Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ on a bloody bier,

      And roused the vengeance blood alone could quell.

      Even as the ball broke up into a hundred hurried farewells, the bizarre air of unreality still hung over Brussels. From the window of her hotel on the Parc the newly arrived Charlotte Waldie had watched a soldier turn back again and again to embrace his wife and child for a last time, and yet as the dawn exodus of Wellington’s army began, and market carts and vendors bringing their cabbages, cauliflowers, peas and early potatoes in from the surrounding countryside added their own note of burlesque to the sombre occasion, it was almost impossible to take in the fact that this really was war. ‘Soon afterwards the 42nd and 92nd Highland regiments marched through the Palace Royale and the Parc,’ wrote Charlotte Waldie, ‘with their bagpipes playing before them, whilst the bright beams of the rising sun shone full on their tartan bonnets. We admired their fine athletic forms, their firm erect military demeanour and undaunted mien. We felt proud that they were our countrymen: in their gallant bearing … Alas! We little thought that even before the fall of night these brave men, whom we now gazed at with so much interest and admiration, would be laid low.’

      As the sound of the last fife melted away from a suddenly silent Brussels, the first units of the army entered into the gloom of the dense Soignes Forest that stretched out to the south on either side of the Charleroi road. It might have occurred to some of the more experienced troops that this would be no road to retreat along if things went badly, but in the warm still of the morning, with no sound of canon ahead to concentrate the mind, and Guards officers, coats open, snuff boxes in hand, trotting towards the battle along the cobbled chaussée in their smart cabriolets as if they were making for Epsom or Ascot, it was hard to believe that there was a French army less than twenty miles away.

      It was partly a failure of imagination, it was partly sang-froid, part show and part utterly genuine, but at the bottom of it all was a supreme confidence in the man who led them. Over the last few months Wellington might have seemed more interested in his love affairs than in Bonaparte, but the moment the fighting started he was always a different man; the ‘Beau’, as his staff called him, gone, and the general worth a division against any enemy back in command. ‘Where indeed, and what is not his forte?’ Augustus Frazer asked his wife. ‘Cold and indifferent, nay apparently careless in the beginning of battles, when his moment of difficulty comes intelligence flashes from the eyes of this wonderful man; and he rises superior to all that can be imagined.’

      That ‘moment’ had come. But if he knew exactly where he wanted to fight his battle – he had used a thumb to mark out a long low ridge, crossing the Charleroi road just south of the Soignes Forest, on the Duke of Richmond’s map only hours before – the time had long gone when he could fight the enemy on the ground he chose. The last report he had was that the French were already in Frasnes near Quatre Bras, and with the Prussians about to be engaged at Ligny to the east of the crossroads and the bulk of his army still marching from the west, the only force that stood between Bonaparte and Brussels was the reserve strung out behind him along the main north–south Charleroi road.

      Wellington was certainly luckier than he deserved. A combination of inertia and confused orders and priorities had wasted an overwhelming French advantage and meant that Quatre Bras was still in allied hands when he reached the crossroads at ten. The army opposing a token allied force of 7,000 troops was three times as strong in men and still more in guns, but Wellington knew that if they could hold the critical line of the chaussée linking Quatre Bras and Ligny three miles to the east until fresh units arrived, the odds must slowly but inexorably swing his way.

      There was nothing pretty about the battle that followed, nothing scientific – shot, grape, shell and musket, hand-to-hand fighting in the woods and long rye; wave after wave of cavalry breaking against British squares – but gradually a battle that should have been lost before it had begun started to move Wellington’s way. Over the next hours the issue still remained in doubt, but as each unit arrived and was thrown in the odds had already begun to shift. As night fell, with the woods to the south-west of the crossroads and the farm buildings straddling the Charleroi road again in allied hands, the field was Wellington’s. At savage cost Quatre Bras had been saved and the road to Brussels held.

      Over the battlefield a giant and perfect pyramid of smoke, visible for miles, hung like a funeral pall. Around the crossroads, where the foul-mouthed Sir Thomas Picton, Wellington’s great ‘fighting general’ from the Peninsula, had rallied the 28th with the battle cry of ‘Remember Egypt’, and where Wellington had leaped a hedge of bayonets into the safety of a Highland square, lay the dead and wounded of both sides. French casualties were over four thousand, allied closer to five. In the course of the action, the 92nd – the Gordon Highlanders – whose sergeants, only hours earlier, had been reeling for the Duchess of Richmond’s guests, had lost five commanding officers. The 42nd, the Black Watch, had suffered some 300 killed and wounded; the 69th from Lincolnshire more than forty per cent; the 30th very nearly as many, the Guards’ heavy losses clearing out Bossu Wood, the Dutch and ‘death’s-head’ Brunswickers the same. ‘In no battle did the British infantryman display more valour or more cool courage than at Quatre Bras,’ wrote Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars. ‘Cavalry we had none that could stand the shock of the French; the Brunswick and Belgian cavalry, it is true, made an attempt, but were scattered like chaff before the wind by the veteran Cuirassiers … The British cavalry had had a long march, some nearly forty miles, and consequently did not arrive until the battle was over. The gallant Picton, seeing the cavalry driven back, led on our infantry in squares into the centre of the enemy’s masses of cavalry, facing charging squadrons with squares, and in line against heavy columns of infantry.’

      Even though that old combination of Picton and the British infantryman had bailed Wellington out, it was no victory. To their left, long after the guns fell silent at Quatre Bras, the sound of cannon continued in the direction of Ligny. The allies had secured the road to Brussels but the French in their turn had prevented them joining up with the Prussians. It was, at the best, a draw. Deployed across a forward slope, and facing the main body of Bonaparte’s Army of the North, Blücher’s Prussians had been badly beaten, and as they retreated north and east towards Wavre, Wellington had no choice but to retire as well.

      It was a dejected army that buried its dead, and on Saturday 17th, under cover of cavalry and of an apocalyptic storm, began their withdrawal towards Brussels. The rains had turned the paths and fields into canals and quagmires, but at 2 a.m. on this Sunday morning, as the thunder crashed and the rain lashed down, and the Duke of Brunswick lay in his coffin, they finally halted along a ridge just south of the Soignes Forest. The 92nd, or what was left of them – one colonel, one major, four captains, twelve lieutenants, four ensigns, twelve sergeants and about 250 rank had failed to answer the roll call – had stopped near a farm building called La Haye Sainte, taking up their position on either side of the Brussels road. The name would have meant nothing to them, but then except perhaps for Wellington and De Lancey it would have meant little to anyone. On the day before, Sir Augustus Frazer, in command of the army’s horse artillery, had been told that Wellington was heading towards a place called Waterloo. He could not even find it on his map. What, he asked, was its real name? He was about to find out. The ‘trumpet of fame’, as Edward Cotton called it, would never sound as it should for the dead of Quatre Bras, but Wellington would have his battle where he had wanted it.

3 a.m.

      A Dying World

      The short midsummer night was over on the tiny Isle of Scalpaigh. From the highest point on the island, Skye and the dark line of the Ross-shire hills would have been visible in the distance, but if anyone was stirring down by the shoreline they had not yet seen, lying beside a cairn on the rough track that led from the MacLennans’ stone house to the family well, a torn and СКАЧАТЬ