universally successful, and upon which he ever relied, the Duke of
Wellington had kept his British troops, the nucleus of his defensive plan,
for the last and worst of the action. He had stationed to take the first
brunt those troops upon which he least relied, and these were the first
Dutch-Belgian brigade under Bijlandt. This body was stationed in front of
the sunken road (at the point marked A in red upon the map). Behind it he
had put Pack's brigade and Kemp's, both British; to the left of it, but
also behind the road, Best's Hanoverian brigade. Papelotte village he held
with Perponcher's Belgians.
It will be seen that the crushing fire of the French eighty guns
maintained for half an hour had fallen full upon the Dutch-Belgians,
standing exposed upon the forward slope at a range of not more than 800
yards.[20] At the French charge, though that was delivered through high
standing crops and over drenched and slippery soil up the slope,
Bijlandt's brigade broke. It is doubtful indeed whether any other troops
would not have broken under such circumstances. Unfortunately the incident
has been made the subject of repeated and most ungenerous accusation. A
body purposely set forward before the whole line to stand such fearful
pounding and to shelter the rest; one, moreover, which in two days of
fighting certainly lost one-fourth of its number in killed and wounded,
and probably lost more than one-third, is deserving of a much more
chivalrous judgment than that shown by most historians in its regard.
Anyhow, Kemp's brigade quickly filled the gap left by the failure of the
Netherlanders, and began to press back the French charge.
Meanwhile the French right, which had captured Papelotte, was compelled to
retreat upon seeing the centre thus driven back, while the French left had
failed to carry the farm of La Haye Sainte. Indeed upon this side, that
is, in the neighbourhood of the great road, the check and reverse to the
French assault had been more complete than elsewhere. An attempt to drive
its first success home with a cavalry charge had been met by a
countercharge, deservedly famous, in which, among other regiments, the
First and Second Lifeguards, the Blues, the King's Dragoons, had broken
the French horse and followed up the French retirement down the slope. The
centre of that retirement was similarly charged by the Scots Greys; and in
the end of the whole affair the English horsemen rode up to the spur where
the great battery stood, sabred the gunners, and then, being thus advanced
so uselessly and so dangerously from their line, were in their turn driven
back to the English positions with bad loss.
When this opening chapter of the battle closed, the net result was that
the initial charge of the First Corps under Erlon had failed. It had left
behind it many prisoners; certain guns which had advanced with it had been
put out of action; it had lost two colours.
Save for the furious inconsequent and almost purposeless fighting that was
still raging far off to the left round Hougomont, the battle ceased. The
valley between the opposing forces was strewn with the dead and dying, but
no formed groups stood or moved among the fallen men. The swept slopes had
all the appearance during that strange halt of a field already lost or
won. The hour was between three and half-past in the afternoon, and so
ended the first phase of the battle of Waterloo. It had lasted rather
over two hours.
THE SECOND PART OF THE ACTION
The second and decisive phase of the battle of Waterloo differed from the
first in this: In the first phase Napoleon was attacking Wellington's
command alone. It was line against line. By hammering at the line opposed
to him on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, Napoleon confidently expected to
break it before the day should close. His first hammer blow, which was the
charge of the First Army Corps under Erlon, had failed, and failed badly.
The cavalry in support of that infantry charge had failed as well as their
comrades, and the British in their turn had charged the retiring French,
got right into their line, sabred their gunners, only to be broken in
their turn by the counter-effort of further French horse.
This first phase had ended in a sort of halt or faint in the battle, as I
have described.
The second phase was a very different matter. It developed into what were
essentially two battles. It found Napoleon fighting not only against
Wellington in front of him, but against Blucher to his right and almost
behind him. It was no longer a simple business of hammering with the whole
force of the French army at the British and their allies upon the ridge in
front, but of desperately attempting to break the Anglo-Dutch line against
time, with diminishing and perpetually reduced forces; with forces
perpetually reduced by the necessity of sending more and more men off to
the right to resist, if it were possible, the increasing pressure of the
accumulating Prussian forces upon the right flank of the French.
This second phase of the action at Waterloo began in the neighbourhood of
four o'clock.
It is true that the arriving Prussians had not yet debouched from the
screen of wood that hid them two and a half miles away to the east, but at
that hour (four o'clock) the heads of their columns were all ready to
debouch, and the delay between their actual appearance upon the field and
the beginning of the second half of the battle was not material to the
result.
That second half of the action began with a series of great cavalry
charges which the Emperor had not designed, and which, even as he watched
them, he believed would be fatal to him. As spectacles, these famous
rides presented the most awful and memorable pageant in the history of
modern war; as tactics they were erroneous, and grievously erroneous.
Before this second phase of the battle was entered it was easily open to
Napoleon, recognising the Prussians advancing and catching no sight of
Grouchy, to change his plan, to abandon the offensive, to stand upon the
defensive along the height which he commanded, there to await Grouchy,
and, if Grouchy still delayed, to maintain the chances of an issue which
might at least be negative, if he could prevent its being decisively
disastrous.
But even if such a conception had passed through the Emperor's mind,
military science was against it. If ever those opposed to him had full
time to concentrate their forces he would, even with the reinforcement of
Grouchy, be fighting very nearly two to one. His obvious, one might say
his necessary, plan was to break Wellington's line, if still it could be
broken, before the full pressure of the arriving Prussians should be felt.
Short of that, there could be nothing but immediate or ultimate disaster.
We shall see how, much later in the action, yet another opportunity for
breaking away, and for standing upon the defensive, or for retreating,
was, in the opinion of some critics, offered to the Emperor by fate.
But we shall see how, upon that second and later occasion in the day, his
advantage in so doing was even less than it was now between this hour of
half-past three and four o'clock, when he determined to renew the combat.
He first sent orders to Ney to make certain of La Haye Sainte, to clear
the enemy from that stronghold, which checked a direct assault upon the
centre, and then to renew the general attack.
La Haye Sainte was not taken at this first attempt. The French were
repelled; the skirmishers, who were helping the direct attack by mounting
the slope upon its right, were thrown back as well, and after this
unsuccessful beginning of the movement the guns were called upon to
prepare a further and more vigorous assault upon a larger scale. Not only
the first great battery of eighty guns, but many of the batteries to the
west of the Brussels road (which had hitherto been turned upon Hougomont
and the English guns behind that position) were now directed upon the
centre of the English line, and there broke out a cannonade even more
furious than the one which had opened the action at one o'clock. Men
trained in a generation's experience of war called it the most furious
artillery effort of their time; and never, perhaps, even in the career of
the Gunner who was now in the last extremity of his fate, had guns better
served him.
Under the battering of that discharge the front of Wellington's command
was partially withdrawn behind the cover of the ridge. A stream of
wounded, mixed with not a few men broken and flying, began to swell
northward up the Brussels road; and Ney, imagining from such a sight that
the enemy's line wavered, committed his capital error, and called upon the
cavalry to charge.
Wellington's line was not wavering. For the mass of the French cavalry to
charge at such a moment was to waste irreparably a form of energy whose
high potential upon the battlefield corresponds to a very rapid
exhaustion, and which, invaluable against a front shaken and doubtful, is
useless against a front still solid.
It was not and could not have been the Emperor who ordered that false
step. It is even uncertain whether the whole body of horsemen that moved
had been summoned by Ney, or whether the rearmost did not simply follow
the advance of their fellows. At any rate, the great group of mounted
men[21] which lay in reserve behind the First Army Corps, and to the west
of the road, passed in its entirety through the infantry, and began to
advance at the trot down the valley for the assault upon the opposite
slope.
I repeat, it is not certain whether Ney called upon all this mass of
cavalry and deliberately risked the waste of it in one blow. It is more
probable that there was some misunderstanding; that Desnoettes' command,
which was drawn up behind Milhaud's, followed Milhaud's, under the
impression that a general order had been given to both; that Ney, seeing
this extra body of horse following, imagined Napoleon to have given it
orders. At any rate, Napoleon never gave such orders, and, from the height
upon which he stood, could not have seen the first execution of them, for
the first advance of that cavalry was hidden from him by a slight lift of
land.
There were 5000 mounted men drawn up in the hollow to the west of the
Brussels road for the charge. It was not until they began to climb the
slope that Napoleon saw what numbers were being risked, and perceived the
full gravity of Ney's error.
To charge unshaken infantry in this fashion, and to charge it without
immediate infantry support, was a thing which that master of war would
never have commanded, and which, when he saw it developing under the
command of his lieutenant, filled him with a sense of peril. But it was
too late to hesitate or to change the disposition of this sudden move. The
5000 climbed at a slow and difficult trot through the standing crops and
the thick mud of the rising ground, suffered--with a moment's
wavering--the last discharge of the British guns, and then, on reaching
the edge of the plateau, spurred to the gallop and charged.
It was futile. They passed the line of guns (the gunners had orders to
abandon their pieces and to retire within the infantry squares); they
developed, in too short a start, too slight an impetus; they seethed, as
the famous metaphor of that field goes, "like angry waves round rocks";
they lashed against every side of the squares into which the allied
infantry had formed. The squares stood.
Wellington had had but a poor opinion of his command. It contained,
indeed, elements more diverse and raw material in larger proportion than
ever he, or perhaps any other general of the great wars, had had to deal
with, but it was infantry hitherto unshaken; and the whole conception of
that false movement, the whole error of that cavalry action, lay in the
idea that the allied line had suffered in a fashion which it had been very
far from suffering. Nothing was done against the squares; and the firmest
of them, the nucleus of the whole resistance, were the squares of British
infantry, three deep, against which the furious close-sabring, spurring,
and fencing of sword with bayonet proved utterly vain. Upon this mass of
horsemen moving tumultuous and ineffectual round the islands of foot
resisting their every effort, Uxbridge, gathering all his cavalry,
charged, and 5000 fresh horse fell upon the French lancers and
cuirassiers, already shredded and lessened by grape at fifty yards and
musket fire at ten. This countercharge of Uxbridge's cleared the plateau.
The French horsemen turned bridle, fled to the hollow of the valley again,
and the English gunners returned to their pieces. The whole fury of the
thing had failed.
But it had failed only for a moment. What remained of the French horse
reformed and once again attempted to charge. Once again, for all their
gravely diminished numbers, they climbed the slope; once again the squares
were formed, and the torment of horsemen round about them struck once
more.
Seen from the point where Napoleon stood to the rear of his line, the high
place that overlooked the battlefield, it seemed to eyes of less genius
than his own that this second attempt had succeeded. Indeed, its fierce
audacity seemed to other than the French observers at that distance to
promise success. The drivers of the reserve batteries in the rear of
Wellington's line were warned for retreat, and Napoleon, reluctant, but
pressed by necessity, seeing one chance at last of victory by mere shock,
himself sent forward a reserve of horse to support the distant cuirassiers
and lancers. He called upon Kellerman, commanding the cavalry of the
Guard, to follow up the charge.
He knew how doubtful was the success of this last reinforcement, for he
knew how ill-judged had been Ney's first launching of that great mass of
horse at an unbroken enemy; but, now that the thing was done, lest,
unsupported, it should turn to a panic which might gain the whole army, he
risked almost the last mounted troops he had and sent them forward,
acting thus like a man throwing good money after bad for fear that all may
be lost.
A better reason still decided Napoleon so to risk a very desperate chance,
and to hurl Kellerman upon the heels of Milhaud. That reason was the
advent, now accomplished, of the Prussians upon his right, and the
necessity, imperative and agonised, of breaking Wellington's line before
the whole strength of the newcomers should be felt upon the French flank
and rear.
Let us turn, then, and see how far and with what rapidity the Prussians at
this moment--nearly half-past five o'clock--had accomplished their
purpose.
* * * * *
Of the four Prussian corps d'armee bivouacked in a circle round Wavre, and
unmolested, as we have seen, by Grouchy, it was the fourth, that of Bulow,
which was given the task of marching first upon the Sunday morning to
effect the junction with Wellington. It lay, indeed, the furthest to the
east of all the Prussian army,[22] but it was fresh to the fight, for it
had come up too late to be engaged at Ligny. It was complete; it was well
commanded.
The road it had to traverse was not only long, but difficult. The passage
of the river Lasne had to be effected across so steep a ravine and by so
impassable a set of ways that the modern observer, following that march as
the present writer has followed it, after rain and over those same fields
and roads, is led to marvel that it was done in the time which Blucher's
energy and the traditional discipline of the Prussian soldiers found
possible. At any rate, the heads of the columns were on the Waterloo edge
of the Wood of Fischermont[23] (or Paris) before four o'clock, and ready
to debouch. Wellington had expected them upon the field by two o'clock at
latest. They disappointed him by two hours, and nearly three, but the
miracle is that they arrived when they did; and it is well here to
consider in detail this feat which the Fourth Prussian Army Corps had
accomplished, for it is a matter upon which our historians of Waterloo are
often silent, and which has been most unfortunately neglected in this
country.
The Fourth Prussian Army Corps, under Bulow, lay as far east as Liege
when, on the 14th of June, Napoleon was preparing to cross the Sambre.
Its various units were all in the close neighbourhood of the town, so none
of them were spared much of the considerable march which all were about to
undertake to the west; even its most westward detachment was no more than
three miles from Liege city.
Bulow should have received the order to march westward at half-past ten on
the morning of the 15th. The order, as we have seen in speaking of Ligny,
was not delivered till the evening of that day. The Fourth Army Corps was
told to concentrate in the neighbourhood of Hannut and a little east of
that distant point. The corps, as a whole, did not arrive until the early
afternoon of Friday the 16th.
It is from this point--Hannut--that the great effort begins.
Bulow, it must be remembered, commanded no less than 32,000 men. The
fatigues and difficulties attendant upon the progress of such a body, most
of it tied to one road, will easily be appreciated.
During the afternoon of the 16th, while Ligny was being fought, he
advanced the whole of this body to points immediately north and east of
Gembloux. Not a man, therefore, of his great command had marched less than
twenty miles, many must have marched over twenty-five, upon that Friday
afternoon.
Then followed the night during which the other three defeated corps fell
back upon Wavre.
That night was full of their confused but unmolested retreat. With the
early morning of the Saturday Bulow's 32,000 fell back along a line
parallel to the general retirement, and all that day they were making
their way by the cross-country route through Welhain and Corroy to Dion Le
Mont.
This task was accomplished through pouring rain, by unpaved lanes and
through intolerable mud, over a distance of close on seventeen miles for
the hardest pushed of the troops, and not less than thirteen for those
whom the accident of position had most spared.
The greater part of the Fourth Corps had spent the first night in the
open; all of it had spent the second night upon the drenched ground. Upon
the _third_ day, the Sunday of Waterloo, this force, though it lies
furthest from the field of Waterloo of all the Prussian forces, is picked
out to march first to the aid of Wellington, because it as yet has had no
fighting and is supposed to be "fresh." On the daybreak, therefore, after
bivouacking in that dreadful weather, Bulow's force is again upon the
move. It does not get through Wavre until something like eight o'clock,
and the abominable conditions of the march may be guessed from the fact
that its centre did not reach St Lambert until one o'clock, nor did the
last brigade pass through that spot until three o'clock. Down the steep
ravine of the Lasne and up on the westward side of it was so hard a
business that, as we have seen, the brigades did not begin to debouch from
the woods at the summit until after four o'clock. It was not until after
five o'clock that the last brigade, the 14th, had come up in line with the
rest upon the field of Waterloo, having moved, under such abominable
conditions of slow, drenched marching, another fifteen miles.
In about forty-eight hours, therefore, this magnificent piece of work had
been accomplished. It was a total movement of over fifty miles for the
average of the corps--certainly more than sixty for those who had marched
furthest--broken only by two short nights, and those nights spent in the
open, one under drenching rain. The whole thing was accomplished without
appreciable loss of men, guns, or baggage, and at the end of it these men
put up a fight which was the chief factor in deciding Waterloo.
Such was the supreme effort of the Fourth Prussian Army Corps which
decided Waterloo.
There are not many examples of endurance so tenacious and organisation so
excellent in the moving so large a body under such conditions in the whole
history of war.
* * * * *
When the Fourth Prussian Corps debouched from the Wood of Fischermont and
began its two-mile approach towards his flank, Napoleon, who had already
had it watched by a body of cavalry, ordered Lobau with the Sixth French
Army Corps, or rather with what he had kept with him of the Sixth Army
Corps, to go forward and check it.
It could only be a question of delay. Lobau had but 10,000 against the
30,000 which Bulow could ultimately bring against him when all his
brigades had come up; but delay was the essential of the moment to
Napoleon. To ward off the advancing Prussian pressure just so long as
would permit him to carry the Mont St Jean was his most desperate need.
Lobau met the enemy, three to two, in the hollow of Plancenoit,[24] was
turned by such superior numbers, and driven from the village.
All this while, during the Prussian success which brought that enemy's
reinforcement nearer and nearer to the rear of the French army and to the
Emperor's own standpoint, the wasted though magnificent action of the
French cavalry was continuing against Wellington's right centre, west of
the Brussels road. Kellerman had charged for the third time; the plateau
was occupied, the British guns abandoned, the squares formed. For the
third time that furious seething of horse against foot was seen from the
distant height of the Belle Alliance. For the third time the sight carried
with it a deceptive appearance of victory. For the third time the cavalry
charge broke back again, spent, into the valley below. Ney, wild as he had
been wild at Quatre Bras, failing in judgment as he had failed then,
shouted for the last reserve of horse, and forgot to call for that 6000
untouched infantry, the bulk of Reille's Second Corps, which watched from
the height of the French ridge the futile efforts of their mounted
comrades.
Folly as it was to have charged unbroken infantry with horse alone, the
charges had been so repeated and so tenacious that, _immediately_
supported by infantry, they might have succeeded. If those 6000 men of
Reille's, the mass of the Second Army Corps, which stood to arms unused
upon the ridge to the west of the Brussels road, had been ordered to
follow hard upon the last cavalry charge, Napoleon might yet have snatched
victory from such a desperate double strain as no general yet in military
history has escaped. He might conceivably have broken Wellington's line
before that gathering flood of Prussians to the right and behind him
should have completed his destruction.
But the moment was missed. Reille's infantry was not ordered forward until
the defending line had had ample time to prepare its defence; until the
English gunners were back again at their pieces, and the English squares
once more deployed and holding the whole line of their height.
It is easy to note such errors as we measure hours and distances upon a
map. It is a wonderment to some that such capital errors appear at all in
the history of armies. Those who have experience of active service will
tell us what the intoxication of the cavalry charges meant, of what blood
Ney's brain was full, and why that order for the infantry came too late.
Of the 6000 infantry which attempted so belated a charge, a quarter was
broken before the British line was reached, and that assault, in its turn,
failed.
At this point in the battle, somewhat after six o'clock, two successes on
the part of the French gave them an opportunity for their last disastrous
effort, and introduced the close of the tragedy.
The first was the capture of La Haye Sainte, the second was the recapture
of Plancenoit.