Shortly after 3 a.m. on the morning after the battle, Monday, 19 June 1815, Wellington’s Scottish surgeon, Dr John Robert Hume, climbed the stairs to the room on the first floor at the wagoners’ inn in Waterloo, where the Duke was sleeping on a rough mattress on the floor. Hume was reluctant to wake the Duke because he went to bed exhausted and had only had three hours’ sleep, but Sir Charles Broke, De Lancey’s replacement as Quartermaster General, had arrived seeking orders for the movement of the army at dawn from the Commander-in-Chief. Worse, Hume was dreading breaking the news to him that his chief ADC, Sir Alexander Gordon, had just died in the surgeon’s arms. Hume recorded Wellington’s reaction in his medical notes, which are in the archive at the Royal Society of Surgeons, Edinburgh:
I went upstairs and tapped gently at the door, when he (Wellington) told me to come in. He had as usual taken off his clothes but had not washed himself.
As I entered, he sat up in bed, his face covered in the dust and sweat of the previous day, and extended his hand to me, which I took and held in mine, whilst I told him of Gordon’s death, and of such of the casualties as had come to my knowledge. He was much affected.
I felt tears dropping fast upon my hand and looking towards him, saw them chasing one another in furrows over his dusty cheeks. He brushed them suddenly away with his left hand, and said to me in a voice tremulous with emotion, ‘Well, thank God, I don’t know what it is to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.’
Two of Sir Charles Bell’s watercolours of the Waterloo wounded. Bell’s own description of the injured:
‘A Sabre Wound … The soldier belonged to the 1st Dragoons. He could not speak and stooped languidly with a vacant and indifferent expression of countenance.’
‘Arm carried off by cannon shot close to shoulder joint. Patient is Sergeant Anthony Tuittmeyer 2nd Line Battalion King’s German Legion. He rode 15 miles into Brussels after being wounded.’ (From Wellington’s Doctors by Dr Martin Howard, courtesy of The Army Medical Services Museum)
Wellington went in to see Gordon’s body lying in his cot. He returned bitterly upset. Gordon, 29, was Wellington’s favourite among the elite band of young Guards officers on his staff, having been with him since the Peninsular Campaign. He had been hit by a musket ball in the thigh, late in the battle, as he tried to rally the wavering allied ranks when Napoleon threw the Imperial Guard against their lines.
The use of the Imperial Guard – the Immortals – was the emperor’s last throw of the dice. They had never been beaten; they marched through the fields with one intention – to smash the faltering allied lines on the ridge. For the defenders on the ridge, the ‘Immortals’ seemed like giants in their bearskins topped by red plumes, as they climbed up the muddy slope, with ported arms, their officers waving their swords, ‘as if on a field day’, and pressed on by the insistent thumping of the drummer boys, ‘rum dum, rum dum, rummadum dummadum, dum dum’. Ney himself led his men, his face blackened by smoke.
Around 3,000 veterans of the Middle Guard tramped up the slopes to the west of La Haye Sainte (towards the ridge where the Lion Mound now stands) and formed three attack forces. Two battalions of French Grenadiers pushed back the first line of British, Brunswick and Nassau troops. Gordon and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fox Canning, another of Wellington’s ADCs, were hit by musket balls – Gordon in the thigh, Canning in the stomach – as they tried to rally the young and largely inexperienced recruits from the city of Brunswick and the Nassau regiment on the ridge. Canning crumpled and bled to death on the battlefield, cradled by the Earl of March, another of Wellington’s ADCs and one of the two sons of the Duke of Richmond who were in the battle that day. It was in the same desperate action that the Prince of Orange was hit by a ball in the shoulder (now the site of the Lion Mound).
Wellington had ordered two battalions of more than 1,600 1st Foot Guards commanded by General Sir Peregrine Maitland to lie down behind the ridge so they could not be seen until the last moment. It was a tactic he had used before in the Peninsular War. They were attacked by two battalions of Chasseurs in the second prong of the Imperial Guard attack. Wellington shouted the order: ‘Stand up Guards!’ They rose up as if from the Belgian soil, and the men in the first of four ranks of muskets fired at point-blank range into the mass of blue coats; then the second, third, and fourth ranks fired in turn: ‘The French columns appeared staggered … and convulsed,’ said Lieutenant Colonel J.P. Dirom of the 1st Foot Guards.1
Captain H.W. Powell of the 1st Foot Guards wrote:
Those who from a distance and more on the flank could see the affair, tell us that the effect of our fire seemed to force the head of the column bodily back. Whether it was from the sudden and unexpected appearance of a corps so near them which must have seemed as starting out of the ground, or the tremendously heavy fire we threw into them, La Garde, who had never before failed in an attack suddenly stopped.
The third force of the Imperial Guard, a fresh Chaasseur battalion, came up to push the assault forward, but they were stopped by a surprise attack organised on their flank by Sir John Colborne – the officer who had squeezed up to let the young Ensign Keppel and his muddy servant warm themselves the night before. Colborne used his own initiative to bring his men of the 52nd Foot to the left side of the French column. Now he ordered his men to fire into the flanks of the Immortals, as they recoiled from the volleys in their front. The emperor’s ‘invincible’ Imperial Guard tottered under the shock of musket fire, and for the first time in their lives, they wavered. Wellington shouted: ‘Now Maitland … now’s your time.’ As the Imperial Guard turned and fled, Maitland’s Guards Brigade charged after them, down past Hougoumont with their bayonets. For the first time in their history, the Imperial Guard ran in confusion shouting: ‘La Garde Recule’ (‘The Guard Retreat’). With a wave of his hat, Wellington signalled the general advance. The defenders of Hougoumont only then realised that the battle was won.
Gordon was stretchered off the battlefield after 7.30 p.m. on a door scavenged from Mont St Jean by a sergeant major. He was in excruciating pain and had lost a lot of blood when they reached Dr Hume at the farm, where he was using the barn as a field hospital. The surgeon slashed away Gordon’s uniform trousers and quickly inspected the wound. Dr Hume noted the musket ball had entered on the inside of Gordon’s left thigh and had wounded the femoral artery a little above where it pierces the biceps muscle. Going downwards, the ball had shattered the femur in several pieces, lodging in the knee near the surface of the integument. Dr Hume thought Gordon would ‘suffer torture’ if he was stretchered down to Waterloo, over a mile away, along a road crowded by the chaos of war. There was also the added risk that carrying him further with broken bones moving in his thigh would sever an artery and he would bleed to death. Dr Hume decided he must operate immediately and called over Assistant Surgeon Kenny of the Artillery regiment to assist him. Using a knife and a saw that had seen plenty of work that afternoon, Dr Hume sawed off Gordon’s left leg high above the thigh. He later noted:
Notwithstanding it was necessary to take off the thigh very high up, he bore the operation well and though weak was in tolerable spirits asking me several questions about different officers whom he had seen carried from the field wounded and requesting me to tell him how soon I thought he would get well, whether he should not be able to ride …2
Gordon told Dr Hume through his pain he felt easy and asked to be carried to Wellington’s headquarters at the inn a mile down the road. Dr Hume went with him, but said he unfortunately entered the inn ‘at the moment when Mr Sunning was in the act of amputating Lord FitzRoy Somerset’s arm’. FitzRoy Somerset, who later commanded the army in the Crimea as Lord Raglan, had been wounded by a musket ball when he was riding alongside the Duke near La Haye Sainte, after it fell to the French. Wellington felt sure it had been fired from the roof of the farm. The ball smashed his right elbow. FitzRoy Somerset walked back to a room by the inn in Waterloo used as a field hospital and showed remarkable sang froid while having his arm sawn off. The Prince of Orange, lying wounded in the shoulder in the same room, was unaware that an operation had been performed until FitzRoy Somerset’s arm was tossed onto a growing pile of severed arms and legs outside and FitzRoy Somerset called out, ‘Hey bring my arm back. There’s a ring my wife gave me on the finger.’
Dr Hume, who was clearly worried he would be blamed for Gordon’s death, said he was convinced that the sight of FitzRoy Somerset’s bloody stump had a fatal psychological impact on Gordon’s condition. He noted:
From that instant, he became very restless and uneasy, sighing frequently and begging for a little wine. I gave him a small quantity with water and as soon as Lord FitzRoy and the Prince of Orange (injured by a shot in the arm) set out for Brussels, I had him put to bed and gave him a few drops of Laudanum with a little wine.
Gordon was in such pain that he sent for Dr Hume at 10 p.m., but the doctor was busy again.
One of the Earl of Uxbridge’s young ADCs, 24-year-old Captain Horace Beauchamp Seymour, rode back to the inn and told him the Earl had been badly wounded in the leg with one of the last shots of the battle. He told Hume Uxbridge was being carried to him in a gig, a small carriage. Dr Hume went out into the road to meet the gig, but he recalled there were so many wounded men that he felt obliged to deal with them first:
I had hardly got to the end of the town when his lordship made his appearance in a gig or Tilbury supported by some of his aides-de-camp.
I followed him to his quarters and found on inspection that a grape shot [canister] had struck him on the right knee close to the lower edge of the Patella [knee cap] and entered on the inside of the ligament, and having torn open the capsular ligament, had made its exit behind, externally fracturing the head of the tibia and cutting the outer hamstring in two.
The Duke and the Earl of Uxbridge were riding in pursuit of the routed French army across the fields below La Haye Sainte when a ball from canister fired by a French battery passed over Wellington’s horse and smashed into Uxbridge’s knee, shattering the knee joint. Uxbridge exclaimed, ‘I’ve got it at last!’ Wellington replied, ‘No? Have you by God?’* Wellington, who had been looking at the battery that fired the canister, snapped shut his telescope and held Uxbridge up in the saddle until he was helped down by other officers from his horse. Then the Duke spurred Copenhagen on towards the French gun that had fired the shot, shouting an order to Major General Frederick Adam in command of the 3rd British Brigade of foot soldiers, ‘Adam – you must dislodge those fellows.’
A worried aide urged him to be careful but Wellington said: ‘Never mind. Let them fire away. The battle’s gained. My life’s of no consequence now.’3
Wellington’s famously laconic exchange with Uxbridge is often seen as the ultimate example of the British ‘stiff upper lip’ and proof that Wellington was cold hearted. Uxbridge emphasised in a letter years later to historian Captain William Siborne that the Duke ‘throughout was invariably conciliatory and confiding’, but he was clearly being diplomatic. There was bad blood between Wellington and Uxbridge going back to Uxbridge’s cuckolding of Wellington’s brother. Uxbridge’s sister, Lady Caroline Capel, gave vent to her outrage at Wellington, when the Duke gave scant credit to her brother for the victory in his Waterloo Despatch. She called it ‘odious’.
Hume was amazed to find Uxbridge ‘perfectly cool, his pulse was calm and regular as if he had just risen from his bed in the morning’. Indeed, the surgeon said Uxbridge showed ‘excessive composure’ though his suffering must have been extreme. He was not ‘heated’ and did not show the least agitation, despite the pain or his exertions at being in the saddle all day, and taking part in many cavalry charges. Dr Hume decided to operate in Uxbridge’s quarters, a small cottage in Waterloo, but he clearly felt nervous about operating on the second most senior man in the British Army. He wrote that he felt he owed a duty to Uxbridge’s family to do nothing until ‘evincing to all the world’ that amputation was not only necessary but unavoidable. He went out to collect as many medical officers as he could to assist him and confirm his diagnosis. He met with several surgeons of Artillery who accompanied him, and he borrowed a knife from one of them because his own knife had ‘been a good deal employed during the day’ – it was blunt.
He was preparing to operate with the other surgeons standing by when a young assistant ‘pushed himself forward’ and told Uxbridge without consulting Dr Hume that he would save the leg. The unnamed assistant said: ‘My Lord, this is a very nasty wound. It may be long of getting well, but a stiff joint will be the only consequence, there will be no need for taking off the limb.’ Dr Hume was furious: ‘I never felt myself so completely confounded and taken aback, however restraining myself, I said: “Sir, you have not examined the wound. When you have it will be time enough to give your opinion”.’ They then had an argument over the patient. Dr Hume angrily told the pushy young assistant:
You see that the ball has passed through the centre of the joint, that the head of the tibia is smashed to pieces and that the capsular ligament which is torn open is filled with fragments of bone and cartilage from the middle external condyle of the femur, the outer hamstring is also divided: even were the capsular ligament simply punctured with a sword, my own opinion would be against risking the life of the patient under all the circumstances.
Uxbridge remained unruffled by the argument among the surgeons over his body. He told Dr Hume:
I put myself under your charge and I resign myself entirely to your decision … whilst I observe to you that I feel as any other man would naturally do, anxious to save my limb, yet my life being of infinitely more consequence to my numerous family … I request that you will … act in such a way as to the best of your judgment is most calculated to preserve that.
Dr Hume said: ‘Certainly my Lord, but …’ Uxbridge interrupted: ‘Why any buts – are you not the Chief? It is you I consult on this occasion.’ He told Uxbridge that it was better to operate sooner rather than later. ‘Very well,’ Uxbridge replied, ‘I am ready.’ Having applied a tourniquet, probably a leather strap tightened around the thigh to snapping point to cut down the loss of blood, Dr Hume took up the knife in his hand. Uxbridge was lucky – the knife was sharp, because (unlike the knife he had used on Gordon) it was new. Lord Uxbridge said, ‘Tell me when you are going to begin.’ Dr Hume replied: ‘Now my Lord.’ Uxbridge laid his head on a pillow, put his hand up to his eyes and said, ‘Whenever you please.’
The surgeon recorded the operation in eye-watering detail that made me wince when I read it:
I began my incision … with one stroke of the knife I divided the muscles all round down to the bone and having retracted them on both sides I took the saw.* I had sawed nearly through the femur, but the person who held the leg, being over apprehensive of splintering the bone, raised up the limb, so that the saw being confined, could not be pushed forwards or backwards. I did not perceive what was the cause and said angrily, ‘Damn the saw’ when Lord Uxbridge said with a smile, ‘What is the matter?’ These were the only words he spoke and during the whole of the operation he neither uttered a groan or complaint, nor gave any sign of impatience or uneasiness.4
Dr Hume noted he gave Uxbridge a very small quantity of weak wine and water and checked his pulse – it was only 66 beats per minute. ‘I am quite certain had anyone entered the room they would have enquired of him where the wounded man was …’
Uxbridge (later made the Marquis of Anglesey by the Prince Regent) interred his leg in a ‘grave’ at the cottage, which became a bizarre tourist attraction. In the Victorian period, tourists armed with their edition of Baedeker’s Belgium were told:
The garden of a peasant (a few paces to the N of the church) contains an absurd monument to the leg of the Marquis of Anglesey … the proprietor of the ground who uses all his powers of persuasion to induce travellers to visit the spot, derives considerable income from this source.
The false leg that he later wore became a model for army prosthetics and is on show at the Horse Guards Museum, Whitehall. It is said he went back to the cottage with his sons, found the table on which he had his leg amputated and had his dinner off it. But today you cannot see the cottage opposite the inn where Uxbridge had his leg removed. It was recently demolished for flats.
While Dr Hume was in the middle of the operation on Uxbridge, he had a message from Gordon’s bedside to say that his stump was bleeding and Gordon was very uneasy. He sent a surgeon from the 15th Hussars called Carter to see Gordon. Carter brought back word that Gordon was very restless, although nothing appeared amiss with the stump.
As soon as he finished with Uxbridge, Dr Hume went to inspect Gordon’s wound:
I found the ligatures on the arteries all perfectly secure but there was a very considerable venous oozing all over the surface of the stump and particularly from the great femoral vein round which I had put a ligature, cleaning away about eight or 10 ounces of clotted blood which had collected about the ends of the muscles and the integument. I again did up the stump carefully moistening the bandage with cold water and I repeated the anodyne draught.
Surgeons like Hume are among the forgotten heroes of Waterloo. They had to operate in primitive conditions, with war raging all around them and no anaesthetic apart from weak wine or laudanum. It is hardly surprising that it was reckoned that one in three patients died from shock after amputations.
Surgeon Samuel Good of the 3rd Foot Guards and Matthias Kenny, a second assistant surgeon with the Ordnance Medical Department, were also at work at the Mont St Jean farm, hacking off limbs while Hume was tending to Gordon.
A mile away, the surgeon of the Coldstream Guards, William Whymper, operated throughout the ferocious siege at Hougoumont farm with a couple of assistant surgeons, ignoring the carnage all around them. There were hundreds of casualties lying around the farmyard with horrific injuries, including many who were burned to the bone when the chateau caught fire, and one who had a hand cleaved off by a French axe.
On the battlefield, the recently-married wife of Private George Osborne of the 3rd Foot Guards, was injured while she was acting as a nurse. She was one of the female camp followers allowed by the army, and tore up her own clothing for bandages. She was hit in the left arm and breast as she tended to a wounded officer, Captain Edward Bowater. Mrs Osborne was later awarded the Queen’s Bounty for her bravery. But army surgeons were rarely mentioned in despatches.
The horrific wounds they had to deal with were graphically illustrated by the Scottish surgeon Sir Charles Bell, who toured the makeshift hospitals in Brussels where many of the injured were sent to die or recover. He was a gifted anatomical artist and his archive of watercolours provides an invaluable medical record, but they are much more – Bell has managed to convey in harrowing detail the emotions of the patients.
In one of his sketches after Waterloo, a soldier lies on a bed and lifts up a white shirt to show his intestines that have tumbled out of his stomach after being cut open by a sabre. The look on his face is one of horror and resignation at his own impending death. Bell’s skill with the paintbrush was apparently greater than with a knife: he allegedly had a mortality rate of 90 per cent with amputations.
Dr Hume’s handwritten medical notes are an equally vivid reminder that mingled with the glory that day, there were piles of guts and gore. Army surgeons like Hume carried their own medical kit in a rosewood box with a red velvet inlay that would be recognisable to surgeons today. A typical set included knives, saws, a screw tourniquet, ligatures and a tenaculum for securing blood vessels. However, the lack of anaesthetics and the grime of the battlefield made the field-operating theatre more like a butcher’s shop. One surgeon reported:
All the decencies of performing surgical operations were soon neglected, whilst I amputated one man’s thigh there lay at one time 13, all beseeching to be taken next. It was strange to feel my clothes stiff with blood and my arms powerless with the exertion of using my knife.
Wellington finally climbed out of the saddle at the inn shortly after the village clock struck 10 p.m., but was too exhausted, physically and mentally, to celebrate the triumph of his victory over Bonaparte. He had ridden out from the inn after 6 a.m. at the head of forty horsemen, and had returned with no more than five. All that Wellington wanted was sleep.
He had pursued the French for a time and De Lancey’s ADC, Lieutenant Colonel Jackson, witnessed Wellington’s famous meeting with Blücher, the Prussian field marshal, at La Belle Alliance, although Wellington was later convinced it was at Genappe: ‘Mein lieber Kamerad,’ said the old Field Marshal. ‘Quelle affaire!’ Blücher later suffered mad delusions when he got to Paris. Wellington put it down to a bang on the head Blücher suffered when he was showing off to some ladies and fell off his horse: ‘Poor Blücher went mad for some time,’ the Duke told his astonished dinner guests at Walmer Castle in 1838. ‘When I went to take my leave of him he positively told me that he was pregnant! And what do you think he said he was pregnant of? An elephant! And who do you think he said had produced it? A French soldier! That is the human mind.’ Blücher retired home to Silesia and died in 1819 aged 76. The engineer George Stephenson later gave Blücher the best memorial – he named a steam engine after him. Blücher would have liked that. Fire and steam summed him up.
The Duke, like his men, was too tired to go on with the pursuit of the French Army. He left the fresher Prussians to continue ‘hunting by night’. The Prussians were cock-a-hoop. They captured Napoleon’s dark-blue and gilded carriage, with his travelling case containing nearly 100 pieces in solid gold, and some diamonds worth an estimated million francs.5 The emperor had to climb out of his carriage and escape on a horse with his escort of Red Lancers.* Jardin Aine, Napoleon’s equerry, recorded: ‘He was at this time extremely pale and haggard and much changed. He took a small glass of wine and a morsel of bread which one of his equerries had in his pocket and some moments later mounted, asking if the horse galloped well …’6 Blücher’s chief of staff, Gneisenau, said it was ‘the best night of my life’.
Wellington picked his way on Copenhagen across a landscape lit by moonlight that resembled Hell by Hieronymus Bosch. Corpses, some already stripped, lay in heaps; the mutilated bodies of dead horses littered the field; ghostly figures walked through the fields of dead and the dying, firing the occasional shot to deliver the coup de grace; and he had to pick his way through the wreckage of war strewn about the fields and roads – breast plates, broken gun carriages, abandoned muskets, piles of clothes, helmets and shakos and men lying moaning, wanting death. And there was the paper. One of the odder images of Waterloo is that the battlefield was strewn with paper: personal letters and diaries and pay books that were carried by every soldier, cast aside by the looters as they searched for gold. The paper fluttered in the night breeze.
Wellington passed his horse to his groom and went inside the inn. In peacetime, it was chiefly used by wagon drivers carrying goods between France and Belgium. Wellington found it hot and packed with officers, including Dutch and German troops, celebrating their great victory. He went upstairs to see how Sir Alexander Gordon was faring. He had been laid in the Duke’s bed, a small wooden cot on the first floor of the inn. Gordon was weak through loss of blood and racked with pain, but raised himself up at the sight of the Duke and whispered: ‘Thank God you are safe.’ Wellington told Gordon about the great victory that they had secured, and told him he would do well.
Downstairs in the spacious common room, Lieutenant Colonel Jackson found three or four small tables laid for supper and several foreign officers looking hungry and impatient. His friend, Colonel Robert Torrens, a fellow officer on the staff of the Quartermaster General and who was related to the Prince Regent’s ADC, Major General Sir Henry Torrens, secured a table and a smoking stew was quickly laid out. A Dutchman bowed and begged to join them. They agreed and he finished up eating their supper; they could not muster an appetite for food.7
Jackson had spent the day riding around without orders after De Lancey had been mortally wounded and decided he might as well take De Lancey’s bed.* He went upstairs to claim his room, but found it already occupied by a seriously wounded French officer who had a gaping wound from a sabre cut to the back of his head, which went down to the bone of his skull. Jackson washed his enemy’s wounds and left him in the bed; he then went back down to the common room to grab some sleep on the floor.
The Duke, leaving Gordon to rest, sat down to a melancholy supper in a private room next door with a few close members of his staff including Álava, who had been with him since the Peninsular campaign. Each time the door opened, the Duke hoped to see more of his young hand-picked staff officers. There were pitifully few to join him. He was in no mood to receive two of Napoleon’s senior officers, who had been captured – Marshal Cambronne, who commanded the last of the Imperial Guard and led a rearguard action to protect the emperor at the end of the battle, and Georges Mouton, the Comte de Lobau.
Under the gentlemanly rules of combat, they expected to be invited to join Wellington at supper but the Duke coldly refused. Before Cambronne was captured he is alleged to have said: ‘The Guard dies and does not surrender.’ He became the butt of barrack room humour: ‘Cambronne surrenders, he does not die.’ Wellington told one dinner party twenty-four years later he had never heard anything so absurd as his request to join the supper party:
Why I found him that very evening in my room at Waterloo – him and General Mouton – and I bowed them out! I said to them, ‘Messieurs, j’en suis bien fache, mais je ne puis avoir l’honneur de vous recevoir jusqu’a ce que vous ayez fait votre paix avec Sa Majeste Tres Chretienne.’ [‘Gentlemen, I am very angry, but I cannot have the honour to receive you until you have made your peace with his most Christian Majesty.’]
They bowed. I added, ‘Ce n’est possible,’ and I passed on. I would not let them sup with me that night. I thought they had behaved so very ill to the King of France.8
Around midnight, von Müffling, the beefy Prussian* who acted as Wellington’s go-between with the Prussian marshal, Blücher, sank into his seat at the inn and told the Duke that Blücher wanted to name the victory ‘Battle of La Belle Alliance’, after their meeting place. Wellington said nothing. The French, with superior local knowledge, still know it as La Bataille de Mont St Jean. The Duke had decided to follow military practice by naming it after the place where he began his despatch.
Wellington drank a single glass of wine, toasting ‘the Memory of the Peninsular War’. He asked Carlo Pozzo di Borgo to pen an urgent note to Louis XVIII in Ghent, saying he would be restored to the throne in Paris. The French king trusted Pozzo, who – though a Corsican like Napoleon – was Tsar Alexander’s ambassador in France and had helped to restore Louis to the throne in 1814. Pozzo dispatched a Russian officer with his message. Then Wellington went to grab a few hours’ sleep on a rough mattress. He was too exhausted and depressed to face writing his official despatch until the morning.
Hume said in his notes that he checked on Gordon after Wellington had retired to sleep:
He [Gordon] said he felt easier and lay for some time more composed but about one o’clock in the morning, he became restless as before, frequently changing his posture, calling every moment and in this manner he continued till he became perfectly exhausted and expired soon after daylight. I should think [it was] about half past three o’clock in the morning.
Dr Hume woke the Duke with the news of Gordon’s death and gave him the list of killed and seriously injured. The dead included Ponsonby, Picton, De Lancey, Canning (his ADC) and now Gordon. Wellington began his despatch at a desk in his private room but the list was too distressing and he could not go on. Wellington scribbled a note for Broke to get the army on the move again and prepared to leave. Jackson, sleeping on the floor downstairs, was roughly shaken and told to take it to the commanders who were still in the field. It said: ‘Memorandum – The troops belonging to the allied army will move upon Nivelles at daylight. Wellington.’
Jackson had found it difficult to get to sleep while a group of Dutch soldiers caroused loudly into the early hours of the morning. He drowsily roused up the hostler to prepare his horse and was on the road to the battlefield before daybreak. The Duke needed to replace his staff and decided to ride into Brussels to finish his official despatch for Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. It would be a story of heroism and sacrifice – he would weep over the losses over dinner weeks later, but the common soldiers who died in their droves were hardly given a mention.
Copenhagen, Wellington’s chestnut warhorse, had survived shot and shell without a sign of nerves, and had ridden into one of the British squares as coolly as his rider, but when Wellington got off his horse in Brussels, Copenhagen kicked out. It was the first sign of the stress they had both endured:
‘On the Duke dismounting, this noble animal kicked up his heels and scampered half over the town before he was caught,’ recorded Lady Shelley.
The Duke sat down in the window of his rented ‘billet’ 54 rue Royale in the centre of Brussels to complete the despatch he had started in Waterloo, but first he had a few letters to dash off. One of the first was to Lady Frances Webster, the young and beautiful married woman to whom he had sent a note on the morning of the battle. To avoid impropriety, it was drafted as advice to her father, but the fact that the Duke felt it necessary to write to her that morning suggests he was clearly besotted with her:
Bruxelles, 19th June 1815. Half-past 8 in the morning.
My dear Lady Frances,
Lord Mount-Norris [her father] may remain in Bruxelles in perfect security. I yesterday, after a most severe and bloody contest, gained a complete victory, and pursued the French till after dark. They are in complete confusion; and I have, I believe, 150 pieces of cannon; and Blücher, who continued the pursuit all night, my soldiers being tired to death, sent me word this morning that he had got 60 more. My loss is immense. Lord Uxbridge, Lord FitzRoy Somerset, General Cooke, General Barnes, and Colonel Berkeley are wounded: Colonel De Lancey, Canning, Gordon, General Picton killed. The finger of Providence was upon me, and I escaped unhurt.—Believe me, etc., Wellington.
He put it more bluntly to Frances, Lady Shelley, another of the society ladies in Wellington’s ‘court’, when he told her about his narrow escape at the moment Uxbridge was hit: ‘The finger of God was upon me.’9 He told her:
I hope to God that I have fought my last battle. It is a bad thing to be always fighting. While in the thick of it, I am too much occupied to feel anything, but it is wretched just after. It is quite impossible to think of glory. Both mind and feelings are exhausted. I am wretched even at the moment of victory and I always say that next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.10
It was an aphorism that he reworked a number of times.
The Duke also penned from Brussels a grief-stricken note to Gordon’s, brother Lord Aberdeen:
He received the wound which occasioned his death when rallying one of the Brunswick battalions which was shaking a little; and he lived long enough to be informed by myself of the glorious result of our actions, to which he had so much contributed by his active and zealous assistance.
Wellington told him:
I cannot express to you the regret and sorrow with which I look round me, and contemplate the loss which I have sustained, particularly in your brother. The glory resulting from such actions, so dearly bought, is no consolation to me, and I cannot suggest it as any to you and his friends; but I hope that it may be expected that this last one has been so decisive, as that no doubt remains that our exertions and our individual losses will be rewarded by the early attainment of our just object. It is then that the glory of the actions in which our friends and relations have fallen will be some consolation for their loss.
It is almost certain that if he had survived, Gordon would have carried Wellington’s Waterloo Despatch back to London, but he entrusted the honour to the Honourable Henry Percy, because he was one of his few ADCs to emerge unscathed.
A crowd gathered outside Wellington’s rented house to watch the extraordinary historic sight of the Napoleon’s nemesis writing his official report. The curious onlookers included Thomas Creevey, the radical MP who had struck up an unlikely friendship with the Duke, although they had been political enemies at Westminster. Wellington saw Creevey and told him to come up. Creevey noted in his journal Wellington said: ‘It has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.’ Wellington added: ‘By God, I don’t think it would have done if I had not been there.’11
The full casualty lists from Waterloo shocked the nation. They included hundreds of aristocratic fathers and sons, the upper-crust of well-to-do Georgian society. The foul-mouthed Welshman, Sir Thomas Picton, was the most senior British officer to be killed at Waterloo and had towns named after him across the globe.
Wellington also listed De Lancey among the dead, unaware he was still clinging to life in a hovel in Mont St Jean, as Magdalene, his 22-year-old wife, agonised about his fate in the safety of Antwerp. First she was told he was dead, then that he had survived. She eventually found him in a cottage a few days later. She went by coach with some friends but in Brussels the chaos on the roads after the battle forced them to abandon it for saddled horses. She described in her journal how, as they rode near Mont St Jean, the ‘horses screamed at the smell of corruption’.
She had only been married on 4 April 1815 and wrote that she had expected to live a life of carefree privilege in Regency Britain. Like many officers’ wives, she had gone with her husband to Brussels, little thinking that their blissful life together would end so suddenly: ‘I saw my husband loved and respected by everyone, my life gliding on, like a gay dream, in his care...’
One of De Lancey’s friends, Captain William Hay, paid a visit to De Lancey and his wife. They were in ‘a little wretched cottage at the end of the village which was pointed out to me as the place where De Lancey was lying mortally wounded,’ recalled Captain Hay:
How wholly shocked I was on entering, to find Lady De Lancey seated on the only chair the hovel contained, by the side of her dying husband. I made myself known. She grasped me by the hand, and pointed to poor De Lancey covered with his coat, and with just a spark of life left.
He was strong at first but gradually weakened after several days, until he finally died of his internal injuries. Dr Hume performed a post mortem and found eight ribs had been forced from the spine, one puncturing a lung.
Magdalene wrote an account of his death for her family and it was later published. The painful honesty of her tragic story – A Week at Waterloo in 1815 – moved Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. She wrote:
When I went into the room where he lay, he held out his hand and said, ‘Come, Magdalene, this is a sad business, is it not?’ I could not speak, but sat down by him and took his hand. This was my occupation for six days.
Dickens described in a letter reading Lady De Lancey’s account:
After working at Barnaby [Barnaby Rudge] all day and wandering about the most wretched and distressful streets for a couple of hours in the evening – searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon – I went at it at about 10 o’clock. To say that reading that most astonishing and tremendous account has constituted an epoch in my life – that I shall never forget the lightest word of it … I never saw anything so real, so touching and so actually present before my eyes is nothing. I am husband and wife, dead man and living woman …
The woman who moved Dickens so much in 1819 married another officer, Captain Henry Hervey of the Madras Infantry, but she died young in 1822. Creevey records meeting Wellington on the way to Waterloo in a curicle two days after the battle to see Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby and De Lancey. There were also tens of thousands of common soldiers who were terribly injured – Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’, who would return to Britain and pass out of history without fanfares.
Officers were given cash rewards from a fund, called His Majesty’s Royal Bounty, for serving at Waterloo – £1,274 for generals, £90 for captains, £19 for sergeants and £2 for corporals, drummers and privates. Many had to rely on charity from a public fund called the Waterloo Subscription. For the men in the ranks who lost a leg or arm at Waterloo they had the prospect of a life of poverty and begging, or parish relief when the charity ran out.
The Duke personally interceded on Dr Hume’s behalf to make sure he was comfortable in retirement. He persuaded the army in 1819 to give Dr Hume a retirement pension of 30 shillings a day – a large sum when the pay for a soldier in the ranks was a single shilling a day. ‘As a mark of special respect to Wellington’s recommendation it is resolved that Dr Hume be allowed to retire upon an allowance of 30/- [30s] per diem [per day] …’ This was increased to £2 a day in 1821 as a retired inspector of hospitals.
Dr Hume, born in Renfrewshire, remained close to the Duke and his family as a personal physician and trusted friend for the rest of their lives. He was the surgeon at the embassy in Paris while Wellington was there and continued his career as an eminent army surgeon, remaining in the service for a total of thirty-four years. He also became deputy inspector of hospitals and was knighted in 1850. He died of ‘cardiac dropsy’ in 1857 aged 76 at his home, 9 Curzon Street, Mayfair. He outlived the Duke by five years but after Waterloo, Wellington’s surgeon had one more historic service to perform for the Duke. Dr Hume acted as Wellington’s second when the Duke felt honour-bound to fight a duel. It was at Battersea Fields at dawn on 21 March 1829 against an obscure peer, Lord Winchelsea. Unbelievably, the Duke was prime minister at the time.
Winchelsea, a fanatical Protestant Loyalist, had accused the Dublin-born* Duke of underhand tactics in pursuit of popery after he was forced to cave in to the demands for Catholic Emancipation in his native Ireland. The Duke’s second, Sir Henry Hardinge, Secretary of State for War in Wellington’s Cabinet who lost his left hand at Ligny, asked Hume to attend a duel but did not say who for. Hume’s detailed account of the duel is kept with his medical notes in Edinburgh. He was astonished to see that the rider approaching through the morning light at Battersea Fields was the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington. Hume loaded the two pistols for Hardinge, because he only had one hand. The Duke irritably told Hardinge: ‘Look sharp and step out the ground. I have no time to waste.’ Hardinge paced out twelve steps, leaving Winchelsea standing with his back to a ditch. The Duke called to Hardinge: ‘Damn it! Don’t stick him up so near a ditch. If I hit him, he will tumble in.’ Wellington planned to shoot Winchelsea in the leg, but not to kill him by drowning in the ditch. Wellington and Winchelsea faced each other. Then Hardinge said: ‘Gentlemen, are you ready? Fire!’ Wellington clearly trusted his own skill with a pistol, but as a pragmatist he may have felt it wise to have his eminent personal surgeon with him, should the ‘finger of providence’ have deserted him at last. In the event, Winchelsea wisely kept his pistol clamped to his side and the Duke deliberately missed.
* This exchange is famously reported as Uxbridge: ‘By God! I’ve lost my leg.’ Wellington: ‘Have you by God?’ But Croker claims the true exchange is quoted above and it was given to him by Lord Anglesey himself in 1816.
* The saw is on display in the National Army Museum, Chelsea, with a glove belonging to his ADC, Captain Thomas Wildman and a sabretache, both soaked in Uxbridge’s blood.
* The carriage was presented to the Prince Regent, but was eventually destroyed in a fire at Madame Tussaud’s in 1925.
* Frances, Lady Shelley noted in her diary that the door was still marked quartier general when she visited Waterloo three months later.
* Wellington complained he had been given the fattest soldier in the Prussian army as a liaison officer and he took thirty hours to go 30 miles with a message.
* Wellington was reputedly born at Mornington House, Upper Merrion Street, Dublin, now the Merrion Hotel.
1. Captain W. Siborne, Waterloo Letters, p. 257.
2. Medical notes by Dr Hume on the treatment of Sir Alex Gordon, Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, GD1/6.
3. Elizabeth Longford, Wellington the Years of the Sword (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 481.
4. Medical notes by Dr Hume, GD1/5.
5. Elizabeth Longford, Wellington, p. 482.
6. Jardine Aine, With Napoleon At Waterloo, edited by Macenzie Macbride, Francis Griffiths, London, 1911.
7. Basil Jackson, Notes and Reminiscences of a Staff Officer (London: John Murray), p. 42.
8. 5th Earl Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, (London: John Murray, 1888), p. 172.
9. Richard Edgcumbe (ed.), The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley (London: John Murray, 1912), p. 103.
10. Ibid., p. 102.
11. Rt Hon. Sir Herbert Maxwell, The Creevey Papers (London: John Murray, 1904), p. 142.