‘It must be a great victory!’ We got up at once and ran off to make enquiries. The gun was celebrating the victory the Emperor had gained over the Prussians at Ligny on June 16th. We went to the Café des Pyrénées to read the bulletin. We were wild with joy! The gun at Les Invalides brought back memories of the triumphs which had stirred our childhood. We were drunk with pride … I remember the enthusiasm with which a student from Grenoble named Rousseau told us that Wellington had been captured and Blücher killed!
Emile had watched the army leave Paris in early June and had been hugely impressed. He described the departing troops as ‘superb’ and he believed they were ‘so full of ardour’ that they had to be invincible. He was elated at the news of Ligny, while the Royalists in Paris were downcast and spreading rumours that tried to undermine the Emperor’s achievement. But that Sunday morning the gun at Les Invalides contradicted the Royalists’ gloom, it told of victory, and Emile, like most Parisians, could not wait to hear of the Emperor’s ultimate triumph. ‘At last,’ he wrote excitedly, ‘the fight was on!’
He was right.
* * *
Napoleon and Wellington used their artillery differently. For a start the Emperor had far more guns at Waterloo, 246 cannon against Wellington’s 157, and on the whole those guns were heavier. The French and Prussians both deployed 12-pounder cannon, while the heaviest British pieces were 9-pounders. The Emperor had trained as an artilleryman and he put great faith in his guns. He liked to assemble them in a Grand Battery and use them as an offensive, as against a defensive, weapon. At Wagram, in 1809, Napoleon had torn the heart out of an Austrian army with a Grand Battery of 112 guns. Now at Waterloo he concentrated 80 guns in another Grand Battery.
The French guns were defensive as well, of course, but Napoleon knew that any enemy position needed ‘softening’ before his troops assaulted. That was the job of the Grand Battery, to break apart enemy formations before his infantry or cavalry attacked them. Those assault troops would come under fire from the enemy artillery, so another task of Napoleon’s guns was counter-battery fire, trying to destroy or disable the enemy’s cannon.
Wellington chose not to concentrate his guns in a Grand Battery, instead scattering them along the whole of his line, where they were positioned to fire at any French assault. Essentially the British–Dutch guns are used defensively, and they were absolutely forbidden to engage in counter-battery fire. If an artillery unit started a duel with an enemy battery then they were likely to draw fire from other enemy guns and, inevitably, suffer from shattered wheels or broken carriages, rendering the cannon useless until repairs could be made. Captain Mercer discovered this for himself when he disobeyed orders and opened fire on a French battery that was annoying him:
I ventured to commit a folly, for which I should have paid dearly, had our Duke chanced to be in our part of the field. I ventured to disobey orders, and open a slow deliberate fire at the battery, thinking with my 9-pounders soon to silence his 4-pounders. My astonishment was great, however, when our very first gun was responded to by at least half-a-dozen gentlemen of very superior calibre, whose presence I had not even suspected, and whose superiority we immediately recognised … I instantly saw my folly, and ceased firing, and they did the same – the 4-pounders alone continuing the cannonade as before. But this was not all. The first man of my troop touched was by one of those confounded long shots. I shall never forget the scream the poor lad gave when struck. It was one of the last they fired and shattered his left arm to pieces.
Mercer was indeed lucky the Duke did not see his attempt at counter-battery fire. Later in the day, when Wellington did see one of his batteries try the same thing, he ordered the arrest of the battery commander. And right at the beginning of the day, when the French paraded their troops as they waited for the ground to dry, another British battery commander saw Napoleon reviewing his army on the far ridge. Wellington happened to be close by and the commander asked permission to try a shot that might kill the Emperor and was very tartly told that the commanders of armies had better things to do than fire at each other. Permission denied. The British–Dutch guns were there to defend the ridge, not assault the enemy’s position, let alone assassinate Emperors.
Napoleon did use his guns offensively, and around 1 p.m. in the afternoon he ordered the Grand Battery to start its bombardment of Wellington’s position. Half the battery was the big 12-pounder cannons, the rest either 8-pounders or 6-inch howitzers. Mercer spoke of being attacked by 4-pounders, but the French had none, so his assailants were either 6-pounders, the smallest French calibre at Waterloo, or perhaps 5½-inch howitzers. The howitzers would prove deadly that day because of their ability to fire over obstacles, in this case the ridge which sheltered the majority of Wellington’s troops.
The Grand Battery was on the right of Napoleon’s position, the guns positioned well forward on the slope facing the British–Dutch army. Their target was the left side of Wellington’s ridge, from La Haie Sainte across to the smaller fortress of Papelotte, and their job was to wear the defenders down with roundshot and shell. In letter after letter, diary after diary, soldiers of the era talk of the horror of such bombardments. The infantry could only suffer as the great missiles ripped into their ranks and the shells exploded, but that was why Wellington always tried to post his men on a reverse slope. It did not wholly shelter them, but it did mitigate much of the Grand Battery’s effect.
The range was short, between 650 and 870 yards (600 and 800 metres), and the guns were huge. A 12-pounder weighed almost 2 tons and needed a crew of fifteen men who had to reposition the monster after each firing because of the massive recoil. A well-trained crew could fire two shots a minute, though that was rare and, in the muddy conditions of Waterloo, almost impossible to maintain. Mark Adkin, in his indispensable book The Waterloo Companion, reckons that the Grand Battery fired around 4,000 roundshot and shells at the eastern section of Wellington’s ridge in the half-hour before the infantry attacked. That sounds like a considerable weight of metal, but the target area was wide, deep, and much of it was hidden from the gunners. Those reverse slopes protected the British–Dutch infantry, though the protection they offered was certainly not complete. Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Home, before being sent to reinforce Hougoumont’s garrison, was positioned on the right of the ridge, above the château, and other French guns were also cannonading that part of Wellington’s line. For a time those guns did little damage – ‘they had not gotten our range,’ Home said, ‘and firing rather high, their shot flew over us’ – but gradually the French gunners adjusted the elevating screws on their cannons and the shots began to land among the redcoats who had been ordered to lie down. One roundshot ‘dreadfully lacerated’ Lieutenant Simpson, ‘he however remained perfectly sensible and aware of his situation. His only request then was to be put out of his pain but lived till evening.’
If Wellington had not sheltered his troops, if, like Blücher at Ligny, he had kept them visible to the French gunners, the slaughter would have been gruesome, but the French artillerymen could only guess where the infantry was concealed and try to skim the ridge top in hopes that their roundshot would land among their enemies. ‘The gunners were standing in line,’ a French officer wrote of the Grand Battery,
inserting the charges, ramming them home and swinging the slow matches to make them burn more fiercely … Behind them stood the captains of the guns, nearly all of them elderly and they gave their orders as if on parade. Eighty guns fired together, drowning out every other sound. The whole valley was filled with smoke. A second or two later the clear calm voices of the captains could be heard again; ‘Load! Ram! Arm! Fire!’ This continued without break for a half an hour. We could scarcely see our comrades while across the valley the English had also opened fire. We could hear the whistle of their cannon balls in the air, the dull thud when they struck the ground and that other sound as muskets were smashed to matchwood and men hurled twenty paces to the rear, every bone crushed.
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sp; Accuracy was difficult. The artillery was not rifled, so windage affected every shot, and then there was the smoke. There was little wind that day, so the smoke lingered in the damp air and after the first shot it is doubtful that the French gunners could see their targets at all clearly, but they knew the range and the gun captains would check the barrel’s elevation before each shot. In 1835 the British tested artillery from the Napoleonic Wars and discovered that at 600 yards they struck their target almost nine times out of ten, though accuracy dropped off sharply as the range lengthened. The test targets were board fences that simulated infantry in line, which is a generous test, and against a smaller target, such as a single field gun, accuracy was much harder to attain. But if a roundshot did find its target the damage could be horrific. At Waterloo one French 12-pounder ball, 4¾ inches in diameter, killed or wounded twenty-six men in one strike. Fortunately for the British–Dutch forces most of the Grand Battery’s cannonade was frustrated by Wellington’s use of the reverse slope.
There were roughly 15,000 British–Dutch–German troops in the area that was bombarded by the Grand Battery, but nearly all of them were concealed behind the crest of the ridge. The French knew they were there, even if they could not see them. They could see some officers and skirmishers ahead of the battalions, and there were plenty of men in Napoleon’s army who knew Wellington’s habit of posting men out of sight, but the few men in sight, along with the artillery posted on the forward slope, were small and difficult targets. Napoleon’s artillerymen wanted to weaken the defenders’ line, and that was almost impossible for the cannon, though howitzers, by dropping their shells just beyond the crest, were more dangerous.
The noise was huge. Eighty guns, even if only firing once a minute, would fill the air with a percussive pounding, and other guns besides those in the Grand Battery were joining the cacophony. Smoke thickened in front of the blackened muzzles, and blast flattened the rye in great fans in front of each cannon. One soldier described the sound of the roundshot going overhead as being like the noise of a heavy barrel of ale being rolled across a wooden floor above his head; indeed the noise was so deafening that some men thought another huge thunderstorm had broken across the Belgian countryside.
The bombardment was, as an officer of the 92nd said, ‘horrendous’, but casualties were few. The infantry were either lying down, or sitting, and the thick mud helped. Howitzer shells buried themselves, muffling the effects of the explosion, and one Hanoverian officer noted that ‘the number of casualties would have been much higher had not the rain softened the soil so that the cannon balls lost much of their lethal force that they could have kept by bouncing off hard soil.’ Yet some shots found targets. Captain Friedrich Weiz reported that the allied artillery suffered severely:
Three guns of a recently arrived battery were smashed before firing a single shot, and one of this battery’s caissons blew up just as it was passing near the front of the 1st battalion. With the caisson ablaze its horses panicked and hauled it straight towards the large artillery park from where it had come. A huge disaster was averted when some dragoons rode up in a hurry and, while racing alongside, stabbed and brought down the horses.
The veterans in the allied ranks had seen and heard such cannonades before, though rarely with such intensity, but the noise, the smoke and the screams of wounded men and horses had an effect on troops new to combat. And one brigade seems to have been especially affected, Bylandt’s Brigade of Dutch and Belgian battalions. Most histories of Waterloo recount that they were mistakenly left on the forward slope and so suffered extraordinary casualties that eventually broke them so that they fled, but in fact they had been withdrawn from their forward position and were posted just behind the ridge’s crest. In front of them was the road which ran along the ridge, and that road had thick hedges. Lieutenant Isaac Hope, the officer who described the cannonade as ‘horrendous’, said that the hedges ‘afforded [Bylandt’s men] no shelter from the enemy’s fire, yet concealed them from their view’.
In front of the road, on the forward slope, the British guns were entirely exposed to the French cannonade. There were thirty-four guns there, served by around a thousand men. A thousand sounds a lot, but in addition to the gun crews who loaded, fired and repositioned the cannon, men were needed to bring ammunition from the caissons parked to the rear. Those men were exposed to the enemy’s fire, but continued their own bombardment, which was aimed, not at the smoke-wreathed Grand Battery, but beyond it to where d’Erlon’s Corps was assembling for their assault. Eighteen thousand French infantry were on the far ridge, and the Dutch–British guns were shooting into their thick ranks.
The heaviest British guns were 9-pounders, but they were supplemented by 6-pounders and by howitzers. The British tended to use their howitzers as cannon, firing on a fairly flat trajectory, while the French often elevated a barrel as much as 30°. At Waterloo the British howitzers were not needed to lob shells over obstacles because the French did not use Wellington’s reverse-slope tactic, so the howitzers were firing directly at the infantry beyond the swirling clouds of smoke. The British guns were firing a mix of shells, roundshot, and Britain’s ‘secret’ weapon, the spherical case-shot.
The French knew all about spherical case, but never managed to duplicate it. It was the invention of Henry Shrapnel, a Royal Artillery officer, and was simply a shell designed to explode above the enemy and shower him with musket balls. When it was good it was very good, but when it was bad it was horrible. In 1813, in the Peninsula, a single shrapnel round killed every horse and man of a French gun crew, but the friction between the musket balls and the powder inside the case was sometimes so intense that the case-shot exploded inside the gun barrel. That problem was not to be solved for half a century, but fortunately for the gunners it did not happen frequently and Shrapnel’s spherical case-shot was reliable enough. It was only effective if the gunner cut the fuse to the right length, a skill that also applied to shells. A shell was simply a round iron ball filled with gunpowder that was ignited by a fuse. The fuse was a length of cord which protruded from the shell and was lit by the gun’s firing. Cut a fuse too short and the shell would explode in mid-air, doing no damage; cut it too long and the shell would land with its fuse spitting sparks, and a brave man could extinguish it. Cut to the right length, and that length depended on the distance of the target from the gun, the shell would explode and scatter fragments of its casing for up to twenty yards. All the gunners at Waterloo were experts at cutting fuses, but many men on both sides reported that the shells were rendered less effective because of the mud. Major Jean-Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse, a staff officer, was on the French left, a long way from where the Grand Battery was firing at the British ridge. He was watching the fight at Hougoumont and just behind him was a brigade of carabiniers, heavy cavalry who, like the cuirassiers, wore breastplates and had big thigh-length riding boots. The hill where Lemonnier-Delafosse was posted was under fire from the British–Dutch guns above Hougoumont, and many of their shots fell among that cavalry. ‘To escape their range,’ Lemonnier-Delafosse recalled:
this brigade moved to the left which made General Foy laugh, ‘Ha! The Big Boots don’t like rough stuff!’ We received the cannon balls standing firm. They smothered us in mud and the soaked ground, by conserving the tracks of their paths, looked like a field rutted by cart wheels. This was lucky for us because many of the projectiles buried or muffled themselves while rolling along the muddy soil.
The cannonade over Hougoumont is a reminder that the battle of Waterloo was not a series of discrete events like the acts of a play. The battle is often described that way, with Act One the assault on Hougoumont and Act Two the attack by d’Erlon’s Corps, but of course the two events coincided. While d’Erlon’s Corps is threatening Wellington’s left there is also smoke, gunfire and death on Wellington’s right. The Duke is assailed by all this. He can see little because of the smoke, and almost nothing of what happens at Hougoumont is visible because a swell of land hides th
e château from his command position on the ridge. French roundshot and shell are flying near him, and the noise is pounding the eardrums, not just the noise of guns and exploding shells, but screams from the wounded, drummers on the far ridge and, on both ridges, the regimental bands playing. One officer described the air as ‘undulating’ from the passage of the shells and roundshot, and already that air was heating from the blast of the great guns. In time it would be described as like walking into an oven. The Duke’s great gift was to remain calm in this turmoil, to filter out what was unthreatening and to concentrate on what was essential. He knows that a great attack is about to be launched on his left and he has ridden along that part of the ridge to inspect the troops who will be attacked, but he is content to let General Picton, who commands that wing, deal with the threat. He knows and trusts Picton, just as he trusts Macdonell in Hougoumont. He is watching the far ridge, using his telescope, trying to read what Napoleon intends, but he is also turning that spyglass to the east.
And so is Napoleon, because both men are waiting for reinforcements. Wellington knows he needs Blücher’s troops, indeed he would never have made this stand on Mont St Jean’s low ridge if he did not have the Prussian’s promise to come to his aid. Napoleon is looking for Grouchy’s Corps, those 33,000 men with their 96 guns who will give him an overwhelming edge in numbers and so lead to victory over the man who carries the impertinent description of the conqueror of the world’s conqueror.