The National Army Museum in Chelsea has a finely detailed model of the battlefield by the army expert topographer and historian Captain William Siborne. As I tried to work out the lie of the land on Siborne’s model, I overheard a conversation between two young army officer types: ‘Have you ever been to the battlefield, Henry?’
‘Oh yah,’ drawled his friend. ‘It’s boring.’ Henry missed the point. It is the banality of the bucolic landscape today, the farms, the gently rolling fields with neatly planted rows of corn, which makes the carnage that happened within the compass of about 8 square miles truly shocking.
The battle had five key phases: 11.20 a.m. the first shots of the battle were fired over Hougoumont and went on all day, almost in isolation from the main action: 12–1.30 p.m. – Napoleon softens up Wellington’s centre by unleashing an artillery bombardment on the ridge that was so deafening it could be heard in Brussels and, allegedly, Dover; 1.30–2 p.m. Ney follows up the bombardment by launching a frontal assault on the ridge with the Comte d’Erlon’s infantry in columns – they are repulsed by allied infantry and a cavalry charge; 4 p.m. Ney (thinking Wellington’s infantry is in retreat when they are pulled back from the cannon fire on the ridge) launches massive charges by forty-three squadrons of cavalry, 12,000 horses – the allied infantry form defensive hollow squares on the plains, holding their bayonets out like porcupines – and lacking sufficient artillery support, the French cavalry are again repulsed; 7.30 p.m. Napoleon launches the Imperial Guard against Wellington’s exhausted lines.
Arguments still rage over whether the arrival of Blücher’s Prussians turned the tide of the battle. Siborne infuriated Wellington by including 40,000 Prussian troops on the original model. Wellington’s secretary wrote to Siborne protesting ‘those who see the work will deduce from it that the result of the Battle was not so much owing to British Valour, and the great Generalship of the Chief of the English Army, as to the flank Movements of the Prussians’. Siborne was summoned to Bathurst’s War Office at the corner of Downing Street to be told he was ‘mistaken’ and must have the Prussians removed. Wellington mounted a whispering campaign to discredit Siborne, insisting to friends he had won the battle before Blücher’s troops arrived. Frances, Lady Shelley noted in her journal: ‘The Duke himself told me in Paris that the battle was won before the Prussians arrived.’
There could only be one winner between Wellington and the low-ranking army surveyor – Siborne’s model today has only a token force of Prussians, although there is good evidence Siborne was right. As a journalist, I see Siborne as one of the largely forgotten heroes of the battle (although he arrived in Paris after it was over): he spent eight months on the battlefield at La Haye Sainte doing painstaking research and gathered a unique archive of 700 letters from the main participants to piece together the story of the battle for his model. He discovered the uncomfortable truth that the Prussians arrived in force after 4 p.m. – three hours before Wellington admitted – and when he wrote his history of the battle, Siborne stood by his evidence. The army refused to pay for Siborne’s model so he put it on private show. Although it was over twenty years after the event, it caused a sensation – it was seen by 100,000 people paying a shilling a head at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1838. But he never got the proceeds and went broke. He gained a sinecure at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, to see out his old age in relative comfort, and died aged 51 in 1849. He is buried at Brompton Cemetery.
Standing at the crossroads on the ridge at Mont St Jean today, the battlefield seems horrifyingly small given the slaughter that happened here. On this patch of lush green fields, about 4 miles (6.5kms) by 2 miles (3.5kms), an estimated 47,000 men were killed or injured in about twelve hours.
The opposing slopes where Wellington and Napoleon marshalled their men are (according to Siborne’s measurements) only 2,500yds apart, with undulating fields and a shallow valley running east–west between them, covered in clover and ripening waist-high rye. Wellington must have been able to see Napoleon, although he said years later, ‘No I could not – the day was dark, there was a great deal of rain in the air.’ Wellington must have been turning a Nelsonian blind eye to the emperor. Sir John Kincaid, stationed with his rifle regiment in the sand pit opposite the farm of La Haye Sainte, clearly saw Napoleon on his white mare, Desiree:
The formation of the French lines was scarcely completed when the magnificent and animating spectacle which they presented was heightened in an extraordinary degree by the passing of the Emperor along them, attended by numerous and brilliant staff. The troops hailed him with loud and fervent acclamations.
The Duke much later admitted to Frances, Lady Shelley, he:
saw an officer ride along the French line and heard a tremendous cheer which was kept up during that officer’s progress. The Duke felt sure it was none other than Bonaparte himself. It was probably the moment when Bonaparte pointed his finger in the direction of Brussels and promised his troops the plunder of that city.
Sunday, 18 June 1815 was the first time Napoleon and Wellington had faced each other on a battlefield. Wellington was extraordinarily single-minded; to force himself to focus on a military career, he gave up gambling at cards and burned his beloved violin as a young man of 24 (his father Garret Wesley, a musical prodigy, was professor of music at Dublin University). Napoleon, a genius of offensive war, would meet his defensive match in Wellington. Crucially, Wellington used three farms on the battlefield – Hougoumont on the extreme right of his lines, La Haye Sainte in the left-centre, and Papellotte on his far left – as breakwaters against the waves of French columns, to limit the emperor’s ability to move his troops on the field of battle.
Napoleon’s plan was astonishingly simple, as described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables:
To go straight to the centre of the Allies’ line, to make a breach in the enemy, to cut them in two, to drive the British half back on Hal, and the Prussian half on Tongres, to make two shattered fragments of Wellington and Blücher, to carry Mont-Saint-Jean, to seize Brussels, to hurl the German into the Rhine and the Englishman into the sea.
There were striking similarities between the two men: they were both the same age, 46, and both had learned their trade at a French military school (where the Duke learned to speak fluent French). But the two commanders were on very different form that day.
Wellington was in his prime, slim and fit and every eyewitness said ‘Nosey’ seemed to be everywhere. With a long, boney nose like a raptor’s beak, Wellington truly watched the battlefield like a hawk through a portable brass field telescope from his vantage point sitting on Copenhagen under an elm tree at the Mont St Jean crossroads. He restlessly patrolled the ridge, keeping a grip on his lines, issuing orders through his ADCs (who acted like messengers), riding to crisis points, cajoling, steadying, ordering Maitland’s guards to lie down to save them in the final attack, and finally ordering them to stand and fire, before waving his hat in the air to signal the general advance. Lieutenant Colonel Basil Jackson, a staff officer attached to the deputy Quartermaster General Sir William De Lancey, recalled years later:
As I looked over my saddle, I could see the outlines of the Duke and his horse amidst the smoke, standing very near to the Highlanders of Picton’s division bearing a resemblance to the statue in Hyde Park when partially shrouded by fog, while the balls – and they came thickly – hissed harmlessly over our heads.
Jackson added, ‘It was a time of intense anxiety for had the Duke fallen, heaven only knows what might have been the result of the fight!’ The Duke, who had no time for false modesty, would have agreed with Jackson. The ADCs had been warned to stay back, but Jackson spotted one ADC still with him – Lord Arthur Hill ‘the most portly young man in the army’ who was known at Military College as ‘fat Hill’.
Napoleon in contrast was decidedly past his best, flabby after putting on weight in exile on Elba and suffering from piles that made him irritable and riding difficult. His Equerry, Jardin Aine said he rode through the lines and gave orders to make certain that every detail was executed promptly but returned often to Le Caillou on horseback. ‘There he dismounted and, seating himself in a chair which was brought to him, he placed his head between his hands and rested his elbows on his knees. He remained thus absorbed sometimes for half-an-hour, and then rising up suddenly would peer through his glasses on all sides to see what was happening. At three o’clock an Aide-de-Camp from the right wing came to tell him that they were repulsed and that the artillery was insufficient …’1 He spent two hours away from the battlefield in the afternoon, leaving Marshal Ney in charge of the battle at a crucial time.
Napoleon was under 5ft 7in tall, thick about the shoulders and neck, with grey eyes that, to Lieutenant Colonel Jackson, who accompanied him later to exile in St Helena, appeared ‘wholly devoid of expression’. Napoleon habitually wore a green cut-away military coat, white waistcoat, breeches, and silk stockings, a cocked hat, worn square on, with a tricolour cockade and the star of the Legion d’Honneur. Jackson, no fan of Bonaparte, said he was vain about his physique, often given to using coarse expressions, mistrustful and on his guard, apt to talk too much and then withdraw what he had said; he could not tolerate being contradicted, disliked the wealthy but revered la noblesse, and had a horrid habit of spitting, even in bed, whether it hit the carpet or the bed-curtains. Flattery failed towards him, but probity and diligence succeeded. His decision to attack the Allied armies instead of waging a defensive campaign inside France had been a great gamble, but he confessed much later that he felt as though he had lost his winning touch. During his exile on St Helena, he said:
I sensed that Fortune was abandoning me. I no longer had in me the feeling of ultimate success, and if one is not prepared to take risks when the time is ripe, one ends up doing nothing – and, of course, one should never take a risk without being sure that one will be lucky.
Wellington rated Napoleon as a field commander, saying he was worth 40,000 men in boosting the morale of his troops, but Napoleon underrated Wellington. He dismissed the Duke as a ‘sepoy’ general, a reference to his rise in India under the patronage of his older brother Richard, the governor-general, fighting the armies of the maharajas. It was obviously a barb that stung the Duke. Colonel Daniel Mackinnon, the Coldstreams’ historian, said when the Duke’s Spanish friend and military attache, Don Miguel de Álava arrived at Mont St Jean from Brussels, he found Wellington in a tree observing the French deployments. Wellington said: ‘How are you Álava. Bonaparte shall see today how a General of Sepoys shall defend a position!’ The Duke had used the experience he had gained in India and the Peninsula to scout out the perfect place for a defensive position, a ridge with a ‘reverse slope’, which could protect his troops from Bonaparte’s famous artillery.
In the weeks before the battle, the Duke ordered his engineers to draw up a detailed topographical map of a wide area to the south of Brussels. Ten Royal Engineer Officers, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Carmichael Smyth and Brigade Major Oldfield, rode for miles, mapping every hill and dale. I found their map at the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham, Kent, largely ignored by most visitors, who were drawn to the strange Heath Robinson contraptions for allowing armies to cross rivers or scale heights. The map shows that Wellington’s engineers did not have a clue precisely where he intended to make his stand. James Scott, deputy curator of the museum, told me they produced ten sheets covering 120 square miles at 4 inches to the mile that were stitched together to make one vast map 135cms x 95cms. The contours of the gently rolling farm fields are picked out in coloured shading in grey and green wash and red pigment like a modern Ordnance Survey map. Oddly, the greatest detail is around Hal, well behind his front lines. Here Wellington controversially stationed 15,500 troops to protect his escape route to the coast, or to prevent Napoleon outflanking him to the west – a manoeuvre never contemplated by Bonaparte because it would have pushed Wellington towards the Prussian army on the east. The reserves at Hal never fired a shot, although they were sorely needed in the battle, but the map for Hal gives a clue to its importance in the Duke’s thinking: it is drawn on better paper than the rest of the map, with more detailing showing tree lines and hill shading. The engineers clearly thought this area was going to be the focus of his action, and, perhaps, so did Wellington. The actual battlefield, before the ridge at Mont St Jean, a little over a mile south of Waterloo, is in the extreme right hand corner of the map and on inferior brown paper with less detail, suggesting it was hurriedly added at a later stage as an afterthought. Three prominent farms are labelled, ‘Chateau Goumont’ for Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, and La Belle Alliance. If you look carefully you can see a faint loop around Mont St Jean in grey pencil. This is the pencil mark left by Wellington’s own hand. The faint grey swirl of pencil is the closest you can get to Wellington’s careful planning for defeating Napoleon.
He circled the ridge probably as he stood at Quatre Bras to show De Lancey exactly where wanted his forces concentrated after receiving the news carried by his ADC Sir Alexander Gordon that the Prussian field marshal Blücher had been forced to fall back on Wavre, about 8 miles to the east of Mont St Jean. De Lancey, as Wellington’s Quartermaster General, folded up the map and carried it through the battle until around 3 p.m., when he was mortally wounded as he spoke to the Duke on horseback. De Lancey was hit in the back by a bouncing cannon ball and was pitched over the head of his horse onto the ground. He tried to get up – Wellington said he bounced up like a ‘struck pheasant’ – but collapsed with terrible internal injuries. Wellington, who had been warned by his ADCs to take care of the roundshot, dismounted and went to him:
A ball came bounding along en-richochet as it is called and, striking him on the back, sent him many yards over the head of his horse. He fell on his face and bounded upwards and fell again. All the staff dismounted and ran to him and when I came up he said, ‘Pray tell them to leave me and let me die in peace.’ I had him conveyed to the rear …
De Lancey, 37, the American-born son of a Huguenot family, was carried away in a blanket, but before doing so, the precious map was recovered by Brigade Major Oldfield and passed to Lieutenant Colonel Carmichael Smyth, commander of the Royal Engineer Officers on Wellington’s staff. Carmichael Smyth later kept it safe at home until his death in 1860. It was then lost but it resurfaced at a London bookseller’s in a job lot of maps in 1910. The bookseller recognised its importance and tipped off the Royal Engineers Museum. Fortunately, a curator at the Museum bought it with his own money, and rescued it. It was painstakingly restored and at the time of writing was being prepared for representing with an inter-active display at the Chatham museum in 2015 for the bicentenary of Waterloo. It is one of the most telling relics of the battle because it gives us a window on Wellington’s mind.
Wellington had carefully scouted out the land to the south of Brussels in the weeks before the battle, and had found what he was looking for at Mont St Jean – a ridge with a reverse slope. There was a forward slope to give him the advantage over the emperor’s feared columns, but the reverse slope back towards the farm at Mont St Jean enabled the allied commander to shield his troops from direct sight by Napoleon’s beloved 12-pounders, which the emperor called ‘my beautiful daughters’. Wellington may have identified this position a year before. ‘In the summer of last year (1814), his Grace went there on his way to Paris, and on that occasion took a military view of it,’ said one of his aides. ‘He then declared, that if ever it should be his fortune to defend Brussels, Waterloo would be the position he would occupy.’ This could be true – he often played a game guessing at what lay out of sight, over the crest of a hill to test his skills at topography. And Mont St Jean lay on the main route into Brussels from Charleroi and the French border. If Napoleon was to be stopped, it would have to be here.
At the top of the ridge today, on the west side of the Charleroi–Brussels crossroads, there is a bus stop shaded by a stand of towering elms. This is where the distinctive figure of Wellington could be seen by his men, scanning the battlefield mounted on Copenhagen. Today the battlefield is little changed, apart from the Lion Mound, which dominates the skyline on Wellington’s ridge like a monumental piece of Belgian surrealist art. It is as if someone has dropped the Great Pyramid of Egypt on Belgium, painted it bright green and stuck a lion on top as a joke.
The Lion Mound is 141ft high and was created on the orders of King William of Orange to mark the spot where his son, the Prince of Orange, was hit in the shoulder by a musket ball. Being hit by a musket ball was often fatal. The Duke of Brunswick had been killed two days earlier at Quatre Bras by a musket ball that went through his bridle-hand and hit his liver: ‘He fell, and breathed his last in ten minutes.’ And with the lack of modern medicine, a musket ball did not need to hit a vital organ to kill.
However, given the general slaughter all around, it seems odd that this huge mound was produced to celebrate the prince’s recovery from a shoulder wound. Of course, it is nothing of the kind. The Lion Mound was a monument to hubris. Belgium, split between French speakers in the Walloon area in the south – including Waterloo – and the Dutch-speaking Flemish area in the north, had been annexed by the First French Republic ending Austrian rule. The Mound was a very visible reminder to the French-speaking Belgians that after Waterloo, they were firmly under the rule of the House of Orange as part of the Netherlands. It did not work. Within four years of the Mound being completed in 1826, the Belgians revolted and secured their independence.
Wellington was understandably furious when he first saw the Mound. Victor Hugo wrote that he complained: ‘They have altered my battlefield.’ If Hugo is right, he was being diplomatic in his language. It was created by scraping 10 million cubic tons of Belgian earth from the ridge and wiped away one of the most important features to understanding the battle and Wellington’s strategy; it removed the steep ridge that protected his men, and virtually obliterated the steep banks surrounding a ‘sunken’ road running east to west along the ridge at Mont St Jean.
It is difficult today to visualise just how steep the slope and the bank of the sunken road was. The slope made the climb through fields churned to mud a real slog for the French infantry. It also meant they would have been unable to see their enemy until the last moment, because they were in a dip, and when Maitland’s Guards stood up it looked as though they were rising out of the Belgian soil. The psychological shock effect was enormous even before the musket balls struck flesh, sinew and bone.
Soil sampling and GPS computer modelling have confirmed that the ridge was a far more prominent feature before the thousands of tons of earth were piled up to make the Mound. The Gordon monument, erected by the family of Wellington’s chief ADC, Sir Alexander Gordon in 1817, is a good guide to just how high the ridge was; the base is the old height of the land before the construction of the Lion Mound and it is reached by a flight of twenty-three stone steps.
The opposing armies presented a spectacular sight before the slaughter started. Before the days of camouflage, every regiment strutted like peacocks in bright colours. The British infantry famously wore scarlet but many regiments wore more gaudy outfits to ‘outdo’ each other and some wore elaborate plumed hats like Ladies’ Day at Ascot. The French cavalry were magnificent to the eye, according to a contemporary account:
chasseurs in green and purple and yellow; hussars with dolmans and shakos of all tints – sky-blue, scarlet, green and red; dragoons with turban-helmets of tiger skin; carabineers – giants of six feet, clad in white – with breastplates of gold and lofty helmets with red plumes; grenadiers in blue, faced with scarlet, yellow epaulettes and high bearskin caps; the red lancers – red breeched, red-capped with floating white plumes half a yard long …2
The cavalry was notorious for being style-conscious. The Royals and the Life Guards wore tight scarlet tunics with blue facings and gold lace; the Horse Guards and the Dragoon Guards wore blue with scarlet facings and gold lace; the Inniskilling Dragoons wore scarlet with yellow facings and gold lace; while the Hussars wore blue with white facings and silver lace. Captain Rees Howell Gronow, a Regency dandy who had decided to leave London and join Wellington’s army of his own volition, observed:
You discovered at a distance what appeared to be an overwhelming, long moving line, which, ever advancing, glittered like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight. On they came until they got near enough, whilst the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath the thundering tramp of the mounted host. One might suppose that nothing could have resisted the shock of this terrible moving mass.3
Despite the smart uniforms, Wellington’s army was a far cry from the seasoned, battle-hardened fighting machine he had left in Toulouse in 1814, when Napoleon was first forced to abdicate. The Duke was contemptuous of it: ‘On the whole our army was an infamously bad one,’ he said two decades later, ‘and the enemy knew it.’ The overwhelming majority of Wellington’s force at Waterloo, 64 per cent, was drawn from Continental Europe. Just 35 per cent of Wellington’s army was British. Wellington fielded 67,665 men and 156 guns but by the time he got to Waterloo, Colonel Daniel MacKinnon, the Coldstream’s historian, who was there, reckoned the total force – after losses at Quatre Bras and the reserve of 15,500 men held at Hal – was no more than 55,000 against Napoleon’s 68,900 men and 246 guns. The exact numbers are still a contentious issue. I have used the detailed returns gathered for Captain Siborne’s History of the War in France and Belgium in 1815 (first published in 1848 by T. and W. Boone of London). The British contingent comprised 15,181 infantry, 5,843 cavalry, 2,967 artillery and 78 guns – a total force of 23,991 British troops. The majority of his forces (38 per cent) were from the German states thanks to the links with Britain’s Hanoverian king, George III. They ranged from the Hanoverians from George III’s homeland, Brunswickers and the crack King’s German Legion, raised in England from German ex-patriots, who fought to the death to defend La Haye Sainte, to Nassauers and 17,000 Dutch-Belgians under the command of the Prince of Orange. Wellington, like his commanders, clearly did not trust some of these Continental forces to stand firm under fire, particularly the French-speaking Belgians, although the 1st Dutch-Belgian Brigade under Colonel Detmers was credited with helping to break the Imperial Middle Guard at the crux of the battle.
There are still heated debates about claims of cowardice or worse, treachery, by the some of the Continental troops that littered the memoirs of British soldiers. Wellington, typically, had no such qualms. Years after the battle, he was still accusing the Nassau troops of being turncoats: ‘The next thing I saw of them at Waterloo was them running off, and what is more, firing upon us as they ran!’
The most shocking anti-Belgian propaganda was still being recycled as late as 1890 by Charles Dalton in the foreword to his Waterloo Roll Call:
Of the Nassau, Dutch and Belgian troops, it is only fair to say they were, mostly, utterly useless at Waterloo. The glamour of Napoleon was upon them. They had lately been in his service and had a settled conviction that Wellington would be defeated and his army cut to pieces … the ‘Brave Belgians’ … retired from the field and carried news of Wellington’s defeat to Brussels.
This Victorian jingoism has fuelled one of the most persistent myths about Waterloo: that it was a British – or even more inaccurately, an English – victory. This may also have helped to strengthen the view in Britain about itself: that ‘plucky little Albion’ has been called upon to rescue Europe from a power-crazed tyrant three times within 200 years. This historic self-view, reinforced by Waterloo, may still have an impact on Britain’s attitude towards the European Union. Wellington later told his female admirers he layered the suspect units with the tougher British and German battalions behind them to make sure they did not break. Some of the German and British regiments were battle-hardened after the Peninsular War, but the truth is many of the British troops were also inexperienced. Again there are disputes about the proportion, but some estimates suggest only six of his twenty-five British battalions had served in Spain. As soon as peace was secured in Paris in 1814, some of Wellington’s best regiments were sent to fight in America for the War of 1812 and the Anglo-American peace treaty signed in Ghent in January 1815 was too late to bring back more than a handful of units in time to fight Napoleon.
I walk along a track at the traffic lights along the ridge in the direction of the Waterloo golf course, somewhere in the distance. A few yards along the rough track, I find a small metal plaque that at first sight looks like a milestone: ‘In memory of the heroic stand by the 27th Inniskilling Regiment of Foot … when of the 747 officers and men who joined battle, 493 were killed or wounded. A noble record of stubborn endurance.’
A social history of the Inniskilling regiment has shown that they were mostly Catholics from Fermanagh, from poor homes, and more than thirty from Galway, Kerry and Donegal could speak only Irish.4 They were a unit closely knit by their Irish ties, and the next day they were found dead together still ‘in square’ where they fell. They had been drilled to respond to a cavalry charge by forming a square; so long as they did not break, cavalry found it impenetrable – there were eyewitness accounts of the frustrated French cuirassiers riding up and exchanging insults with the men. But they were horribly vulnerable to artillery in their square formations, and when La Haye Sainte, the farm just below the ridge, fell at about 6.30 p.m., Napoleon pushed forward his field guns and pounded the squares with a murderous fire. Wellington regretted it deeply, remarking at dinner years later: ‘We should not have lost La Haye Sainte any more than Hougoumont if there had only been a wicket (a gate) behind to let in ammunition. But the French kept up such a fire on the front that we could not supply it from that quarter.’
Across the track, overlooking the rolling hills south towards La Belle Alliance is another marker stone with a plaque. It says:
To the gallant memory of Lieutenant General Thomas Picton Commander of the 5th Division and the left wing of the Army at the battle of Waterloo. Born 1758. Died near this spot in the early afternoon of 18 June 1815 leading his men against Count Drouet d’Erlon’s advance.
It took nerves of steel to hold steady on the ridge, as more than 16,000 of d’Erlon’s infantry, a quarter of Napoleon’s army, advanced in columns after the emperor’s cannon fell silent; the columns were roughly 150 men across, 24 deep, around 3,600 soldiers in each (though there is a debate about exactly how they were composed). It would have taken them about twenty minutes to cross the muddy fields, wading through the waist-high corn, under fire from roundshot and canister balls as they got closer to the allied guns. But to the 4,000 defenders on the ridge, their steady advance with drums pounding was a frightening, bowel-liquidising sight that had made armies all over Europe crack and run. Historian Richard Holmes said in his BBC War Walks series the sight of 20,000 men advancing with fixed bayonets was inclined to make men ‘find an urgent engagement somewhere else’.
Lieutenant Colonel Basil Jackson said in his memoirs:
The system is as old as the Macedonian phalanx … the undisciplined armies of the French Revolution relied on the moral effect of rapidly pushing forward large masses against the weakest parts of an enemy’s position – a method that rarely failed of success against continental armies, for, impelled by natural ardour and enthusiasm, they dashed on with the elan for which they have credit and actually frightened the defenders by their rapid and imposing advance.
The only way to stop them in 1815, before the advent of machine guns, was for lines of infantry in two or three ranks to hold firm and, rank by rank, mechanically pour continuous volleys of musket fire into the advancing columns at point-blank range as their officers shouted out the orders: ‘present, fire, reload, present, fire, reload’. The allied ranks had been subjected to a terrifying bombardment of roundshot from 12 noon to around 1.30 p.m. that took off men’s heads, splashed their comrades with blood and brains, mingling the screams of horses and men, blood and smoke.
D’Erlon’s forces, including the 45th – ‘the Invincibles’ – were hit by roundshot and canister (dozens of large balls in a canister that exploded out of the cannon like giant gunshot rounds) but they tramped remorselessly up the slope, and shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur! En avant! En avant!’ as their drummers beat out the roll of the ‘pas de charge’.
When d’Erlon’s men crashed through the hedges at the top of the ridge, von Bijlandt’s Dutch-Belgian brigade fell back, running past Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton’s jeering 5th Division.* The Highlanders – remnants of the regiment that had been decimated defending Quatre Bras – were being pushed back, and d’Erlon’s corps was threatening to drive a wedge between Pack and Kempt’s brigades to take possession of the ridge.
Picton, hugely experienced, a blood-and-guts leader who had fought all the way through the Peninsular campaign – saw the French columns momentarily pause to spread out so they could fire at the thin red lines on the ridge. He seized the moment and ordered his men to fire a volley from their muskets at point-blank range through the hedge that concealed them. Three thousand muskets in two thin lines fired into the French massed ranks. Almost before the smoke cleared Picton yelled: ‘Charge! Charge! Hurrah! Rally the Highlanders!’ Picton was on horseback, wearing a top hat and civilian clothes, cursing the French and his own men in his usual fashion. Picton’s men burst through the hedge with their bayonets, but as they did so, Picton was shot from his horse and he was dead before he hit the ground. A musket ball had gone through his right temple, leaving a hole through his top hat** and through his brain. The musket ball was later cut out with a razor. It had lodged on the lower and opposite side of his head, where it appeared just breaking through the skin.5 His corpse was found to be terribly bruised just above the hip with the skin very distended by a mass of coagulated blood. Picton must have been badly injured, possibly by roundshot at Quatre Bras, but had said nothing about the wound to his side, and got his servant to bandage it up. His death came at a moment of great peril for Wellington’s line. There were few reserves of infantry immediately behind the lines on the ridge for Wellington to push forward. The Earl of Uxbridge, commanding the cavalry and standing close to Wellington, decided he had to throw in the heavy cavalry to maintain the momentum of Picton’s counter-charge.
The 1st Brigade of heavy cavalry, under Major General Lord Edward Somerset, comprised the 1st and 2nd Life Guards, the Royal Horse Guards, known as the Blues, and the 1st Dragoon Guards. The 2nd Brigade was commanded by Major General Sir William Ponsonby. It was known as the Union Brigade because it included Scots, English (the Royals) and Irish (Inniskilling) Dragoons. In total there were over 2,000 horsemen on the reverse slope waiting for the order to charge.
Uxbridge rode up at speed and ordered a double charge of the Heavy Cavalry. He told Ponsonby to attack the infantry and Somerset’s cavalry to stop the French cuirassiers, who were riding towards the ridge in support of the infantry. Uxbridge, in his excitement, placed himself in front of Somerset’s brigade. The sabres of over 2,000 horsemen were raised, waiting for the order to advance. They paused for a moment, the horses ready, ears pricked. The head of the French column of infantry had crossed the sunken ridge road. Uxbridge’s order to advance was repeated down the line by other officers. Major George de Lacy Evans, who had been taken on by Ponsonby as an extra ADC a few weeks before on his return from service in America, waved his hat as a signal to the line to go forward. Uxbridge led Somerset’s Brigade slowly at first, at no more than a walk, but gathering pace. Captain Alexander Kennedy Clark of the Royal Dragoons and his Corporal, Francis Stiles, had been standing on the reverse slope at Mont St Jean patiently waiting for their moment, and it was now.
* Some, including Basil Jackson, said they ran; others say they were carrying out an orderly retreat.
** The hat with the hole of the musket ball is in the National Military Museum, Sandhurst. The top hat he wore in the Peninsular campaign to shield his eyes from the sun is in the National Army Museum, Chelsea.
1. Jardine Aine, Equerry to the Emperor Napoleon, With Napoleon at Waterloo, unpublished papers edited by Mackenzie Macbride (London: Francis Griffiths, 1911), p.184.
2. W.H. Fitchett, Wellington’s Men (1900), p. 16.
3. Captain Rees Howell Gronow, Reminiscences of Captain Gronow (London: Smith, Elder and Co, 1862).
4. Mark Bois, ‘The Inniskillings at Waterloo’ (www.napoleon-series.org, November 2007).
5. John Booth, Waterloo (London: 1816, Google Books), p. XXXV.