The Scum of the Earth Page 7

  The logs of Royal Navy warships, HMS Alert, Erebus, Foxhound, Sharpshooter, Swan and Wrangler all reported the atrocious weather conditions.* Low pressure was recorded across England and the Low Countries on 17 June, which was dominated by a cold front advancing from the west, causing heavy overnight rain. Force-6 winds of 24 knots in the Channel were reduced to little more than a gentle breeze across the battlefield, but the thick low cloud caused ‘murky’ conditions with poor visibility even after the rain stopped. It may have been the brightening skyline in the west, after the worst of the rain storms had passed, that may have encouraged Napoleon to accede to Drouot’s request for a delay to allow the ground to dry out. The weather was a factor in determining the outcome of the battle, according to two meteorologists, Dennis Wheeler and Gaston Demaree, who reconstructed the weather of 16–18 June for a paper for the Royal Meteorological Society, though it was not the only reason Napoleon lost.8

  A respected British geologist, the late Kenneth Spink linked the rain storms over Waterloo that weekend to the Tambora eruption. Spink told a conference at Warwick University in 1996 less than 3 inches of rain normally would be expected in the month of June: ‘Enormous rainstorms developed before and during the series of battles leading to the major conflict at Waterloo. With the benefit of hindsight, it can be seen that these were caused by the eruption of Tambora … This bad weather was almost entirely to Wellington’s advantage.’9 Victor Hugo lamented, ‘Had it not rained in the night 17–18 June 1815, the future of Europe might have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, were what determined Napoleon’s fate.’ The writer claimed: ‘Had the ground been dry, so that the artillery could move the battle would have begun at six in the morning; it would have been over and done with by two, three hours before the Prussians could turn the scales.’

  The writer was excusing the emperor’s mistakes by heaping the blame on the weather. In 1816, far worse weather was to shape events across the globe. The ash spread around the earth, reflecting sunlight, causing the climate to change by lowering temperatures. In London, people witnessed remarkable sunsets, because the volcanic dust was acting like a curtain on the sun’s dying rays. The year after Waterloo, 1816, ‘the year without a summer’, deepened the distress and unrest in Britain while it was still celebrating victory; unseasonal rain ruined the crops and made the crushing poverty even harder to endure. When Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’ returned home, they found their country at war with itself.

  But first they had a battle to fight.

  Notes

  * Captain Johnny Kincaid was a real-life version of Richard Sharpe, but the author of the Sharpe novels, Bernard Cornwell, denies he was the inspiration for his fictional hero.

  * The Met Office was not created until 1854.

  1. Dennis Wheeler and Gaston Demaree, Weather, Royal Meteorological Society, June 2005, vol. 60, no. 6.

  2. Julian Paget and Derek Saunders, Hougoumont Waterloo (Battleground Books), p. 32.

  3. Gareth Glover (ed.), The Waterloo Archive Vol. lV: British Sources (Barnsley: Frontline Books, 1999), p. 98.

  4. Charles O’Neil, Private O’Neil: The Recollections of an Irish Rogue (Leonaur Books, 1997).

  5. Andrew Roberts, Waterloo – Napoleons Last Gamble (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), p.41.

  6. Ibid., p. 110.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Dennis Wheeler and Gaston Demaree, Weather, Royal Meteorological Society, June 2005, vol. 60, no. 6.

  9. K. Sping, ‘Geological Constraints at the Battle of Waterloo’, Applied Geoscience Conference, 15–18 April 1996, Warwick University.

  3

  THE BATTLE

  The National Army Museum in Chelsea has a finely detailed model of the battlefield by the army expert topographer and historian Captain William Siborne. As I tried to work out the lie of the land on Siborne’s model, I overheard a conversation between two young army officer types: ‘Have you ever been to the battlefield, Henry?’

  ‘Oh yah,’ drawled his friend. ‘It’s boring.’ Henry missed the point. It is the banality of the bucolic landscape today, the farms, the gently rolling fields with neatly planted rows of corn, which makes the carnage that happened within the compass of about 8 square miles truly shocking.

  The battle had five key phases: 11.20 a.m. the first shots of the battle were fired over Hougoumont and went on all day, almost in isolation from the main action: 12–1.30 p.m. – Napoleon softens up Wellington’s centre by unleashing an artillery bombardment on the ridge that was so deafening it could be heard in Brussels and, allegedly, Dover; 1.30–2 p.m. Ney follows up the bombardment by launching a frontal assault on the ridge with the Comte d’Erlon’s infantry in columns – they are repulsed by allied infantry and a cavalry charge; 4 p.m. Ney (thinking Wellington’s infantry is in retreat when they are pulled back from the cannon fire on the ridge) launches massive charges by forty-three squadrons of cavalry, 12,000 horses – the allied infantry form defensive hollow squares on the plains, holding their bayonets out like porcupines – and lacking sufficient artillery support, the French cavalry are again repulsed; 7.30 p.m. Napoleon launches the Imperial Guard against Wellington’s exhausted lines.

  Arguments still rage over whether the arrival of Blücher’s Prussians turned the tide of the battle. Siborne infuriated Wellington by including 40,000 Prussian troops on the original model. Wellington’s secretary wrote to Siborne protesting ‘those who see the work will deduce from it that the result of the Battle was not so much owing to British Valour, and the great Generalship of the Chief of the English Army, as to the flank Movements of the Prussians’. Siborne was summoned to Bathurst’s War Office at the corner of Downing Street to be told he was ‘mistaken’ and must have the Prussians removed. Wellington mounted a whispering campaign to discredit Siborne, insisting to friends he had won the battle before Blücher’s troops arrived. Frances, Lady Shelley noted in her journal: ‘The Duke himself told me in Paris that the battle was won before the Prussians arrived.’

  There could only be one winner between Wellington and the low-ranking army surveyor – Siborne’s model today has only a token force of Prussians, although there is good evidence Siborne was right. As a journalist, I see Siborne as one of the largely forgotten heroes of the battle (although he arrived in Paris after it was over): he spent eight months on the battlefield at La Haye Sainte doing painstaking research and gathered a unique archive of 700 letters from the main participants to piece together the story of the battle for his model. He discovered the uncomfortable truth that the Prussians arrived in force after 4 p.m. – three hours before Wellington admitted – and when he wrote his history of the battle, Siborne stood by his evidence. The army refused to pay for Siborne’s model so he put it on private show. Although it was over twenty years after the event, it caused a sensation – it was seen by 100,000 people paying a shilling a head at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1838. But he never got the proceeds and went broke. He gained a sinecure at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, to see out his old age in relative comfort, and died aged 51 in 1849. He is buried at Brompton Cemetery.

  Standing at the crossroads on the ridge at Mont St Jean today, the battlefield seems horrifyingly small given the slaughter that happened here. On this patch of lush green fields, about 4 miles (6.5kms) by 2 miles (3.5kms), an estimated 47,000 men were killed or injured in about twelve hours.

  The opposing slopes where Wellington and Napoleon marshalled their men are (according to Siborne’s measurements) only 2,500yds apart, with undulating fields and a shallow valley running east–west between them, covered in clover and ripening waist-high rye. Wellington must have been able to see Napoleon, although he said years later, ‘No I could not – the day was dark, there was a great deal of rain in the air.’ Wellington must have been turning a Nelsonian blind eye to the emperor. Sir John Kincaid, stationed with his rifle regiment in the sand pit opposite the farm of La Haye Sainte, clearly saw Napoleon on his white mare, Desiree:

  The formatio
n of the French lines was scarcely completed when the magnificent and animating spectacle which they presented was heightened in an extraordinary degree by the passing of the Emperor along them, attended by numerous and brilliant staff. The troops hailed him with loud and fervent acclamations.

  The Duke much later admitted to Frances, Lady Shelley, he:

  saw an officer ride along the French line and heard a tremendous cheer which was kept up during that officer’s progress. The Duke felt sure it was none other than Bonaparte himself. It was probably the moment when Bonaparte pointed his finger in the direction of Brussels and promised his troops the plunder of that city.

  Sunday, 18 June 1815 was the first time Napoleon and Wellington had faced each other on a battlefield. Wellington was extraordinarily single-minded; to force himself to focus on a military career, he gave up gambling at cards and burned his beloved violin as a young man of 24 (his father Garret Wesley, a musical prodigy, was professor of music at Dublin University). Napoleon, a genius of offensive war, would meet his defensive match in Wellington. Crucially, Wellington used three farms on the battlefield – Hougoumont on the extreme right of his lines, La Haye Sainte in the left-centre, and Papellotte on his far left – as breakwaters against the waves of French columns, to limit the emperor’s ability to move his troops on the field of battle.

  Napoleon’s plan was astonishingly simple, as described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables:

  To go straight to the centre of the Allies’ line, to make a breach in the enemy, to cut them in two, to drive the British half back on Hal, and the Prussian half on Tongres, to make two shattered fragments of Wellington and Blücher, to carry Mont-Saint-Jean, to seize Brussels, to hurl the German into the Rhine and the Englishman into the sea.

  There were striking similarities between the two men: they were both the same age, 46, and both had learned their trade at a French military school (where the Duke learned to speak fluent French). But the two commanders were on very different form that day.

  Wellington was in his prime, slim and fit and every eyewitness said ‘Nosey’ seemed to be everywhere. With a long, boney nose like a raptor’s beak, Wellington truly watched the battlefield like a hawk through a portable brass field telescope from his vantage point sitting on Copenhagen under an elm tree at the Mont St Jean crossroads. He restlessly patrolled the ridge, keeping a grip on his lines, issuing orders through his ADCs (who acted like messengers), riding to crisis points, cajoling, steadying, ordering Maitland’s guards to lie down to save them in the final attack, and finally ordering them to stand and fire, before waving his hat in the air to signal the general advance. Lieutenant Colonel Basil Jackson, a staff officer attached to the deputy Quartermaster General Sir William De Lancey, recalled years later:

  As I looked over my saddle, I could see the outlines of the Duke and his horse amidst the smoke, standing very near to the Highlanders of Picton’s division bearing a resemblance to the statue in Hyde Park when partially shrouded by fog, while the balls – and they came thickly – hissed harmlessly over our heads.

  Jackson added, ‘It was a time of intense anxiety for had the Duke fallen, heaven only knows what might have been the result of the fight!’ The Duke, who had no time for false modesty, would have agreed with Jackson. The ADCs had been warned to stay back, but Jackson spotted one ADC still with him – Lord Arthur Hill ‘the most portly young man in the army’ who was known at Military College as ‘fat Hill’.

  Napoleon in contrast was decidedly past his best, flabby after putting on weight in exile on Elba and suffering from piles that made him irritable and riding difficult. His Equerry, Jardin Aine said he rode through the lines and gave orders to make certain that every detail was executed promptly but returned often to Le Caillou on horseback. ‘There he dismounted and, seating himself in a chair which was brought to him, he placed his head between his hands and rested his elbows on his knees. He remained thus absorbed sometimes for half-an-hour, and then rising up suddenly would peer through his glasses on all sides to see what was happening. At three o’clock an Aide-de-Camp from the right wing came to tell him that they were repulsed and that the artillery was insufficient …’1 He spent two hours away from the battlefield in the afternoon, leaving Marshal Ney in charge of the battle at a crucial time.

  Napoleon was under 5ft 7in tall, thick about the shoulders and neck, with grey eyes that, to Lieutenant Colonel Jackson, who accompanied him later to exile in St Helena, appeared ‘wholly devoid of expression’. Napoleon habitually wore a green cut-away military coat, white waistcoat, breeches, and silk stockings, a cocked hat, worn square on, with a tricolour cockade and the star of the Legion d’Honneur. Jackson, no fan of Bonaparte, said he was vain about his physique, often given to using coarse expressions, mistrustful and on his guard, apt to talk too much and then withdraw what he had said; he could not tolerate being contradicted, disliked the wealthy but revered la noblesse, and had a horrid habit of spitting, even in bed, whether it hit the carpet or the bed-curtains. Flattery failed towards him, but probity and diligence succeeded. His decision to attack the Allied armies instead of waging a defensive campaign inside France had been a great gamble, but he confessed much later that he felt as though he had lost his winning touch. During his exile on St Helena, he said:

  I sensed that Fortune was abandoning me. I no longer had in me the feeling of ultimate success, and if one is not prepared to take risks when the time is ripe, one ends up doing nothing – and, of course, one should never take a risk without being sure that one will be lucky.

  Wellington rated Napoleon as a field commander, saying he was worth 40,000 men in boosting the morale of his troops, but Napoleon underrated Wellington. He dismissed the Duke as a ‘sepoy’ general, a reference to his rise in India under the patronage of his older brother Richard, the governor-general, fighting the armies of the maharajas. It was obviously a barb that stung the Duke. Colonel Daniel Mackinnon, the Coldstreams’ historian, said when the Duke’s Spanish friend and military attache, Don Miguel de Álava arrived at Mont St Jean from Brussels, he found Wellington in a tree observing the French deployments. Wellington said: ‘How are you Álava. Bonaparte shall see today how a General of Sepoys shall defend a position!’ The Duke had used the experience he had gained in India and the Peninsula to scout out the perfect place for a defensive position, a ridge with a ‘reverse slope’, which could protect his troops from Bonaparte’s famous artillery.

  In the weeks before the battle, the Duke ordered his engineers to draw up a detailed topographical map of a wide area to the south of Brussels. Ten Royal Engineer Officers, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Carmichael Smyth and Brigade Major Oldfield, rode for miles, mapping every hill and dale. I found their map at the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham, Kent, largely ignored by most visitors, who were drawn to the strange Heath Robinson contraptions for allowing armies to cross rivers or scale heights. The map shows that Wellington’s engineers did not have a clue precisely where he intended to make his stand. James Scott, deputy curator of the museum, told me they produced ten sheets covering 120 square miles at 4 inches to the mile that were stitched together to make one vast map 135cms x 95cms. The contours of the gently rolling farm fields are picked out in coloured shading in grey and green wash and red pigment like a modern Ordnance Survey map. Oddly, the greatest detail is around Hal, well behind his front lines. Here Wellington controversially stationed 15,500 troops to protect his escape route to the coast, or to prevent Napoleon outflanking him to the west – a manoeuvre never contemplated by Bonaparte because it would have pushed Wellington towards the Prussian army on the east. The reserves at Hal never fired a shot, although they were sorely needed in the battle, but the map for Hal gives a clue to its importance in the Duke’s thinking: it is drawn on better paper than the rest of the map, with more detailing showing tree lines and hill shading. The engineers clearly thought this area was going to be the focus of his action, and, perhaps, so did Wellington. The actual battlefield, before the
ridge at Mont St Jean, a little over a mile south of Waterloo, is in the extreme right hand corner of the map and on inferior brown paper with less detail, suggesting it was hurriedly added at a later stage as an afterthought. Three prominent farms are labelled, ‘Chateau Goumont’ for Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, and La Belle Alliance. If you look carefully you can see a faint loop around Mont St Jean in grey pencil. This is the pencil mark left by Wellington’s own hand. The faint grey swirl of pencil is the closest you can get to Wellington’s careful planning for defeating Napoleon.

  He circled the ridge probably as he stood at Quatre Bras to show De Lancey exactly where wanted his forces concentrated after receiving the news carried by his ADC Sir Alexander Gordon that the Prussian field marshal Blücher had been forced to fall back on Wavre, about 8 miles to the east of Mont St Jean. De Lancey, as Wellington’s Quartermaster General, folded up the map and carried it through the battle until around 3 p.m., when he was mortally wounded as he spoke to the Duke on horseback. De Lancey was hit in the back by a bouncing cannon ball and was pitched over the head of his horse onto the ground. He tried to get up – Wellington said he bounced up like a ‘struck pheasant’ – but collapsed with terrible internal injuries. Wellington, who had been warned by his ADCs to take care of the roundshot, dismounted and went to him: