The Scum of the Earth Read online

  A ball came bounding along en-richochet as it is called and, striking him on the back, sent him many yards over the head of his horse. He fell on his face and bounded upwards and fell again. All the staff dismounted and ran to him and when I came up he said, ‘Pray tell them to leave me and let me die in peace.’ I had him conveyed to the rear …

  De Lancey, 37, the American-born son of a Huguenot family, was carried away in a blanket, but before doing so, the precious map was recovered by Brigade Major Oldfield and passed to Lieutenant Colonel Carmichael Smyth, commander of the Royal Engineer Officers on Wellington’s staff. Carmichael Smyth later kept it safe at home until his death in 1860. It was then lost but it resurfaced at a London bookseller’s in a job lot of maps in 1910. The bookseller recognised its importance and tipped off the Royal Engineers Museum. Fortunately, a curator at the Museum bought it with his own money, and rescued it. It was painstakingly restored and at the time of writing was being prepared for representing with an inter-active display at the Chatham museum in 2015 for the bicentenary of Waterloo. It is one of the most telling relics of the battle because it gives us a window on Wellington’s mind.

  Wellington had carefully scouted out the land to the south of Brussels in the weeks before the battle, and had found what he was looking for at Mont St Jean – a ridge with a reverse slope. There was a forward slope to give him the advantage over the emperor’s feared columns, but the reverse slope back towards the farm at Mont St Jean enabled the allied commander to shield his troops from direct sight by Napoleon’s beloved 12-pounders, which the emperor called ‘my beautiful daughters’. Wellington may have identified this position a year before. ‘In the summer of last year (1814), his Grace went there on his way to Paris, and on that occasion took a military view of it,’ said one of his aides. ‘He then declared, that if ever it should be his fortune to defend Brussels, Waterloo would be the position he would occupy.’ This could be true – he often played a game guessing at what lay out of sight, over the crest of a hill to test his skills at topography. And Mont St Jean lay on the main route into Brussels from Charleroi and the French border. If Napoleon was to be stopped, it would have to be here.

  At the top of the ridge today, on the west side of the Charleroi–Brussels crossroads, there is a bus stop shaded by a stand of towering elms. This is where the distinctive figure of Wellington could be seen by his men, scanning the battlefield mounted on Copenhagen. Today the battlefield is little changed, apart from the Lion Mound, which dominates the skyline on Wellington’s ridge like a monumental piece of Belgian surrealist art. It is as if someone has dropped the Great Pyramid of Egypt on Belgium, painted it bright green and stuck a lion on top as a joke.

  The Lion Mound is 141ft high and was created on the orders of King William of Orange to mark the spot where his son, the Prince of Orange, was hit in the shoulder by a musket ball. Being hit by a musket ball was often fatal. The Duke of Brunswick had been killed two days earlier at Quatre Bras by a musket ball that went through his bridle-hand and hit his liver: ‘He fell, and breathed his last in ten minutes.’ And with the lack of modern medicine, a musket ball did not need to hit a vital organ to kill.

  However, given the general slaughter all around, it seems odd that this huge mound was produced to celebrate the prince’s recovery from a shoulder wound. Of course, it is nothing of the kind. The Lion Mound was a monument to hubris. Belgium, split between French speakers in the Walloon area in the south – including Waterloo – and the Dutch-speaking Flemish area in the north, had been annexed by the First French Republic ending Austrian rule. The Mound was a very visible reminder to the French-speaking Belgians that after Waterloo, they were firmly under the rule of the House of Orange as part of the Netherlands. It did not work. Within four years of the Mound being completed in 1826, the Belgians revolted and secured their independence.

  Wellington was understandably furious when he first saw the Mound. Victor Hugo wrote that he complained: ‘They have altered my battlefield.’ If Hugo is right, he was being diplomatic in his language. It was created by scraping 10 million cubic tons of Belgian earth from the ridge and wiped away one of the most important features to understanding the battle and Wellington’s strategy; it removed the steep ridge that protected his men, and virtually obliterated the steep banks surrounding a ‘sunken’ road running east to west along the ridge at Mont St Jean.

  It is difficult today to visualise just how steep the slope and the bank of the sunken road was. The slope made the climb through fields churned to mud a real slog for the French infantry. It also meant they would have been unable to see their enemy until the last moment, because they were in a dip, and when Maitland’s Guards stood up it looked as though they were rising out of the Belgian soil. The psychological shock effect was enormous even before the musket balls struck flesh, sinew and bone.

  Soil sampling and GPS computer modelling have confirmed that the ridge was a far more prominent feature before the thousands of tons of earth were piled up to make the Mound. The Gordon monument, erected by the family of Wellington’s chief ADC, Sir Alexander Gordon in 1817, is a good guide to just how high the ridge was; the base is the old height of the land before the construction of the Lion Mound and it is reached by a flight of twenty-three stone steps.

  The opposing armies presented a spectacular sight before the slaughter started. Before the days of camouflage, every regiment strutted like peacocks in bright colours. The British infantry famously wore scarlet but many regiments wore more gaudy outfits to ‘outdo’ each other and some wore elaborate plumed hats like Ladies’ Day at Ascot. The French cavalry were magnificent to the eye, according to a contemporary account:

  chasseurs in green and purple and yellow; hussars with dolmans and shakos of all tints – sky-blue, scarlet, green and red; dragoons with turban-helmets of tiger skin; carabineers – giants of six feet, clad in white – with breastplates of gold and lofty helmets with red plumes; grenadiers in blue, faced with scarlet, yellow epaulettes and high bearskin caps; the red lancers – red breeched, red-capped with floating white plumes half a yard long …2

  The cavalry was notorious for being style-conscious. The Royals and the Life Guards wore tight scarlet tunics with blue facings and gold lace; the Horse Guards and the Dragoon Guards wore blue with scarlet facings and gold lace; the Inniskilling Dragoons wore scarlet with yellow facings and gold lace; while the Hussars wore blue with white facings and silver lace. Captain Rees Howell Gronow, a Regency dandy who had decided to leave London and join Wellington’s army of his own volition, observed:

  You discovered 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 they came until they got near enough, whilst the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath the thundering tramp of the mounted host. One might suppose that nothing could have resisted the shock of this terrible moving mass.3

  Despite the smart uniforms, Wellington’s army was a far cry from the seasoned, battle-hardened fighting machine he had left in Toulouse in 1814, when Napoleon was first forced to abdicate. The Duke was contemptuous of it: ‘On the whole our army was an infamously bad one,’ he said two decades later, ‘and the enemy knew it.’ The overwhelming majority of Wellington’s force at Waterloo, 64 per cent, was drawn from Continental Europe. Just 35 per cent of Wellington’s army was British. Wellington fielded 67,665 men and 156 guns but by the time he got to Waterloo, Colonel Daniel MacKinnon, the Coldstream’s historian, who was there, reckoned the total force – after losses at Quatre Bras and the reserve of 15,500 men held at Hal – was no more than 55,000 against Napoleon’s 68,900 men and 246 guns. The exact numbers are still a contentious issue. I have used the detailed returns gathered for Captain Siborne’s History of the War in France and Belgium in 1815 (first published in 1848 by T. and W. Boone of London). The British contingent comprised 15,181 infantry, 5,843 cavalry, 2,967 artillery and 78 guns – a total force of 23,991 British troops
. The majority of his forces (38 per cent) were from the German states thanks to the links with Britain’s Hanoverian king, George III. They ranged from the Hanoverians from George III’s homeland, Brunswickers and the crack King’s German Legion, raised in England from German ex-patriots, who fought to the death to defend La Haye Sainte, to Nassauers and 17,000 Dutch-Belgians under the command of the Prince of Orange. Wellington, like his commanders, clearly did not trust some of these Continental forces to stand firm under fire, particularly the French-speaking Belgians, although the 1st Dutch-Belgian Brigade under Colonel Detmers was credited with helping to break the Imperial Middle Guard at the crux of the battle.

  There are still heated debates about claims of cowardice or worse, treachery, by the some of the Continental troops that littered the memoirs of British soldiers. Wellington, typically, had no such qualms. Years after the battle, he was still accusing the Nassau troops of being turncoats: ‘The next thing I saw of them at Waterloo was them running off, and what is more, firing upon us as they ran!’

  The most shocking anti-Belgian propaganda was still being recycled as late as 1890 by Charles Dalton in the foreword to his Waterloo Roll Call:

  Of the Nassau, Dutch and Belgian troops, it is only fair to say they were, mostly, utterly useless at Waterloo. The glamour of Napoleon was upon them. They had lately been in his service and had a settled conviction that Wellington would be defeated and his army cut to pieces … the ‘Brave Belgians’ … retired from the field and carried news of Wellington’s defeat to Brussels.

  This Victorian jingoism has fuelled one of the most persistent myths about Waterloo: that it was a British – or even more inaccurately, an English – victory. This may also have helped to strengthen the view in Britain about itself: that ‘plucky little Albion’ has been called upon to rescue Europe from a power-crazed tyrant three times within 200 years. This historic self-view, reinforced by Waterloo, may still have an impact on Britain’s attitude towards the European Union. Wellington later told his female admirers he layered the suspect units with the tougher British and German battalions behind them to make sure they did not break. Some of the German and British regiments were battle-hardened after the Peninsular War, but the truth is many of the British troops were also inexperienced. Again there are disputes about the proportion, but some estimates suggest only six of his twenty-five British battalions had served in Spain. As soon as peace was secured in Paris in 1814, some of Wellington’s best regiments were sent to fight in America for the War of 1812 and the Anglo-American peace treaty signed in Ghent in January 1815 was too late to bring back more than a handful of units in time to fight Napoleon.

  I walk along a track at the traffic lights along the ridge in the direction of the Waterloo golf course, somewhere in the distance. A few yards along the rough track, I find a small metal plaque that at first sight looks like a milestone: ‘In memory of the heroic stand by the 27th Inniskilling Regiment of Foot … when of the 747 officers and men who joined battle, 493 were killed or wounded. A noble record of stubborn endurance.’

  A social history of the Inniskilling regiment has shown that they were mostly Catholics from Fermanagh, from poor homes, and more than thirty from Galway, Kerry and Donegal could speak only Irish.4 They were a unit closely knit by their Irish ties, and the next day they were found dead together still ‘in square’ where they fell. They had been drilled to respond to a cavalry charge by forming a square; so long as they did not break, cavalry found it impenetrable – there were eyewitness accounts of the frustrated French cuirassiers riding up and exchanging insults with the men. But they were horribly vulnerable to artillery in their square formations, and when La Haye Sainte, the farm just below the ridge, fell at about 6.30 p.m., Napoleon pushed forward his field guns and pounded the squares with a murderous fire. Wellington regretted it deeply, remarking at dinner years later: ‘We should not have lost La Haye Sainte any more than Hougoumont if there had only been a wicket (a gate) behind to let in ammunition. But the French kept up such a fire on the front that we could not supply it from that quarter.’

  Across the track, overlooking the rolling hills south towards La Belle Alliance is another marker stone with a plaque. It says:

  To the gallant memory of Lieutenant General Thomas Picton Commander of the 5th Division and the left wing of the Army at the battle of Waterloo. Born 1758. Died near this spot in the early afternoon of 18 June 1815 leading his men against Count Drouet d’Erlon’s advance.

  It took nerves of steel to hold steady on the ridge, as more than 16,000 of d’Erlon’s infantry, a quarter of Napoleon’s army, advanced in columns after the emperor’s cannon fell silent; the columns were roughly 150 men across, 24 deep, around 3,600 soldiers in each (though there is a debate about exactly how they were composed). It would have taken them about twenty minutes to cross the muddy fields, wading through the waist-high corn, under fire from roundshot and canister balls as they got closer to the allied guns. But to the 4,000 defenders on the ridge, their steady advance with drums pounding was a frightening, bowel-liquidising sight that had made armies all over Europe crack and run. Historian Richard Holmes said in his BBC War Walks series the sight of 20,000 men advancing with fixed bayonets was inclined to make men ‘find an urgent engagement somewhere else’.

  Lieutenant Colonel Basil Jackson said in his memoirs:

  The system is as old as the Macedonian phalanx … the undisciplined armies of the French Revolution relied on the moral effect of rapidly pushing forward large masses against the weakest parts of an enemy’s position – a method that rarely failed of success against continental armies, for, impelled by natural ardour and enthusiasm, they dashed on with the elan for which they have credit and actually frightened the defenders by their rapid and imposing advance.

  The only way to stop them in 1815, before the advent of machine guns, was for lines of infantry in two or three ranks to hold firm and, rank by rank, mechanically pour continuous volleys of musket fire into the advancing columns at point-blank range as their officers shouted out the orders: ‘present, fire, reload, present, fire, reload’. The allied ranks had been subjected to a terrifying bombardment of roundshot from 12 noon to around 1.30 p.m. that took off men’s heads, splashed their comrades with blood and brains, mingling the screams of horses and men, blood and smoke.

  D’Erlon’s forces, including the 45th – ‘the Invincibles’ – were hit by roundshot and canister (dozens of large balls in a canister that exploded out of the cannon like giant gunshot rounds) but they tramped remorselessly up the slope, and shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur! En avant! En avant!’ as their drummers beat out the roll of the ‘pas de charge’.

  When d’Erlon’s men crashed through the hedges at the top of the ridge, von Bijlandt’s Dutch-Belgian brigade fell back, running past Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton’s jeering 5th Division.* The Highlanders – remnants of the regiment that had been decimated defending Quatre Bras – were being pushed back, and d’Erlon’s corps was threatening to drive a wedge between Pack and Kempt’s brigades to take possession of the ridge.

  Picton, hugely experienced, a blood-and-guts leader who had fought all the way through the Peninsular campaign – saw the French columns momentarily pause to spread out so they could fire at the thin red lines on the ridge. He seized the moment and ordered his men to fire a volley from their muskets at point-blank range through the hedge that concealed them. Three thousand muskets in two thin lines fired into the French massed ranks. Almost before the smoke cleared Picton yelled: ‘Charge! Charge! Hurrah! Rally the Highlanders!’ Picton was on horseback, wearing a top hat and civilian clothes, cursing the French and his own men in his usual fashion. Picton’s men burst through the hedge with their bayonets, but as they did so, Picton was shot from his horse and he was dead before he hit the ground. A musket ball had gone through his right temple, leaving a hole through his top hat** and through his brain. The musket ball was later cut out with a razor. It had lodged on the lower and opposite side o
f his head, where it appeared just breaking through the skin.5 His corpse was found to be terribly bruised just above the hip with the skin very distended by a mass of coagulated blood. Picton must have been badly injured, possibly by roundshot at Quatre Bras, but had said nothing about the wound to his side, and got his servant to bandage it up. His death came at a moment of great peril for Wellington’s line. There were few reserves of infantry immediately behind the lines on the ridge for Wellington to push forward. The Earl of Uxbridge, commanding the cavalry and standing close to Wellington, decided he had to throw in the heavy cavalry to maintain the momentum of Picton’s counter-charge.

  The 1st Brigade of heavy cavalry, under Major General Lord Edward Somerset, comprised the 1st and 2nd Life Guards, the Royal Horse Guards, known as the Blues, and the 1st Dragoon Guards. The 2nd Brigade was commanded by Major General Sir William Ponsonby. It was known as the Union Brigade because it included Scots, English (the Royals) and Irish (Inniskilling) Dragoons. In total there were over 2,000 horsemen on the reverse slope waiting for the order to charge.

  Uxbridge rode up at speed and ordered a double charge of the Heavy Cavalry. He told Ponsonby to attack the infantry and Somerset’s cavalry to stop the French cuirassiers, who were riding towards the ridge in support of the infantry. Uxbridge, in his excitement, placed himself in front of Somerset’s brigade. The sabres of over 2,000 horsemen were raised, waiting for the order to advance. They paused for a moment, the horses ready, ears pricked. The head of the French column of infantry had crossed the sunken ridge road. Uxbridge’s order to advance was repeated down the line by other officers. Major George de Lacy Evans, who had been taken on by Ponsonby as an extra ADC a few weeks before on his return from service in America, waved his hat as a signal to the line to go forward. Uxbridge led Somerset’s Brigade slowly at first, at no more than a walk, but gathering pace. Captain Alexander Kennedy Clark of the Royal Dragoons and his Corporal, Francis Stiles, had been standing on the reverse slope at Mont St Jean patiently waiting for their moment, and it was now.