"Three hundred cannon-mouths roar'd loud;
And from their throats with flash and cloud
Their showers of iron threw."
--SCOTT.
One of the most realistic pictures of the fight at this stage is given
by Captain Mercer, in command of a battery of horse artillery. Mercer
was on the extreme British right during the first stage of the battle,
and only got occasional glimpses of the ridge where the fight was
raging--intermittent visions of French cavalry riding in furious
charges, and abandoned British batteries with guns, muzzle in air,
against the background of grey and whirling smoke. About three
o'clock, in the height of the cavalry struggle, Fraser, who was in
chief command of the horse artillery, galloped down the reverse slope
to Mercer's battery, his face black with powder, his uniform torn, and
brought the troop at full gallop to the central ridge, explaining as
they rode the Duke's orders, that, when the French cavalry charged
home, Mercer and his men should take refuge under the bayonets of the
nearest square.
As they neared the crest at a gallop, Mercer describes the humming as
of innumerable and gigantic gnats that filled the bullet-torn air. He
found his position betwixt two squares of Brunswickers, in whose ranks
the French guns were making huge gaps, while the officers and sergeants
were busy literally pushing the men together. "The men," says Mercer,
"were like wooden figures, semi-paralysed with the horrors of the fight
about them;" and to have attempted to run to them for shelter would
certainly have been the signal for the whole mass to dissolve. Through
the smoke ahead, not a hundred yards distant, were the French squadrons
coming on at a trot. The British guns were swung round, unlimbered,
loaded with case-shot, and fire opened with breathless speed. Still
the French came on; but as gun after gun came into action, their pace
slowed down to a walk, till the front files could endure the terrific
fire no longer. They turned round and tried to ride back. "I actually
saw them," says Mercer, "using the pommels of their swords to fight
their way out of the _mêlée_." Some, made desperate by finding
themselves penned up at the very muzzles of the British guns, dashed
through their intervals, but without thinking of using their swords.
Presently the mass broke and ebbed, a flood of shattered squadrons,
down the slope. They rallied quickly, however, and their helmets could
be seen over the curve of the slope as the officers dressed the lines.
The French tirailleurs, meanwhile, crept up within forty yards of the
battery, and were busy shooting down Mercer's gunners. Mercer, to keep
his men steady, rode slowly to and fro in front of the muzzles of his
guns, the men standing with lighted port-fires. The tirailleurs,
almost within pistol-shot, seized the opportunity to take pot-shots at
him. He shook his glove, with the word "Scélérat," at one of them; the
fellow grinned, and took a leisurely aim at Mercer, the muzzle of his
gun following him as he turned to and fro in his promenade before his
own pieces. The Frenchman fired, and the ball passed at the back of
Mercer's neck into the forehead of the leading driver of one of his
guns.
But the cavalry was coming on again in solid squadrons, a column so
deep that when the leading files were within sixty yards of Mercer's
guns the rear of the great mass was still out of sight. The pace was a
deliberate trot. "They moved in profound silence," says Mercer, and
the only sound that could be heard from them, amidst the incessant roar
of battle, was the low, thunder-like reverberation of the ground
beneath the simultaneous tread of so many horses, through which ran a
jangling ripple of sharp metallic sound, the ring of steel on steel.
The British gunners, on their part, showed a stern coolness fully equal
to the occasion. Every man stood steadily at his post, "the guns ready
loaded with round-shot first, and a case over it; the tubes were in the
vents, the port-fires glared and sputtered behind the wheels." The
column was led on this time by an officer in a rich uniform, his breast
covered with decorations, whose earnest gesticulations were strangely
contrasted with the solemn demeanour of those to whom they were
addressed. Mercer allowed the leading squadron to come within sixty
yards, then lifted his glove as the signal to fire. Nearly the whole
leading rank fell in an instant, while the round shot pierced the
column. The front, covered with struggling horses and men, was
impassable. Some of the braver spirits did break their way through,
only to fall, man and horse, at the very muzzles, of the guns. "Our
guns," says Mercer, "were served with astonishing activity, and men and
horses tumbled before them like nine-pins." Where the horse alone was
killed, the cuirassier could be seen stripping himself of his armour
with desperate haste to escape. The mass of the French for a moment
stood still, then broke to pieces and fled. Again they came on, with
exactly the same result. So dreadful was the carnage, that on the next
day, Mercer, looking back from the French ridge, could identify the
position held by his battery by the huge mound of slaughtered men and
horses lying in front of it. The French at last brought up a battery,
which opened a flanking fire on Mercer's guns; he swung round two of
his pieces to meet the attack, and the combat raged till, out of 200
fine horses in Mercer's troop, 140 lay dead or dying, and two men out
of every three were disabled.
Ney's thirteen cavalry charges on the British position were
magnificent, but they were a failure. They did not break a single
square, nor permanently disable a single gun. Both Wellington and
Napoleon are accused of having flung away their cavalry; but
Wellington--or, rather, Uxbridge--by expending only 2000 sabres,
wrecked, as we have seen, a French infantry corps, destroyed a battery
of 40 guns, and took 3000 prisoners. Ney practically used up 15,000
magnificent horsemen without a single appreciable result. Napoleon, at
St. Helena, put the blame of his wasted cavalry on Ney's hot-headed
impetuosity. The cavalry attack, he said, was made without his orders;
Kellerman's division joined in the attack without even Ney's orders.
But that Napoleon should watch for two hours his whole cavalry force
wrecking itself in thirteen successive and baffled assaults on the
British squares, without his orders, is an utterly incredible
supposition.
If two hours of cavalry assault, punctuated as with flame by the fire
of 200 guns, did not destroy the stubborn British line, it cannot be
denied that it shook it terribly. The British ridge was strewn with
the dead and dying. Regiments had shrunk to companies, companies to
mere files. "Our square," says Gronow, "presented a shocking sight.
We were nearly suffocated by the smoke and smell from burnt cartridges.
It was impossible to move a step without treading on a wounded or slain
comrade." "Where is your brigade?" Vivian asked of Lord Edward
Somerset, who commanded the Life Guards. "Here," said Lord Edward,
pointing to two scanty squadrons, and a long line of wounded or
mutilated horses. Before nightfall the two gallant brigades that made
the great cavalry charge of the morning had contracted to a single
squadron of fifty files. Wellington sent an aide-de-camp to ask
General Hackett, "What square of his that was which was so far in
advance?" It was a mass of killed and wounded men belonging to the
30th and 73rd regiments that lay slain, yet in ranks, on the spot the
square had occupied at one period of the fight, and from which it had
been withdrawn. Seen through the whirling smoke, this quadrangle of
corpses looked like a square of living men. The destruction wrought by
the French guns on the British squares was, in brief, terrific. By a
single discharge of grape upon a German square, one of its sides was
completely blown away, and the "square" transfigured into a triangle,
with its base a line of slaughtered men. The effect produced by
cannon-shot at short range on solid masses of men was sometimes very
extraordinary. Thus Croker tells how an officer received a severe
wound in the shoulder, apparently from a jagged ball. When the missile
was extracted, however, it turned out to be a huge human double-tooth.
Its owner's head had been shattered by a cannon-ball, and the very
teeth transformed into a radiating spray of swift and deadly missiles.
There were other cases of soldiers being wounded by coins driven
suddenly by the impact of shot from their original owners' pockets.
The sustained fire of the French tirailleurs, too, wrought fatal
mischief.
La Haye Sainte by this time had been captured. The brave men who held
it for so many hours carried rifles that needed a special cartridge,
and supplies of it failed. When the French captured the farmhouse,
they were able to push some guns and a strong infantry attack close up
to the British left. This was held by the 27th, who had marched from
Ghent at speed, reached Waterloo, exhausted, at nine A.M., on the very
day of the battle, slept amid the roar of the great fight till three
o'clock, and were then brought forward to strengthen the line above La
Haye Sainte. The 27th was drawn up in square, and the French
skirmishers opened a fire so close and fatal, that, literally, in the
space of a few minutes every second man was shot down!