been the consequences if the French and British armies had happened to
encounter each other in the midst of this forest, instead of meeting,
as they did, a few miles beyond it? Had our troops been a little later
in leaving Brussels on the morning of the 16th of June, this must
inevitably have been the case; for it was impossible that the advanced
guard of Belgic troops, which was stationed at the outpost of Quatre
Bras, could have sustained the attack of the French, or have delayed
their progress for any length of time. But if the hostile armies had
encountered each other here, it would have been impossible that a
general action could have taken place; the thick entangled underwood
makes all entrance into the forest impracticable; and if they had
attempted to fight, the road would soon have been choked up with dead.
Yet the English, I imagine, would not have retreated, since, if they
had, they must either have abandoned Brussels to the enemy, or fought
under its very walls; and whether the French would have retreated
till they came to open ground, or how they would have manoeuvred in
such a situation, it was impossible for an unmilitary head like mine
even to form a conjecture. During the battle, all the cottages and
villages by the wayside had been deserted by their inhabitants, who
fled in consternation into the woods, in expectation of the victory
and immediate advance of the French, from whom they looked for no
mercy. The road had been so dreadfully cut up with the heavy rains and
the incessant travelling upon it, that notwithstanding three weeks of
summer weather had now elapsed since the battle, the chaussée in the
centre was worn into ruts upon the hard pavement, and in many places
it was still so deep, that the horses could scarcely drag us through;
the unpaved way on each side of the chaussée was perfectly impassable.
Along the whole way, shattered wheels and broken remains of waggons
still lay, buried among the mud. Their demolition was one of the many
consequences that resulted from the violent panic with which the men
who were left in charge of the baggage were seized towards the close
of the battle. It was originally caused, I understood, by the Belgic
cavalry, great numbers of whom fled in the heat of the desperate
attack made by the French upon our army in front of Mont St. Jean
before the Prussians came up. They were rallied and brought back by
some British officers; but, unable to stand the dreadful onset of the
French, they turned about again and fled in irretrievable confusion,
trampling upon the wounded and the dying in their speed, and spreading
the alarm that the battle was lost. With troops less steady, with any
other troops, in short, than the British, the example of flight, joined
to such an alarm, at this critical moment, might have occasioned the
loss of the battle in reality. The men stationed in the rear in charge
of the baggage, who knew nothing of what was going forward, believed at
once the report, and, without stopping a moment to ascertain its truth,
they set off at full speed. If the battle was lost, it was clearly
their business to run away, and they could not be accused of neglecting
this part of their duty. Following the example of the Belgians, they
all set off full gallop in the utmost confusion, pell-mell, along the
road to Brussels. Nothing is so infectious, nothing so rapid in its
progress as fear: the panic increased every moment; the terrified
fugitives overtook the carts filled with wounded, and encountered
waggons and troops, and military supplies coming up to the field. It
was impossible to pass: the road, confined on each side by the thickly
woven and impenetrable underwood, was speedily choked up; those who
were proceeding to the army insisted upon going one way, and those who
were running away from it, persisted in going the other. The confusion
surpassed all description; till at last, amidst the crash of waggons,
the imprecations of the drivers, and the cries of the soldiers, a
battle took place, and many were the broken heads and bruises, and
various were the wounds and contusions received in this inglorious
fray. It is even said, and I fear with truth, that some lives were
lost. The baggage was abandoned, and scattered along the road; the
waggons were thrown one upon another into the woods, and over the banks
by the road-side; the horses, half-killed, were left to perish; and the
wounded were deserted. Over every obstacle these panic-struck people,
frantic with fear, forced their way, and, pursued by nothing but their
own terrified imaginations, they arrived at Brussels, proclaiming the
dreadful news that the battle was lost, and the French advancing! The
fearful tidings extended from thence even into Holland; and thus, in
consequence of the cowardice of some Belgians and baggage-men, the
last and most dreadful alarm of Sunday night was spread over the whole
country.
The road, the whole way through the forest of Soignies, was marked with
vestiges of the dreadful scenes which had recently taken place upon it.
Bones of unburied horses, and pieces of broken carts and harness were
scattered about. At every step we met with the remains of some tattered
clothes, which had once been a soldier's. Shoes, belts, and scabbards,
infantry caps battered to pieces, broken feathers and Highland bonnets
covered with mud, were strewn along the road-side, or thrown among
the trees. These mournful relics had belonged to the wounded who had
attempted to crawl from the fatal field, and who, unable to proceed
farther, had laid down and died upon the ground now marked by their
graves--if holes dug by the way-side and hardly covered with earth
deserved that name. The bodies of the wounded who died in the waggons
on the way to Brussels had also been thrown out, and hastily interred.
Thus the road between Waterloo and Brussels was one long uninterrupted
charnel-house: the smell, the whole way through the forest, was
extremely offensive, and in some places scarcely bearable. Deep
stagnant pools of red putrid water, mingled with mortal remains,
betrayed the spot where the bodies of men and horses had mingled
together in death. We passed a large cross on the left side of the
road, which had been erected in ancient times to mark the place where
_one_ human being had been murdered. How many had now sunk around it in
agony, and breathed, unnoticed and unpitied, their dying groans! It was
surrounded by many a fresh-made, melancholy mound, which had served for
the soldier's humble grave; but no monument points out to future times
the bloody spot where they expired; no cross stands to implore from the
passenger the tribute of a tear, or call forth a pious prayer for the
repose of the departed spirits who here perished for their country!
The melancholy vestiges of death and destruction became more frequent,
the pools of putrid water more deep, and the smell more offensive, as
we approached Waterloo, which is situated at the distance of about
three leagues, or scarcely nine miles, from Brussels. Before we left
the forest, the Church of Waterloo appeared in view, at the end of
the avenue of trees. It is a singular building, much in the form of a
Chinese temple, and built of red brick. On leaving the wood, we passed
the trampled and deep-marked bivouac, where the heavy baggage-waggons,
tilted carts, and tumbrils had been stationed during the battle, and
from which they had taken flight with such precipitation.
Even here cannon-balls had lodged in the trees, but had passed over
the roofs of the cottages. We entered the village which has given
its name to the most glorious battle ever recorded in the annals of
history. It was the Headquarters of the British army on the nights
preceding and following the battle. It was here the dispositions for
the action were made on Saturday afternoon. It was here on Monday
morning the dispatches were written, which perhaps contain the most
brief and unassuming account a conqueror ever penned, of the most
glorious victory that a conqueror ever won.[22] Waterloo consists of a
sort of long, irregular street of whitewashed cottages, through which
the road runs. Some of them are detached, and some built in rows. A
small house, with a neat, little, square flower-garden before it, on
the right hand, was pointed out to us as the quarters of Lord Uxbridge,
and the place where he remained after the amputation of his leg, until
well enough to bear removal. His name, and those of "His Grace the Duke
of Wellington," "His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange," and other
pompous titles, were written on the doors of these little thatched
cottages. We also read the lamented names of Sir Thomas Picton, Sir
Alexander Gordon, Sir William de Lancey, and Sir William Ponsonby, who
had slept there the night before the battle, and many others who now
sleep in the bed of honour. Volumes of sermons and homilies upon the
instability of human life could not have spoken such affecting and
convincing eloquence to our hearts as the sight of these names, thus
traced in chalk, which had been more durable than the lives of these
gallant men.
After leaving Waterloo, the ground rises: the wood, which had opened,
again surrounded us, though in a more straggling and irregular
manner--and it was not till we arrived at the little village of Mont
St. Jean, more than a mile beyond Waterloo, that we finally quitted the
shade of the forest, and entered upon the open field where the battle
had been fought. During the whole of the action the rear of the left
wing of our army rested upon this little village, from which the French
named the battle. We gazed with particular interest at a farm-house, at
the farthest extremity of the village nearest the field, on the left
side of the road,--with its walls and gates and roofs still bearing the
vestiges of the cannon-balls that had pierced them. Every part of this
house and offices was filled with wounded British officers; and here
our friend Major L. was conveyed in excruciating agony, upon an old
blanket, supported by the bayonets of four of his soldiers.
On the right we saw at some distance the church of Braine la Leude,
which was in the rear of the extremity of the right wing of our army.
From the top of the steeple of this church the battle might have
been seen more distinctly than from any other place, if any one had
possessed coolness and hardihood sufficient to have stood the calm
spectator of such a scene; and if some cannon-ball had not stopped his
observations by carrying off his head.
Alighting from the carriage, which we sent back to the barrière of Mont
St. Jean, we walked past the place where the beaten down corn, and the
whole appearance of the ground, would alone have been sufficient to
have indicated that it had been the bivouac of the British army on the
tempestuous night before the battle, when, after marching and fighting
all day beneath a burning sun, they lay all night in this swampy piece
of ground, under torrents of rain. We rapidly hurried on, until our
progress was arrested by a long line of immense fresh-made graves. We
suddenly stopped--we stood rooted to the spot--we gazed around us in
silence; for the emotions that at this moment swelled our hearts were
too deep for utterance--we felt that we stood on the field of battle!
"And these, then, are the graves of the brave!" at length mournfully
exclaimed one of the party, after a silence of some minutes, hastily
wiping away some "natural tears." "Look how they extend all along in
front of this broken, beaten-down hedge--what tremendous slaughter!"
"This is, or rather was," said an officer who was our conductor,
"the hedge of La Haye Sainte;[23] the ground in front of it, and
the narrow lane that runs behind it, were occupied by Sir Thomas
Picton's division, which formed the left wing of the army; and it
was in leading forward his men to a glorious and successful charge
against a furious attack made by an immense force of the enemy, that
this gallant and lamented officer fell. He was shot through the head,
and died instantly, without uttering a word or a groan!" We gazed at
the opposite height, or rather bank, upon which the French army was
posted. We thought of the feelings with which our gallant soldiers
must have viewed it, before the action commenced, when it was covered
with the innumerable legions of France, ranged in arms against them.
The solemn and portentous stillness which precedes the bursting of the
tempest, is nothing to the awful sublimity of a moment such as this.
The threatening columns of that immense army, which their valour had
destroyed and scattered, were then ready to pour down upon them. The
cannon taken in the action, which now stood in the field before us
under the guard of a single British soldier, were then turned against
them.
The field-pieces taken by the Prussians in the pursuit were not here.
But 130 pieces of cannon belonging to the British, and taken by them on
the field of battle, still remained here. We went to examine them; they
were beautiful pieces of ordnance, inscribed with very whimsical names,
and some of them with the revolutionary words of Liberté, Egalité,
Fraternité! Our own artillery, which was admirably served, had been
principally placed in two lines upon the ridge of the gentle slope
on which our army was stationed. About four o'clock in the afternoon
the first line of guns advanced, and the second took the place which
the first had before occupied; it was also placed upon every little
eminence over the field, and it did great execution amongst the enemy's
ranks.[24]
The ground occupied by Sir Thomas Picton's division, on the left of
the road from Brussels, is lower than any other part of the British
position. It is divided from the more elevated ridge where the French
were posted by a very gentle declivity. To the right the ground rises,
and the hollow irregularly increases, until at Château Hougoumont it
becomes a sort of small dell or ravine, and the banks are both high and
steep. But the ground occupied by the French is uniformly higher, and
decidedly a stronger position than ours.
Nothing struck me with more surprise than the confined space in which
this tremendous battle had been fought; and this, perhaps, in some
measure contributed to its sanguinary result. The space which divided
the two armies from the farm-house of La Haye Sainte, which was
occupied by our troops, to La Belle Alliance, which was occupied by
theirs, would, I think, scarcely measure three furlongs. Not more than
half a mile could have intervened between the main body of the French
and English armies; and from the extremity of the right to that of the
left wing of our army, I should suppose to be little more than a mile.
The hedge along which Sir Thomas Picton's division was stationed, and
through which the Scots Greys, with the Royals and the Inniskillens,
headed by Lord Uxbridge, made their glorious and decisive charge at the
close of the action, is almost the only one in the field of battle.
The ground is occasionally divided by some shallow ditches, and in one
place there is a sort of low mud dyke, which was very much broken and
beaten down. This was not on the ground our troops occupied, but rather
below the French position; and excepting this, the whole field of
battle is unenclosed. The ground is, however, very uneven and broken,
and the soil a strong clay. It belongs to different farmers, and bore
crops of different kinds of corn; but it is entirely arable land, and,
excepting a very small piece on the French side, none of it was in
grass.
Against the left wing of our army the attacks of the French were
furious and incessant. Buonaparte had stationed opposite to it the
chief body of his Corps de Réserve, and fresh columns of troops
continually poured down, without being able to make the smallest
impression upon the firm and impenetrable squares which the British
regiments formed to receive them. It was Buonaparte's object to turn
the left wing of our army, and cut it off from the Prussians, with whom
a communication was maintained through Ohain, and who were known (at
least by the commanders of the British army) to be advancing.[25] The
Duke expected them to have joined before one o'clock, but it was seven
before they made their appearance.
On the top of the ridge in front of the British position, on the left
of the road, we traced a long line of tremendous graves, or rather
pits, into which hundreds of dead had been thrown as they had fallen
in their ranks, without yielding an inch of ground. The effluvia which
arose from them, even beneath the open canopy of heaven, was horrible;
and the pure west wind of summer, as it passed us, seemed pestiferous,
so deadly was the smell that in many places pervaded the field. The
fresh-turned clay which covered those pits betrayed how recent had
been their formation. From one of them the scanty clods of earth which
had covered it had in one place fallen, and the skeleton of a human
face was visible. I turned from the spot in indescribable horror, and
with a sensation of deadly faintness which I could scarcely overcome.
On the opposite side of the road we scrambled up a perpendicular
bank, through which the road had evidently been cut. It was upon this
eminence that the Duke of Wellington stood, beneath the memorable tree,
from the commencement of the action, surrounded by his staff. It was
here, we were told, that in the most critical part of it he rallied the
different regiments, and led them on again in person to renew the shock
of battle. Here we stood some time to survey the field.
Immediately before us, nearly in the hollow, was the farm-house of
La Haye Sainte, surrounded by a quadrangular wall, full of holes for
musketry. At the commencement of the action it was occupied by the
British, and it formed the most advanced post of the left centre of
our army. It was gallantly and successfully defended by a detachment
of the light battalion of the German Legion, until nearly the close
of the day, when their ammunition was exhausted; it was impossible to
send them a supply, as all communication with them was cut off by the
enemy, who at length succeeded in carrying it, after a most obstinate
resistance; but its brave defenders only resigned its possession with
their lives.
On the opposite side of the road, a little behind La Haye Sainte,
and immediately below the ground occupied by Sir Thomas Picton's
division, is a quarry which was surrounded by British artillery at
the commencement of the battle. Towards the close of the action it
was filled with the wounded, who had taken refuge in it as a shelter
from the shot and shells, and from the charge of the cavalry--when,
horrible to relate! a body of French Cuirassiers were completely
overthrown into this quarry by a furious charge of the British,
and horses and riders were rolled in death upon these unfortunate
sufferers. The ghastly spectacle which it exhibited next morning was
described to me by an eye-witness of this scene of horror. On the
left, in the hollow between the two armies, we saw the hamlet of Ter
la Haye, which was occupied by British troops;--its possession was
never disputed by the enemy, although it was close advanced upon their
position. Beyond it, still farther to the left, were the woods of
Frischermont, and the road to Wavre, from which the Prussians issued
through a narrow defile, and advanced to attack the right flank of the
French.
These woods bounded the prospect on that side. On the right stood the
ruins of Château Hougoumont (or Château Goumont, as the country-people
called it), concealed from view by a small wood which crowns the hill.
It formed the most advanced post of the right centre of our army,
and it was defended to the last with efforts of successful valour,
almost more than human, against the overpowering numbers and furious
attacks of the enemy. The battle commenced here about eleven o'clock.
The French, suddenly uncovering a masked battery, opened a tremendous
fire upon this part of our position, and advanced to the attack with
astonishing impetuosity, led on, it is said, by Jerome Buonaparte in
person, while Napoleon viewed it from his station near the Observatory
on the opposite height. They were completely repulsed by the bravery of
General Byng's brigade of Guards, but they succeeded in carrying the
wood, which was occupied by the Belgic troops. The French, however,
after a dreadful struggle, were driven out of the wood again by the
Coldstreams and the third regiment of Guards, and never afterwards
were able to regain possession of it. The Black Brunswickers behaved
most gallantly. In retrieving the consequences of the misconduct of
the Belgic troops, and in defending the Château and the garden, the
British Guards performed prodigies of valour, though they suffered
most severely. Lieutenant General Cooke, Major-General Byng, Lord
Saltoun, the lamented Colonel Miller, who died as he had lived--a brave
and honourable soldier; Captain Adair, Captains Evelyn and Ellis;
Colonels Askew, Dashwood, and D'Oyley, with many others, particularly
distinguished themselves by their steady gallantry and personal valour.
The house was consumed by fire, and numbers of the wounded perished in
the flames; yet the British maintained possession of it to the last,
in spite of the incessant and desperate attacks of the enemy, who
directed against it a furious fire of shot and shells, under cover of
which large bodies of troops advanced continually to the assault, and
were driven back again and again with tremendous slaughter. Without the
possession of this important post the right flank of our army could not
be attacked; it formed what is called the key of the position; from its
elevation it commanded the whole of the ground occupied by our army,
and had it been lost, the victory to the French would scarcely have
been doubtful.
Opposite, but divided from it by a deep hollow, were the heights
occupied by the French, upon which, at some distance, and secure from
the storm of war, stands the Observatory, where Buonaparte stationed
himself at the beginning of the action, and whence he issued his
orders, and commanded column after column to advance to the charge,
and rush upon destruction. His "invincible" legions, his invulnerable
Cuirassiers, in vain assaulted the position of the British with the
most furious and undaunted resolution. In vain the vast tide of battle
rolled on--like the rocks of their native land, they repelled its
rage.--Squares of infantry received the onset of the French columns;
directed against them a steady and uninterrupted fire of musketry, and
stood firm and unshaken beneath the most tremendous showers of shot
and shell. Every vacancy caused by death was instantly filled up: the
enemy vainly sought for an opening through which they might penetrate
the impenetrable phalanx; and when at last they receded from the
ineffectual attack, the British cavalry rushed forward to the charge,
and, notwithstanding their superiority of numbers, drove them back
with immense slaughter. But I am relating the history of the battle,
forgetful that I am only describing the field.
From the spot where we now stood I cast my eyes on every side, and saw
nothing but the dreadful and recent traces of death and devastation.
The rich harvests of standing corn,[26] which had covered the scene
of action we were contemplating, had been beaten into the earth, and
the withered and broken stalks dried in the sun, now presented the
appearance of stubble, though blacker and far more bare than any
stubble land.
In many places the excavations made by the shells had thrown up the
earth all around them; the marks of horses' hoofs, that had plunged
ankle deep in clay, were hardened in the sun; and the feet of men,
deeply stamped into the ground, left traces where many a deadly
struggle had been. The ground was ploughed up in several places with
the charge of the cavalry, and the whole field was literally covered
with soldiers' caps, shoes, gloves, belts, and scabbards; broken
feathers battered into the mud, remnants of tattered scarlet or blue
cloth, bits of fur and leather, black stocks and havresacs, belonging
to the French soldiers, buckles, packs of cards, books, and innumerable
papers of every description. I picked up a volume of Candide; a few
sheets of sentimental love-letters, evidently belonging to some French
novel; and many other pages of the same publication were flying
over the field in much too muddy a state to be touched. One German
Testament, not quite so dirty as many that were lying about, I carried
with me nearly the whole day; printed French military returns, muster
rolls, love-letters, and washing bills; illegible songs, scattered
sheets of military music, epistles without number in praise of
"l'Empereur, le Grand Napoléon," and filled with the most confident
anticipations of victory under his command, were strewed over the field
which had been the scene of his defeat. The quantities of letters
and of blank sheets of dirty writing paper were so great that they
literally whitened the surface of the earth.