Читать книгу Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed - David Crane - Страница 14

Dance of Death

In these early hours of Sunday morning a woman in her late twenties called Charlotte Waldie sat alone in her room in Antwerp’s Laboureur Inn. Her brother and sister had long since gone to bed, but even after two sleepless nights Charlotte had no intention of missing out on anything. As the rain lashed against the window panes and the thunder rolled in the distance she sat listening to the ‘dismal sound’ of a coffin lid being nailed down in a room below and waited for the inn to fall quiet.

Charlotte Waldie had been born of a Scottish father and an English mother on the family estate by the Tweed River, near the ancient abbey town of Kelso. In her later accounts of these days in Belgium she would always sign herself ‘An Englishwoman’, but underneath that rather cool description was a child of the turbulent Scottish Borders, a glowing patriot of the school of Walter Scott with an inexhaustible appetite for experience, a gift for prose of a breathless, heady kind, a travel writer’s eye for detail and an unashamed habit of seeing the whole world as copy for her pen.

On Sunday 18 June, Charlotte Waldie had been in Belgium for just six days. She had sailed from Ramsgate with her brother and sister on an overcrowded packet on the afternoon of the 10th, and thirty-six stifling and miserable hours later, had been rowed ashore from their becalmed boat in the dead of night, unceremoniously carried through the waves and dumped somewhere on the sands of the Belgian coast near Ostend.

The family had been forced to leave servants, barouche and baggage behind when they abandoned the packet for their rowing boat, but Charlotte Waldie was not a gothic novelist for nothing, and anything tamer would probably have been a disappointment. The Waldies had no more idea than anyone else in Britain or Belgium of what might be happening on the other side of the French border, and after the English tourist’s customary genuflections in the direction of High Art and Rubens – and an audience in Ghent with the woefully unromantic ‘Louis le Désiré’ – had arrived in Brussels just in time to hear that Bonaparte had crossed the border and to follow half of the expatriate population in their panicked stampede from a city suddenly under threat.

Only hours earlier, Brussels had seemed a place of ‘hope, confidence and busy expectation’, but as the first, confused reports from the front came in and the sound of cannon – twenty miles away? ten? five? no one could be sure – rolled across the now deserted Parc, Brussels turned on itself in a frantic struggle to get the last horse, carriage or cart out of the city before the French arrived. ‘Old men in their night-caps, women with dishevelled hair,’ Charlotte had watched the chaotic scenes in the courtyard below from her room in the Hôtel de Flandre, ‘masters and servants, ladies and stable boys, lords and beggars; Dutchmen, Belgians, and Britons, bewildered garçons and scared filles de chambre; all crowded together, jostling, crying, scolding, squabbling, lamenting, exclaiming, whipping, swearing and vociferating’.

It had been a day of mayhem and fear, of crowded roads, of rumour and counter-rumour, of victory and defeat – the Prussians had held the French, the French had destroyed the Prussians, Wellington was wounded and the British defeated, the French were in retreat, Brussels was in French hands – and now, twenty-four hours later, as the sound of hammering ceased and the Laboureur Inn fell silent, Charlotte Waldie slipped out of her room and down the stairs to see for herself the other side of war. ‘It was a solemn and affecting scene,’ she recalled as she entered the same small chamber where Magdalene De Lancey had rested for an hour and which now contained ‘the last narrow mansion of a brave and unfortunate prince’. Tapers were burning at the head and foot of the coffin, and the room was now empty except for ‘two Brunswick officers who were watching over it, and whose pale, mournful countenances, sable uniforms, and nodding black plumes, well accorded with the gloomy chamber. It was but yesterday that this prince, in the flower of life and fortune, went out into the field of military ardour, and gloriously fell in battle, leading on his soldiers to the charge. He was the first of the noble warriors who fell on the memorable field of Quatre Bras. But he has lived long enough who has lived to acquire glory.’

The coffin was that of Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick, the cousin of the Prince Regent, the brother of Queen Caroline, a favourite uncle of the Princess Charlotte, and one of the first casualties of Hazlitt’s battle between liberty and legitimacy. For the last six years the duke had held the rank of lieutenant general in the British Army, but it was as a hero of the German struggle against Bonaparte that he had made his name, raising, equipping and commanding his famous force of ‘Black Brunswickers’ in a quixotic and doomed bid to reclaim the duchy lost after the death of his father at Jena in 1806.

With his flat, coarse potato of a face, his great side-whiskers and a nose that would have graced a Hanseatic merchant, it would be difficult to imagine a less romantic-looking figure than the duke. And yet in spite of everything that his sister Caroline could do to taint it, romance still clung to the Brunswick name. ‘The Brunswickers are all in black,’ the engagingly uxorious Sir Augustus Frazer, in command of Wellington’s horse artillery, had written home to his wife, after admiring the duke’s hussars at the great review in May, ‘the Duke having, in 1809, when the Duchess died, paid this tribute of respect to his wife. There is something romantic in this. They are to change their uniform when they shall have avenged themselves on the French for an insult offered to the remains of the Duke’s father. Is this chivalry, or barbarity?’

It was a wonderfully nineteenth-century thought that the two things might be opposites – another prince dressed in black had very little trouble squaring them – and Wellington for one would have settled for something more barbarous than the army of young boys that Brunswick had brought with him. In the weeks since arriving in the Belgian capital, Wellington had complained endlessly of the ‘infamous army’ he had been given to do the job, but by the time it had at last become clear that the French advance towards Quatre Bras and Brussels was not a feint, he was in no position to pick and choose whether it was his old Peninsula veterans or the raw and untested Brunswickers who would get him out of the fix he had got himself into.

That had been late on Thursday 15th, and that night anyway the duke had other things to do. He must have known as well as anyone that Bonaparte’s brilliant advance had not shown him at his best, but he had promised the Duchess of Richmond she could have her ball (‘Duchess, you may give your ball with the greatest safety, without fear of interruption,’ he had superbly told her) and he was damned if anything the French did now was going to show him up for a fool.

He had his other reasons for going to the Richmond ball that night, or would find them with hindsight – morale, psychology, a show of British sang-froid, a ‘marker’ for wavering Belgians – but the answer was probably no more complicated than pride. Throughout his career he had had to live with the carping of opposition politicians who hated the Wellesleys, and yet it was a very long time – probably the Siege of Seringapatam in the spring of 1799 and his first major battle – since he had had to justify or explain himself to his own officers and he had no intention of doing anything to undermine the extraordinary hold he had over them now.

‘Nobody can guess Lord Wellington’s intentions,’ Uxbridge’s sister Lady Caroline Capel had written just a week earlier, ‘& I dare say Nobody will know he is going till he is actually gone.’ If the women of Brussels did not know what he was doing then certainly no one else was going to. For an old Peninsula-hand like Sir Augustus Frazer there was nothing new in this, but for those who had never been around the duke before, there was something almost shocking in the dominance he exerted over officers who in any other situation and under anyone else were figures of substance in their own right. ‘Our movements are kept in the greatest secrecy. We know nothing that is going on,’ the Reverend George Stonestreet, the most unmilitary of Guards’ chaplains, wrote from 1st Division Headquarters to his brother-in-law, a broker in the City always keen for his own reasons to know what was happening in Belgium. ‘General Officers, even those commanding divisions are kept in ignorance by the great Duke … I am astonished to find the fear which exists, of at all offending the Duke; and the implicit submission and humility with which Men of talent courage and character shrink before his abrupt, hurried and testy manner.’

If anyone knew what was on his mind it was likely to be his latest dalliance, the pale and anorexically thin Byron cast-off, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, but it would have taken a brave man to have asked the duke what he was doing at the ball. Lord Fitzroy Somerset, Wellington’s secretary, had not understood why the army had not marched immediately that Thursday afternoon, but when it came to the point he was no bolder than the rest, tamely conceding that ‘as it was the place where every British officer of rank was likely to be found, perhaps for that reason the Duke dressed & went there’.

He was right in that at least, almost everyone but the De Lanceys was there. And if it might have been argued – and it was in angry Whig and opposition circles – that Wellington’s officers might have been better off with their regiment, nothing so vividly encapsulates the strange air of unreality that marked these last days before Waterloo. It was here at a rented house in the rue de Blanchisserie in the early hours of the 16th, as Wellington sat on a sofa and talked with Lady Dalrymple Hamilton, and the Duke of Brunswick gave a sudden, violent shudder of premonition, and Gordon Highlanders demonstrated their reels to the duchess’s guests, that the cumulative oddity of what would soon be dubbed ‘the 100 Days’ took on the surreal, climactic air of a macabre Regency Dance of Death. ‘There was the sound of revelry by night,’ Byron famously would write,

And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then

Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright

The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spoke again,

And all went merry as a Marriage bell;

But hush! Hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell.

Within a window’s niche in that high hall

Sate Brunswick’s fated chieftain; he did hear

That sound the first amidst the festival,

And caught its tone with Death’s prophetic ear;

And when they smiled because he deem’d it near,

His heart more truly knew that peal too well

Which stretch’d his father 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.