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

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СКАЧАТЬ instincts of all the staunchly Whig Keppels, was a throwback to a freer and more robust age. In the spring of 1815 he was still a schoolboy at Dr Page’s Westminster; but school had never been much more than a minor distraction for him, an alternative London address equally handy for the theatres or duck shoots, a convenient base from which he could as easily slip off to see the Princess Charlotte as join in with the mob stoning his father’s Portland Street house during the anti-Corn Law riots.

      If the eighteenth century, in all its dubious and scandalous licence, survived into the early nineteenth century anywhere, it was in the English public schools, and pedigree and character had equipped Keppel to enjoy its freedoms to the full. In the memoirs of other Westminsters of only a slightly later generation, the talk is all of ‘shadows’ and ‘substances’ and the other ludicrous arcana of public school life, but in Keppel’s we get the authentic taste of an aristocratic Regency London, a world of prize-fighting, carriage-racing, bull-baiting, mail-coach driving, badger-drowning and the great clown Grimaldi – a world, in short, closer to that of his grandfather’s days than to the God-fearing institutions that would soon be taking shape in the dreams of George’s Winchester near-contemporary, Thomas Arnold.

      There was not an ounce of malice, or what Arnold would darkly think of as ‘vice’, in the young Keppel, only boundless animal spirits and a happy, democratic talent for mixing as easily with gallows-bound ruffians down by the river as the heir presumptive to the throne. If he thought about his future at all it was in the vaguest terms of a career in the law and maybe a safe family seat in Parliament, but at the age of fifteen the Bar or the House of Commons – or anything in fact beyond the immediate confines of his schoolboy’s London world – all seemed to belong to a period with which he need not unduly concern himself.

      Even the escape of Bonaparte from Elba had made almost no impression on a lad more interested in the exotic Madame Oldenburg’s hats than in politics, but in the mock-heroic drama Keppel liked to make of his life, their planets had already begun to converge. From his first days at Westminster he had used Abbot Livingstone’s wall in Great College Street to get in and out of Mother Grant’s boarding house, and on a night in the middle of March 1815, just as ‘another truant on a larger scale’ was about to enter Paris, George had slipped quietly back through Dean’s Yard after a night at the theatre to find waiting for him the rope ladder that the school Crispin – ‘Cobbler Foot by name, an old man-of-war’s man’ – had run up for precisely these eventualities.

      It was a well-rehearsed routine – the scaling ladder hanging down on the street side, a convenient lean-to that the school authorities (‘not wise in their generation’, as Keppel sadly recorded) had kindly provided on the drop side, a straw dummy tucked up in his bed – and there seemed no reason to think anything was wrong. He had made his way over the wall without any difficulty and got safely back to his room; and it was only when he opened his door to find his bedding flung back and the straw doppelgänger strewn across the floor that he knew he was in trouble.

      In the past he could invariably rely on his old childhood playmate, the Prince Regent’s capricious daughter and heir presumptive, Princess Charlotte, to come up with a lie on his behalf, but this time there was no way out. The next morning he had been ‘sorely puzzled’ at the silence which greeted him when he went into school, but ‘the mystery’ was solved the next day when a letter from his father informed him that his ‘school days had come to an end’, along with another ‘from Dr Page … recommending him to choose [a profession] in which physical rather than mental exertion would be a requisite’.

      If nothing in his school career became him quite like the leaving, his father was never likely to see it that way, and retribution was fast. His older brother, Lord Bury, was already in the army and bound for Belgium, and the first that George knew that he was going to be joining him was when the next day Bury greeted him with the cheery news that from now on George would have to call him Sir.

      A week earlier or a week later and George would almost certainly have been safe, but his timing could not have been worse, and he got home to find that his father had procured him a commission into the 14th of Foot. The first two battalions of the 14th were already on service in India and Italy, but in 1813 a third battalion had been raised and when the news from Elba reached London, the existing order to disband was hastily revoked and the battalion – the youngest and least experienced in the whole British army – was ordered for Ostend and the Low Countries.

      Keppel was still well short of his sixteenth birthday, but as another brother disarmingly put it, there were ‘plenty of us’ Keppel children, and one younger son more or less was not going to make a lot of difference. In 1809 the three-week-old Henry – a future Admiral of the Fleet – was already in his father’s footpan for burial in the garden when a faint whimper brought the nurse, and sentiment was in equally short order when the young Ensign Keppel of the 14th of Foot, tricked out in his new uniform and as proud of its single-fringed epaulette as any Coleridgean dupe of a shepherd boy, presented himself to his unimpressed mother at a ball hosted by the Marquess of Lansdowne. ‘Holding the King’s Commission, I looked upon myself as a man, and was what young ladies would call “out”,’ he remembered: ‘My first gaiety was a great reunion at Lansdowne House. A less gay evening I have seldom spent. I still wanted two months of sixteen, and my fair complexion made me look still younger. In my excessive bashfulness I thought that every one whose eye I met was speculating upon what business a mere schoolboy could have in such an assembly. To complete the confusion, I encountered my mother, who, still young and handsome, did not care to see a second grown-up son in society. “What, George!” she exclaimed; “Who would have thought of seeing you here? There, run away, you’ll find plenty of cakes and tea in the next room.’”

      For all his pride in his commission, the ‘Peasants’ of the 14th of Foot were not a fashionable lot and in any normal situation they would not have been allowed abroad, let alone on active service. The one saving grace for Keppel was that half of them were scarcely more than boys themselves, but even in a unit where fourteen of the officers and 300 of the rank and file were under the age of twenty, Keppel was the ‘baby’ of the battalion, ‘dry nursed’ by his seniors and saluted by his men with the kind of half-stifled smile that had had him hiding in embarrassment when he first joined them for embarkation at Ramsgate.

      In spite of all the subsequent marching, however, it had not been a bad introduction to his new profession – there were always chance encounters with Westminsters, or an old ‘fag-master’ who had given him a ‘terrible licking for hiding in the coal-hole’, to make him feel at home – and above all they were going to get to fight. In the usual run of things the 14th would have been kept to garrison duties, but they had been saved from that by Lord Hill and on the evening of Saturday 17 June, Keppel and the rest of the battalion found themselves instead on the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean queuing for their gin ration as part of the 4th Division’s 4th Brigade of Infantry.

      The gin was pretty well the last thing Keppel could remember. His luggage had disappeared along with a baggage train two days earlier, but after the long march he was too tired to care about that, or anything else, and the next thing he knew was that it was two o’clock in the morning and he was lying flat out ‘in a mountain stream’ with his soldier-servant Bill Moles shaking him awake.

      That had been two hours ago. Just behind where he lay was a cottage. As he went in he found three men sitting round a fire they had made out of broken-up chairs and tables, drying their clothes. Without speaking they made room for him. It was only when they put their uniforms back on that Keppel realised that one of them was Colonel Sir John Colborne – ‘afterwards General Lord Seaton GCB’ – and an old colleague of his brother’s in Spain. He was offered breakfast, but, ‘hungry as I was’, it was too ‘infinitesimally small’ to accept. It was a reminder, though, if a Keppel had ever needed one, of why he was there.

      He was there because he belonged. Caste might trump rank, but it also brought with it its obligations and it was on the battlefield that they СКАЧАТЬ