Deeds that Won the Empire Part 11

Nothing could surpa.s.s the courage of the Danes. Fresh crews marched fiercely to the floating batteries as these threatened to grow silent by mere slaughter, and, on decks crimson and slippery with the blood of their predecessors, took up the fight. Again and again, after a Danish ship had struck from mere exhaustion, it was manned afresh from the sh.o.r.e, and the fight renewed. The very youngest officer in the Danish navy was a lad of seventeen named Villemoes. He commanded a tiny floating battery of six guns, manned by twenty-four men, and he managed to bring it under the very counter of Nelson's flagship, and fired his guns point-blank into its huge wooden sides. He stuck to his work until the British marines shot down every man of his tiny crew except four. After the battle Nelson begged that young Villemoes might be introduced to him, and told the Danish Crown Prince that a boy so gallant ought to be made an admiral. "If I were to make all my brave officers admirals," was the reply, "I should have no captains or lieutenants left."

The terrific nature of the British fire, as well as the stubbornness of Danish courage, may be judged from the fact that most of the prizes taken in the fight were so absolutely riddled with shot as to have to be destroyed. Foley, who led the van at the battle of the Nile, was Nelson's flag-captain in the _Elephant_, and he declared he burned fifty more barrels of powder in the four hours' furious cannonade at Copenhagen than he did during the long night struggle at the Nile! The fire of the Danes, it may be added, was almost as obstinate and deadly.

The _Monarch_, for example, had no fewer than 210 of its crew lying dead or wounded on its decks. At one o'clock Sir Hyde Parker, who was watching the struggle with a squadron of eight of his heaviest ships from the offing, hoisted a signal to discontinue the engagement. Then came the incident which every boy remembers.

The signal-lieutenant of the _Elephant_ reported that the admiral had thrown out No. 39, the signal to discontinue the fight. Nelson was pacing his quarterdeck fiercely, and took no notice of the report. The signal-officer met him at the next turn, and asked if he should repeat the signal. Nelson's reply was to ask if his own signal for close action was still hoisted. "Yes," said the officer. "Mind you keep it so," said Nelson. Nelson continued to tramp his quarter-deck, the thunder of the battle all about him, his ship reeling to the recoil of its own guns. The stump of his lost arm jerked angrily to and fro, a sure sign of excitement with him. "Leave off action!" he said to his lieutenant; "I'm hanged if I do." "You know, Foley," he said, turning to his captain, "I've only one eye; I've a right to be blind sometimes." And then putting the gla.s.s to his blind eye, he exclaimed, "I really do not see the signal!" He dismissed the incident by saying, "D---- the signal! Keep mine for closer action flying!"

As a matter of fact, Parker had hoisted the signal only to give Nelson the opportunity for withdrawing from the fight if he wished. The signal had one disastrous result--the little cl.u.s.ter of frigates and sloops engaged with the Three-Crown Batteries obeyed it and hauled off.

As the Amazon, Riou's ship, ceased to fire, the smoke lifted, and the Danish battery got her in full sight, and smote her with deadly effect.

Riou himself, heartbroken with having to abandon the fight, had just exclaimed, "What will Nelson think of us!" when a chain-shot cut him in two, and with him a sailor with something of Nelson's own genius for battle perished.

By two o'clock the Danish fire began to slack. One-half the line was a mere chain of wrecks; some of the floating batteries had sunk; the flagship was a ma.s.s of flames. Nelson at this point sent his boat ash.o.r.e with a flag of truce, and a letter to the Prince Regent. The letter was addressed, "To the Danes, the brothers of Englishmen." If the fire continued from the Danish side, Nelson said he would be compelled to set on fire all the floating batteries he had taken, "without being able to save the brave Danes who had defended them."

Somebody offered Nelson, when he had written the letter, a wafer with which to close it. "This," said Nelson, "is no time to appear hurried or informal," and he insisted on the letter being carefully sealed with wax. The Crown Prince proposed an armistice. Nelson, with great shrewdness, referred the proposal to his admiral lying four miles off in the _London_, foreseeing that the long pull out and back would give him time to get his own crippled ships clear of the shoals, and past the Three-Crown Batteries into the open channel beyond--the only course the wind made possible; and this was exactly what happened. Nelson, it is clear, was a shrewd diplomatist as well as a great sailor.

The night was coming on black with the threat of tempest; the Danish flagship had just blown up; but the white flag of truce was flying, and the British toiled, as fiercely as they had fought, to float their stranded ships and take possession of their shattered prizes. Of these, only one was found capable of being sufficiently repaired to be taken to Portsmouth. On the 4th Nelson himself landed and visited the Crown Prince, and a four months' truce was agreed upon. News came at that moment of the a.s.sa.s.sination of Paul I., and the League of Armed Neutrality--the device by which Napoleon hoped to overthrow the naval power of Great Britain--vanished into mere s.p.a.ce. The fire of Nelson's guns at Copenhagen wrecked Napoleon's whole naval policy.

It is curious that, familiar as Nelson was with the grim visage of battle, the carnage of that four hours' cannonade was too much for even his steady nerves. He could find no words too generous to declare his admiration of the obstinate courage shown by the Danes. "The French and Spanish fight well," he said, "but they could not have stood for an hour such a fire as the Danes sustained for four hours."

KING-MAKING WATERLOO

"Last noon beheld them full of l.u.s.ty life, Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay, The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife; The morn the marshalling in arms--the day Battle's magnificently stern array!

The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent The earth is cover'd thick with other clay, Which her own clay shall cover, heap'd and pent, Rider and horse--friend, foe--in one red burial blent!"

--BYRON.

"I look upon Salamanca, Vittoria, and Waterloo as my three best battles--those which had great and permanent consequences. Salamanca relieved the whole south of Spain, changed all the prospects of the war, and was felt even in Prussia. Vittoria freed the Peninsula altogether, broke off the armistice at Dresden, and thus led to Leipsic and the deliverance of Europe; and Waterloo did more than any other battle I know of towards the true object of all battles--the peace of the world."--WELLINGTON, _Conversation with Croker_.

On June 18, 1815, the grey light of a Sunday morning was breaking over a shallow valley lying between parallel ridges of low hills some twelve miles to the south of Brussels. All night the rain had fallen furiously, and still the fog hung low, and driving showers swept over plain and hill as from the church spires of half-a-dozen tiny villages the matin bells began to ring. For centuries those bells had called the villagers to prayers; to-day, as the wave of sound stole through the misty air it was the signal for the awakening of two mighty armies to the greatest battle of modern times.

More ink has, perhaps, been shed about Waterloo than about any other battle known to history, and still the story bristles with conundrums, questions of fact, and problems in strategy, about which the experts still wage, with pen and diagram, strife almost as furious as that which was waged with lance and sword, with bayonet and musket, more than eighty years ago on the actual slopes of Mont St. Jean. It is still, for example, a matter of debate whether, when Wellington first resolved to fight at Waterloo, he had any express promise from Blucher to join him on that field. Did Wellington, for example, ride over alone to Blucher's headquarters on the night before Waterloo, and obtain a pledge of aid, on the strength of which he fought next day?

It is not merely possible to quote experts on each side of this question; it is possible to quote the same expert on both sides.

Ropes, for example, the latest Waterloo critic, devotes several pages to proving that the interview never took place, and then adds a note to his third edition declaring that he has seen evidence which convinces him it did take place! It is possible even to quote Wellington himself both for the alleged visit and against it. In 1833 he told a circle of guests at Strathfieldsaye, in minute detail, how he got rid of his only aide-de-camp, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, and rode over on "Copenhagen" in the rain and darkness to Wavre, and got from Blucher's own lips the a.s.surance that he would join him next day at Waterloo. In 1838, when directly asked by Baron Gurney whether the story was true, he replied, "No, I did not see Blucher the day before Waterloo." If Homer nodded, it is plain that sometimes the Duke of Wellington forgot!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Battle of Waterloo, June 18th, 1815.]

Clearness on some points, it is true, is slowly emerging. It is admitted, for example, that Napoleon took the allies by surprise when he crossed the Sambre, and, in the very first stage of the campaign, scored a brilliant strategic success over them. Wellington himself, on the night of the famous ball, took the Duke of Richmond into his dressing-room, shut the door, and said, "Napoleon has humbugged me, by ----; he has gained twenty-four hours' march on me." The Duke went on to explain that he had ordered his troops to concentrate at Quatre Bras; "but," he added, "we shall not stop him there, and I must fight him here," at the same time pa.s.sing his thumb-nail over the position of Waterloo. That map, with the scratch of the Duke's thumb-nail over the very line where Waterloo was afterwards fought, was long preserved as a relic. Part of the surprise, the Duke complained, was due to Blucher.

But, as he himself explained to Napier, "I cannot tell the world that Blucher picked the fattest man in his army (m.u.f.fling) to ride with an express to me, and that he took thirty hours to go thirty miles."

The hour at which Waterloo began, though there were 150,000 actors in the great tragedy, was long a matter of dispute. The Duke of Wellington puts it at ten o'clock. General Alava says half-past eleven, Napoleon and Drouet say twelve o'clock, and Ney one o'clock.

Lord Hill may be credited with having settled this minute question of fact. He took two watches with him into the fight, one a stop-watch, and he marked with it the sound of the first shot fired, and this evidence is now accepted as proving that the first flash of red flame which marked the opening of the world-shaking tragedy of Waterloo took place at exactly ten minutes to twelve.

As these sketches are not written for military experts, but only pretend to tell, in plain prose, and for younger Britons, the story of the great deeds which are part of their historical inheritance, all the disputed questions about Waterloo may be at the outset laid aside. It is a great tale, and it seems all the greater when it is simply told.

The campaign of Waterloo, in a sense, lasted exactly four days, yet into that brief s.p.a.ce of time there is compressed so much of human daring and suffering, of genius and of folly, of shining triumph and of blackest ruin, that the story must always be one of the most exciting records in human history.

I. THE RIVAL HOSTS

"Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands, And of armed men the hum; Lo! a nation's hosts have gathered Round the quick alarming drum,-- Saying, 'Come, Freeman, come, Ere your heritage be wasted,' said the quick alarming drum.

'Let me of my heart take counsel: War is not of life the sum; Who shall stay and reap the harvest When the autumn days shall come?'

But the drum Echoed, 'Come!

Death shall reap the braver harvest,' said the solemn-sounding drum.

What if, 'mid the cannons' thunder, Whistling shot and bursting bomb, When my brothers fall around me, Should my heart grow cold and numb?'

But the drum Answered, 'Come!

Better there in death united, than in life a recreant,--Come!'"

--BRET HARTE.

For weeks the British and Prussian armies, scattered over a district 100 miles by 40, had been keeping guard over the French frontier.

Mighty hosts of Russians and Austrians were creeping slowly across Europe to join them. Napoleon, skilfully shrouding his movements in impenetrable secrecy, was about to leap across the Sambre, and both Blucher and Wellington had to guess what would be his point of attack; and they, as it happened, guessed wrongly. Napoleon's strategy was determined partly by his knowledge of the personal characters of the two generals, and partly by the fact that the bases of the allied armies lay at widely separate points--the English base at Antwerp, the Prussian on the Rhine. Blucher was essentially "a hussar general"; the fighting impulse ran riot in his blood. If attacked, he would certainly fight where he stood; if defeated, and driven back on his base, he must move in diverging lines from Wellington. That Blucher would abandon his base to keep touch with Wellington--as actually happened--Napoleon never guessed. Wellington, cooler and more methodical than his Prussian fellow-commander, would not fight, it was certain, till his troops were called in on every side and he was ready.

Blucher was nearer the French frontier. Napoleon calculated that he could leap upon him, bar Wellington from coming to his help by planting Ney at Quatre Bras, win a great battle before Wellington could join hands with his ally, and then in turn crush Wellington. It was splendid strategy, splendidly begun, but left fatally incomplete.

Napoleon fought and defeated Blucher at Ligny on June 16, attacking Quatre Bras at the same time, so as to occupy the English. Wellington visited Blucher's lines before the fight began, and said to him, "Every general knows his own men, but if my lines were drawn up in this fashion I should expect to get beaten;" and as he cantered back to his own army he said to those about him, "If Bonaparte be what I suppose he is, the Prussians will get a ---- good licking to-day." Captain Bowles was standing beside the Duke at Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th, when a Prussian staff-officer, his horse covered with sweat, galloped up and whispered an agitated message in the Duke's ear. The Duke, without a change of countenance, dismissed him, and, turning to Bowles, said, "Old Blucher has had a ---- good licking, and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles. As he has gone back, we must go too. I suppose in England they will say we have been licked. I can't help it! As they have gone back, we must go too." And in five minutes, without stirring from the spot, he had given complete orders for a retreat to Waterloo.

The low ridge on which the Duke took up his position runs east and west. The road from Brussels to the south, just before it crosses the crest of the ridge, divides like the upper part of the letter Y into two roads, that on the right, or westward, running to Nivelles, that on the left, or eastward, to Charleroi. A country road, in parts only a couple of feet deep, in parts sunk from twelve to fifteen feet, traverses the crest of the ridge, and intersects the two roads just named before they unite to form the main Brussels road. Two farmhouses--La Haye Sainte, on the Charleroi road, and Hougoumont, on that to Nivelles--stand out some 250 yards in advance of the ridge.

Thus the cross-road served as a ditch to Wellington's front; the two farmhouses were, so to speak, horn-works guarding his right centre and left centre; while in the little valley on the reverse side of the crest Wellington was able to act on his favourite tactics of keeping his men out of sight till the moment for action arrived. The ridge, in fact, to the French generals who surveyed it from La Belle Alliance seemed almost bare, showing nothing but batteries at intervals along the crest, and a spray of skirmishers on the slopes below.

Looked at from the British ridge, the plain over which the great fight raged is a picture of pastoral simplicity and peace. The crops that Sunday morning were high upon it, the dark green of wheat and clover chequered with the lighter green of rye and oats. No fences intersect the plain; a few farmhouses, each with a leafy girdle of trees, and the brown roofs of one or two distant villages, alone break the level floor of green. The present writer has twice visited Waterloo, and the image of verdurous and leafy peace conveyed by the landscape is still most vivid. Only Hougoumont, where the orchard walls are still pierced by the loop-holes through which the Guards fired that long June Sunday, helps one to realise the fierce strife which once raged and echoed over this rich valley with its gra.s.sy carpet of vivid green. Waterloo is a battlefield of singularly small dimensions. The British front did not extend for more than two miles; the gap betwixt Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, through which Ney poured his living tide of cavalry, 15,000 strong, is only 900 yards wide, a distance equal, say, to a couple of city blocks. The ridge on which Napoleon drew up his army is less than 2000 yards distant from that on which the British stood. It sloped steadily upward, and, as a consequence. Napoleon's whole force was disclosed at a glance, and every combination of troops made in preparation for an attack on the British line was clearly visible, a fact which greatly a.s.sisted Wellington in his arrangements for meeting it.

The opposing armies differed rather in quality than in numbers.

Wellington had, roughly, 50,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, a little less than 6000 artillerymen; a total of 67,000 men and 156 guns. Napoleon had 49,000 infantry, nearly 16,000 cavalry, over 7000 artillery; a total of, say, 72,000 men, with 246 guns. In infantry the two armies were about equal, in cavalry the French were superior, and in guns their superiority was enormous. But the French were war-hardened veterans, the men of Austerlitz and of Wagram, of one blood and speech and military type, a h.o.m.ogeneous ma.s.s, on flame with warlike enthusiasm. Of Wellington's troops, only 30,000 were British and German; many even of these had never seen a shot fired in battle, and were raw drafts from the militia, still wearing the militia uniform.

Only 12,000 were old Peninsula troops. Less than 7000 of Wellington's cavalry were British, and took any part in the actual battle.

Wellington himself somewhat ungratefully described his force as an "infamous army"; "the worst army ever brought together!" Nearly 18,000 were Dutch-Belgians, whose courage was doubtful, and whose loyalty was still more vehemently suspected. Wellington had placed some battalions of these as part of the force holding Hougoumont; but when, an hour before the battle actually began, Napoleon rode through his troops, and their tumultuous shouts echoed in a tempest of sound across to the British lines, the effect on the Dutch-Belgians in Hougoumont was so instant and visible that Wellington at once withdrew them. "The mere name of Napoleon," he said, "had beaten them before they fired a shot!"

The French themselves did justice to the native fighting quality of the British. "The English infantry," as Foy told the Emperor on the morning of Waterloo, "are the very d---- to fight;" and Napoleon, five years after, at St. Helena, said, "One might as well try to charge through a wall." Soult, again, told Napoleon, "Sire, I know these English. They will die on the ground on which they stand before they lose it." That this was true, even of the raw lads from the militia, Waterloo proved. But it is idle to deny that of the two armies the French, tried by abstract military tests, was far the stronger.

The very aspect of the two armies reflected their different characteristics. A grim silence brooded over the British position.

Nothing was visible except the scattered cl.u.s.ters of guns and the outposts. The French army, on the other side, was a magnificent spectacle, gay with flags, and as many-coloured as a rainbow. Eleven columns deployed simultaneously, and formed three huge lines of serried infantry. They were flanked by mail-clad cuira.s.siers, with glittering helmets and breast-plates; lines of scarlet-clad lancers; and hussars, with bearskin caps and jackets glittering with gold lace. The black and menacing ma.s.ses of the Old Guard and of the Young Guard, with their huge bearskin caps, formed the reserve. As Napoleon, with a glittering staff, swept through his army, the bands of 114 battalions and 112 squadrons poured upon the peaceful air of that June Sunday the martial cadences of the Ma.r.s.eillaise, and the "Vive l'Empereur!" which broke from the crowded host was heard distinctly by the grimly listening ranks of the British. "As far as the eye could reach," says one who describes the fight from the French ranks, "nothing was to be seen but cuira.s.ses, helmets, busbies, sabres and lances, and glittering lines of bayonets."

As for the British, there was no tumult of enthusiasm visible among them. Flat on the ground, in double files, on the reverse side of the hill, the men lay, and jested in rough fashion with each other, while the officers in little groups stood on the ridge and watched the French movements. Let it be remembered that many of the troops had fought desperately on the 16th, and retreated on the 17th from Quatre Bras to Waterloo under furious rain, and the whole army was soddened and chilled with sleeping unsheltered on the soaked ground. Many of the men, as they rose hungry and shivering from their sleeping-place in the mud, were so stiff and cramped that they could not stand upright.

II. HOUGOUMONT

"The trumpets sound, the banners fly, The glittering spears are ranked ready, The shouts o' war are heard afar, The battle closes thick and b.l.o.o.d.y."

--BURNS.

The ground was heavy with the rains of the night, and Napoleon lingered till nearly noon before he launched his attack on the British lines.

At ten minutes to twelve the first heavy gun rang sullenly from the French ridge, and from the French left Reille's corps, 6000 strong, flung itself on Hougoumont. The French are magnificent skirmishers, and as the great ma.s.s moved down the slope, a dense spray of tirailleurs ran swiftly before it, reached the hedge, and broke into the wood, which, in a moment, was full of white smoke and the red flashes of musketry. In a solid ma.s.s the main body followed; but the moment it came within range, the British guns keeping guard over Hougoumont smote it with a heavy fire. The French batteries answered fiercely, while in the garden and orchard below the Guards and the French fought almost literally muzzle to muzzle.

Hougoumont was a strong post. The fire from the windows in the main building commanded the orchard, that from the orchard commanded the wood, that from the wood swept the ridge. The French had crossed the ridge, cleared the wood, and were driving the Guards, fighting vehemently, out of the orchard into the hollow road between the house and the British ridge. But they could do no more. The light companies of the Foot Guards, under Lieut.-Colonel Macdonnell, held the buildings and orchard, Lord Saltoun being in command of the latter. m.u.f.fling, the Prussian commissioner on Wellington's staff, doubted whether Hougoumont could be held against the enemy; but Wellington had great confidence in Macdonnell, a Highlander of gigantic strength and coolest daring, and n.o.bly did this brave Scotsman fulfil his trust. All day long the attack thundered round Hougoumont. The French ma.s.ses moved again and again to the a.s.sault upon it; it was scourged with musketry and set on fire with sh.e.l.ls. But steadfastly under the roar of the guns and the fierce crackle of small-arms, and even while the roofs were in flames above their heads, the gallant Guardsmen held their post. Once the main gateway was burst open, and the French broke in.