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Before the Arrival of the Prussians

The action was to take the form of an assault by Napoleon’s forces against this defensive position held by Wellington. It was the business of Wellington, although his total force was slightly inferior to the enemy in numbers,17 and considerably inferior in guns, to hold that defensive position until the Prussians should come up in flank. This he had had word would take place at latest by one or two o’clock. It was the business of Napoleon to capture the strong outworks, Hougomont and La Haye Sainte; and, that done, to hammer the enemy’s line until he broke it. That delay in beginning this hammering would be fatal; that the Prussians were present upon his flank, could arrive in the midst of the battle, and were both confidently and necessarily expected by his enemy; that his simple single battle would turn into two increasingly complex ones, Napoleon could have no idea. Napoleon could see no need for haste. A long daylight was before him. It was necessary to let the ground dry somewhat after the terrible rain of the day before if artillery was to be used effectively; nor did he press his columns, which were moving into position all through the morning, and which had not completely deployed even by eleven o’clock.

It was a little after that hour that he dictated to Soult the order of battle. Its first and effective phrases run as follows:—

“Once the whole army is deployed, that is, at about half-past one, at the moment when the Emperor shall send the order to Marshal Ney, the attack is to be delivered. It will have for its object the capture of the village of Mont St. Jean and the cross-roads. …”

The remainder of the order sets out forces to be engaged in this first attack.

The French forces consisted in the IInd Army Corps deployed to the left or west of the road, the Ist to the right or east of it, and behind Napoleon, in the centre and in reserve, the VIth Corps and the Guard.

The plan in the Emperor’s mind was perfectly simple. There was to be no turning of the right nor of the left flank of the enemy, which would only have the effect of throwing back that enemy east or west. His line was to be pierced, the village of Mont St. Jean which lay on the ridge of Wellington’s position and which overlooks the plateau on every side was to be carried, and this done Napoleon would be free to decide upon his next action, according to the nature and extent of the disorder into which he had thrown the enemy’s broken line.

As a fact, Napoleon made a movement before that hour of half-past one which he had set down in his order for the beginning of the assault. That movement was a movement against the advanced and fortified position of Hougomont.

He sent orders to his left, to the body on the east of the high road, the Second Army Corps, under Reille, to send troops to occupy the outer gardens, wood, and orchards of the country-house, and at twenty-five minutes to twelve the first gun fired in support of that movement was also the first cannonshot of Waterloo.

After a brief artillery duel and exchange of cannonshots between the height on the French left, which overlooks Hougomont, and the corresponding height upon the English right, the French infantry began to march down the slope to occupy the little wood which stands to the south of the chateau. These four regiments were commanded by the Emperor’s brother Jerome, who was—as we have seen at Quatre Bras—under the orders of Reille. The clearing of the wood was no very desperate affair, but it was a difficult one, and it took an hour. The Germans of Nassau and Hanover, who were charged with the defence of Hougomont and its approaches, stubbornly contested the standing trees and the cut-clearing which lay between them and the garden wall of the chateau.

It must be clearly seized, at this early and even premature point in the action, that Napoleon’s object in making this attack upon Hougomont was only to weaken Wellington’s centre.

Hougomont lay upon Wellington’s right. Wellington had always been nervous of his right, and feared the turning of his line there, because, should he have to retreat, his communications would ultimately lie in that direction. It was for this reason that he had set right off at Braine l’Alleud, nearly a mile to the west of his line, the Dutch-Belgian Division of Chassé and sixteen guns, which force he connected with a reserve body at Hal, much further to the west.

Napoleon judged that an attack on Hougomont before the action proper was begun, coming thus upon Wellington’s right, would make him attempt to reinforce the place and degarnish his centre, where the Emperor intended the brunt of the attack to fall.

Napoleon had no other intention that history can discover in pressing the attack against Hougomont so early. It was almost in the nature of a “feint.” But when, towards half-past twelve, his brother’s division had cleared the wood and come up against the high garden wall of the farm, for some reason which cannot be determined, whether the eagerness of the troops, the impulsiveness of Jerome himself, or whatever cause, instead of being contented with holding the wood according to orders, the French furiously attacked the loopholed and defended wall. They attempted to break in the great door, which was recessed, and therefore protected by a murderous cross-fire. They were beaten back into the wood, leaving a heap of dead. At this point Reille, according to his own account (which may well enough be accurate), sent orders for the division to remain in the wood, and not to waste itself against so strong an outpost. But Jerome and his men were not to be denied. They marched round the chateau, under a heavy artillery fire from the English batteries above, and attempted to carry the north wall. As they were so doing, four companies of the Coldstreams, the sole reinforcement which Wellington could be tempted to part with from his main line, came in reinforcement to the defence, and, after a sharp struggle, the French were thrust back once more.

It was by that time past one o’clock, and this first furious attempt upon Hougomont, unintended by the Emperor, and a sheer waste, had doubly failed. It had failed in itself—the house and garden still remained untaken, the post was still held. It had failed in its object, which had been to draw Wellington, and to get him to send numerous troops from his centre to his right in defence of the threatened place.

Meanwhile the Emperor, for whom this diversion of a few regiments against Hougomont was but a small matter, had prepared and was about to deliver his main attack.

The reader will see upon the contours of the coloured map a definite spur of land marked with a broad green band in front of the French order of battle, and further marked by the green letter “B” in the very centre of the map. It was along this spur and at about one o’clock that the Emperor drew up a great battery of eighty pieces in order to prepare the assault upon the opposing ridge, which was to be delivered the moment their fire had ceased. Napoleon at that moment was watching his army and its approaching engagement from that summit upon the great road marked “A” in green upon my coloured map, whence the whole landscape to the north and west lies open.18

There he received the report of Ney that the guns were ready, and only waiting for the order.

A little while before the guns were ready and Ney had reported to that effect, Napoleon had received Grouchy’s letter, in which it was announced that the mass of the Prussian army had retreated on Wavre. He had replied to it with instructions to Grouchy so to act that no Prussian corps at Wavre could come and join Wellington. Hardly had the Emperor dictated this reply when, looking northward and then eastward over the great view, he saw, somewhat over four miles away, a shadow, or a movement, or a stain upon the bare uplands towards Wavre; he thought that appearance to be companies of men. A few moments later a sergeant of Silesian Hussars, taken prisoner by certain cavalry detachments far out to the east, was brought in. He had upon him a letter sent from Bulow to Wellington announcing that the Prussians were at hand, and the prisoner further told the Emperor that the troops just perceived were the vanguard of the Prussian reinforcement. Thus informed, the Emperor caused a postscript to be added to his dictated letter, and bade Grouchy march at once towards this Prussian column, fall upon it while it was still upon the march and defenceless and destroy it.

Such an order presupposed Grouchy’s ability to act upon it; Napoleon took that ability for granted. But Grouchy, as a fact, could not act upon it in time. Hard riding could not get Napoleon’s note to Grouchy’s quarters within much less than an hour and a half. When it got there Grouchy himself must be found, and that done his 33,000 must be got together in order to take the new direction. Further, the Emperor could not know in what state Grouchy’s forces might be, nor what direction they might already have taken. It should be mentioned, however, to explain Napoleon’s evident hope at the moment of things going well, that the prisoner had told the Emperor it was commonly believed in the Prussian lines that Grouchy was actually marching to join him, Napoleon, at that moment. Napoleon sent some cavalry off eastward to watch the advent of the Prussians; he ordered his remnant of one army corps, the Sixth, which he had kept in reserve behind his line,19 to march down the hill to the village of Plancenoit and stand ready to meet the Prussian attack; and having done all this, he made ready for the assault upon the ridge which Wellington’s troops held.

That assault was to be preceded, as I have said, by artillery preparation from the great battery of eighty guns which lay along the spur to the north and in front of the French line. For half an hour those guns filled the shallow valley with their smoke; at half-past one they ceased, and Erlon’s First Corps d’Armée, fresh to the combat, because it had so unfortunately missed both Ligny and Quatre Bras, began to descend from its position, to cross the bottom, and to climb the opposite slope, while over the heads of the assaulting columns the French and English cannon answered each other from height to height.

The advance across the valley, as will be apparent from the map, had upon its right the village of Papelotte, upon its left the farm of La Haye Sainte, and for its objective that highway which runs along the top of the ridge, and of which the most part was in those days a sunken road, as effective for defence as a regular trench.

Following a practice which he never abandoned, which he had found universally successful, and upon which he ever relied, the Duke of Wellington had kept his British troops, the nucleus of his defensive plan, for the last and worst of the action. He had stationed to take the first brunt those troops upon which he least relied, and these were the first Dutch-Belgian brigade under Bijlandt. This body was stationed in front of the sunken road (at the point marked A in red upon the map). Behind it he had put Pack’s brigade and Kemp’s, both British; to the left of it, but also behind the road, Best’s Hanoverian brigade. Papelotte village he held with Perponcher’s Belgians.

It will be seen that the crushing fire of the French eighty guns maintained for half an hour had fallen full upon the Dutch-Belgians, standing exposed upon the forward slope at a range of not more than 800 yards.20 At the French charge, though that was delivered through high standing crops and over drenched and slippery soil up the slope, Bijlandt’s brigade broke. It is doubtful indeed whether any other troops would not have broken under such circumstances. Unfortunately the incident has been made the subject of repeated and most ungenerous accusation. A body purposely set forward before the whole line to stand such fearful pounding and to shelter the rest; one, moreover, which in two days of fighting certainly lost one-fourth of its number in killed and wounded, and probably lost more than one-third, is deserving of a much more chivalrous judgment than that shown by most historians in its regard. Anyhow, Kemp’s brigade quickly filled the gap left by the failure of the Netherlanders, and began to press back the French charge.

Meanwhile the French right, which had captured Papelotte, was compelled to retreat upon seeing the centre thus driven back, while the French left had failed to carry the farm of La Haye Sainte. Indeed upon this side, that is, in the neighbourhood of the great road, the check and reverse to the French assault had been more complete than elsewhere. An attempt to drive its first success home with a cavalry charge had been met by a countercharge, deservedly famous, in which, among other regiments, the First and Second Lifeguards, the Blues, the King’s Dragoons, had broken the French horse and followed up the French retirement down the slope. The centre of that retirement was similarly charged by the Scots Greys; and in the end of the whole affair the English horsemen rode up to the spur where the great battery stood, sabred the gunners, and then, being thus advanced so uselessly and so dangerously from their line, were in their turn driven back to the English positions with bad loss.

When this opening chapter of the battle closed, the net result was that the initial charge of the First Corps under Erlon had failed. It had left behind it many prisoners; certain guns which had advanced with it had been put out of action; it had lost two colours.

Save for the furious inconsequent and almost purposeless fighting that was still raging far off to the left round Hougomont, the battle ceased. The valley between the opposing forces was strewn with the dead and dying, but no formed groups stood or moved among the fallen men. The swept slopes had all the appearance during that strange halt of a field already lost or won. The hour was between three and half-past in the afternoon, and so ended the first phase of the battle of Waterloo. It had lasted rather over two hours.