Marshal Ney placed himself at our head, it was 4.00 pm. At first our impact was irresistible. In spite of a hail of iron which beat on our helmets and breastplates, in spite of a sunken lane above which were sited the English batteries, we reached the crest of the heights and went like lightning through the guns.
The key words there are ‘at first’. Because what was beginning was perhaps the most extraordinary passage of fighting on that extraordinary day. At first Ordener probably thought Ney was doing the right thing because, as his horse breasted the British–Dutch ridge, he saw ‘the enemy baggage and massed fugitives hurrying along the road to Brussels’, and he saw abandoned artillery through which the horsemen had passed ‘like lightning’, but then he saw something else.
British squares. The British were not running away. Wellington was not disengaging and trying to withdraw his forces. Yes, there were men and wagons on the road, but most of the British–Dutch army was still on the ridge and they were ready to fight. The allied guns were indeed abandoned, but that was temporary because the gunners had taken refuge inside the squares. Those guns had already taken a toll of the horsemen, sending roundshot through their ranks to leave crippled and dying horses in the valley, then they had fired canister at deadly short range before the gunners ran to the shelter of the nearest infantry square.
So now it was horsemen against infantry, and every cavalryman must have known what Captain Duthilt had written, that ‘it is difficult, if not impossible, for the best cavalry to break infantry who are formed in squares’, so while at first the cavalrymen seemed to have pierced the British–Dutch line, instead they were faced with the worst obstacle a horseman could encounter. The wide plateau of the ridge top was packed with squares, at least twenty of them, in a rough chequer pattern so that if a horseman rode safely past one square he was immediately faced with another, and then encountered more beyond. And each square bristled with bayonets and spat musket fire. At that moment the sensible thing for Marshal Ney to have done was to recognize his mistake and withdraw the cavalry from danger, but Michel Ney was rarely sensible in battle. He believed courage and passion could drive men through any hardship, and so it might, but it would not drive horses onto the face of a square.
What followed was murderous for both sides. Johnny Kincaid said of Waterloo that he had never ‘heard of a battle in which everybody was killed, but this seemed likely to be an exception’. The allies, of course, had warning that the cavalry was coming; they had seen the horsemen massing across the valley and had time to make preparations, which was why young Ensign Leeke’s battalion had formed square. The artillery readied themselves too. Sir Augustus Frazer commanded the horse artillery and he galloped to Captain Mercer. ‘Left limber up, and as fast as you can! At the gallop, march!’ Mercer goes on:
I rode with Frazer, whose face was as black as a chimney-sweep’s from the smoke, and the jacket-sleeve of his right arm torn open by a musket-ball or case-shot, which had merely grazed his flesh. As we went along he told me that the enemy had assembled an enormous mass of heavy cavalry in front of the point to which he was leading us (about one-third of the distance between Hougoumont and the Charleroi road), and that in all probability we should immediately be charged on gaining our position. ‘The Duke’s orders, however, are positive,’ he added, ‘that in the event of their persevering and charging home, you do not expose your men, but retire with them into the adjacent squares of infantry.’ As he spoke we were ascending the reverse slope of the main position. We breathed a new atmosphere – the air was suffocatingly hot, resembling that issuing from an oven. We were enveloped in thick smoke … cannon-shot, too, ploughed the ground in all directions, and so thick was the hail of balls and bullets that it seemed dangerous to extend the arm lest it should be torn off.
The British and Dutch guns were deployed on the flat crest of the ridge and the approaching French cavalry made an unmissable target. The French talked of ‘charging’, and going like ‘like lightning’, but few men could gallop. The charge was restricted by those great bulwarks forward of Wellington’s line, La Haie Sainte and Hougoumont. Fire from those two fortresses forced the cavalrymen inwards and the resultant pressure was so great that some horses were lifted off the ground by the animals on either side. They were advancing, too, across wet ground, uphill and through high, obstinate crops, none of which had yet been trampled flat. Mercer said that the leading cavalry came at a ‘brisk trot’. When his battery was deployed he estimated the enemy was already within a hundred yards. He ordered case-shot. ‘The very first round, I saw, brought down several men and horses.’ His five other guns came into action:
making terrible slaughter, and in an instant covering the ground with men and horses. Still they persevered in approaching us – the first round had brought them to a walk – though slowly, and it did seem they would ride over us. We were a little below the level of the ground on which they moved, having in front of us a bank of about a foot and a half or two feet high – and this gave more effect to our case-shot … for the carnage was dreadful.
It is interesting that Mercer reckons his guns ‘were a little below the level of the ground on which they moved’. He was certainly on the ridge’s summit, but here the ridge is flat-topped, making a fairly wide plateau, and the British squares are set well back from the forward lip of that flatter land which is about to become a killing ground. Mercer’s battery shoot at point-blank range into the horsemen and then Mercer quotes a French account which, he was certain, referred to his guns. ‘Through the smoke,’ the French cavalryman wrote,
I saw the English gunners abandon their pieces, all but six guns stationed under the road, and almost immediately our cuirassiers were upon the squares, whose fire was drawn in zig-zags. Now, I thought, those gunners would be cut to pieces; but no, the devils kept firing with grape; which mowed us down like grass.
Thousands of horsemen were now struggling to attack the squares, but the arithmetic was fatal to them. Assume that a British battalion had 500 men and made a square of equal sides, then each face of the square would present four ranks of about thirty men each. That makes 480 men in the four sides of the square, the rest are officers or sergeants who are in the square’s centre. Now take one side of the square. Thirty men are kneeling and holding their muskets braced and pointing outwards with fixed bayonets. Thirty more men are crouching in the second rank with their bayonets also bristling outwards, and behind them stand sixty men firing muskets. Thirty men take up about fifty -two feet, which is the width of our notional square, but a horseman needs much more space, well over three feet and closer to four, so only about fourteen or fifteen horsemen can charge at the square’s face. They can come in ranks, but the front rank cannot hold more than fifteen men, and those fifteen are faced by 120 men, half of whom are firing muskets. That is notional. Squares were usually oblongs, but the arithmetic still holds. If cavalry charged the square, they would be shot down. Men and horses would fall in agony, and the following horsemen would be baulked by thrashing hoofs and fallen bodies. The charge is reduced to chaos with one volley. Lieutenant Eeles, a Rifleman, describes it well enough. The cuirassiers had charged to within ‘thirty or forty yards’ of his square:
when I fired a volley from my Company which had the effect, added to the fire of the 71st, of bringing so many horses to the ground, that it became quite impossible for the Enemy to continue their charge. I certainly believe that half of the Enemy were at that instant on the ground; some few men and horses were killed, more wounded, but by far the greater part were thrown down over the dying and wounded.
So most of the fallen enemy had simply stumbled over the casualties in the front ranks of the charge, and even if the volley had missed, and that often happened with inexperienced troops who tended to fire high, the cavalry still cannot charge into the face of the square because their horses will swerve away from such an obstacle. When the King’s German Legion broke the squares at Garcia Hernandez it was because the French volley killed both
a horse and its rider and the deadweight of the two corpses acted like a battering ram that drove open a gap in the square’s face through which other horsemen galloped, but that battle had been on dry, hard ground, while at Waterloo the horsemen were struggling through mud and matted crops and had already been shaken by roundshot and blasts of canister tearing through their ranks. A Royal Engineer officer took shelter in a square of the 79th and reckoned that too many men fired high with their opening volley, because the musket balls had little effect on the cavalry, but still the horsemen swerved aside to spur along the flanks of the square where, of course, they were greeted with more musket fire. And behind the first row of squares were more squares and more bayonets and more muskets. Ney had led his cavalry into a maze of death.
Cavalry could break squares. It might happen by accident, as it did at Garcia Hernandez, but most likely it would be fear that broke the infantry. A cavalry charge was a fearsome spectacle, big men on big horses, men in breastplates and helmets and plumes, a thunder of hoofs, the sight of swords and sabres raised to strike. Raw troops could panic, or squares could be ripped apart by cannon fire and musketry, offering a chance for horsemen to finish the bloody business. At the battle of Wagram in 1809 the French Chasseurs broke an Austrian square with an oblique attack that slanted into the face which had just fired a volley at another cavalry unit, but the feat was so rare that the Colonel commanding the victorious Chasseurs was immediately rewarded with a promotion.
Even experienced troops could feel overawed by the sight of attacking cavalry. Sergeant Tom Morris, whose officer’s pregnant wife had walked all the way from Quatre-Bras to Brussels, was in square and saw the cuirassiers come over the crest.
Their appearance, as an enemy, was certainly enough to inspire a feeling of dread, none of them under six feet, defended by steel helmets and breast plates … The appearance was of such a formidable nature that I thought we could not have the slightest chance with them.
Rees Howell Gronow was an Ensign in the 1st Foot Guards. His battalion had been left in London to perform ceremonial duties, but young Gronow, just three years out of Eton College and desperate to accompany the army to Flanders, had borrowed £200 and gambled that into £600, which was enough to buy him horses, and without requesting leave he embarked for Belgium. Now, instead of standing guard at St James’s Palace, he was on the ridge and no man, he said, could have forgotten ‘the awful grandeur of that charge’.
You perceived at a distance what appeared to be an overwhelming, long moving line, which, ever advancing, glittered like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight. On came the mounted host until they got near enough, whilst the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath their thundering tramp. One might suppose that nothing could have resisted the shock of this terrible moving mass. They were the famous cuirassiers … who had distinguished themselves on most of the battle-fields of Europe. In an incredibly short period they were within twenty yards of us, shouting ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ The word of command, ‘Prepare to receive cavalry’, had been given, every man in the front ranks knelt, and a wall bristling with steel, held together by steady hands, presented itself to the infuriated cuirassiers … The charge of the French cavalry was gallantly executed; but our well-directed fire brought men and horses down, and ere long the utmost confusion arose in their ranks … Again and again various cavalry regiments, heavy dragoons, lancers, hussars, carabineers of the Guard, endeavoured to break our walls of steel.
Some of the French cavalry carried carbines, short-barrelled smoothbore muskets, which they fired at the squares, but Gronow reckoned such shots ‘produced little effect’ and the riders had small chance to reload in the mêlée, while the redcoats were reloading with practised skill. ‘Our men’, Gronow recorded, ‘had orders not to fire unless they could do so on a near mass.’ Even the most inaccurate musket could not miss a regiment of cavalry at twenty paces, and the men had orders to shoot at the horses because a fallen and wounded horse was a real obstacle to other riders. ‘It was pitiable to witness the agony of the poor horses,’ Gronow said. And the musketry worked. Steady, relentless, pitiless volleys reduced the cavalry charge to impotence. The musket fire, he said:
Brought down a large number of horses, and created indescribable confusion. The horses of the first rank of cuirassiers, in spite of all the efforts of their riders, came to a stand-still, shaking and covered with foam, at about twenty yards distance from our squares, and generally resisted all attempts to force them to charge the line of serried steel.
Green-jacketed Riflemen formed square too. The rifle was a shorter weapon than a musket, so it carried a longer bayonet, 23 inches of steel. Rifleman John Lewis saw the cuirassiers coming ‘all clothed in armour’. Gronow might have thought the carbine fire was ineffective, but Lewis would not have agreed:
We all closed in and formed a square just as they came within ten yards of us, and they found they could do no good with us; they fired with their carbines on us, and came to the right-about directly, and at that moment the man on my right hand was shot through the body, and the blood ran out at his belly and back like a pig stuck in the throat; he dropt on his side; I spoke to him; he just said, ‘Lewis, I’m done!’ and died directly. All this time we kept up a constant fire at the Imperial Guards as they retreated, but they often came to the right-about and fired; and as I was loading my rifle, one of their shots came and struck my rifle, not two inches above my left hand, as I was ramming down the ball with my right hand, and broke the stock, and bent the barrel in such a manner that I could not get the ball down; just at that time … a nine-pound shot came and cut the serjeant of our company right in two; he was not above three file from me, so I threw down my rifle and went and took his.
Gronow had compared the oncoming cavalry to a ‘wave of the sea’, and like a wave breaking on a beach the cavalry came, were baulked and retreated. As soon as the horsemen had retreated from the ridge’s summit the allied gunners ran from the squares and opened fire again. Captain Mercer double-shotted his cannons, loading a canister on top of a roundshot. The cavalry were re-forming just fifty or sixty yards away, then they charged again and he gave the word ‘Fire!’
The effect was terrible, nearly the whole leading rank fell at once; and the round-shot, penetrating the column, carried confusion throughout its extent … Our guns were served with an astonishing activity … Those who pushed forward over the heaps of carcasses of men and horses gained but a few paces in advance, there to fall in their turn and add to the difficulties of those succeeding them. The discharge of every gun was followed by a fall of men and horses like that of grass before the mower’s scythe.
Yet still the French pushed on, penetrating the gaps between the squares where they were cut down by musket fire. The allied squares were safe enough when the horsemen charged because, with the squares surrounded by cavalry, the French artillery stopped firing, but as soon as the cavalry withdrew the enemy guns started again and, because the horsemen only withdrew a short distance beyond the ridge’s crest, the infantry could not lie down. So the squares were pounded with roundshot and shell. The French had also brought horse artillery forward and placed them on the forward lip of the plateau, and those guns joined the bombardment. John Lewis again:
The man that stood next to me on my left hand had his left arm shot off by a nine-pound shot, just above his elbow, and he turned round and caught hold of me with his right hand and his blood run all over my trousers.
Sergeant Tom Morris reckoned that some French gunners advanced with the horsemen and turned a British cannon around and fired what he called ‘grape-shot’, which was almost certainly canister. ‘Our situation’, he wrote, ‘was truly awful’:
our men were falling by dozens from the enemy fire. About this time also a large shell fell just in front of us, and while the fuze was burning out we were wondering how many of us it would destroy. When it burst, about seventeen men were killed or wounded.
Ensign Gronow was appalled at th
e sights inside the square. ‘It was impossible to move a yard,’ he wrote:
without treading upon a wounded comrade, or upon the bodies of the dead; and the loud groans of the wounded and dying was most appalling … Our square was a perfect hospital, being full of dead, dying and mutilated soldiers. The charges of the cavalry were in appearance very formidable, but in reality a great relief, as the artillery could no longer fire on us.
Astonishingly, Ney persisted with the cavalry attacks. Not one square had been broken, but still he led the horsemen back up the hill and into the tangled crossfire of disciplined musketry. And he insisted on more men joining the charge until it was almost as large as the charge at Eylau; perhaps 9,000 cavalry were now being hurled at 20,000 infantry. Ney saw a brigade of carabiniers, men with steel breastplates, waiting in a patch of low ground near Hougoumont. Their commander, General Blanchard, had been ordered by General Kellerman not to join the madness, but, as Kellerman recalled, Marshal Ney:
galloped over to [the brigade] and lost his temper over its inactivity. He ordered it to throw itself on seven or eight English squares … flanked by numerous artillery batteries. The carabiniers were forced to obey, but their charge met with no success and half the brigade was left lying on the ground.