"But yet, though thick the shafts as snow,
Though charging knights like whirlwinds go,
Though bill-men ply the ghastly blow,
Unbroken was the ring;
The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,
Each stepping where his comrade stood,
The instant that he fell.
No thought was there of dastard flight;
Linked in the serried phalanx tight,
Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
As fearlessly and well."
--SCOTT.
Napoleon's infantry had failed to capture either Hougoumont or La Haye
Sainte, which was stoutly held by Baring and his Hanoverians. The
great infantry attack on the British left had failed, and though the
stubborn fight round the two farmhouses never paused, the main battle
along the ridge for a time resolved itself into an artillery duel.
Battery answered battery across the narrow valley, nearly four hundred
guns in action at once, the gunners toiling fiercely to load and fire
with the utmost speed. Wellington ordered his men to lie down on the
reverse of the ridge; but the French had the range perfectly, and
shells fell thickly on the ranks of recumbent men, and solid shot tore
through them. The thunder of the artillery quickened; the French
tirailleurs, showing great daring, crept in swarms up the British slope
and shot down the British gunners at their pieces. Both Hougoumont and
La Haye Sainte were on fire at this stage of the battle. The smoke of
the conflict, in an atmosphere heavy with moisture, hung like a low
pall of blackest crape over the whole field; and every now and again,
on either ridge, columns of white smoke shot suddenly up and fell back
like gigantic and vaporous mushrooms--the effect of exploding
ammunition waggons. "Hard pounding this, gentlemen," said Wellington,
as he rode past his much-enduring battalions. "Let us see who will
pound longest."
At four o'clock came the great cavalry attack of the French. Through
the gap between, not merely the two farmhouses, but the two farmhouses
plus their zone of fire--through a gap, that is, of probably not more
than 1000 yards, the French, for two long hours, poured on the British
line the whole strength of their magnificent cavalry, led by Ney in
person. To meet the assault, Wellington drew up his first line in a
long chequer of squares, five in the first line, four, covering their
intervals, in the second. In advance of them were the British guns,
with their sadly reduced complement of gunners. Immediately behind the
squares were the British cavalry brigades; the Household Brigade,
reduced by this time to a couple of squadrons; and behind them, in
turn, the Dutch-Belgian infantry, who had fortitude enough not to run
away, but lacked daring sufficient to fill a place on the fire-scourged
edge of actual battle. When the British front was supposed to be
sufficiently macadamised by the dreadful fire of the French batteries,
Ney brought on his huge mass of cavalry, twenty-one squadrons of
cuirassiers, and nineteen squadrons of the Light Cavalry of the Guard.
At a slow trot they came down the French slope, crossed the valley,
and, closing their ranks and quickening their stride, swept up to the
British line, and broke, a swirling torrent of men and horses, over the
crest. Nothing could be more majestic, and apparently resistless, than
their onset--the gleam of so many thousand helmets and breastplates,
the acres of wind-blown horse-hair crests and many-coloured uniforms,
the thunder of so many galloping hoofs. Wellington had ordered his
gunners, when the French cavalry reached their guns, to abandon them
and run for shelter beneath the bayonets of the nearest square, and the
brave fellows stood by their pieces pouring grape and solid shot into
the glittering, swift-coming human target before them till the leading
horses were almost within touch of the guns, when they ran and flung
themselves under the steady British bayonets for safety.
The French horsemen, as they mounted the British slope, saw nothing
before them but the ridge, empty of everything except a few abandoned
guns. They were drunk with the rapture of victory, and squadron after
squadron, as it reached the crest, broke into tempests of shouts and a
mad gallop. All the batteries were in their possession; they looked to
see an army in rout. Suddenly they beheld the double line of British
squares--or, rather, "oblongs"--with their fringe of steady steel
points; and from end to end of the line ran the zigzag of fire--a fire
that never slackened, still less intermitted. The torrent and tumult
of the horsemen never checked; but as they rode at the squares, the
leading squadron--men and horses--smitten by the spray of lead, tumbled
dead or dying to the ground. The following squadrons parted, swept
past the flanks of the squares, scourged with deadly volleys, struggled
through the intervals of the second line, emerged breathless and broken
into the space beyond, to be instantly charged by the British cavalry,
and driven back in wreck over the British slope. As the struggling
mass left the crest clear, the French guns broke in a tempest of shot
on the squares, while the scattered French re-formed in the valley, and
prepared for a second and yet more desperate assault.
Foiled in his first attack, Ney drew the whole of Kellerman's
division--thirty-seven squadrons, eleven of cuirassiers, six of
carabineers, and the Bed Lancers of the Guard--into the whirlpool of
his renewed assault, and this time the mass, though it came forward
more slowly, was almost double in area. Gleaming with lance and sword
and cuirass, it undulated as it crossed the broken slopes, till it
seemed a sea, shining with 10,000 points of glancing steel, in motion.
The British squares, on the reverse slope, as they obeyed the order,
"Prepare to receive cavalry!" and fell grimly into formation, could
hear the thunder of the coming storm--the shrill cries of the officers,
the deeper shouts of the men, the clash of scabbard on stirrup, the
fierce tramp of the iron-shod hoofs. Squadron after squadron came over
the ridge, like successive human waves; then, like a sea broken loose,
the flood of furious horsemen inundated the whole slope on which the
squares were drawn up. But each square, a tiny, immovable island of
red, with its fringe of smoke and steel and darting flame, stood
doggedly resolute. No French leader, however daring, ventured to ride
home on the very bayonets. The flood of maddened men and horses swung
sullenly back across the ridge, while the British gunners ran out and
scourged them with grape as they rode down the slope.
From four o'clock to six o'clock this amazing scene was repeated. No
less than thirteen times, it was reckoned, the French horsemen rode
over the ridge, and round the squares, and swept back wrecked and
baffled. In the later charges they came on at a trot, or even a walk,
and they rode through the British batteries and round the squares, in
the words of the Duke of Wellington, "as if they owned them." So dense
was the smoke that sometimes the British could not see their foes
until, through the whirling blackness, a line of lances and crested
helmets, or of tossing horse-heads, suddenly broke. Sometimes a single
horseman would ride up to the very points of the British bayonets and
strike at them with his sword, or fire a pistol at an officer, in the
hope of drawing the fire of the square prematurely, and thus giving his
comrades a chance of breaking it. With such cool courage did the
British squares endure the fiery rush of the French cavalry, that at
last the temper of the men grew almost scornful. They would growl out,
"Here come these fools again," as a fresh sweep of horsemen came on.
Sometimes the French squadrons came on at a trot; sometimes their
"charge" slackened down to a walk. Warlike enthusiasm had exhausted
itself. "The English squares and the French squadrons," says Lord
Anglesey, "seemed almost, for a short time, hardly taking notice of
each other."
In their later charges the French brought up some light batteries to
the crest of the British ridge, and opened fire at point-blank distance
on the solid squares. The front of the 1st Life Guards was broken by a
fire of this sort, and Gronow relates how the cuirassiers made a dash
at the opening. Captain Adair leaped into the gap, and killed with one
blow of his sword a French officer who had actually entered the square!
The British gunners always ran swiftly out when the French cavalry
recoiled down the slope, remanned their guns, and opened a murderous
fire on the broken French. Noting this, an officer of cuirassiers drew
up his horse by a British battery, and while his men drew off, stood on
guard with his single sword, and kept the gunners from remanning it
till he was shot by a British infantryman. Directly the broken cavalry
was clear of the ridge, the French guns opened furiously on the British
lines, and men dropped thick and fast. The cavalry charges, as a
matter of fact, were welcomed as affording relief from the intolerable
artillery fire.
For two hours 15,000 French horsemen rode round the British squares,
and again and again the ridge and rear slope of the British position
was covered with lancers, cuirassiers, light and heavy dragoons, and
hussars, with the British guns in their actual possession; and yet not
a square was broken! A gaily dressed regiment of the Duke of
Cumberland's (Hanoverian) Hussars watched the Homeric contest from the
British rear, and Lord Uxbridge, as the British cavalry were completely
exhausted by their dashes at the French horsemen as they broke through
the chequer of the squares, rode up to them and called on them to
follow him in a charge. The colonel declined, explaining that his men
owned their own horses, and could not expose them to any risk of
damage! These remarkable warriors, in fact, moved in a body, and with
much expedition, off the field, Seymour (Lord Uxbridge's aide) taking
their colonel by the collar and shaking him as a dog shakes a rat, by
way of expressing his view of the performance.