemy; that his simple single battle would turn into two increasingly
complex ones, Napoleon could have no idea. Napoleon could see no need
for haste. A long daylight was before him. It was necessary to let the
ground dry somewhat after the terrible rain of the day before if
artillery was to be used effectively; nor did he press his columns,
which were moving into position all through the morning, and which had
not completely deployed even by eleven o'clock.
It was a little after that hour that he dictated to Soult the order
of battle. Its first and effective phrases run as follows:—
“Once the whole army is deployed, that is, at about half-past one,
at the moment when the Emperor shall send the order to Marshal Ney, the
attack is to be delivered. It will have for its object the capture of
the village of Mont St Jean and the cross-roads....”
The remainder of the order sets out forces to be engaged in this
first attack.
The French forces consisted in the IInd Army Corps deployed to the
left or west of the road, the Ist to the right or east of it, and
behind Napoleon, in the centre and in reserve, the VIth Corps and the
Guard.
The plan in the Emperor's mind was perfectly simple. There was to be
no turning of the right nor of the left flank of the enemy, which would
only have the effect of throwing back that enemy east or west. His line
was to be pierced, the village of Mont St Jean which lay on the ridge
of Wellington's position and which overlooks the plateau on every side
was to be carried, and this done Napoleon would be free to decide upon
his next action, according to the nature and extent of the disorder
into which he had thrown the enemy's broken line.
As a fact, Napoleon made a movement before that hour of half-past
one which he had set down in his order for the beginning of the
assault. That movement was a movement against the advanced and
fortified position of Hougomont.
He sent orders to his left, to the body on the east of the high
road, the Second Army Corps, under Reille, to send troops to occupy the
outer gardens, wood, and orchards of the country-house, and at
twenty-five minutes to twelve the first gun fired in support of that
movement was also the first cannonshot of Waterloo.
After a brief artillery duel and exchange of cannonshots between the
height on the French left, which overlooks Hougomont, and the
corresponding height upon the English right, the French infantry began
to march down the slope to occupy the little wood which stands to the
south of the chateau. These four regiments were commanded by the
Emperor's brother Jerome, who was—as we have seen at Quatre
Bras—under the orders of Reille. The clearing of the wood was no very
desperate affair, but it was a difficult one, and it took an hour. The
Germans of Nassau and Hanover, who were charged with the defence of
Hougomont and its approaches, stubbornly contested the standing trees
and the cut-clearing which lay between them and the garden wall of the
chateau.
It must be clearly seized, at this early and even premature point in
the action, that Napoleon's object in making this attack upon Hougomont
was only to weaken Wellington's centre.
Hougomont lay upon Wellington's right. Wellington had always been
nervous of his right, and feared the turning of his line there,
because, should he have to retreat, his communications would ultimately
lie in that direction. It was for this reason that he had set right off
at Braine l'Alleud, nearly a mile to the west of his line, the
Dutch-Belgian Division of Chassé and sixteen guns, which force he
connected with a reserve body at Hal, much further to the west.
Napoleon judged that an attack on Hougomont before the action proper
was begun, coming thus upon Wellington's right, would make him attempt
to reinforce the place and degarnish his centre, where the Emperor
intended the brunt of the attack to fall.
Napoleon had no other intention that history can discover in
pressing the attack against Hougomont so early. It was almost in the
nature of a “feint.” But when, towards half-past twelve, his brother's
division had cleared the wood and come up against the high garden wall
of the farm, for some reason which cannot be determined, whether the
eagerness of the troops, the impulsiveness of Jerome himself, or
whatever cause, instead of being contented with holding the wood
according to orders, the French furiously attacked the loopholed and
defended wall. They attempted to break in the great door, which was
recessed, and therefore protected by a murderous cross-fire. They were
beaten back into the wood, leaving a heap of dead. At this point
Reille, according to his own account (which may well enough be
accurate), sent orders for the division to remain in the wood, and not
to waste itself against so strong an outpost. But Jerome and his men
were not to be denied. They marched round the chateau, under a heavy
artillery fire from the English batteries above, and attempted to carry
the north wall. As they were so doing, four companies of the
Coldstreams, the sole reinforcement which Wellington could be tempted
to part with from his main line, came in reinforcement to the defence,
and, after a sharp struggle, the French were thrust back once more.
It was by that time past one o'clock, and this first furious attempt
upon Hougomont, unintended by the Emperor, and a sheer waste, had
doubly failed. It had failed in itself—the house and garden still
remained untaken, the post was still held. It had failed in its object,
which had been to draw Wellington, and to get him to send numerous
troops from his centre to his right in defence of the threatened place.
Meanwhile the Emperor, for whom this diversion of a few regiments
against Hougomont was but a small matter, had prepared and was about to
deliver his main attack.
The reader will see upon the contours of the coloured map a definite
spur of land marked with a broad green band in front of the French
order of battle, and further marked by the green letter “B” in the very
centre of the map. It was along this spur and at about one o'clock that
the Emperor drew up a great battery of eighty pieces in order to
prepare the assault upon the opposing ridge, which was to be delivered
the moment their fire had ceased. Napoleon at that moment was watching
his army and its approaching engagement from that summit upon the great
road marked “A” in green upon my coloured map, whence the whole
landscape to the north and west lies open.[18]
There he received the report of Ney that the guns were ready, and
only waiting for the order.
A little while before the guns were ready and Ney had reported to
that effect, Napoleon had received Grouchy's letter, in which it was
announced that the mass of the Prussian army had retreated on Wavre. He
had replied to it with instructions to Grouchy so to act that no
Prussian corps at Wavre could come and join Wellington. Hardly had the
Emperor dictated this reply when, looking northward and then eastward
over the great view, he saw, somewhat over four miles away, a shadow,
or a movement, or a stain upon the bare uplands towards Wavre; he
thought that appearance to be companies of men. A few moments later a
sergeant of Silesian Hussars, taken prisoner by certain cavalry
detachments far out to the east, was brought in. He had upon him a
letter sent from Bulow to Wellington announcing that the Prussians were
at hand, and the prisoner further told the Emperor that the troops just
perceived were the vanguard of the Prussian reinforcement. Thus
informed, the Emperor caused a postscript to be added to his dictated
letter, and bade Grouchy march at once towards this Prussian column,
fall upon it while it was still upon the march and defenceless and
destroy it.
Such an order presupposed Grouchy's ability to act upon it; Napoleon
took that ability for granted. But Grouchy, as a fact, could not act
upon it in time. Hard riding could not get Napoleon's note to Grouchy's
quarters within much less than an hour and a half. When it got there
Grouchy himself must be found, and that done his 33,000 must be got
together in order to take the new direction. Further, the Emperor could
not know in what state Grouchy's forces might be, nor what direction
they might already have taken. It should be mentioned, however, to
explain Napoleon's evident hope at the moment of things going well,
that the prisoner had told the Emperor it was commonly believed in
the Prussian lines that Grouchy was actually marching to join him,
Napoleon, at that moment. Napoleon sent some cavalry off eastward
to watch the advent of the Prussians; he ordered his remnant of one
army corps, the Sixth, which he had kept in reserve behind his
line,[19] to march down the hill to the village of Plancenoit and stand
ready to meet the Prussian attack; and having done all this, he made
ready for the assault upon the ridge which Wellington's troops held.
That assault was to be preceded, as I have said, by artillery
preparation from the great battery of eighty guns which lay along the
spur to the north and in front of the French line. For half an hour
those guns filled the shallow valley with their smoke; at half-past one
they ceased, and Erlon's First Corps d'Armée, fresh to the combat,
because it had so unfortunately missed both Ligny and Quatre Bras,
began to descend from its position, to cross the bottom, and to climb
the opposite slope, while over the heads of the assaulting columns the
French and English cannon answered each other from height to height.
The advance across the valley, as will be apparent from the map, had
upon its right the village of Papelotte, upon its left the farm of La
Haye Sainte, and for its objective that highway which runs along the
top of the ridge, and of which the most part was in those days a sunken
road, as effective for defence as a regular trench.
Following a practice which he never abandoned, which he had found
universally successful, and upon which he ever relied, the Duke of
Wellington had kept his British troops, the nucleus of his defensive
plan, for the last and worst of the action. He had stationed to take
the first brunt those troops upon which he least relied, and these were
the first Dutch-Belgian brigade under Bijlandt. This body was stationed
in front of the sunken road (at the point marked A in red upon the
map). Behind it he had put Pack's brigade and Kemp's, both British; to
the left of it, but also behind the road, Best's Hanoverian brigade.
Papelotte village he held with Perponcher's Belgians.
It will be seen that the crushing fire of the French eighty guns
maintained for half an hour had fallen full upon the Dutch-Belgians,
standing exposed upon the forward slope at a range of not more than 800
yards.[20] At the French charge, though that was delivered through high
standing crops and over drenched and slippery soil up the slope,
Bijlandt's brigade broke. It is doubtful indeed whether any other
troops would not have broken under such circumstances. Unfortunately
the incident has been made the subject of repeated and most ungenerous
accusation. A body purposely set forward before the whole line to stand
such fearful pounding and to shelter the rest; one, moreover, which in
two days of fighting certainly lost one-fourth of its number in killed
and wounded, and probably lost more than one-third, is deserving of a
much more chivalrous judgment than that shown by most historians in its
regard. Anyhow, Kemp's brigade quickly filled the gap left by the
failure of the Netherlanders, and began to press back the French
charge.
Meanwhile the French right, which had captured Papelotte, was
compelled to retreat upon seeing the centre thus driven back, while the
French left had failed to carry the farm of La Haye Sainte. Indeed upon
this side, that is, in the neighbourhood of the great road, the check
and reverse to the French assault had been more complete than
elsewhere. An attempt to drive its first success home with a cavalry
charge had been met by a countercharge, deservedly famous, in which,
among other regiments, the First and Second Lifeguards, the Blues, the
King's Dragoons, had broken the French horse and followed up the French
retirement down the slope. The centre of that retirement was similarly
charged by the Scots Greys; and in the end of the whole affair the
English horsemen rode up to the spur where the great battery stood,
sabred the gunners, and then, being thus advanced so uselessly and so
dangerously from their line, were in their turn driven back to the
English positions with bad loss.
When this opening chapter of the battle closed, the net result was
that the initial charge of the First Corps under Erlon had failed. It
had left behind it many prisoners; certain guns which had advanced with
it had been put out of action; it had lost two colours.
Save for the furious inconsequent and almost purposeless fighting
that was still raging far off to the left round Hougomont, the battle
ceased. The valley between the opposing forces was strewn with the dead
and dying, but no formed groups stood or moved among the fallen men.
The swept slopes had all the appearance during that strange halt of a
field already lost or won. The hour was between three and half-past in
the afternoon, and so ended the first phase of the battle of Waterloo.
It had lasted rather over two hours.
THE SECOND PART OF THE ACTION
The second and decisive phase of the battle of Waterloo differed
from the first in this: In the first phase Napoleon was attacking
Wellington's command alone. It was line against line. By hammering at
the line opposed to him on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, Napoleon
confidently expected to break it before the day should close. His first
hammer blow, which was the charge of the First Army Corps under Erlon,
had failed, and failed badly. The cavalry in support of that infantry
charge had failed as well as their comrades, and the British in their
turn had charged the retiring French, got right into their line, sabred
their gunners, only to be broken in their turn by the counter-effort of
further French horse.
This first phase had ended in a sort of halt or faint in the battle,
as I have described.
The second phase was a very different matter. It developed into what
were essentially two battles. It found Napoleon fighting not only
against Wellington in front of him, but against Blucher to his right
and almost behind him. It was no longer a simple business of hammering
with the whole force of the French army at the British and their allies
upon the ridge in front, but of desperately attempting to break the
Anglo-Dutch line against time, with diminishing and perpetually reduced
forces; with forces perpetually reduced by the necessity of sending
more and more men off to the right to resist, if it were possible, the
increasing pressure of the accumulating Prussian forces upon the right
flank of the French.
This second phase of the action at Waterloo began in the
neighbourhood of four o'clock.
It is true that the arriving Prussians had not yet debouched from
the screen of wood that hid them two and a half miles away to the east,
but at that hour (four o'clock) the heads of their columns were all
ready to debouch, and the delay between their actual appearance upon
the field and the beginning of the second half of the battle was not
material to the result.
That second half of the action began with a series of great cavalry
charges which the Emperor had not designed, and which, even as he
watched them, he believed would be fatal to him. As spectacles, these
famous rides presented the most awful and memorable pageant in the
history of modern war; as tactics they were erroneous, and grievously
erroneous.
Before this second phase of the battle was entered it was easily
open to Napoleon, recognising the Prussians advancing and catching no
sight of Grouchy, to change his plan, to abandon the offensive, to
stand upon the defensive along the height which he commanded, there to
await Grouchy, and, if Grouchy still delayed, to maintain the chances
of an issue which might at least be negative, if he could prevent its
being decisively disastrous.
But even if such a conception had passed through the Emperor's mind,
military science was against it. If ever those opposed to him had full
time to concentrate their forces he would, even with the reinforcement
of Grouchy, be fighting very nearly two to one. His obvious, one might
say his necessary, plan was to break Wellington's line, if still it
could be broken, before the full pressure of the arriving Prussians
should be felt. Short of that, there could be nothing but immediate or
ultimate disaster.
We shall see how, much later in the action, yet another opportunity
for breaking away, and for standing upon the defensive, or for
retreating, was, in the opinion of some critics, offered to the Emperor
by fate.
But we shall see how, upon that second and later occasion in the
day, his advantage in so doing was even less than it was now between
this hour of half-past three and four o'clock, when he determined to
renew the combat.
He first sent orders to Ney to make certain of La Haye Sainte, to
clear the enemy from that stronghold, which checked a direct assault
upon the centre, and then to renew the general attack.
La Haye Sainte was not taken at this first attempt. The French were
repelled; the skirmishers, who were helping the direct attack by
mounting the slope upon its right, were thrown back as well, and after
this unsuccessful beginning of the movement the guns were called upon
to prepare a further and more vigorous assault upon a larger scale. Not
only the first great battery of eighty guns, but many of the batteries
to the west of the Brussels road (which had hitherto been turned upon
Hougomont and the English guns behind that position) were now directed
upon the centre of the English line, and there broke out a cannonade
even more furious than the one which had opened the action at one
o'clock. Men trained in a generation's experience of war called it the
most furious artillery effort of their time; and never, perhaps, even
in the career of the Gunner who was now in the last extremity of his
fate, had guns better served him.
Under the battering of that discharge the front of Wellington's
command was partially withdrawn behind the cover of the ridge. A stream
of wounded, mixed with not a few men broken and flying, began to swell
northward up the Brussels road; and Ney, imagining from such a sight
that the enemy's line wavered, committed his capital error, and called
upon the cavalry to charge.
Wellington's line was not wavering. For the mass of the French
cavalry to charge at such a moment was to waste irreparably a form of
energy whose high potential upon the battlefield corresponds to a very
rapid exhaustion, and which, invaluable against a front shaken and
doubtful, is useless against a front still solid.
It was not and could not have been the Emperor who ordered that
false step. It is even uncertain whether the whole body of horsemen
that moved had been summoned by Ney, or whether the rearmost did not
simply follow the advance of their fellows. At any rate, the great
group of mounted men[21] which lay in reserve behind the First Army
Corps, and to the west of the road, passed in its entirety through the
infantry, and began to advance at the trot down the valley for the
assault upon the opposite slope.
I repeat, it is not certain whether Ney called upon all this mass of
cavalry and deliberately risked the waste of it in one blow. It is more
probable that there was some misunderstanding; that Desnoettes'
command, which was drawn up behind Milhaud's, followed Milhaud's, under
the impression that a general order had been given to both; that Ney,
seeing this extra body of horse following, imagined Napoleon to have
given it orders. At any rate, Napoleon never gave such orders, and,
from the height upon which he stood, could not have seen the first
execution of them, for the first advance of that cavalry was hidden
from him by a slight lift of land.
There were 5000 mounted men drawn up in the hollow to the west of
the Brussels road for the charge. It was not until they began to climb
the slope that Napoleon saw what numbers were being risked, and
perceived the full gravity of Ney's error.
To charge unshaken infantry in this fashion, and to charge it
without immediate infantry support, was a thing which that master of
war would never have commanded, and which, when he saw it developing
under the command of his lieutenant, filled him with a sense of peril.
But it was too late to hesitate or to change the disposition of this
sudden move. The 5000 climbed at a slow and difficult trot through the
standing crops and the thick mud of the rising ground, suffered—with a
moment's wavering—the last discharge of the British guns, and then, on
reaching the edge of the plateau, spurred to the gallop and charged.
It was futile. They passed the line of guns (the gunners had orders
to abandon their pieces and to retire within the infantry squares);
they developed, in too short a start, too slight an impetus; they
seethed, as the famous metaphor of that field goes, “like angry waves
round rocks”; they lashed against every side of the squares into which
the allied infantry had formed. The squares stood.
Wellington had had but a poor opinion of his command. It contained,
indeed, elements more diverse and raw material in larger proportion
than ever he, or perhaps any other general of the great wars, had had
to deal with, but it was infantry hitherto unshaken; and the whole
conception of that false movement, the whole error of that cavalry
action, lay in the idea that the allied line had suffered in a fashion
which it had been very far from suffering. Nothing was done against the
squares; and the firmest of them, the nucleus of the whole resistance,
were the squares of British infantry, three deep, against which the
furious close-sabring, spurring, and fencing of sword with bayonet
proved utterly vain. Upon this mass of horsemen moving tumultuous and
ineffectual round the islands of foot resisting their every effort,
Uxbridge, gathering all his cavalry, charged, and 5000 fresh horse fell
upon the French lancers and cuirassiers, already shredded and lessened
by grape at fifty yards and musket fire at ten. This countercharge of
Uxbridge's cleared the plateau. The French horsemen turned bridle, fled
to the hollow of the valley again, and the English gunners returned to
their pieces. The whole fury of the thing had failed.
But it had failed only for a moment. What remained of the French
horse reformed and once again attempted to charge. Once again, for all
their gravely diminished numbers, they climbed the slope; once again
the squares were formed, and the torment of horsemen round about them
struck once more.
Seen from the point where Napoleon stood to the rear of his line,
the high place that overlooked the battlefield, it seemed to eyes of
less genius than his own that this second attempt had succeeded.
Indeed, its fierce audacity seemed to other than the French observers
at that distance to promise success. The drivers of the reserve
batteries in the rear of Wellington's line were warned for retreat, and
Napoleon, reluctant, but pressed by necessity, seeing one chance at
last of victory by mere shock, himself sent forward a reserve of horse
to support the distant cuirassiers and lancers. He called upon
Kellerman, commanding the cavalry of the Guard, to follow up the
charge.
He knew how doubtful was the success of this last reinforcement, for
he knew how ill-judged had been Ney's first launching of that great
mass of horse at an unbroken enemy; but, now that the thing was done,
lest, unsupported, it should turn to a panic which might gain the whole
army, he risked almost the last mounted troops he had and sent them
forward, acting thus like a man throwing good money after bad for fear
that all may be lost.
A better reason still decided Napoleon so to risk a very desperate
chance, and to hurl Kellerman upon the heels of Milhaud. That reason
was the advent, now accomplished, of the Prussians upon his right, and
the necessity, imperative and agonised, of breaking Wellington's line
before the whole strength of the newcomers should be felt upon the
French flank and rear.
Let us turn, then, and see how far and with what rapidity the
Prussians at this moment—nearly half-past five o'clock—had
accomplished their purpose.
* * * * *
Of the four Prussian corps d'armée bivouacked in a circle round
Wavre, and unmolested, as we have seen, by Grouchy, it was the fourth,
that of Bulow, which was given the task of marching first upon the
Sunday morning to effect the junction with Wellington. It lay, indeed,
the furthest to the east of all the Prussian army,[22] but it was fresh
to the fight, for it had come up too late to be engaged at Ligny. It
was complete; it was well commanded.
The road it had to traverse was not only long, but difficult. The
passage of the river Lasne had to be effected across so steep a ravine
and by so impassable a set of ways that the modern observer, following
that march as the present writer has followed it, after rain and over
those same fields and roads, is led to marvel that it was done in the
time which Blucher's energy and the traditional discipline of the
Prussian soldiers found possible. At any rate, the heads of the columns
were on the Waterloo edge of the Wood of Fischermont[23] (or Paris)
before four o'clock, and ready to debouch. Wellington had expected them
upon the field by two o'clock at latest. They disappointed him by two
hours, and nearly three, but the miracle is that they arrived when they
did; and it is well here to consider in detail this feat which the
Fourth Prussian Army Corps had accomplished, for it is a matter upon
which our historians of Waterloo are often silent, and which has been
most unfortunately neglected in this country.
The Fourth Prussian Army Corps, under Bulow, lay as far east as
Liège when, on the 14th of June, Napoleon was preparing to cross the
Sambre. Its various units were all in the close neighbourhood of the
town, so none of them were spared much of the considerable march which
all were about to undertake to the west; even its most westward
detachment was no more than three miles from Liège city.
Bulow should have received the order to march westward at half-past
ten on the morning of the 15th. The order, as we have seen in speaking
of Ligny, was not delivered till the evening of that day. The Fourth
Army Corps was told to concentrate in the neighbourhood of Hannut and a
little east of that distant point. The corps, as a whole, did not
arrive until the early afternoon of Friday the 16th.
It is from this point—Hannut—that the great effort begins.
Bulow, it must be remembered, commanded no less than 32,000 men. The
fatigues and difficulties attendant upon the progress of such a body,
most of it tied to one road, will easily be appreciated.
During the afternoon of the 16th, while Ligny was being fought, he
advanced the whole of this body to points immediately north and east of
Gembloux. Not a man, therefore, of his great command had marched less
than twenty miles, many must have marched over twenty-five, upon that
Friday afternoon.
Then followed the night during which the other three defeated corps
fell back upon Wavre.
That night was full of their confused but unmolested retreat. With
the early morning of the Saturday Bulow's 32,000 fell back along a line
parallel to the general retirement, and all that day they were making
their way by the cross-country route through Welhain and Corroy to Dion
Le Mont.
This task was accomplished through pouring rain, by unpaved lanes
and through intolerable mud, over a distance of close on seventeen
miles for the hardest pushed of the troops, and not less than thirteen
for those whom the accident of position had most spared.
The greater part of the Fourth Corps had spent the first night in
the open; all of it had spent the second night upon the drenched
ground. Upon the third day, the Sunday of Waterloo, this force,
though it lies furthest from the field of Waterloo of all the Prussian
forces, is picked out to march first to the aid of Wellington, because
it as yet has had no fighting and is supposed to be “fresh.” On the
daybreak, therefore, after bivouacking in that dreadful weather,
Bulow's force is again upon the move. It does not get through Wavre
until something like eight o'clock, and the abominable conditions of
the march may be guessed from the fact that its centre did not reach St
Lambert until one o'clock, nor did the last brigade pass through that
spot until three o'clock. Down the steep ravine of the Lasne and up on
the westward side of it was so hard a business that, as we have seen,
the brigades did not begin to debouch from the woods at the summit
until after four o'clock. It was not until after five o'clock that the
last brigade, the 14th, had come up in line with the rest upon the
field of Waterloo, having moved, under such abominable conditions of
slow, drenched marching, another fifteen miles.
In about forty-eight hours, therefore, this magnificent piece of
work had been accomplished. It was a total movement of over fifty miles
for the average of the corps—certainly more than sixty for those who
had marched furthest—broken only by two short nights, and those nights
spent in the open, one under drenching rain. The whole thing was
accomplished without appreciable loss of men, guns, or baggage, and at
the end of it these men put up a fight which was the chief factor in
deciding Waterloo.
Such was the supreme effort of the Fourth Prussian Army Corps which
decided Waterloo.
There are not many examples of endurance so tenacious and
organisation so excellent in the moving so large a body under such
conditions in the whole history of war.
* * * * *
When the Fourth Prussian Corps debouched from the Wood of
Fischermont and began its two-mile approach towards his flank,
Napoleon, who had already had it watched by a body of cavalry, ordered
Lobau with the Sixth French Army Corps, or rather with what he had kept
with him of the Sixth Army Corps, to go forward and check it.
It could only be a question of delay. Lobau had but 10,000 against
the 30,000 which Bulow could ultimately bring against him when all his
brigades had come up; but delay was the essential of the moment to
Napoleon. To ward off the advancing Prussian pressure just so long as
would permit him to carry the Mont St Jean was his most desperate need.
Lobau met the enemy, three to two, in the hollow of Plancenoit,[24] was
turned by such superior numbers, and driven from the village.
All this while, during the Prussian success which brought that
enemy's reinforcement nearer and nearer to the rear of the French army
and to the Emperor's own standpoint, the wasted though magnificent
action of the French cavalry was continuing against Wellington's right
centre, west of the Brussels road. Kellerman had charged for the third
time; the plateau was occupied, the British guns abandoned, the squares
formed. For the third time that furious seething of horse against foot
was seen from the distant height of the Belle Alliance. For the third
time the sight carried with it a deceptive appearance of victory. For
the third time the cavalry charge broke back again, spent, into the
valley below. Ney, wild as he had been wild at Quatre Bras, failing in
judgment as he had failed then, shouted for the last reserve of horse,
and forgot to call for that 6000 untouched infantry, the bulk of
Reille's Second Corps, which watched from the height of the French
ridge the futile efforts of their mounted comrades.
Folly as it was to have charged unbroken infantry with horse alone,
the charges had been so repeated and so tenacious that, immediately
supported by infantry, they might have succeeded. If those 6000 men of
Reille's, the mass of the Second Army Corps, which stood to arms unused
upon the ridge to the west of the Brussels road, had been ordered to
follow hard upon the last cavalry charge, Napoleon might yet have
snatched victory from such a desperate double strain as no general yet
in military history has escaped. He might conceivably have broken
Wellington's line before that gathering flood of Prussians to the right
and behind him should have completed his destruction.
But the moment was missed. Reille's infantry was not ordered forward
until the defending line had had ample time to prepare its defence;
until the English gunners were back again at their pieces, and the
English squares once more deployed and holding the whole line of their
height.
It is easy to note such errors as we measure hours and distances
upon a map. It is a wonderment to some that such capital errors appear
at all in the history of armies. Those who have experience of active
service will tell us what the intoxication of the cavalry charges
meant, of what blood Ney's brain was full, and why that order for the
infantry came too late. Of the 6000 infantry which attempted so belated
a charge, a quarter was broken before the British line was reached, and
that assault, in its turn, failed.
At this point in the battle, somewhat after six o'clock, two
successes on the part of the French gave them an opportunity for their
last disastrous effort, and introduced the close of the tragedy.
The first was the capture of La Haye Sainte, the second was the
recapture of Plancenoit.
La Haye Sainte, standing still untaken before the very front of
Wellington's line, must be captured if yet a further effort was to be
attempted by Napoleon. Major Baring had held it with his small body of
Germans all day long. Twice had he thrust back a general assault, and
throughout more than five hours he had resisted partial and equally
unsuccessful attacks. Now Ney, ordered to carry it at whatever cost,
brought up against it a division, and more than a division. The French
climbed upon their heaped dead, broke the doors, shot from the walls,
and, at the end of the butchery, Baring with forty-two men—all that
was left him out of nine companies—cut his way back through to the
main line, and the farm was taken. Hougomont, on the left, round which
so meaningless a struggle had raged all day long, was never wholly
cleared of its defenders, but the main body of it was in flames, and
with the capture of La Haye Sainte the whole front was free for a final
attack at the moment which Napoleon should decide.
Meanwhile, at Plancenoit, further French reinforcements had
recaptured the village and again lost it. The Sixth Corps had given way
before the Prussian advance, as we have seen. The next French
reinforcements, though they had at first thrust the Prussians back, in
turn gave way as the last units of the enemy arrived, and the Prussian
batteries were dropping shot right on to the fields which bordered the
Brussels road.
Napoleon took eleven battalions of the Guard (the Imperial Guard was
his reserve, and had not yet come into action[25]) and drew them up
upon his flank to defend the Brussels road; with two more battalions he
reinforced the wavering troops in Plancenoit. They cleared the enemy
out of the village with the bayonet, and for the moment checked that
pressure upon the flank and rear which could not but ultimately return.
It was somewhat past seven by the time all this was accomplished.
Napoleon surveyed a field over which it was still just possible (in his
judgment at least) to strike a blow that might save him. He saw, far
upon the left, Hougomont in flames; in the centre, La Haye Sainte
captured; on the right, the skirmishers advancing upon the slope before
the English line; his eastern flank for the moment free of the
Prussians, who had retired before the sudden charge of the Guard. He
heard far off a cannonade which might be that of Grouchy.
But even as he looked upon his opportunity he saw one further thing
that goaded him to an immediate hazard. Upon the north-eastern corner
of his strained and bent-back line of battle, against the far,
perilous, exposed angle of it, he saw new, quite unexpected hordes of
men advancing. It was Ziethen debouching with the head of his First
Prussian Army Corps at this latest hour—and Napoleon saw those most
distant of his troops ready to yield to the new torrent.
The sun, now within an hour of setting, had shone out again. Its
light came level down the shallow valley, but all that hollow was so
filled with the smoke of recent discharges that the last stroke which
Napoleon was now preparing was in part hidden from the Allies upon the
hill. That final stake, the only venture left, was to be use of his
last reserve and the charge of the Guard.
No combat in history, perhaps, had seen a situation so desperate
maintained without the order for retreat. Wellington's front, which the
French were attacking, was still held unbroken; upon the French flank
and rear, though the Fourth Prussian Army Corps were for the moment
held, they must inevitably return; more remained to come: they were in
the act of pressing upon the only line open to the French for retreat,
and now here came Ziethen with his new masses upon the top of all.
If, at this hour, just after seven, upon that fatal day, retreat had
been possible or advisable to Napoleon, every rule of military art
demanded it. He was now quite outnumbered; his exhausted troops were
strained up to and beyond the breaking point. To carry such strains too
far means in all things, not only in war, an irretrievable catastrophe.
But retreat was hardly possible as a military action; it was
impossible as a political one.
Napoleon could hardly retreat at that hour, although he was already
defeated, because the fury and the exhaustion of the combat, its
increasing confusion, and the increasing dispersion of its units, made
any rapid concentration and organisation for the purposes of a sudden
retirement hazardous in the extreme. The doomed body, held closer and
closer upon its right flank, menaced more and more on its right rear,
now suddenly threatened on its exposed salient angle, would fight on.
Though Napoleon had withdrawn from the combat an hour before, when
Bülow's 30,000 had struck at his right flank and made his destruction
certain; though he had then, while yet he could, organised a
retirement, abandoned the furious struggle for La Haye Sainte before it
was successful, and covered with his best troops an immediate retreat,
that retreat would not have availed his cause.
The appearance of the Prussians on his right proved glaringly the
nature of his doom. Grouchy—a quarter of his forces—was cut off from
him altogether. The enemy, whom he believed to be beyond Grouchy, and
pursued by Grouchy, had appeared, upon the contrary, between Grouchy
and himself. Now Ziethen too was here.
Did Napoleon retire, he would retire before forces half as large
again as his own, and destined to grow to double his own within a few
hours. His retirement would leave Grouchy to certain disaster.
Politically, retreat was still more hopeless. He himself would
re-enter France defeated, with, at the most, half the strength that had
crossed the frontier three days before. He would so re-enter
France—the wealthier classes of which watched his power, nearly all of
them with jealousy, most with active hate—surrounded by general
officers not ten of whom, perhaps, he could sincerely trust, and by a
whole society which supported him only upon the doubtful condition of
victory.
Such a retirement was ruin. It was more impossible morally even than
it was impossible physically, under the conditions of the field.
Therefore it was that, under conditions so desperate, with his battle
lost if ever battle was, the Emperor yet attempted one ultimate throw,
and in this half-hour before the sunset sent forward the Guard.
In those solemn moments, wherein the Imperial Guard formed for their
descent into that hollow whose further slope was to see their last feat
of arms, Ziethen, with the First Prussian Corps, pressed on into the
far corner the field of battle. At the far end of the long ridge of the
Mont St Jean, more than a mile away, this last great body and newest
reinforcement of the Emperor's foes had emerged from the walls and
thickets of Smohain and, new to the fighting, was already pushing in
the weary French line that had stood the carnage of six hours. It was
not enough that the Fourth Prussian Corps should have determined the
day already with its 30,000 come up from the east against him; now the
foremost battalions of the First coming up from the north were
appearing to clinch the matter altogether.
It was under such conditions of irretrievable disaster that Napoleon
played for miracle, and himself riding slowly down the valley at the
head of his comrades and veterans, gave them over to Ney for the final
attack against Wellington's line which still held the opposing slope.
It was then, at the moment when Ziethen and the men of the First
Prussian Army Corps began to press upon the north-eastern angle of the
fight, and were ready to determine it altogether, that the Guard began
its ponderous thrust up between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte, to the
west of the Brussels road. Up that fatal hill, which had seen the four
great cavalry charges, and more recently the breaking of the Second
Corps, the tall men, taller for the bearskins and the shouldered
musket, the inheritors of twenty-two victorious and now immortal years,
leant forward, advancing. To the hanging smoke of the cannon in the
vale was added the rising mist of evening; and when the furious
cannonade which was to support their attack had ceased with their
approach to the enemy's line, a sort of silence fell upon the
spectators of that great event.
The event was brief.
It was preceded by a strange sight: a single horseman galloped
unharmed from the French to the English line (a captain); he announced
to the enemy the approaching movement of the Guard. He was a hater of
the flag and of the Revolution, and of its soldier: he was for the old
Kings.
There was no need for this dramatic aid. The lull in the action,
Napoleon's necessity for a last stroke, possibly through the mist and
smoke the actual movement of the Guard, were apparent. The infantry
whom Wellington had retired behind the ridge during the worst of the
artillery preparation was now set forward again. It was the strongest
and the most trusted of his troops whom Wellington posted to receive
the shock—Adams' brigade and the brigade of Guards. Three batteries of
the reserve were brought forward, with orders not to reply to the
French cannon, but to fire at the advancing columns of the charge.
As the Guard went upward, the whole French front to the right moved
forward and supported the attack. But upon the left, the Second Army
Corps, Reille's recently broken 6000, could not yet move. They came far
behind and to the west of the Brussels road; the Guard went up the
slope alone.
At two hundred yards from the English line the grape began to mow
through them. They closed up after each discharge. Their advance
continued unchecked.
Of the four columns,[26] that nearest to the Brussels road reached,
touched, and broke the line of the defenders. Its strength was one
battalion, yet it took the two English batteries, and, in charging
Halkett's brigade, threw the 30th and the 73rd into confusion. It might
have been imagined for one moment that the line had here been pierced,
but this first and greatest chance of success was defeated, and with it
all chances, for it is the head of a charge that tells.
The reader will have seen upon the map, far off to the west or left,
at Braine l'Alleud, a body of reserve, Belgian, which Wellington had
put so far off in the mistaken notion that the French would try to turn
him in that direction. This force of 3000 men with sixteen guns
Wellington had recalled in the last phases of the battle. It was their
action, and especially that of their artillery, that broke this first
success of the Guard. The Netherlanders charged with the bayonet to
drive home the effect of their cannon, and the westernmost column of
the French attack was ruined.
As the four columns were not all abreast, but the head of the first
a little more forward than that of the second, the head of the second
than that of the third, and so forth, the shock of the French guard
upon the British came in four separate blows, each delivered a few
moments later than the last.
We have seen how the Dutch broke the first column.
The second column, which attacked the right of Halkett's brigade,
failed also. The 33rd and 69th wavered indeed, but recovered, and their
recovery was largely due to the personal courage of their chief.
The next column, again, the third, came upon the British Guards; and
the Guards, reserving their fire until the enemy were at a
stone's-throw, fired point-blank and threw the French into confusion.
During that confusion the brigade of Guards charged, pursued the enemy
part of the way down the slope, were closed upon by the enemy and
driven back again to the ridge.
The fourth column of the French was now all but striking the
extremity of the British line. Here Adams' brigade, a battalion of the
95th, the 71st, and the 52nd regiments, awaited the blow.
The 52nd was the inmost of the three.
It stood just where the confusion of the Guards as they were thrown
back up the hill joined the still unbroken ranks of Adams' extremity of
the British line.
The 52nd determined the crisis of that day. And it was then
precisely that the battle of Waterloo was decided, or, to be more
accurate, this was the moment when the inevitable breaking-point
appeared.
Colborne was its commander. Instead of waiting in the line, he
determined to run the very grave risk of leaving it upon his own
initiative, and of playing a tremendous hazard; he took it upon himself
to bring the 52nd out, forward in advance of and perpendicular to the
defending line, and so to bring a flank fire upon the last French
charge.
[Illustration]
The peril was very great indeed. It left a gap in the English line;
the possibility, even the chance, of a French advance to the left
against that gap and behind the 52nd meant ruin. It was the sort of
thing which, when men do it and fail, is quite the end of them.
Colborne did it and succeeded. No French effort was made to the left of
the 52nd. It had therefore but its front to consider; it wheeled round,
left that dangerous gap in the English line, and poured its fire in
flank upon the last charge of the fourth French column. That fire was
successful. The assault halted, wavered, and began to break.
The French line to the right, advancing in support of the efforts of
the Guard, saw that backward movement, and even as they saw it there
came the news of Ziethen's unchecked and overwhelming pressure upon the
north-east of the field, a pressure which there also had at last broken
the French formation.
The two things were so nearly simultaneous that no historical search
or argument will now determine the right of either to priority. As the
French west of the Brussels road gave way, the whole English line moved
together and began to advance. As the remnants of the First French Army
Corps to the east of the Brussels road were struck by Ziethen they
also broke. At which point the first flexion occurred will never be
determined.
The host of Napoleon, stretched to the last limit, and beyond,
snapped with the more violence, and in those last moments of daylight a
complete confusion seized upon all but two of its numerous and
scattered units.
Those two were, first, certain remnants of the Guard itself, and
secondly, Lobau's troops, still stubbornly holding the eastern flank.
Squares of the Old Guard, standing firm but isolated in the flood of
the panic, checked the pursuit only as islands check a torrent. The
pursuit still held. All the world knows the story of the challenge
shouted to these veterans, and of Cambronne's disputed reply just
before the musket ball broke his face and he fell for dead. Lobau also,
as I have said, held his troops together. But the flood of the Prussian
advance, perpetually increasing, carried Plancenoit; the rear ranks of
the Sixth Army Corps, thrust into the great river of fugitives that was
now pouring southward in panic down the Brussels road, were swept away
by it and were lost; and at last, as darkness fell, the first ranks
also were mixed into the mass of panic, and the Imperial army had
ceased to exist.
There was a moon that night; and hour after hour the Prussian
cavalry, to whom the task had been entrusted, followed, sabring,
pressing, urging the rout. Mile after mile, past the field of Quatre
Bras itself, where the corpses, stripped by the peasantry, still lay
stark after those two days, the rush of the breakdown ran. Exhaustion
had weakened the pursuers before fear had given way to fatigue with the
pursued; and when the remnants of Napoleon's army were past the Sambre
again, not 30,000 disjointed, unorganised, dispersed, and broken men
had survived the disaster.[27]
FINIS
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Footnotes:
[1] I use the word “English” here to emphasise the character of
Wellington's command; for though even this second half of the allied
line was not in its majority of British origin, yet it contained a
large proportion of British troops; the commander was an Englishman,
the Duke of Wellington, and the best elements in the force were from
these islands.
[2] Rather more than 106,000; guns 204.
[3] Surely an error in judgment, for thus the whole mass of the
army, all of it except the First and Second Corps, would be crossing
the Sambre at that one place, with all the delay such a plan would
involve. As a fact, the Fourth Corps, or right wing of the advance, was
at last sent over the river by Châtelet, but it would have been better
to have given such orders at the beginning.
[4] There were some five hundred Prussian prisoners.
[5] See ante, pp. 27 and 32.
[6] A lengthy digression might here be admitted upon the question of
how defence against aerial scouting will develop. That it will develop
none can doubt. Every such advantage upon the part of one combatant has
at last been neutralised by the spread of a common knowledge and a
common method to all.
[7] To be accurate, not quite five-twelfths.
[8] It is worth remarking that Perponcher had been told by
Wellington, when he first heard of Napoleon's approach, to remain some
miles off to the west at Nivelles. Wellington laboured, right up to the
battle of Waterloo, under the fantastic impression that the French, or
a considerable body of them, were, for some extraordinary reason, going
to leave the Brussels road, go round westward and attack his right. He was, as might be expected of a defensive genius, nervous for his
communications. Luckily for Wellington, Perponcher simply disobeyed
these orders, left Nivelles before dawn, was at Quatre Bras before
sunrise, and proceeded to act as we shall see above.
[9] Or at the most sixteen.
[10] This first division of the Guards consisted of the two brigades
of Maitland and of Byng.
[11] Let it be remembered, for instance, that Ziethen's corps, which
helped to turn the scale at Waterloo, two days later, only arrived, on
the field of battle less than half an hour before sunset.
[12] I have in this map numbered separate corps and units from one
to ten, without giving them names. The units include the English
cavalry and Dornberg's brigade, with the Cumberland Hussars, the First,
Second, Third, and Fifth Infantry Divisions, the corps of Brunswick,
the Nassauers, and the Second and Third Netherlands Divisions. All of
these ultimately reached Quatre Bras with the exception of the Second
Infantry Division.
[13] In which 15,000, as accurate statistics are totally lacking,
and the whole thing is a matter of rough estimate, we may assign what
proportion we will to killed, to wounded, and to prisoners
respectively.
[14] The reason he was thus ignorant of what had really happened to
the Prussians was, that the officer who had been sent by the chief of
the Prussian staff to the Duke after nightfall to inform him of the
Prussian defeat had never arrived. That officer had been severely
wounded on the way, and the message was not delivered.
[15] There has arisen a discussion as to the whole nature of this
retreat between the French authorities, who insist upon the close
pursuit by their troops and the precipitate flight of the English
rearguard, and the English authorities, who point out how slight were
the losses of that rearguard, and how just was Wellington's comment
that the retreat, as a whole, was unmolested.
This dispute is solved, as are many disputes, by the consideration
that each narrator is right from his point of view. The French pursuit
was most vigorous, the English rearguard was very hard pressed indeed;
but that rearguard was so well handled that it continually held its
own, gave back as good as it got, and efficiently protected the
unmolested retreat of the mass of the army.
[16] “Dead” ground means ground in front of a position sheltered
by its very steepness from the fire of the defence upon the summit.
The ideal front for a defence conducted with firearms is not a very
steep slope, but a long, slight, open and even one.
[17] Almost exactly ten per cent.
[18] It is from thirty to fifty feet above the spur on which he had
just ranged his guns in front of the army, some twenty-five feet higher
than the crest occupied a mile off by the allied army, and a few feet
higher than the bare land somewhat more than four miles off, upon which
Napoleon first discerned the arriving Prussians.
[19] See map opposite title-page.
[20] There is conflict of evidence as to how long the brigade was
exposed to this terrible ordeal. It was slightly withdrawn at some
moment, but what moment is doubtful.
[21] The group marked “C” upon the coloured map. It was for the most
part under the command of Milhaud, but the rear of it was under the
command of Desnoettes.
[22] See sketch opposite page 134.
[23] This is the wood upon the extreme right hand of the coloured
map.
[24] In the model on p. 155 Plancenoit is not shown. It would be out
of the model, nearer the spectator, behind Napoleon's position at A,
and between A and N.
[25] The Guard as a whole had lain behind the French line in reserve
all day upon the point marked D upon the coloured map.
[26] Virtually, this advance in echelon had turned into four
columns.
[27] We may allow certainly 7000 prisoners and 30,000 killed and
wounded, but that is a minimum. It is quite possible that another 3000
should be added to the prisoners and other 5000 to those who fell. The
estimates differ so widely because the numerous desertions after the
fall of the Empire make it very difficult to compare the remnant of the
army with its original strength.
Transcriber's Notes:
Passages in italics are indicated by underscore.
The following misprints have been corrected:
“prople” corrected to “people” (page 19)
“Quartre” corrected to “Quatre” (page 49)
“Brussells” corrected to “Brussels” (page 155)
Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies
in spelling and hyphenation usage have been retained.