Authors: Alessandro Barbero
The Battle (26 page)
H
owever good his telescope may have been, Napoleon, from his position on the ridge at La Belle Alliance, had not had sufficient time to forestall the disaster. But before the enemy cavalry had reached the end of its ride, stopping to catch its breath in the shallow valley or among the guns of the Grande Batterie, the emperor was already reacting. He ordered Milhaud's corps, which constituted the cavalry reserve of the right wing, to counterattack. General Farine, who had already been wounded at Ligny and would soon receive another wound at Waterloo, and General Travers, with their four cuirassier regiments, ten fresh squadrons totaling almost 1,300 sabers, set out in pursuit of the exhausted British cavalry, whose troops were remounting the slope in disorder, trying to return to their original positions.
From his position on the extreme right of the French line, in front of Papelotte, General Jacquinot, commander of I Corps's light cavalry, had also watched incredulously as the rout unfolded, and had immediately wheeled his squadrons into line to intervene. One of his four regiments, Colonel Marbot's Seventh Hussars, had been detached to reconnoiter the Prussian advance. Jacquinot held another in reserve, but he sent his two regiments of lancers—some seven hundred riders in all—galloping into the fray. For some time, Napoleon had been increasing the number of French cavalry units armed with lances, following the examples of the Austrian uhlans and the Russian Cossacks. As the new weapon was nearly nine feet long, weighed seven pounds, and had a steel point on a wooden staff, it was awkward to carry, and cumbersome, it had its detractors, and the British cavalry had not yet considered adopting it; but Jacquinot's men would demonstrate the lance's terrifying efficiency. The two regiments fanned out and started a mopping-up operation over the entire length of the ground where catastrophe had struck the I Corps only a few minutes previously.
The commanders of the British cavalry quickly realized that their men, and particularly their horses, were in no condition to withstand this double counterattack. When Lord Uxbridge saw the cuirassiers advancing, he hastened to turn back and summon his reserves to intervene. Although he had forgotten to give the appropriate orders, he expected—or so he later said—that the other cavalry brigades deployed in that sector would have moved forward to support the great charge, but to his dismay he discovered that none of them had moved. When he reached the crossroads behind La Haye Sainte, he met Wellington, surrounded by his aides-de-camp and a crowd of foreign military attaches, and he saw to his relief that this whole
"Troupe doree,"
as he called it, was rejoicing in the success of the charge. "They thought the battle was over," he recalled. And so, although his conscience was telling him that he been wrong to lead the charge in person instead of staying behind to coordinate the reserves, he stayed there with the others to see what would happen.
On the other side of the battlefield, across the main road, Sir William Ponsonby had also seen that things were taking a turn for the worse. For some time, he and his adjutants had been signaling frantically to their troopers to stop their wild career, but so great was the excitement of the pursuit that no one paid the officers any heed. Major De Lacy Evans reported, "Our men were
out of hand.
The General of the Brigade, his staff, and every Officer within hearing, exerted themselves to the utmost to re-form the men; but the helplessness of the Enemy offered too great a temptation to the Dragoons, and our efforts were abortive." Soon, Ponsonby and his officers became aware that the French lancers were coming threateningly close, advancing in good order, their long lances decorated with red-and-white pennons. "If we could have formed a hundred men," Evans observed, "we could have made a respectable retreat, and saved many; but we could effect no formation, and were as helpless against their attack as their Infantry had been against ours. Everyone saw what must happen."
Sir William and his staff, vainly pursuing the Scots Grays, rode into the midst of the French guns. "Finding that we were not successful in stopping the troops, we were forced to continue with them in order to continue our exclamations to halt, as we all, except I suppose the Cornets, saw what would happen," reiterated Major Evans, still obsessed, many years later, by the memory of that foreseen disaster.
22
An instant later, Jacquinot's lancers fell on them, and everyone had to try to save his own skin. "Those whose horses were best or least blown, got away. Some attempted to escape back to our position by going round the left of the French Lancers. All these fell into the hands of the Enemy." De Lacy Evans and a few others galloped all the way to the main road, dodged the fire of the French infantry who were still posted around La Haye Sainte, dashed up the slope, and somehow made it to safety.
Sir William Ponsonby, however, together with his brigade adjutant, Major Reignolds, made a dash around the other side, and a lancer quickly began pursuing them. While they were crossing a plowed field, Sir William's second-rate got stuck in the mud; in an instant, the lancer was upon him. Against a man armed with a lance, the general's saber was worth nothing, so Ponsonby threw it away and surrendered. Reignolds came to his aid, but the lancer compelled both of them to dismount under the threat of his lance. The man was nervous and excited at having captured what was obviously an important prize. Sir William must have had a bad presentiment, because he took out his watch and a miniature portrait and passed them to his adjutant, asking him to deliver them to Lady Ponsonby. At that moment, a small group of Scots Grays happened to pass a short distance away, saw the three, and galloped shouting in their direction, with the idea of liberating the prisoners. In a flash, the Frenchman killed the general and his brigade major with two blows of his lance, then boldly charged the oncoming dragoons, striking down three in less than a minute. The others abandoned the combat, completely incapable of holding their own against the enemy's deadly weapon.
In the hands of Jacquinot's veterans, the lance showed its frightening effectiveness. "I had never before realized the great superiority of the lance over the sword," recalled Durutte, who saw everything from his position on the high ground in front of Papelotte.
23
In the memoirs of Waterloo, the French lancers, galloping at will over the battlefield, sending saber-armed cavalry fleeing before them, and calmly stopping to finish off the wounded without even having to dismount, appear as an image of vivid horror. Wyndham of the Scots Grays saw the lancers pursuing British dragoons who had lost their horses in the charge and were trying to save themselves on foot. He noted the ruthlessness of the lancers' pursuit and watched them cut their victims down. "At Brussels, some weeks afterward, I found many of our men with 10 or 12 lance wounds in them, and one man,
Lock,
had 17 or 18 about his person, and lived afterwards to tell the story." Corporal Dickson remembered how his friends, after their horses were killed, had been surrounded and struck down, one after the other; he seemed to see them still, slipping in the mud and trying to ward off the lance blows with their hands.
An officer in the Grays who had the good luck to survive the combat with a minor wound, Lieutenant Hamilton, revealed that the French lancers held a special place in their enemies' imaginations even before the battle. "One of the red lancers put his lance to my horse's head, I made a cut at his arm as I passed him; and as I did not look behind me to see whether I had struck him or his lance, I should not have known that I had struck his arm, had I not in recovering my sword thrown the blood on my white pouch belt. On inspecting my sword I saw that I had succeeded in wounding the lancer and possibly thus saved my own life. My fears were, when I saw him thrust at my horse's reins, that he would shoot me with his pistol, having heard of the red lancers sometimes doing so." Although this recollection betrays some confusion between the lancers of the Imperial Guard, who wore red uniforms, and those of the regular cavalry, whose uniforms were green, it's obvious that Napoleon's lancers struck the British imagination as exotic, vaguely barbaric enemies, exactly as the kaiser's uhlans were considered at the outbreak of the First World War. This explains why the lancers remained so vivid in the memories of the survivors—much more so than, for example, Milhaud's cuirassiers, and yet the latter made at least an equal contribution to the pursuit and destruction of the British heavy cavalry.
The attack practically wiped out the Scots Grays, against whom the lancers were initially sent. Of the twenty-four officers who had taken part in the Grays' charge, eight were wounded and eight killed, and the lower ranks suffered more or less the same proportion of losses—a terrifying rate, given that usually the wounded greatly outnumbered the dead. Colonel Hamilton's body was found the next day, missing both arms, with a bullet in the heart, and with his pockets emptied by thieves; someone swore he had seen the colonel, armless, guiding his horse with the reins between his teeth, before he disappeared for good. The other two regiments of the Union Brigade suffered comparable casualties, around six hundred dead and wounded out of fewer than a thousand, a percentage that makes the famous charge of the light brigade at Balaklava pale by comparison. As for the Household Brigade, Lord Edward Somerset, after escaping the pursuit of the cuirassiers, succeeded in redeploying several squadrons, particularly those of the Blues, in their original positions. At the beginning of the action, the Blues had been in the second line, and thereafter had maintained a certain order; but of the squadrons that had charged in the first line, fewer than half the men turned back.
Considered on the whole, Uxbridge's charge, despite its extraordinary initial success, had concluded with the destruction of the two brigades engaged. As Captain Kincaid coldly observed, the heavy cavalry never knew when to stop, and they had "burnt their fingers." Tomkinson, who had watched the whole spectacle from his brigade's position on the heights behind Papelotte, commented that it couldn't have ended any other way, since the men of the two cavalry brigades, as well as a great many of their officers, had gone into combat for the first time in their lives, and they had not had the least idea what they should do after their initial impetus was exhausted. But Tomkinson was also sure that the enemy was killing prisoners: After the battle, only one or two men reported out of an entire squadron of the First Dragoon Guards, and to Tomkinson it was inconceivable that all the others would have been killed without anyone trying to surrender.
Almost certainly some of the troopers who were taken prisoner were in fact massacred either immediately after they were captured or later, in cold blood. General Gourgaud, the emperor's aide-de-camp, was escorting a British dragoon to the rear when an infantry sergeant stepped out of formation, struck the man down with the butt of his musket, and killed him with bayonet thrusts before Gourgaud had time to stop him. The endless lists of missing on the rolls of the Household Brigade—124, in the case of the First Dragoon Guards—are the only record of a large number of men who literally vanished during the great charge, probably much the way the general's prisoner did; their bodies were never identified.
W
hen they saw the French lancers attack and overwhelm the winded squadrons of the heavy cavalry, the commanders of some of the light cavalry brigades deployed behind the Allied front decided on their own initiative to intervene in the fray. The old and quarrelsome Sir John Ormsby Vandeleur moved two of his three regiments forward, the Twelfth and Sixteenth Light Dragoons, prudently holding the third in reserve. Some of his squadrons left soon enough to participate in the defeat of the French infantry; the troops they attacked were Durutte's, and although on the whole his soldiers were able to maintain cohesion and fall back without ending in a rout, even this last French division was compelled to return in haste to its starting point, leaving a great number of prisoners in enemy hands. In the course of the confused struggle, the commander of the Sixteenth was almost killed by a ball that entered his back and passed completely through him. Since a wound of this sort did not seem particularly honorable, the officers of the regiment concluded that the colonel had fallen victim to what would today be called "friendly fire": The shot that struck him came from the Allied infantry stationed behind him on the ridge.
The clash between Vandeleur's regiments and Jacquinot's lancers reached heights of extreme ferocity, as Sir Frederick Ponsonby, commander of the Twelfth Light Dragoons and a distant cousin of Sir William, learned firsthand. Two evenings before, Ponsonby had roamed over the battlefield at Quatre Bras, examining the corpses of cuirassiers to determine whether or not their cuirasses were musket-ball-proof. At last he found one with three holes through it that answered his question, and he concluded that not even Napoleon's famous cavalry was invincible; but an enemy more dangerous than the cuirassiers was waiting for him on the battlefield at Waterloo. In combat with Jacquinot's lancers, he was wounded in both arms and lost control of his horse, which carried him into the midst of the enemy, one of whom finally felled him with a saber cut to the head. When he regained consciousness, he was lying in the mud, and he struggled to raise himself; a passing lancer saw him move and gave him a thrust through the back, crying out,
"Tu n'es
pas mort, coquin?”
The steel point entered under his shoulder blade and punctured a lung. The colonel, who was only thirty-two years old, felt his mouth fill with blood and lost consciousness, convinced that the end had come.
The Twelfth Light Dragoons offered a clear example of how, after a single charge and a brief combat, a cavalry regiment could become practically unusable, out of proportion to the losses it officially admitted having sustained. At the moment when they mounted their horses, the three squadrons contained a total of 310 cavalrymen; when the regiment reassembled after the combat, it could muster only two half squadrons, a total of ninety-four men altogether. While over the course of the day the regiment recorded forty-five dead and sixty-one wounded—a high casualty rate—this was still less than half of the total missing after the first charge. The initial casualty rate was swollen to more than twice the actual figure by the number of men taken prisoner, of those who had become isolated and were unable to rejoin their units until the next day, and above all of those who had lost their horses and were therefore of no more use. A cavalry regiment was a bit like a single-shot weapon; you could use it only once.
Along with Vandeleur's troopers, the Netherlands Cavalry Division played an important role in putting an end to the incursion of Napoleon's cavalry. This division was commanded by General Baron de Collaert and deployed on the reverse slope of the ridge, in the direction of the village of Mont-Saint-Jean. The British officers made no effort to hide the mistrust they felt for these politically suspect allies, whose desertion rate was decidedly anomalous. For example, like many Belgian units the Eighth Hussars, a regiment recruited thanks to the commitment of a great landowner, the Due de Croy who virtually considered it his property, had been equipped haphazardly, so much so that at an inspection in March fewer than half of the men were supplied with horses. Perhaps this disorganization was one of the reasons that the regiment had lost more than two hundred deserters since January but a factor of at least equal importance was the hostility of the Belgians toward the Dutch, coupled with the bond that many Belgians still felt with imperial France. During the course of the long day at Waterloo, another thirty-three Hussars went over to the enemy, openly justifying their desertion with their refusal to fight against their former comrades-in-arms.
Despite this problem, however, the Netherlands cavalry performed well in its first charges of the battle, until attrition rendered it, for all practical purposes, useless; the officers in particular gave proof of a combativeness worthy of the Napoleonic veterans they were. Baron de Ghigny, who commanded one of the two light brigades, decided on his own initiative to cross the main road and intervene against Jacquinot's lancers. The first of the baron's two regiments—the aforementioned Eighth Hussars—descended the slope in good order. Their commander was Colonel Duvivier, who until the previous year had commanded a regiment of light cavalry in Napoleon's army, and who was an officer of the Legion of Honor and a baron of the empire. Now Duvivier led his Hussars in a charge against the scattered groups of French light cavalry, which had dispersed after their charge. The ground was so trampled that it was almost impassable, and the conflict did not last long, but it was enough to persuade Jacquinot's lancers to return to their original positions, thus putting an end to the action in this sector.
On the other side of the field, west of La Haye Sainte, General Trip van Zoudtlandt, who had been a colonel in the French army until the past year and bore the scars of a wound received at Berezina, advanced with his three regiments of heavy cavalry carabineers, two Dutch and one Belgian, against the emperor's cuirassiers, who were ascending the slope in pursuit of the remnants of the Household Brigade. The forces were more or less equal, about 1,200 sabers on each side, but the cuirassiers were riding uphill and were already in some disorder when they appeared in front of the line of enemy cavalry, which had just got into motion. A French officer rode ahead, advancing until his horse was practically touching muzzles with those of the Netherlanders; then he rose in his stirrups, brandished his saber, and challenged any enemy officer to fight with him. A Belgian lieutenant, also a veteran of Napoleon's armies, accepted the challenge—this sort of thing was not at all rare on the battlefields of those days— and for a few moments, in the no-man's-land between the battle lines, these two exchanged furious saber-strokes. Each was wounded, but the Belgian had the worse of it and fell, pierced through. Then the two lines clashed, and the combat became general until the French cuirassiers, finding themselves at a disadvantage, abandoned the field and withdrew to the bottom of the slope.
With the disordered saber duels between Milhaud's cuirassiers and Trip's carabineers on the slippery slope west of La Haye Sainte, the colossal cavalry action that had begun with Crabbe's charge and continued with Lord Uxbridge's great countercharge seemed to have exhausted itself. But the cuirassiers had been checked only momentarily; judging by the haste with which their officers were pushing them back into line, they had just begun to fight. It might have been three o'clock in the afternoon, or four o'clock at the latest, which meant that there would be five or six more hours of daylight. Along the ridge, Wellington's army was still deployed in a purely defensive position and appeared incapable of mounting anything beyond counterattacks. The experience of the last hours suggested that dislodging the Allied forces would not be as easy as having breakfast; but the French still believed that the battle could be won.