Authors: Alessandro Barbero
The Battle (15 page)
A
s early as the previous evening, it had been apparent to Wellington that Hougoumont must be defended at all costs. The responsibility for this defense devolved upon the Guards Division, deployed on the high ground immediately facing the estate on the north. Each of the division's two brigades, commanded by Sir John Byng and Sir Peregrine Maitland, consisted of only two battalions, but they were much larger than normal and made up of troops selected and trained with the meticulousness that characterized the Guards; in reality, however, the majority of these men had received their baptism of fire only a few days before at Quatre Bras. In the evening of June 17, the division commander, knowing that he could send reinforcements into the chateau whenever he chose, had limited himself to occupying the buildings and grounds with his four light companies, each numbering about a hundred men. He placed two of these companies, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Macdonell, in the main building and the garden, and the other two, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Lord Saltoun, in the orchard. In reaching their assigned positions, the British had come upon a French patrol, which they had been obliged to chase off in a firefight before they could take possession of the chateau.
But before they defended the buildings they would have to defend the park, and Wellington had decided that German light infantry was better for this sort of combat than their British counterparts; the men in such German units were called
Jager,
"hunters," and for good reason. By tradition, they were recruited among gamekeepers, and their dark green uniforms served to camouflage them among the trees. By order of the duke, some Hanoverian
fager
companies had been detached from their units the previous evening and sent to occupy the park on the south side of the chateau; but when Wellington examined the position on the morning of the battle, he became convinced that he needed more troops and ordered the l/2nd Nassau, which belonged to the Prince of Weimar's brigade, to leave Papelotte and move into Hougoumont wood. When this battalion arrived with its seven hundred to eight hundred men, the Guards officers, believing they could leave to the Germans the responsibility of the defense of the chateau, withdrew their men from the premises and occupied a position nearby.
The selection of the Nassau battalion to defend the chateau and especially the park seems questionable in retrospect. Nassauer infantrymen did wear green uniforms and were officially designated as
fdger,
which may have caused the Guards officers, according to some of their accounts, to see the new arrivals as light infantry. Instead, however, they were probably a normal infantry battalion, not at all trained for this type of combat. Major von Btisgen, who commanded them, took possession of the empty chateau and sent some of his men, including the light company, to the edge of the wood. At that moment there were about a thousand muskets at Hougoumont, of which perhaps half were defending the perimeter of the park.
The first French skirmishers understandably found it difficult to advance very far into the wood, requiring first Cubieres's regiment and then Bauduin's entire brigade to send in increasing numbers of men. To get to the park, the
tirailleurs
had to cover a certain amount of open ground under the disagreeably accurate fire of the British artillery; once they were in the wood, which was not particularly thick, they found that the trees offered only partial shelter from the Germans' lively fusillades. Since all commanding officers of the time had to be able to move quickly on the battlefield, General Bauduin urged his men forward from horseback, thus presenting an excellent target; he was killed almost at once, the first of seven French generals who would be mortally wounded that day.
Even after Bauduin's death, however, his regimental commanders knew what they had to do: keep their troops under cover, as close to the wood as possible, and send in more and more men. Although the German defenders held on tenaciously, eventually the French were able to bring a considerably superior number of muskets to bear on them. Before long, the
fdger,
running short of ammunition and demoralized by the growing number of enemies pouring into the wood, were driven back to the residence and the garden. The Nassauer's regiment had already been severely battered at Quatre Bras; at Hougoumont, many of the men managed to get inside the compound and kept on fighting, but some of them decided they'd seen enough and slipped away. Wellington himself observed their flight, but when he tried to stop a group of them, one fired a random shot in the duke's direction before taking to his heels. "Do you see those fellows run?" Wellington observed to the Austrian attache, who happened to be by his side at that moment. "Well, it is with these that I must win the battle."
Thus the French light infantry reached the wall protecting the garden and the rear of the chateau. Since it was more than six feet high, this wall looked difficult to climb over; but farther along to the left, in the back of the building, there was a large entrance with a heavy door, and the orchard, which stood farther to the right, was not walled but merely surrounded by a hedge, albeit taller than a man and extremely thick. The French, therefore, went resolutely forward. All along the wall and the hedge, however, the surviving Germans were waiting for them, together with the light companies of the Guards, who had precipitously returned to their former positions as soon as the British generals realized that the Germans were evacuating the wood. In the course of the previous night, the Guards had had time to fortify the chateau by making loopholes in the rear of the building, barricading the big door, and building makeshift platforms that allowed the defenders to fire over the garden wall, while the French, when they emerged from the wood, found themselves in the open. Their first assault failed, and the
tirailleurs,
demoralized by their losses, fell back into the wood.
Up to this point, Wellington had remained on the high ground beyond Hougoumont, anxiously watching the development of the conflict. He then decided to push back and retake Hougoumont wood. For the most part, it was impossible for the British artillery to fire on the French, who were well hidden by the trees of the park; but Wellington had at his disposal a battery of six howitzers, under the command of Major Bull. The howitzers had been recently purchased, and this was the moment to see whether they were worth all the sterling they had cost. Cannon fired either cast-iron balls capable of killing or mangling many men at a time, one after the other, if they were struck while in formation, or canister— also called "case-shot"—which had an effective range of only three or four hundred yards. Howitzers, by contrast, could lob their shots in from a high angle, and they fired a different type of ammunition: explosive shells, which burst into fragments that could cause great slaughter, or the even more deadly shrapnel, an English invention, which exploded in midair, pelting a wide area with a murderous hail of musket balls. The only drawback to this technology—whose future was obviously assured—lay in the difficulty of adjusting the fuse so that the shell would burst at the proper distance from the ground. But Major Bull (one of the very few British officers of the time who wore a beard) knew his business. The shells and shrapnel began to explode above the
tirailleurs
hidden among the trees and in the midst of the infantry columns that had advanced as far as the hedgerows, and almost at once the French started retreating in disorder, while the Guards went forward with fixed bayonets and retook possession of the wood.
THE BOMBARDMENT IN THE HOUGOUMONT SECTOR
W
hen he perceived that all the progress made by his men in more than an hour's hard fighting had been nullified, Prince Jerome must surely have felt frustrated. His brother—or so the prince asserted in his memoirs—had personally ordered him to take Hougoumont "at all costs." Obviously, he needed to send in more men; Soye's brigade, therefore, was ordered to move forward in support of Bauduin's. While Bauduin's battalions, feeling the effects of the losses they had suffered, stayed in the shelter of a sunken lane, Soye's men advanced into the open, and in their turn drew the fire of the British artillery. When they reached cover at the edge of the wood, the brigade sent in its skirmishers. Many trees were by then stripped of their branches and in some cases half down, and the
tirailleurs
who went forward among them once again gained numerical superiority and compelled the defenders to retreat to the chateau and the garden. There, however, the attack stalled, because taking the barricaded gate and the garden wall by storm was clearly impossible.
A bombardment by the French artillery broke the stalemate and allowed the embattled brigades to return to the attack. Right from the beginning of the action, Reille's guns had been firing at everything in sight, and even though the distance (a good thousand yards, on average) represented the limit of his 6-pounders' range, a disconcerting number of cannonballs nonetheless reached their targets. All the British eyewitness accounts confirm that the infantry massed on the high ground beyond Hougoumont came under fire from the very first moment and suffered a steady attrition that gradually began to wear on the men's nerves. The column of companies, the formation in which most of Wellington's battalions were deployed, waiting to enter into contact with the enemy, was a deep formation, with all ten companies lined up one behind the other, like rungs on a ladder. It was easy to maneuver units so deployed—a column could transform itself into a line in a few minutes and into a square in even less time than that— and therefore this was the ideal formation for waiting troops; but it certainly wasn't suitable for withstanding artillery fire.
The Twenty-third Fusiliers, whose position was behind the Guards, came under fire from some French guns that had been brought up as far as the Nivelles road; after several men had already been wounded, a ball scored a direct hit on a captain, killing him instantly, whereupon Colonel Ellis ordered his troops to lie down. The Fifty-first Light, holding the extreme right of the Allied line, west of Hougoumont, faced an expanse of grain fields, taller than a man, in the midst of which French skirmishers were hiding, and so the British regiment was under both musket and artillery fire. Sergeant Wheeler found the experience anything but pleasant, and the men of the Fifteenth Hussars, who had been detached to cover this flank, must have felt the same. "A shell now fell into the column of the 15th Huzzars and bursted," he recalled. "I saw a sword and scabbard fly out from the column. . . . grape and shells were dupping about like hail, this was devilish annoying. As we could not see the enemy, altho they were giving us a pretty good sprinkling of musketry, our buglers sounded to lie down." One after the other, all the regiments eventually took the same precaution, and all that multitude of soldiers lay facedown on the wet earth while French cannonballs whizzed over their heads.
A first consequence of the bombardment, therefore, was that the British infantry was kept under pressure and forced to remain under cover as much as possible. But, even more important for the French, their guns distracted the British artillery, which had demonstrated its effectiveness early in the attack, whenever Reille's battalions had exposed themselves in closed formation. Napoleon's artillery outnumbered that of his foe, and it had been ordered to deliver counterbattery fire—that is, to fire on the enemy's guns—whenever possible. Wellington, on the other hand, had expressly ordered his battery commanders not to let themselves be lured into artillery duels, which were a waste of precious ammunition. As Napoleon himself observed, for artillery to respond to enemy fire in kind was practically an automatic reflex. "When artillerymen are under attack from an enemy battery, they can never be made to fire on massed infantry. It's natural cowardice, the violent instinct of self-preservation: men immediately defend themselves from their attackers and try to destroy them, in order to avoid being destroyed themselves."
As soon as the British artillerymen in the batteries stationed behind Hougoumont realized that the French guns were firing on them, Wellington's prohibition was promptly forgotten. Captain Mercer's troop, placed at the end of the artillery line with orders to fire on any French cavalry that advanced too far, quickly came under fire and lost a few horses; since his battery had more than two hundred of them, they presented the most obvious target. Irritated, Mercer decided to flout his orders and opened fire against the French artillery ("a folly, for which I would have paid dearly had our Duke chanced to be in our part of the field"), but had to desist almost at once, because he realized he was drawing the attention of too many enemy batteries and risked getting the worst of it in a protracted duel. A short distance behind his troop, the infantry of the Fourteenth Regiment (waggishly nicknamed "the Peasants," because they were all extremely young recruits just arrived from rural Buckinghamshire) were lying on the ground, but still in square, as the French cavalry wasn't far away: Mercer caught glimpses of their lances, with their white and red banners flying above the fields of tall grain that bordered the Nivelles road.
Like Mercer unable to resist temptation, other battery commanders began to respond to the French fire. Captain Samuel Bolton, who commanded six 9-pounders drawn up six or seven hundred yards behind the chateau, detached three of them to engage a French battery that, according to one of his officers, "was committing great devastation amongst our troops in and near Hougoumont." Those three guns kept firing at the enemy battery for more than an hour, trying to force it to change position. However, the artillery support was scarcely appreciated by the British infantry deployed in that area of the field. Things were going fairly calmly for the Seventy-first Regiment, whose soldiers were lying in a hollow. But then Bolton's guns arrived and took up positions right in front of them, "which, attracting the Enemy's attention, brought down a heavy fire of shot and shell, very destructive in its consequences to our Columns lying in the rear," as an officer of the Seventy-first remembered with annoyance many years later.
Major Bull's howitzer battery, which had directed such effective fire against the French infantry that penetrated Hougoumont wood, also came under attack from the enemy artillery, and Bull, too, lost no time in responding in kind. Later, he justified his actions by declaring that no fewer than twenty-two French guns had been firing directly at his position. In the long run, the losses in men, horses, and wagons and the expenditure of shells wore down the battery to such a point that, no more than two hours after the beginning of the battle, Bull's guns were compelled to abandon the line of fire. Wellington, who was still in the area, was so irritated by the disobedience of his artillery that he gave his aides orders to place the first battery commander he came upon under arrest. The commander in question nevertheless succeeded in convincing the duke that his guns were firing at the enemy infantry and not—as most of his colleagues were doing—at the enemy artillery. Gritting his teeth, Wellington agreed to let the matter drop.