Authors: Alessandro Barbero
The Battle (38 page)
At this critical moment, the German infantry stood fast, but barely, and only thanks to the laborious efforts of its officers; but the British infantry gave a clear demonstration of the tenacity for which it was justly famous. Macready noted, "[The battle] had now become what I more than once heard the smothered muttering from the ranks declare it, 'Bloody thundering work,' and it was to be seen which side had most bottom, and could stand killing longest." His men would have greatly preferred to attack the French guns, whose positions were only a few hundred yards away, but they could not, because the French cavalry was always hovering near their cannons, ready to strike, while the Allied cavalry had disappeared from the battlefield. Another officer reported, "Our men were saying it was bloody murdering work, and growling much at not being allowed to charge." At one point, Wellington himself took refuge in this square, and some of the men started to complain aloud: "Are we to be massacred here? Let us go at them, let us give them
Brummaguml"
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The duke heard them and replied at once, "Wait a little longer, my lads, you shall have at them presently."
In truth, the situation could not have lasted much longer. In the square formed by the 3/lst Foot Guards, the sergeants were standing behind their men, leveling their pikes to compel them to remain in formation. "The fight, at one time, was so desperate with our battalion," a sergeant remembered, "that files upon files were carried out to the rear from the carnage, and the line was held up by the sergeants' pikes placed against their rear—not for want of courage on the men's parts (for they were desperate), only for the moment our loss so unsteadied the line." The Hanoverian square where Captain von Scriba was posted came "under artillery fire again" and "lost its original shape; at first, it became an irregular triangle, and then a mass closed up on all sides, without any identifiable shape." All along the front, in the centers of infantry squares filled with the dead and wounded, suffocated by smoke, and running shorter and shorter on ammunition, a growing number of officers were becoming convinced that the battle would be lost. In a letter to his brother, Ensign Howard of the Thirty-third confessed, "I thought that things were going badly"; the surviving officers decided to send the battalion's colors to safety in the rear, and soon afterward the same was done with all the colors from Halkett's brigade, a measure that was without precedent. Captain Kincaid, who was still holding the sunken lane behind the knoll with a handful of riflemen, was "weary and worn out, less from fatigue than anxiety." When he looked around, peering through the increasingly dense smoke, he could see nothing but the dead and the dying: "I had never yet heard of a battle in which everybody was killed, but this seemed likely to be an exception, as all were going by turns."
A
ccording to tradition, more or less at this time the Duke of Wellington was heard to say "Night or the Prussians must come." The absence of news from those allies was all the more frustrating because the Prussian vanguard, which hours before had advanced as far as Papelotte, had disappeared back into the woods, and despite their promises, no Prussian troops had come marching in after them. "The time they occupied in approaching seemed interminable," Wellington later wrote. "Both they and my watch seemed to have stuck fast." Certainly, the smoke rising in the distance around the bell tower of Plancenoit church and the sound of cannonading off to the south might have indicated to him that the Prussians were already in action; but for the moment the duke could not perceive any visible consequences of their intervention for the desperate battle that was being fought on the ridge.
In fact, although Wellington could not know this, there were already consequences, and they were decisive. That morning, along the main Brussels road between Rossomme and La Belle Alliance, Napoleon had massed thirty-seven battalions, which were supposed to constitute his strategic reserve, to be sent forward at the opportune moment to break through the weakest point in the Allied deployment; of these thirty-seven, no fewer than twenty-three, already withdrawn from the reserve and sent to stop the Prussian advance, were slowly being consumed in the combat around Plancenoit. On the Prussian side, the last two brigades of IV Corps, exhausted by their interminable slog through Belgian mud, had finally arrived in front of the village; one of these brigades, General von Ryssel's Fourteenth, was incomplete, having left two battalions behind at Wavre, but old Blucher nonetheless had at his disposition the equivalent of thirty-four battalions, or something like twenty-four thousand muskets, against the ten thousand that formed the French defensive line. Obviously, since both sides had already been severely battered, and since the Prussians, as they advanced, had scattered their forces to a much greater extent than had been the case with the French, these figures are uncertain, but they are indicative of the enormous numerical disproportion between the two sides.
The Prussians returned to the attack, led this time by the two battalions of the Eleventh Infantry, commanded by Colonel von Reichenbach. This regiment, recruited in Silesia, had been part of the regular army since its reconstitution in 1808, and it was the first seasoned Prussian line regiment that Blucher had been able to put on the battlefield that day. The two
Landwehr
regiments that made up Ryssel's brigade along with the Eleventh were also probably of good quality, having been recruited in Pomerania, one of the most patriotic regions of the old Kingdom of Prussia.
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Under this redoubled pressure, Duhesme's troops were forced to abandon the first houses on the edge of the village, and the battle started to rage again in the narrow streets of Plancenoit, with the bloody ferocity of a house-to-house struggle fought with bayonets and musket butts. Carried forward by their numbers and their enthusiasm, the Prussians reached the village center, and there, around the church and the walled cemetery, the combat became even more savage; but in the end, worn down by the terrific fire that the French poured into them from the houses and the graveyard, Blucher's men were once again driven out of the village.
The tenacity of the defenders of Plancenoit was notable. The southernmost houses of the village, where there was a palpable danger that the advancing Prussians might debouch upon the flank or even in the rear of the French, were defended by the Fifth Ligne, which was no ordinary regiment. Its troops had been deployed by their monarchist officers a few miles south of Grenoble on March 7, with orders to bar the way to Napoleon, who had escaped from Elba and disembarked in France barely a week before. Napoleon had approached the regiment alone and, standing a few meters from the soldiers' musket barrels, had asked, "Would you fire on your emperor?" whereupon the troops revolted against their leaders and carried him in triumph. Remarkably, Colonel Roussille, though he disapproved of his men's defection, asked Napoleon to allow him to remain in his command, declaring, "My regiment has abandoned me, but I do not wish to abandon it." And so the emperor had left Colonel Roussille in command of the Fifth Ligne, and in the evening of Waterloo the colonel was mortally wounded while his troops successfully defended Plancenoit.
By an irony of fate, the other division of VI Corps, fighting tooth and nail to defend the high ground north of Plancenoit, included the Tenth Ligne, which until a few weeks previously had been fighting in the south of France under the Due d'Angouleme, the Bourbon who had tried to incite the southern populations against Napoleon. As they entered Laon at the start of the Waterloo campaign, the soldiers of the Tenth Ligne had refused to shout, with the others,
"Vive l'Empereur,"
shouting instead
"Vive le roi de Rome."
In the opinion of many, this slogan augured ill, being nothing more than an expedient way for the men to underline their loyalty to the king. And yet the monarchists of the Tenth Ligne fought as hard as the Bonapartists of the Fifth at Plancenoit.
In the end, the factor that probably explains the stubbornness of the French resistance better than any other is the presence of the Young Guard. These four regiments of light infantry had been constituted only after Napoleon's return from Elba by recalling veterans from leave, accepting a large number of volunteers in Paris and Lyon, and combining them into units of uneven experience that, while they were certainly not as solid as the Imperial Guard's grenadiers or
chasseurs a
pied,
made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in homogeneity. Their commander, Duhesme, was exceptional. Although not at all exempt from criticism on a personal level—he was an old Jacobin fire-eater who, like many others, had grown rich in nebulous ways, and he had been involved in so many shady affairs, including accusations of murder, that in 1810 the emperor had dismissed him from his service and exiled him from Paris—Duhesme, having been restored to his rank, was an extraordinary battlefield commander, a specialist in precisely the sort of light infantry combat that led his troops to chase the Prussians out of the village a second time.
Their flight was so precipitous that the skirmishers of the Young Guard, pursuing the fugitives, left the village behind and moved forward through open country until they came within musket range of the hollow where the other Prussian battalions, which had taken many casualties in the previous fight, were still laboriously reordering themselves. The accurate and unexpected fire of the French caused a momentary panic in the ranks of the exhausted Prussian infantry, but then a squadron of the Sixth Hussars charged the
tirailleurs,
overwhelming some and compelling the others to return in haste to the village. Nevertheless, the progress made by the Prussians had once again been canceled out, and for the second time Blucher's attack was back where it started.
But reinforcements continued to arrive on the road from Wavre. The II Corps, commanded by General von Pirch, had started marching in the late morning, on the heels of Bulow's corps, and these men, likewise exhausted and covered up to their hats in mud, were starting to come into view. Thus assured that soon he would have new reserves at his disposition, Blucher ordered Btilow to attack again with what he had; this time, the worn-down battalions of the Fourteenth and Sixteenth Brigades penetrated past the village center and pushed all the way to the other end. Duhesme, who had spearheaded the resistance for so long, lay dying from a head wound; some of his men carried him to the rear, literally holding him in the saddle, and tried at first to bring him to safety; but that night they were obliged to abandon him, and the general was a prisoner of the Prussians when he died two days later. Around the cemetery, which had been fought over for so long, entire groups of the Young Guards were starting to raise their hands in surrender, although the Prussians, maddened by the stubborn defense the French had put up, were not always disposed to take prisoners.
As Napoleon was organizing his last reserves for the final attack against Wellington's wavering line, he trained his telescope on his right wing, and what he saw compelled him to take hasty countermeasures. All the troops left to him were the thirteen battalions of the Middle Guard and Old Guard.
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All of which had already left their original positions on both sides of the main road just north of Rossomme and moved forward almost to La Belle Alliance, where they were waiting to advance against Wellington's center. Napoleon hurriedly ordered that those troops to the right of the main road should deploy into squares to form a last line of defense in case of a Prussian breakthrough; and two of those battalions, selected from among the most elite in the French army, the l/2nd Grenadiers and the l/2nd Chasseurs a pied of the Old Guard, were ordered to turn back, march to Plancenoit, and recapture it.
They were little more than a thousand bayonets, but all veterans with ten or twelve campaigns behind them; their skin was covered with tattoos, and large golden earrings hung from their ears, giving them the look of old-time pirates. An Englishman who saw them at Fontainebleau the previous year wrote: "More dreadful looking fellows than Napoleon's Guard I have never seen. They had the look of thoroughbred, veteran, disciplined banditti. Depravity, recklessness, and bloodthirstiness were burned into their faces. Black mustachios, gigantic bearskins, and a ferocious expression were their characteristics." The other soldiers in the French army had no great love for the men of the Imperial Guard, although everyone desired in his heart to be called one day to join its ranks. The severity and arrogance of the Imperial Guard's officers, the double pay and double rations that were the privilege of every one of its members down to the least drummer boy, and the precedence always given to the Guard's needs, whether of quarters or provisions, aroused all the more anger because it was clear to anyone who cared to look that the Guard was sent into combat much more rarely than the cannon fodder that constituted the line regiments. But at Plancenoit, these two Old Guard battalions showed that they were worth the privileges that Napoleon had always granted them. General Morand quickly deployed his men into columns and moved them out. Plancenoit was little more than half a mile from La Belle Alliance, and they had barely begun to descend the slope that led to the village when they encountered Young Guard fugitives, running away from the fight, some of them declaring that the Prussians were hot on their heels. The drums beat the
pas de charge,
and the men of the Old Guard advanced on Plancenoit with cadenced steps and fixed bayonets.
What happened next can be explained only by acknowledging the fatigue of the Prussian troops, the inexperience of the large number of them who were new recruits, and the terrible losses that they had already suffered. Morand's two battalions attacked and overwhelmed the first Prussian skirmishers, who had been cautiously peering out of the houses on the edge of the village. The French then fought their way through the rutted streets with bayonets and musket butts, amid burned houses and piles of dead and wounded, and the multitude of Prussians in front of them, a force many times their number, allowed itself to be driven back, first in disorder and then in a catastrophic rout. The Prussians were pitilessly massacred, trampled on by the triumphant French, and ejected from the village. It had taken the Old Guard twenty minutes to become masters of Plancenoit. They were so intoxicated with blood and victory that General Pelet, commander of the Second Chasseurs, found his men busy cutting prisoners' throats and had to resort to forceful measures before he could manage to save a few. Behind them, the battalions of the Young Guard, brought back into line by their officers and encouraged by the Old Guard's exploit, were returning to their earlier positions. At seven-thirty in the evening, Blucher's offensive was back at its starting point yet again.