Chapter 7
The Duke was in no hurry to undertake this movement, for as yet there was no sign of Napoleon's arrival. The men breakfasted, and it was not until ten o'clock that the retreat began. He sent word back up the road to stop the reinforcements that were still upon their way to join him at Quatre Bras, and to turn them round again up the Brussels road, the way they had come, until they should reach the ridge of the Mont St Jean, just in front of the village of Waterloo, where he had determined to stand. This done, he made his dispositions for retirement, and a little after ten o'clock the retreat upon Waterloo began. His English infantry led the retreat, the Netherland troops following, then the Brunswickers, and the last files of that whole great body of men were marching up the Brussels road northward before noon. Meanwhile, Lord Uxbridge, with his very considerable force of cavalry and the guns necessary to support it, deployed to cover the retreat, and watched the enemy.
That enemy was motionless. Ney did not propose to attack until Napoleon should come up. Napoleon and his troops, arriving from the battlefield of Ligny, were not visible until within the neighbourhood of two o'clock. As he came near the Emperor was perceived, his memorable form distinguished in the midst of a small escorting body, urging the march; and the English guns, during one of those rare moments in which war discovers something of drama, fired upon the man who was the incarnation of all that furious generation of arms. In a military study, this moment, valuable to civilian history, may be neglected.
The flood of French troops arriving made it hard for Uxbridge, in spite of his very numerous cavalry and supporting guns, to cover Wellington's retreat.
The task was, however, not only successfully but nobly accomplished. Just as the French came up the sky had darkened and a furious storm had broken from the north-west upon the opposing forces. It was in the midst of a rain so violent that friend could be hardly distinguished from foe at thirty yards distance that the pursuit began, and to the noise of limbers galloped furiously to avoid capture, and of all those squadrons pursuing and pursued, was joined an incessant thunder.
Things are accomplished in war which do not fit into the framework of its largest stories, and tend, therefore, to be lost. Overshadowed by the great story of Waterloo, the work which Lord Uxbridge and his Horse did on that afternoon of Saturday the 17th of June is too often forgotten.
The ability and the energy displayed were equal.
The first deployment to meet the French advance, the watching of the retirement of Wellington's main body, the continual appreciation of ground during a rapid and dangerous movement and in the worst of weather, the choice of occasional artillery positions--all these showed mastery, and secured the complete order of Wellington's retreat.[15]
The pursuit was checked at its most important point (where the French had to cross the river Dyle at Genappe) by a rapid deployment of the cavalry upon the slope beyond the stream, a rapid unlimbering of the batteries in retreat, and a double charge, first of the Seventh Hussars, next of the First Life Guards.
These charges were successful, they checked the French, and during the remainder of the afternoon the pursuit to the north of the Dyle slackened off until, before darkness, it ceased altogether.
Indeed, there was by that time no further use in it. The mass of Wellington's army had reached, and had deployed upon, that ridge of the Mont St Jean where he intended to turn and give battle. They were in a position to receive any immediate attack, and the purposes of mere pursuit were at an end.
Facing that ridge of the Mont St Jean, where, at the end of the afternoon and through the evening, Wellington's troops were already taking up their positions, was another ridge, best remembered by the name of a farm upon its crest, the "Belle Alliance." This ridge formed the natural halting-place of the pursuers. From the height above Genappe to the ridge of the Belle Alliance was but 5000 yards; and if a further reason be quoted for the cessation of the pursuit and the ranging into battle array of either force, the weather will provide that reason.
The soil of all these fields is of a peculiar black and consistent sort, almost impassable after a drenching rain. The great paved high road which traverses it was occupied and encumbered by the wheeled vehicles and by the artillery. A rapid advance of infantry bodies thrown out to the right and left of the road, and so securing speed by parallel advance, was made impossible by mud, and the line grew longer and longer down the main road, forbidding rapid movement. From mud, that "fifth element in war" (as Napoleon himself called it), Wellington's troops--the mass of them at least--had been fairly free. They had reached their positions before the downpour. Only the cavalry of the rearguard and its batteries had felt the full force of the storm. Dry straw of the tall standing crops had been cut on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, and the men of Wellington's command bivouacked as well as might be under such weather.
With the French it was otherwise. Their belated units kept straggling in until long after nightfall. The army was drawn up only at great expense of time and floundering effort, mainly in the dark, drenched, sodden with mud, along the ridge of the Belle Alliance. It was with difficulty that the wood of the bivouac fires could be got to burn at all. They were perpetually going out; and all that darkness was passed in a misery which the private soldier must silently expect as part of his trade, and which is relieved only by those vague corporate intuitions of a common peril, and perhaps a common glory, which, down below all the physical business, form the soul of an army.
Napoleon, when he had inspected all this and assured himself that Wellington was standing ranged upon the opposite ridge, returned to sleep an hour or two at the farm called Le Caillou, a mile behind the line of bivouacs. Wellington took up his quarters in the village of Waterloo, about a mile and a half behind the bivouacs of his troops upon the Mont St Jean.
In such a disposition the two commanders and their forces waited for the day.
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There must, lastly, be considered, before the description of action is entered on, the nature of the field upon which it was about to be contested. That field had been studied by Wellington the year before. He, incomparably the greatest tactical defensive commander of his time, and one of the greatest of all time, had chosen it for its capacities of defence. They were formidable. Relying upon them, and confident of the Prussians coming to his aid when the battle was joined, he rightly counted upon success.
* * * * *
Let us begin by noting that of no battle is it more important to seize the exact nature of the terrain, that is, of the ground over which it was fought, than of Waterloo.
To the eye the structure of the battlefield is simple, consisting essentially of two slight and rounded ridges, separated by a very shallow undulation of land.
But this general formation is complicated by certain features which can only be grasped with the aid of contours, and these contours, again, are not very easy to follow at first sight for those who have not seen the battlefield.
In the map which forms the frontispiece of this volume, and to which I will beg the reader to turn, I have indicated the undulations of land in pale green lines underlying the other features of the battle, which are in black, red, and blue. The contours are drawn at five metres (that is 16 feet 4 inches) distance; no contours are given below that of 100 metres above the sea. The valley floors below that level are shaded. Up to the 120-metre line the contours are indicated by continuous lines of increasing thickness. Above the 120-metre line they are indicated by faint dotted or dashed lines. I hope in this manner, though the task is a difficult one, to give a general impression of the field.
The whole field, both slight ridges and the intervening depression, lies upon a large swell of land many square miles in extent, while it slopes away gradually to the east on one side and the west on the other. The highest and hardly distinguishable knolls of it stand about 450 feet above the sea. The site of the battle lies actually on the highest part, the water-parting; and the floors of the valleys, down which the streams run to the east and to the west, are from 150 to 200 feet lower than this confused lift of land between. To one, however, standing upon any part of the battlefield, this feature of height is not very apparent. True, one sees lower levels falling away left and right, and the view seems oddly wide, but the eye gathers the impression of little more than a rolling plain. This is because, in comparison with the scale of the landscape as a whole, the elevations and depressions are slight.
Upon this rolling mass of high land there stand out, as I have said, those two slight ridges, and these ridges lie, roughly speaking, east and west--perpendicular to the great Brussels road, which cuts them from south to north. It was upon this great Brussels road that both Wellington and Napoleon took up, at distances less than a mile apart, their respective centres of position for the struggle. Though this line of the road did not precisely bisect the two lines of the opposing armies, the point where it crossed each line marked the tactical centre of that line: both Wellington and Napoleon remained in person upon that road.
Now it must not be imagined that the shallow depression between the ridges stretches of even depth between the two positions taken up by Wellington and Napoleon, with the road cutting its middle; on the contrary, it is bridged, a little to the west of the road, by a "saddle," a belt of fields very nearly flat, and very nearly as high as each ridge. The eastern half of the depression therefore rises continually, and gets shallower and shallower as it approaches the road from east westward, and the road only cuts off the last dip of it. Then, just west of the road there is the saddle; and as you proceed still further westward along the line midway between the French and English positions you find a second shallow valley falling away. This second valley does not precisely continue the direction of the first, but turns rather more to the north. In the first slight decline of this second valley, and a few hundred yards west of the road, lies the country-house called Hougomont, and just behind it lay the western end of Wellington's line. The whole position, therefore, if it were cut out as a model in section from a block of wood, might appear as does the accompanying plan.
In such a model the northern ridge P--Q some two miles in length is that held by Wellington. The southern one M--N is that held by Napoleon. Napoleon commanded from the point A, Wellington from the point B, and the dark band running from one to the other represents the great Brussels High Road. The subsidiary ridge O--O is that on which Napoleon, as we shall see, planted his great battery preparatory to the assault. The enclosure H is Hougomont, the enclosure S is La Haye Sainte.
Of the two ridges, that held by Napoleon needs less careful study for the comprehension of the battle than that held by Wellington.
The latter is known as the Ridge of the Mont St Jean, from a farm lying a little below its highest point and a little behind its central axis. This ridge Wellington had carefully studied the year before, and that great master of defence had noted and admired the excellence of its defensive character. Not only does the land rise towards the ridge through the whole length of the couple of miles his troops occupied, not only is it almost free of "dead"[16] ground, but there lie before it two walled enclosures, the small one of La Haye Sainte, the large one of Hougomont, which, properly prepared and loopholed as they were, were equivalent to a couple of forts standing out to break the attack. There is, again, behind the whole line of the ridge, lower ground upon which the Duke could and did conceal troops, and along which he could and did move them safely during the course of the action.
Anyone acquainted with Wellington's various actions and their terrains will recognise a common quality in them: they were all chosen by an eye unequalled for seizing, even in where an immediate decision was necessary, all the capabilities of a defensive position. That taken up on the 18th of June 1815, in the Duke's last battle, had been chosen, not under the exigencies of immediate combat, but with full leisure and after a complete study. It is little wonder, then, that it is the best example of all. Of all the defensive positions which the genius of Wellington has made famous in Europe, none excels that of Waterloo.
V
THE ACTION
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.
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.