The Frenchmen were trying to capture the Bossu Wood, so the British Guards went into the trees which, Batty recalls:
were so thick it was beyond anything difficult to effect a passage … they contested every bush and at a small rivulet running through the wood they attempted a stand, but could not resist us … our loss was most tremendous and nothing could exceed the desperate work … the French infantry and cavalry fought most desperately and after a conflict of nearly three hours (the obstinacy of which could find no parallel, save in the slaughter it occasioned), we had the happiness to find ourselves complete masters of the road and wood.
The cavalry Batty mentions were not in the wood, no horsemen could hope to negotiate the tangled undergrowth and low branches, but the Guards were also fighting off men in the fields to the west where the Black Watch, the 44th and 69th, and all the other battalions had been fighting and dying.
But, as evening descended, the Duke’s reinforcements had arrived and, with them, wagonloads of new ammunition. It was time to go from the defensive to the attack, and the Duke ordered his thickened line forward. The French resisted for a while, then retreated all the way back to where they had started that morning and Gemioncourt, the great farm which dominated the battlefield, was again in allied hands. The French were in some disarray. One anonymous French eyewitness wrote that:
the crowd of Cuirassiers and wounded troops surging to the rear of the army sowed panic there; the equipment teams, the ambulance men, the canteen people, the servants, the whole crowd of non-combatants who follow the army, fled precipitately, carrying with them all they met, across the fields and along the road to Charleroi which was soon jammed. The rout was complete and spread quickly, everyone was running away in total confusion and shouting ‘Here comes the enemy!’
The panic was premature. Ney had been frustrated, but his forces were still intact and they had, at least, succeeded in denying Blücher any British aid. ‘We were only too happy to have prevented the English from going to the aid of the Prussians,’ said Captain Bourdon de Vatry, an aide-de-camp to Napoleon’s brother, Jérôme, who had commanded part of Ney’s forces. De Vatry was at supper with Marshal Ney and Jérôme Bonaparte when a messenger arrived demanding that Ney march to the Emperor’s support. The message, of course, came far too late, and Ney could not obey anyway because he had failed to capture the vital crossroads.
Darkness fell late on 16 June. It was midsummer and the sun did not set till 9 p.m., and full darkness was a full two hours later. It had been a long day that had begun so well for Napoleon and, though he had not achieved all his objectives, he was still in the driving seat. He had almost succeeded in splitting his enemies, and had driven the Prussians back in retreat. Ney had attacked far too late, and so never had a chance to lead his men eastwards and fall on the Prussian flank, but he had succeeded in keeping Wellington busy all afternoon and evening. The Duke had promised to go to Blücher’s aid, but only if he was not attacked, and he had been attacked. So at nightfall, as Ney dined at a table made from a plank balanced on two barrels, the French were still in a commanding position.
Wellington had won his battle, at least in terms of frustrating the French objective. He had held the crossroads and denied Ney the chance of swinging eastwards and falling on the flank of the Prussians. That was no small victory. If Ney, or even d’Erlon, had attacked the Prussian right then the battle of Ligny could have ended in the utter rout of Blücher’s army. That had not happened. The Prussian army had been battered, but it was still intact and still very much a viable fighting force, yet the cost to the Duke had been high. Over 2,200 British casualties, another 1,100 from the Hanoverians and Brunswickers, including the Duke of Brunswick, who had died from a bullet to the head, and approximately 1,200 Dutch. French losses were slightly fewer, about 4,400 killed or wounded as against Wellington’s 4,500.
The Duke had held the crossroads against what, for most of the day, had been a far superior force, yet now, as the sun finally set, the crossroads offered the allies no advantage at all because, instead of leading to the Prussians, the Nivelles road now led to Napoleon’s victorious forces. Wellington had still not heard what happened at Ligny, but late on that Friday evening he received a confused report that the Prussians had suffered a defeat. He sent an aide towards Ligny to discover what he could, and the man returned to say that all he had seen in the failing light were French vedettes, cavalry groups set as sentries. It was plain that Napoleon had driven the Prussians back, though to where, or how far, or in what condition, Wellington did not yet know.
Even so, whether the defeat was massive or minor, it was obvious what the Emperor would do now. He would use the Nivelles road to fall on Wellington’s flank. The campaign’s objective was in the Emperor’s grasp. The British, after all, were the paymasters of the new coalition opposing France. Knock them out of the war and it was conceivable that the coalition would fall apart.
All Napoleon had to do was march at dawn.
Quatre-Bras where the battle was fought, by James Rouse. The Duke of Brunswick was killed on the left, near the wood.
‘The Death of Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel at the Battle of Quatre Bras’, by Johann Friedrich Matthai.
General François Étienne de Kellerman. When Kellerman arrived at Quatre-Bras he was immediately ordered by Ney to charge the enemy, an order Kellerman questioned, as he only had 700 cuirassiers under command, but Ney insisted. ‘Partez!’ he shouted. ‘Mais partez donc!’ Go! Go now!
The Prince of Orange, ‘Slender Billy’, by Matthew Dubourg, was an active, if wayward presence at Quatre-Bras and Waterloo: his orders led to heavy losses for a British brigade at Quatre-Bras.
‘Voltigeurs, Cents-Suisses’, by Eugene Titeux, 1815. Élite French skirmishers, they were useful for weakening an enemy line before the column attacked. ‘Voltigeur’ was derived from vaulter, or gymnast, because the ideal skirmisher was an agile, quick-moving man.
‘The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras’, by Lady Butler. Private Thomas Patton was an Irishman in the 28th, a Gloucestershire regiment, and at Quatre-Bras they were in square and had been ordered to hold their fire. Enemy horsemen had surrounded the square, but were making no effort to break the red-coated ranks; it was a stand-off, but then Patton recalled how a French officer, he thinks he was a general, ‘came over our bayonets with his horse’s head and encouraged his men to break into our square.’
‘Battle of Quatre-Bras: Sir Thomas Picton Ordering the Charge of Sir James Kempt’s Brigade’, engraving by George Jones, published 1816.
‘The 7th Queen’s Own Hussars under Sir Edward Kerrison, charging the French at Quatre-Bras’, by Denis Dighton, 1818.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ah! Now I’ve got them, those English!
SATURDAY, 17 JUNE. IT HAD CLOUDED over during the night and the dawn was unseasonably chilly. Wellington had three hours’ sleep in the village of Genappe, just north of Quatre-Bras, but he was back at the crossroads shortly after 3 a.m. ‘Ninety-Second,’ he said to some bivouacking Highlanders, ‘I will be obliged to you for a little fire,’ and the soldiers dutifully made a campfire beside which the Duke brooded as he waited for more reports about the fate of his Prussian allies. He was dressed in white breeches and half-boots, a dark blue tailcoat and a white neckcloth, with his usual cocked hat. He always dressed plainly for battle. Many officers liked to wear their gaudiest uniform, none more so than Horatio Nelson, who had made himself conspicuous on HMS Victory’s deck with his braided coat and jewelled decorations, but Wellington invariably wore the plain coat. His men knew who he was, he needed no gilded frippery.
The sun rose about half past four that morning, and shortly after, the Duke might have noticed a distraught woman wandering with three small children through the army’s bivouacs. She was certainly noticeable, because Martha Deacon was nine months pregnant. She had travelled to Quatre-Bras the day before, presumably riding with her children on a supply wagon. Her husband, Thomas Deacon, was
an officer, an Ensign with the 73rd, another Highland battalion. Now she had lost him. All she knew was that he had been wounded in the final advance the previous evening. He had been walking beside Sergeant Thomas Morris when a musket ball had killed the man on Morris’s other side. The ball had struck the man in the forehead, killing him instantly. ‘Who is that?’ Deacon had asked. ‘Sam Shortly,’ Morris said, and glanced at his officer. ‘You are wounded, Sir.’
‘God bless me, so I am,’ Deacon responded. One arm had been broken by a musket ball. He dropped his sword and made his way to the rear in search of Martha and their children, whom he had left with the 73rd’s baggage guard, but though he looked till past nightfall he could not find her. At dawn, faint with loss of blood, he was put aboard one of the wagons carrying the wounded back to Brussels.
Martha, clothed only in a dress of black silk covered by a light shawl, kept looking for Thomas. Eventually she found someone who knew of her husband’s fate, but by then there was no transport northwards and so, with her three children and despite being heavily pregnant, Martha Deacon walked the 22 miles to Brussels. She walked through a rainstorm so fierce that the Duke declared he had not even known its like in India, yet she kept on walking. The journey took the little family two days, but did have a happy ending. Martha found Thomas recovering in Brussels and next day she gave birth to a baby girl. They christened the child Waterloo Deacon.
The Prussians were also awake early. Marshal Blücher, bruised and battered, had snatched a few hours’ sleep in the hamlet of Mellery, not far from Ligny. He was discovered there by his staff, and in the early morning there was a discussion about what the Prussians should do next. Gneisenau, who so mistrusted the British, suggested a retreat east towards the Rhine and Prussia, but such a movement would take Blücher’s army still farther away from his British–Dutch allies, and Blücher, unlike Gneisenau, both liked and trusted Wellington. The debate was brief. Gneisenau, clever and opinionated as he was, nevertheless understood that his commander had an instinctive talent for warfare and so yielded to Blücher’s demand. The army would not go eastwards, but north to Wavre.
This was, perhaps, the most crucial decision of all those four days. The allies had lost the easy communication that had been offered by the Nivelles road, but there were still country lanes that connected Wavre to the Brussels highway. Those lanes were not paved, and they twisted through fields and woodlands, they crossed rivers and streams, but by going north to Wavre instead of retreating eastwards, Blücher was keeping alive the possibility of uniting his forces with Wellington’s army. It was a brave decision. Blücher must have known that the French would send a force to harry his retreat and attempt to block any move west towards Wellington, and by going to Wavre he made his own chances of a safe withdrawal eastwards far more difficult, but he was not nicknamed Marshal Forwards for nothing. Wellington might not have come to his aid the previous day, but the old warhorse would not abandon his ally yet.
And so the Prussians marched north. The Captain of a Westphalian cavalry squadron remarked that the mood of the troops was grim. It had begun to rain and some of the new saddles became swollen with the damp and the riders developed saddle sores, so he ordered them to dismount and lead their horses. The road was difficult, the weather appalling and the troops miserable, but then they encountered Marshal Blücher on the roadside and the mood changed instantly owing to the:
cheerful spirit and freshness of our seventy-four year old Field Marshal. He had his bruised limbs bathed in brandy, and had helped himself to a very large schnapps and now, though riding must have been very painful, he rode alongside the troops exchanging jokes and banter with them and his humour spread like wildfire down the column. I only glimpsed the old hero, though I should dearly have liked to express to him my pleasure at his escape.
It is hard to imagine the Duke of Wellington exchanging ‘jokes and banter’ with his men. It was not his style. More than once he stopped men from cheering him because, he said, if you let them cheer you today then tomorrow they will jeer at you. He was not loved as Blücher was, nor worshipped like Napoleon, but he was respected. He could be sharply witty; long after the wars were over some French officers pointedly turned their backs on him in Paris, for which rudeness a woman apologized. ‘Don’t worry, Madame,’ the Duke said, ‘I’ve seen their backs before.’ He had learned to hide his emotions, though he would openly weep for the casualties his battles caused, and he possessed an explosive temper which he had also learned to control. His men might see the temper, rarely the emotions, but if he was cold towards them he also had confidence in them, and they in him. As Private William Wheeler of the 51st, who served Wellington in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, wrote:
If England should require the service of her army again, and I should be with it, let me have ‘Old Nosey’ to command. Our interests would be sure to be looked into, we should never have occasion to fear an enemy. There are two things we should be certain of. First, we should always be as well supplied with rations as the nature of the service would admit. The second is we should be sure to give the enemy a damned good thrashing. What can a soldier want more?
Wellington would have liked that praise. But now, on the morning after the fight at Quatre-Bras, he was probably unsure whether he would be able to give Napoleon a ‘damned good thrashing’. He was waiting for news from Blücher as he paced beside the fire the Highlanders had made for him. He was alone for at least an hour, deep in thought, sometimes chewing abstractedly on a switch lopped from a tree, but then Lieutenant-Colonel the Honourable Sir Alexander Gordon, one of the Duke’s aides, brought Wellington the news he needed to hear. Blücher’s army, though wounded, still lived and had gone towards Wavre. North to Wavre, not east towards Prussia. ‘Old Blücher has had a damned good licking,’ the Duke growled to an officer of the Coldstream Guards, ‘and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles. As he has gone back, we must go too. I suppose in England they will say we have been licked. I can’t help it; as they are gone back, we must go too.’
So the orders were sent to prepare for the retreat to the position Wellington had reconnoitred the previous year, the ridge of Mont St Jean above the unremarkable valley where the rye grew tall. The Duke might fear that the British public would interpret the retreat as an admission of defeat, but there was no danger that the French public would see the events of 16 June as anything but a victory. Napoleon made certain of that, sending a despatch to Le Moniteur Universel, the official newspaper, describing Ligny and Quatre-Bras as two further victories to add to the Empire’s roll of honour. The published report prompted jubilation in Paris.
The first duty of the day for the British was to rescue their wounded, many of whom had lain all night where they fell. Cavalrymen placed injured men on horses, and those too weak to stay in the saddle were carried away on blankets. Doubtless some French wounded were rescued too, though priority was given to the British and Dutch, who were carried back to Brussels on wagons and, doubtless, in agony.
The French tended their wounded far better than their enemies, or at least attempted to, mainly through the influence of Dominique Jean Larrey, Chief Surgeon to the Imperial Guard. Larrey realized that treating men as soon as possible after they were wounded produced far better results than leaving them to suffer, and so he invented the ‘flying ambulance’, a lightweight vehicle, well-sprung, with a swivelling front axle to make it manoeuvrable on a battlefield crowded with corpses and wreckage, and with a floor which could be rolled out of the rear to make an operating table or to help load the wounded. He often performed surgery on the battlefield, but preferred to establish a central casualty station to which his ambulances would bring the wounded, while the British, in contrast, used their bandsmen to carry men to the rear where surgeons in blood-soaked aprons waited with saws, knives and probes. A skilled surgeon, and Larrey was very skilled, could amputate a leg in less than a minute. There was no anaesthetic, apart from the dulling effects of alcohol, and no antiseptics other than vine
gar or spirits of turpentine. Larrey preferred operating while the patient was still in shock, and he had discovered that the recovery rate of men thus treated was much higher, though men with abdominal wounds stood very little chance of survival no matter how soon they received surgery. Most British casualties had to wait a long time before they received medical help, and many of the men wounded at Quatre-Bras were not to see a surgeon until they had reached distant Brussels, while Larrey was operating very close to the battlefield. Napoleon said of him that ‘he was the most honest man and the best friend to the soldier I ever knew’.
It took the British until midday to rescue their wounded, and meanwhile Wellington gave careful instructions for the army’s withdrawal. The infantry had to go first, but ‘in such a manner as should prevent the enemy from observing what we were about’. Lieutenant Basil Jackson was sent to give the order for withdrawal to General Picton:
I found [him] at a farm-house a short distance along the Charleroi chaussée, [he] gave me a surly acknowledgment of the order; he evidently disliked to retire from a position he had so gallantly held the day before, and no wonder!
What Jackson did not know, what no one except Picton and his servant knew, was that the irascible Welsh General had been struck by a musket ball the previous day. The ball had broken two of his ribs, enough to make any man surly, but Picton concealed the wound because he did not want anyone trying to persuade him to leave the army. He was in a bad mood anyway, forced to ride a trooper’s horse because his groom had taken fright and fled with his horses.