Authors: Alessandro Barbero
The Battle (13 page)
A
round eleven-thirty or noon at the latest, Reille's infantry began moving toward the wood at Hougoumont, seeking contact with the enemy; almost at once the artillery on both sides opened fire in that sector of the field. All along the front, officers pulled their watches out of their pockets and took note of the exact time when the battle began. The watches of the British, regulated in accordance with the observatory in Greenwich, were an hour behind those of the French, a fact that helps to explain the extreme discordance in the various eyewitness accounts. On the east side of the battlefield, d'Erlon's infantry had not yet moved, and his artillerymen were still laboring to haul their guns through the mud and into their batteries, but it was clear that action would soon get under way there as well. The two generals, Reille and d'Erlon—respectively on the left and right of the French line and in charge of the II Corps and I Corps—were preparing to execute the emperor's orders. The rest of the army, including the Imperial Guard, Mouton's corps, and all the cavalry, remained in wait. But there has been debate over the exact instructions that the two commanders had received.
Napoleon's general order had been dictated at eleven and addressed to Marshal Ney, who was charged with coordinating the French offensive. In this order, the emperor decreed that the attack would start around one o'clock, with the goal of seizing the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, "at the intersection of the Nivelles and Brussels roads." The fact that the Allied troops, most of them invisible to the emperor, were actually deployed ahead of Mont-Saint-Jean, in the dead ground immediately behind the ridge, and the related possibility that Napoleon and his generals, striving to make their maps jibe with what they saw through their telescopes, confused La Haye Sainte farm with the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, are in the final analysis irrelevant, given that both places were on the main road to Brussels. To make a breakthrough in this sector, the emperor ordered the three reserve artillery batteries of the I, II, and VI Corps to mass their heavy 12-pounder guns and bombard the center of the enemy position. Immediately after the bombardment, the left-hand division in d'Erlon's deployment was to advance, while his other divisions held themselves in readiness to support the attack; as to Reille's II Corps, it was to advance at the same rate as I Corps. On the back of the sheet of paper, Marshal Ney scribbled in pencil, "Count d'Erlon will observe that the attack is to commence from the left, not the right. Communicate this new disposition to General Reille."
This summarily formulated order from the emperor and Ney's cryptic addendum to it have caused rivers of ink to flow, though Napoleon's intentions seem clear. By sending forward both the I Corps and the II Corps, the emperor obviously planned to engage the enemy all along his front, searching for the point where his troops could break through. The order did not state where that point would be; since the emperor did not yet know where it would be found, he could not pinpoint it. His designation of Mont-Saint-Jean as the objective of his advance meant only that he planned no flanking maneuver to right or left, but rather a frontal assault. In any case, Reille and d'Erlon were not called upon to mount an immediate bayonet charge; they were to make gradual contact with the enemy and exert steadily mounting pressure upon his forces. This phase of the battle could go on for hours, while the conditions for a decisive thrust slowly emerged. Once combat was initiated, the enemy's reactions, the conduct of his troops, and the movements of his reserves would reveal to the emperor the time and place for the final attack.
But remaining open to all possibilities is not the same as refusing to consider the probable outcome, and clearly Napoleon expected d'Erlon's corps to be more completely engaged than Reille's. The wording of the order demonstrates that the emperor had given rather detailed thought to the movements to be undertaken by I Corps, while the indications for II Corps seem much more generic; moreover, the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, which had been chosen as the focal point of the attack, lay on the line of d'Erlon's advance, and there Napoleon ordered the massing of his 12-pounder batteries. Taking into account the little that he could foresee at that moment, the emperor apparently expected more decisive results from the advance of his right wing than from that of his left. In his memoirs, Napoleon claimed that he wanted to maneuver in such a way as to separate the English from the Prussians, cutting off Wellington's retreat to Brussels and pushing his army toward the sea; although the emperor's assertions cannot always be taken as the undiluted truth, in this case there is no apparent reason to disbelieve him.
Another fact demonstrates that Napoleon, while remaining ready for any eventuality, expected to break through Wellington's left wing: At the last moment, he changed his dispositions for I Corps, modifying the verbal orders he had given to his generals over breakfast at Le Caillou. Originally, d'Erlon's troops were to begin engaging the enemy on the right, around Papelotte, and the battle would then be extended gradually along the whole front, so that the final and probably decisive pressure would be exerted along the axis of the Brussels road, when the last of I Corps's divisions entered into action in that sector. But at some point, Napoleon must have experienced one of those supernormal intuitions that had produced so many of his great victories in the past. Looking through his telescope at what little could be seen of the enemy positions behind the ridge, the emperor realized that Wellington's left wing was the weak spot in his deployment, and resolved, therefore, to attempt a breakthrough there.
The proof of this lies in the note that Ney scribbled on the back of Napoleon's order: "Count d'Erlon will observe that the attack is to commence on the left, not the right. Communicate this new disposition to General Reille." The change evidently pertained to the order of advance that the four divisions of I Corps were to follow, and it could only have sprung from a decision to exert gradually increasing pressure against Wellington's left wing, starting from the center and working out. Threatened on its right by Reille's advance, pinned in the center by the offensive of d'Erlon's First Division, the enemy army would be driven in farther to its left, exactly where it was the weakest, after which the remaining divisions of I Corps would make a ninety-degree turn to the left and attack Mont-Saint-Jean, cutting the Brussels road and trapping the bulk of Wellington's forces.
The fact that the troops of Reille's II Corps, and not d'Erlon's, opened the battle, and did so an hour earlier than Napoleon had stipulated, has raised questions over what orders were sent to Reille. The instructions for II Corps—to advance at the same rate as I Corps—appear to be laconic, but Napoleon had spoken at length to Reille and his other division commanders—among them his brother Jerome—that morning and obviously felt no need to modify the arrangements made at that time. Reille was to advance, coordinating his movements with those of the I Corps; since the Hougoumont wood was in his front, it seems entirely credible that he would have been ordered to occupy it, as both Prince Jerome and Reille himself later affirmed. Reille understood, and explained to his officers, that the main effort was going to be made by d'Erlon's corps, and that their task was simply to occupy the woods as a cover for the advance of the French right wing. One of those officers, a
chefde bataillon
named Jolyet, confirmed that their orders were "to prevent the enemy from coming out on our left flank; for I had been well forewarned that the army was going to pivot on us, and consequently that it was imperative for us, at all costs, to hold our position," that is, to retain possession of the Hougoumont wood. The emperor and his generals knew from their maps that the wood was an inhabited place, even though the Ferraris-Capitaine map was imprecise on this point and gave the impression that Hougoumont was nothing less than a village. The chateau and various buildings of Hougoumont, hidden as they were by the alders of the park, were invisible from the French positions. For most of the junior officers and their men, therefore, what they had in front of them was simply a wood that they had to occupy because the emperor's plan required them to do so. Given that the emperor's general order called for the commencement of combat shortly after one o'clock, the fact that Prince Jerome's infantry started advancing toward the wood before noon, when d'Erlon's men had not yet got under way and the artillery bombardment had not yet begun, may come as a surprise, but in the end the discrepancy seems unimportant. Reille stated that he received the order to advance into the wood at a quarter past eleven, and therefore the most probable explanation is that Napoleon had decided to accelerate the pace of events: If II Corps wanted to remain in alignment with I Corps when the latter moved forward in its turn, then II Corps would have to clear the Hougoumont wood. And perhaps their hope that the wood was not even defended caused Napoleon and his generals to consider this movement as a plain and simple adjustment of their line, not the beginning of a battle, only to change their minds when the infantry's advance was greeted from the wood with a heavy barrage of musket fire.
I
n order to appreciate what happened from the moment the battle began, some fundamental principles of infantry tactics in the Napoleonic age are needed to make clear how infantry was generally maneuvered and what options officers had when they found themselves under enemy fire.
The infantry battalion, with its five or six hundred men, constituted the basic unit of maneuver and could be deployed in different formations. Manuals prescribed in detail the movements that had to be executed in order to pass most quickly from one formation to another while causing the least possible confusion. A great part of infantry training consisted in teaching the officers the correct sequence of orders for every eventuality and in accustoming the soldiers to carry out those orders rapidly and automatically, even when they were under fire.
The three basic combat formations for a battalion were the line, the column, and the square. For a century and a half—ever since the musket had become the foot soldier's main weapon—the line had been the normal combat formation used by European infantry. A battalion deployed in line, two or three ranks deep, covered a fairly broad front, a hundred meters or more. Thus disposed, every man was able to shoot, and the battalion's firepower reached its maximum level. Under normal conditions, the British infantry was trained to deploy in two ranks only; this arrangement extended the line as far as possible and optimized the troops' firing capacity. Continental infantry preferred the shorter, more solid three-deep line. In reality, this difference proved unimportant at Waterloo, because although the British infantry was excellently trained in shooting, it fought virtually the entire battle in an emergency formation four ranks deep, renouncing—for reasons we shall discuss—the firepower advantage that even its adversaries acknowledged.
The column, which had come into wide use during the Napoleonic Wars, was a more compact formation, broader than it was deep, that sacrificed the battalion's firepower for the psychological advantage of depth and mass. A French battalion in column consisted of nine ranks, lined up one behind the other; the battalion's total frontage was approximately forty meters, and if the troops closed ranks the column's depth could be reduced to only fifteen meters or so. The column was preferred by both the French and the Prussians for bayonet attacks, because it guaranteed moral support to the men, who were surrounded on all sides by a multitude of comrades, and because of the force of impact it could develop along such a narrow front. However, the column's firepower was comparatively reduced, and it offered enemy artillery an ideal target. The awareness of these disadvantages and the attempt to find a solution for them played an important role in the way the French generals fought the Battle of Waterloo.
But neither the column nor the line was a suitable formation for facing a cavalry charge. Gambling on its speed and the force of its impact, the cavalry could maneuver in such a way as to avoid the fire of the infantry and burst upon it from an unexpected direction. All training manuals emphasized the injunction that infantry soldiers facing cavalry had to form
square,
a term not to be taken in its literal geometric sense. The British manual of arms directed that a battalion, which comprised ten companies, should rather form what was called an
oblong,
with three companies in front, three in the rear, and two on each flank. The eyewitness account of a former staff officer stated that an unusual sort of oblong was also tried at Waterloo, with four companies front and rear and only one on each flank. Often two undermanned battalions were united in a single square; although even this maneuver was covered in the manual, the results could not have been regular, geometrically speaking. Casualties, too, made maintaining an ordered, symmetrical formation impossible.
The "square" therefore was a formation of variable geometric configuration, whose short side might cover as little as a dozen meters, while the long side could extend to sixty or seventy. In any case, the square enclosed many hundreds of men, crowded shoulder to shoulder and presenting four ranks of bayonets in every direction. Against such a formation, cavalry generally failed to charge home, because it was impossible to induce horses to impale themselves on a hedge of steel; and even if occasionally the cavalry, instead of milling around at a distance, actually made physical contact with its adversaries, so many bayonets thrusting at each horse's chest made the outcome a foregone conclusion. That is, of course, provided that the men in the square kept their nerve; if instead they started wavering at the cavalry's approach and a soldier panicked and abandoned his post, the cavalry could force a passage amid the infantry, and in such cases the square inevitably collapsed.
On the battlefield at Waterloo, Wellington's foot soldiers had to remain in square for a great part of the day, and this explains why the infantry, even when it deployed into line, almost always adopted an unusual four-deep formation. The transition from a line of this type into square, and vice versa, was much faster, especially if the emergency necessitated a creative interpretation of the rules. At such times, the standardized, rote-learned procedures that guaranteed the automatic cooperation of so many men often clashed with the advisability of simplifying or ignoring those procedures, and this tension was one of the chief problems that armies of the time had to deal with. It is a veritable leitmotif in the accounts of the officers who fought at Waterloo.
In particular, the British troops in this battle often deployed from square into line without heeding the prescriptions of the training manual published by Sir David Dundas in 1788. At one point in the battle, the men of the 3/lst Foot Guards, under fire from some enemy troops, advanced to dislodge them. In order to drive off the enemy, one of the Foot Guards' officers explained, the battalion chose not to waste time by deploying into line—a maneuver that would have been imprudent at best, given the great masses of enemy cavalry that were roaming this part of the field. Instead, the guardsmen split the rear face of their square in the center; pivoting left and right, this face and the two lateral faces wheeled into line with the front face of the square, thus forming an irregular line four ranks deep. Later in the day, faced with the advancing Imperial Guard, the battalion commander had the idea of using the same unorthodox method once again. He was killed shortly thereafter, and twenty years later a colleague, despite the pity he felt for his fallen comrade-in-arms, still couldn't help being scandalized by the thought of such a flagrant violation of the rules: "The Duke of Wellington ordered the 1st Brigade of Guards to
take ground to its left and form
line four deep,
which poor Frank D'Oyley did by wheeling up the sides of the Square, putting the Grenadiers and my Company (1st Battalion Company) in the centre of our line. What would Dundas have said!!!"