Chapter 8

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.