The Battle (44 page)

SIXTY-FIVE

THE MEETING AT LA BELLE ALLIANCE

At La Belle Alliance, Marshal Soult met General Radet, commander of the military police, and ordered him to gather all the cavalry who were without mounts and arm them with muskets. Radet set about his appointed task, assisted by his aides-de-camp and a handful of gendarmes; they collected muskets from the battlefield, armed all the dismounted cuirassiers they could find, and combined them with infantry stragglers to form a unit. When the Prussians approached from Plancenoit, preceded by a chain of skirmishers, Radet deployed his heterogeneous forces and held off the enemy for a while to the sound of a drum that was beating the charge; meanwhile, he saw to securing the carriages belonging to the emperor and Marshal Soult, whose drivers had already started to unharness the horses and slink away. Then, as the dusk began to deepen, everyone's attention turned to escaping the present predicament: The inn from which Napoleon had directed the battle for a considerable part of the day was the point toward which Pirch's and Bulow's infantry from Plancenoit, Ziethen's from Papelotte, and Adam's and Hew Halkett's from Hougoumont were all converging.

By this point, it was nearly dark, and the only formation in all of Napoleon's army still capable of putting up a fight was the Old Guard's First Grenadiers a pied, commanded by General Petit. This regiment, the best of the best, comprised two battalions, about a thousand men in all, nearly half of them decorated with the Legion of Honor. Held in reserve near La Belle Alliance, these troops had not participated in the offensive and were retiring in good order, formed in square, and stopping every few paces to dress their ranks and fire a volley. Not only did their fire hold off their pursuers, it also kept at a distance the crowd of routed French soldiers who wanted to take refuge in the squares and who would certainly have determined their undoing. "We fired at all who presented themselves," General Petit confessed, "both friends and foes, for fear of letting in the ones with the others."

Not long before, Napoleon himself had been under the protection of one of these squares, but he was by then already galloping toward Le Caillou, from where he would depart immediately for France, escorted by a battalion of the Old Guard—the 1/1 st Chasseurs—who had spent the entire day guarding the emperor's baggage and the imperial treasury.

Shortly after crossing the road near La Belle Alliance, Major Blair, Adam's brigade major, met the first Prussians. There were no more French in the area, and the British officers were busy chalking the numbers of their regiments on abandoned enemy guns so they could later claim them as their rightful booty. Hew Halkett maintained that he and his brigade had captured a dozen guns of the Imperial Guard but left them where they were in order to continue the pursuit of the enemy; the next day, to his great irritation, he found those guns marked with the numbers of the Fifty-second and Seventy-first Regiments. The Eighteenth Hussars, still led by Sir Hussey Vivian in person, also met the Prussians near the road. In their enthusiasm, Vivian's riders mistook the Prussians for French and cut down quite a few with their sabers. Night was falling fast, and in the thickening darkness British and Prussian troops fired on one another practically every time they met, causing a great many "friendly fire" casualties. Wellington himself noticed a Prussian battery that was firing on Adam's men and had to ask the Conte di Sales to gallop over to the battery and apprise the gunners of their mistake. Fortunately, when di Sales reached the guns, he found someone who spoke French, and he was able to have the bombardment stopped.

In some cases, the officers involved in such incidents adopted a philosophical attitude toward them. For example, Lieutenant Ingilby of the horse artillery, whose battery came under fire from the Prussians just when the lieutenant's men were harnessing the horses in order to join the pursuit, calmly suggested, "As the Prussians had never probably seen British troops before, it was not extraordinary that they should take us to be the Enemy in the
pele-mele
sort of confusion that was presented to their view at first coming up." Others, however, reacted less sportingly When a Prussian battery took up a position a few hundred yards away and started firing on Captain Mercer's battery, he at once gave the order to return fire; soon a German officer came galloping up in great distress and remonstrated with the captain: "Dat is your friends de Proosians." Mercer replied that whoever fired on him was his enemy and continued to fire back, undeterred. The German officer took his leave after a cannonball nearly killed him, and the bombardment kept smashing up vehicles, men, and horses on both sides until a Belgian battery went into position nearby. Mercer managed to persuade them to fire on the Prussians rather than on him, and shortly thereafter the Belgians and Prussians ceased firing on one another and moved on.

After nine o'clock, not far from La Belle Alliance, the famous meeting between Wellington and Blucher took place. Probably influenced by the inn's prophetic name, the iconography of the battle has always represented this encounter as occurring right in front of the building itself. Although both men were on horseback, the Prussian commander managed to lean out of his saddle and embrace and kiss Wellington, to the latter's no little dismay, unaccustomed as he was to continental effusiveness. "Mein
lieber Kamerad! Quelle affaire!"
the old man stammered. Later, Wellington would maliciously comment on the scene: "That was about all the French he knew." The two commanders decided together that the Prussians alone would continue the pursuit. This decision is usually explained by citing the exhausted condition of Wellington's troops, but Blucher's were surely no less tired. More likely the choice reflected the plodding management and slowness of movement that characterized British troops, even when they were commanded by the best of their generals. The enormous number of friendly fire incidents that were occurring wherever the two Allied armies encountered each other also must have made separating them seem like a good idea.

Wellington's weary foot soldiers prepared to bivouac on the ground they had defended the whole day. But for hours fighting kept flaring up all along the front, so no one could really feel safe. Some officers of Halkett's brigade were gathered around their provisional commander, Colonel Elphinstone, talking about the course of the day; the happiest of the lot was Major Chambers, who had succeeded by seniority to command of the Thirtieth Regiment and declared that he expected to be promoted immediately to lieutenant colonel. While all the others were agreeing with him and offering their congratulations, a few shots sounded nearby and bullets whistled around them. Lieutenant Pattison said that he would go and see what was happening, saluted his friends, and advanced several paces before he spotted some isolated French soldiers who stubbornly kept firing at him and his comrades. When a ball hissed past him, Pattison instinctively turned around and saw Major Chambers put a hand to his chest and move away from the group in search of a clean place where he might lie down; "in five minutes he was a lifeless corpse."

Even in the rear, where small units of cavalry and militia were guarding large numbers of French prisoners, the tension of the battle was far from diminishing. The British or German cavalry troops could not afford to use good manners as they lined up the prisoners and drove them along the Brussels road, and more than one of the conquerors took advantage of the occasion to mistreat the French and mock their defeat. One or two writers remembered feeling nothing more than pity for those exhausted, ragged, sodden, mud-covered men, many of them disfigured by frightful wounds. But in some cases the prisoners, including those who were wounded, were so hostile and uncooperative that they could be made to march only under threat of arms. A British officer remarked that it would not have been wise to draw near to them without a loaded pistol or at least an unsheathed sword in one's hand. The next day, in the Brussels hospital, Captain Bridges of the Royal Engineers personally saw and heard wounded French soldiers crying out
"Vive l'Empereur"
as surgeons sawed off their arms and legs.

SIXTY-SIX

THE PRUSSIAN PURSUIT

The Prussians carried out the pursuit of the defeated enemy in a paroxysm of ferocity, the result of the tension accumulated in the fighting without quarter that had raged in the streets of Plancenoit, but also of the fanatical anti-French propaganda that had been fed to Blucher's troops. Lieutenant Jackson of Wellington's staff found himself in the midst of the Prussians between La Belle Alliance and Rossomme and was genuinely afraid that they were going to fire on him, so great was their excitement; everywhere around him, they were bayoneting wounded French soldiers to death. Later, the lieutenant came across a group of Prussian infantry who were debating whether or not to kill a wounded cavalryman; drawing near, Jackson saw that the injured soldier was a British light dragoon and began shouting,
"Er ist ein Engldnder!"
until the Prussians went away. By this point, Lieutenant Jackson had had enough of these loyal allies: "I got clear of the Prussians as soon as I could, and was glad to find myself with a whole skin among the 52nd."

Dr. Larrey, chief surgeon of the Imperial Guard and inventor of the ambulance, tried to escape amid throngs of Prussian cavalry; he had already suffered two saber wounds when an uhlan struck him down with his lance. Having dismounted to rob him, the uhlan realized that Larrey was not dead, whereupon he took everything of value that he could find on the doctor, tied his hands behind his back, and brought his bleeding prisoner to his general. According to Larrey, his squat frame and gray redingote deceived the uhlan, who was convinced that he had captured Napoleon himself. The Prussian general immediately saw the mistake and coldly gave orders for the prisoner to be shot. Larrey was standing in front of the firing squad when a Prussian surgeon who had worked with him in Berlin recognized him and managed to save his life.

The effectiveness of the Prussian pursuit, which enormously increased the victors' booty and contributed decisively to breaking the morale of Napoleon's army, is all the more noteworthy because the Prussians, no less exhausted than the British, had available very few troops still capable of marching. Gneisenau placed himself at the head of the vanguard and urged on his exhausted men all night long. According to Clausewitz, Gneisenau "had the drum beat incessantly, intending by this sign of his troops' approach to strike terror into the hearts of the fleeing enemy on all sides, to frighten him out of his resting places, and to keep him in continuous flight." With the Prussian drum hard on their heels, the French kept fleeing until dawn, abandoning guns and baggage every time the road became difficult. It was in the course of this pursuit and not in the battle proper that Napoleon's army was deprived of almost all its cannon, a loss that transformed the defeat into a disaster. "It was the finest night of my life," Gneisenau later wrote.

The majority of the booty was taken where the road went through inhabited centers and the inevitable traffic jams ensued. In Genappe, the road passed over the River Dyle on a single bridge, and there many artillerymen unharnessed their horses and cleared off, abandoning the guns to their pursuers. While houses were beginning to burn and Prussian fusiliers were clearing away a barricade constructed of wagons and cannon at the entrance to the village, Napoleon was obliged to leave his coach and get back in the saddle. A short time later, Major von Keller of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment took possession of the emperor's sword, his medals, a purse of diamonds, and even his hat, which he had let fall to the ground in his panic.
⁴¹

A little farther on, the uhlans reached the last carriages in the imperial train; they had been abandoned by Marchand and left in the middle of the road, each of them with a team of six or eight horses still in harness, but apart from the animals there was no living creature in sight. In these vehicles, too, were hidden bags of precious stones, which Napoleon always carried with him as a reserve of liquid assets in case of an emergency—a policy more befitting an adventurer than an emperor. As their officers were urging them forward, the uhlans hastily filled their pockets with whatever they found and rode on; the fusiliers of the Fifteenth arrived after them and seized the lion's share of the booty. The next day, one of their officers wrote, there were fusiliers selling diamonds as big as peas for a few francs. The rumor that Napoleon's carriages were full of precious gems spread like lightning. The next morning, a British officer passing by the remains of the carriages met several Prussian soldiers digging and sifting the earth around them, looking for fallen valuables.

At Genappe the retreat of the French army was definitively transformed into a rout. Colonel Bro, commander of one of the lancer regiments that had wreaked such a terrible revenge on the British cavalry, had suffered a wound in his right arm in the fighting and was so weak from loss of blood that he was obliged to lean on his servant for support. Having heard that all the wounded were to retire to Charleroi, Bro paid the driver of a cabriolet from the baggage train to take him there, but they were unable to get past Genappe, because the road was clogged with artillery wagons. Bro was still there when the fleeing soldiers started to pour into the road, announcing that the battle was lost and the army in retreat. Two riders, passing in great haste, shouted to him that Napoleon had been killed in one of the Guard's squares; the colonel needed some time to get over this tremendous news and start thinking about saving his own skin. Around him, the fugitives, maddened by fear, were killing one another in order to make way faster; General Radet, who was trying to maintain order, was pulled down from his horse and clubbed half to death with musket butts.

Major Trefcon, suffering from heavy bruises and a sprained wrist, had dragged himself toward the rear in search of an ambulance, and soon he too was on the road to Genappe, in the midst of a growing throng of fugitives. "I met an old cuirassier squadron commander, whom I had known in Spain in former days," Trefcon later wrote. "He, too, was wounded and looking for the ambulances. When he came up to me, he said, 'My poor colonel, we are most unfortunate. The battle is lost.' I was furious, and I believe I answered him rudely. The squadron commander said no more, but sadly hung his head, as though dazed. I felt sorry for him." Before long, however, Trefcon had to admit that his old comrade-in-arms was right; the fleeing soldiers were so numerous and so desperate that the day could not but be lost. Jostled about in the crowd and weakened by his injuries, the major decided to leave the road and seek a way to escape through the countryside; there, by good fortune, he was able to stop an abandoned horse, mount it, and head for the border.

In a house in Genappe, Chef de Bataillon Jolyet, who had suffered a stomach wound at Hougoumont, lay stretched out on a bed of straw after having comforted himself with a little bread and a glass of beer. He was thinking that perhaps the army would halt there and give battle again tomorrow, when he heard the bugles of the Prussian cavalry, which was galloping through the streets of the village.
"Pauvre
France! Pauvre armee!"
he murmured, and so did the others there with him; however, they blew out the candle and locked the door, hoping they might be spared. The next morning, a Prussian officer knocked on the door and compelled them to open it; then he confiscated watches, money, and even the officers' epaulets, acting as if they were lucky he was not taking their lives. Jolyet, who had hidden part of his money in his socks, was searched by several soldiers, and one of them was on the point of stripping off his boots, but his own comrades made him desist. Nevertheless, Jolyet later recalled, "They took my braces, my cravat, my belt, and my shirt, but they magnanimously left me my overcoat and my trousers."

As soon as they got past Genappe, General von Gneisenau gathered the fusiliers around him and commanded them to sing the hymn
"Herr Gott, Dich
loben wir"
("Lord God, We Praise Thee"); then, in the thick darkness, he gave the order to continue the pursuit. Not far ahead of him, Marchand had almost reached Quatre Bras with his remaining carriages when he discovered that a cannon bogged down in the middle of the road made it impossible for him and his party to proceed. At that moment, Prussian cavalry caught up with the rearmost carriages and began to plunder them. Marchand opened the
necessaire,
slipped the banknotes inside his shirt, and took to his heels, abandoning the rest. All the carriages fell into the hands of the Prussians, and thousands of louis d'or disappeared into the soldiers' pockets before the officers were able to establish a modicum of order and post sentinels. The vehicles belonging to the general staff and the marshals' personal carriages were also captured in that stretch of road, but Gneisenau kept pushing on with his remaining men, who were drunk with fatigue and weighed down by gold. "In the end," Clausewitz wrote, "the force accompanying General Gneisenau in his tireless advance was really nothing more than a fusilier battalion and its indefatigable drummer-boy who by the general's order had been set upon one of Bonaparte's carriage-horses."

Napoleon himself continued his flight on horseback, the former colossus of Europe scampering away from the battlefield, in the midst of a crowd of his routed soldiers and accompanied by a few aides-de-camp. General Durutte met him at Gosselies, well past Quatre Bras, on the road to Charleroi. Despite his frightful wounds, Durutte was still alive. He had been assisted by a cavalry trooper, who had bound up his wounded arm with a handkerchief and stopped the loss of blood, and then he had come upon one of his staff officers and one of his servants, who had accompanied him as he fled through the fields. Whenever he felt himself fainting, the general summoned his servant, who held him up by his collar and revived him with a swallow of brandy. At Gosselies, Durutte recognized the emperor and tried to present himself to him, wishing to explain that in his present condition he was afraid he would be unable to continue fighting. But Napoleon, "irritated at having been recognized, or absorbed in his own reflections," did not even deign to respond to the general. It was left to one of his aides to exclaim, "Oh, General, look what they've done to you!"

In the last hours before dawn, the crowd of fugitives reached Charleroi, where a single bridge allowed them to cross the River Sambre and reenter France. The few remaining wagons were abandoned in the narrow streets that led down to this bridge. Sacks of flour and rice were scattered everywhere, along with bottles of wine and brandy and hundreds of loaves of bread, which the fleeing soldiers stopped to skewer on their bayonets before continuing on their way. Peyrusse, the official paymaster of the Armee du Nord, reached the banks of the Sambre with a wagon drawn by six horses and containing the emperor's personal treasury, a million francs in gold, only to discover that it was impossible for his vehicle to pass over the bridge. Peyrusse distributed bags of gold coins to the men of his escort, noting down all their names and making them swear to rejoin him on the other side of the river. As this process was going on, shots were fired a short distance away, and someone cried out, "The Prussians! Save yourselves!" In the general panic, Peyrusse's men were scattered, and all the gold was plundered. While the first Prussian uhlans were entering Charleroi, Napoleon's foreign minister, Maret, Due de Bassano, who was in one of the carriages stuck in the bottleneck, ordered his men to shred all the official documents in his possession and throw the scraps on the muddy road.

In partial contrast to these images of disintegration stands the fact that most of the French combat units managed to maintain a modicum of cohesion and reach safety more or less intact. During the entire pursuit, the Prussians failed to capture even one Eagle, a sign that, at least as far as its regimental standards were concerned, Napoleon's army did not in fact disintegrate. Moreover, the French brought along on their retreat a large number of Allied prisoners, who were not set free until many days or even weeks later. One of them, Lieutenant Wheatley, had to traverse the battlefield at Quatre Bras on the arduous march to France. Naked, unburied corpses were lying everywhere, so thick on the ground that it was impossible not to tread on them in the dark. His boots having been stolen, Wheatley was barefoot, and he later confessed with some embarrassment that walking on dead flesh already trampled into pulp had been a pleasant sensation compared to the torture of the
pave.