Waterloo Part 5

Against the Dutchmen, thus extended, the French order to advance was given, and somewhere between half-past two and a quarter to three the French attack began. It was delivered upon Gemioncourt and the fields to the right or east of the Brussels road.

The action that followed is one simple enough to understand by description, but difficult to express upon a map. It is difficult to express upon a map because it consisted in the repeated attack of one fixed number of men against an increasing number of men.

Ney was hammering all that afternoon with a French force which soon reached its maximum. The position against which he was hammering, though held at first by a force greatly inferior to his own, began immediately afterwards to receive reinforcement after reinforcement, until at the close of the action the defenders were vastly superior in numbers to the attackers.

I have attempted in the rough pen sketch opposite this page to express this state of affairs on the allied side during the battle by marking in successive degrees of shading the bodies of the defence in the order in which they came up, but the reader must remember the factor of time, and how all day long Wellington's command at Quatre Bras kept on swelling and swelling by driblets, as the units marched in at a hurried summons from various points behind the battlefield. This gradual reinforcement of the defence gives all its character to the action.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The French, then, began the a.s.sault by an advance to the right or east of the Brussels road. They cleared out the defenders from Gemioncourt; they occupied that walled position; they poured across the stream, and were beginning to take the rise up to Quatre Bras when, at about three o'clock, Wellington, who had been over at Ligny discussing the position with Blucher, rode up and saw how critical the moment was.

In a few minutes the first French division might be up to the cross-roads at Q.

Bossu Wood, with the four battalions holding it, had not yet been attacked by the French, because their second division of Reille's Second Corps (under Napoleon's brother Jerome), had not yet come up; Erlon's First Corps was still far off, down the road. The men in the Bossu Wood came out to try and stop the French advance. They were thrown back by French cavalry, and even as this was proceeding Jerome's division arrived, attacked the south of Bossu Wood, and brought up the whole of Ney's forces to some 19,000 or 20,000 men.

The French advance, so continued, would now undoubtedly have succeeded against the 8000 Dutch at this moment of three o'clock (and Wellington's judgment that the situation was critical at that same moment was only too sound) had there not arrived precisely at that moment the first of his reinforcements.

A brigade of Dutch cavalry came up from the west along the Nivelles road, and three brigades of infantry appeared marching hurriedly in from the north, along the Brussels road; two of these brigades were British, under the command of Kemp and of Pack, and they formed Picton's division. The third were a brigade of Hanoverians, under Best. The British and the Hanoverians formed along the Namur road at M N, protected by its embankment, kneeling in the high wheat, and ready to fire when the enemy's attacking line should come within close range of their muskets.

The newly arrived Dutch cavalry, on the other side of the road, charged the advancing French, but were charged themselves in turn by French cavalry, overthrown, and in their stampede carried Wellington and his staff in a surge past the cross-roads; but the French cavalry, in its turn, was compelled to retire by the infantry fire it met when it had ridden too far. Immediately afterwards the French infantry as they reached the Namur road came unexpectedly upon the just-arrived British and Hanoverians, and were driven back in disorder by heavy volleying at close range from the embankment and the deep cover beyond.

The cavalry charge and countercharge (Jerome beginning to clear the south of the Bossu Wood), the check received by the French on the right from Picton's brigade and the Hanoverians occupied nearly an hour. It was not far short of four o'clock when Ney received that first urgent dispatch from Napoleon which told him to despatch the enemy's resistance at Quatre Bras, and then to come over eastward to Ligny and help against the Prussians.

Ney could not obey. He had wasted the whole of a precious morning, and by now, close on four o'clock in the afternoon, yet another unit came up to increase the power of the defence, and to make his chance of carrying the Quatre Bras cross-roads, of pushing back Wellington's command, of finding himself free to send men to Napoleon increasingly doubtful.

The new unit which had come up was the corps under the Duke of Brunswick, and when this arrived Wellington had for the first time a superiority of numbers over Ney's single corps (there was still no sign of Erlon) though he was still slightly inferior in guns.

However, the French advance was vigorously conducted. Nearly the whole of the Wood of Bossu was cleared. The Brunswickers, who had been sent forward along the road between Quatre Bras and Gemioncourt, were pushed back as to their infantry; their cavalry broke itself against a French battalion.

It was in this doubly unsuccessful effort that the Duke of Brunswick, son of the famous General of the earlier Revolutionary wars, fell, shot in the stomach. He died that night in the village.

The check to this general advance of the French all along the line was again given by the English troops along the Namur road. Picton seized the moment, ordered a bayonet charge, and drove the French right down the valley. His men were in turn driven back by the time they had cleared the slope, but the check was given and the French never recovered it. Two fierce cavalry charges by the French failed to break the English line, though the Highlanders upon Pack's extreme right, close against Quatre Bras itself, were caught before they could form square, and the second phase of the battle ended in a draw.

Ney had missed the opportunity when the enemy in front of him were in numbers less than half his own; he had failed to pierce their line when reinforcements had brought up their numbers to a superiority over his own.

He must now set about a far more serious business, for there was every prospect, as the afternoon advanced, that Wellington would be still further reinforced, while Ney had nothing but his original 20,000--half his command; of Erlon's coming there was not a sign! Yet another hour had been consumed in the general French advance and its repulse, which I have just described. It was five o'clock.

I beg the reader to concentrate his attention upon this point of the action--the few minutes before and after the hour of five. A number of critical things occurred in that short s.p.a.ce of time, all of which must be kept in mind.

The first was this: A couple of brigades came in at that moment to reinforce Wellington. They gave him a 25 per cent. superiority in men, and an appreciable superiority in guns as well.

In the second place, Ney was keeping the action at a standstill, waiting until his own forces should be doubled by the arrival of Erlon's force.

Ney had been fighting all this while, as I have said, with only half his command--the Second Army Corps of Reille. Erlon's First Army Corps formed the second half, and when it came up--as Ney confidently expected it to do immediately--it would double his numbers, and raise them from 20,000 to 40,000 men. With this superiority he could be sure of success, even if, as was probable, further reinforcements should reach the enemy's line. It is to be noted that it was due to Ney's own tardiness in giving orders that Erlon was coming up so late, but by now, five o'clock, the head of his columns might at any moment be seen debouching from Frasnes.

In the third place, while Ney was thus anxiously waiting for Erlon, and seeing the forces in front of him swelling to be more and more superior to his own, there came yet another message from Napoleon telling Ney how matters stood in the great action that was proceeding five miles away, urging him again with the utmost energy to have done at Quatre Bras, to come back over eastward upon the flank of the Prussians at Ligny, and so to destroy their army utterly and "to save France."

To have done with the action of Quatre Bras! But there were already superior forces before Ney! And they were increasing! If he dreamt of turning, it would be annihilation for his troops, or at the least the catching of his army's and Napoleon's between two fires. He _might_ just manage when Erlon came up--and surely Erlon must appear from one moment to another--he _might_ just manage to overthrow the enemy in front of him so rapidly as to have time to turn and appear at Ligny before darkness should fall, from three to four hours later.

It all hung on Erlon:--He _might_! and at that precise moment, with his impatience strained to breaking-point, and all his expectation turned on Frasnes, whence the head of Erlon's column should appear, there rode up to Ney a general officer, Delcambre by name. He came with a message. It was from Erlon.... Erlon had abandoned the road to Quatre Bras; had understood that he was not to join Ney after all, but to go east and help Napoleon!

He had turned off eastward to the right two and a half miles back, and was by this time far off in the direction which would lead him to take part in the battle of Ligny!

Under the staggering blow of this news Ney broke into a fury. It meant possibly the annihilation of his body, certainly its defeat. He did two things, both unwise from the point of view of his own battle, and one fatal from the point of view of the whole campaign.

First, he launched his reserve cavalry, grossly insufficient in numbers for such a mad attempt, right at the English line, in a despairing effort to pierce such superior numbers by one desperate charge. Secondly, he sent Delcambre back--not calculating distance or time--with peremptory orders to Erlon, as his subordinate, to come back at once to the battlefield of Quatre Bras.

There was, as commander to lead that cavalry charge, Kellerman. He had but one brigade of cuira.s.siers: two regiments of horse against 25,000 men! It was an amazing ride, but it could accomplish nothing of purport. It thundered down the slope, breaking through the advancing English troops (confused by a mistaken order, and not yet formed in square), cut to pieces the gunners of a battery, broke a regiment of Brunswickers near the top of the hill, and reached at last the cross-roads of Quatre Bras. Five hundred men still sat their horses as the summit of the slope was reached.

The brigade had cut a lane right through the ma.s.s of the defence; it had not pierced it altogether.

Some have imagined that if at that moment the cavalry of the Guard, which was still in reserve, had followed this first charge by a second, Ney might have effected his object and broken Wellington's line. It is extremely doubtful, the numbers were so wholly out of proportion to such a task. At any rate, the order for the second charge, when it came, came somewhat late. The five hundred as they reined up on the summit of the hill were met and broken by a furious cross-fire from the Namur road upon the right, from the head of Bossu Wood upon the left, while yet another unit, come up in this long succession to reinforce the defence--a battery of the King's German Legion--opened upon them with grape. The poor remnant of Kellerman's Horse turned and galloped back in confusion.

The second cavalry charge attempted by the French reserve, coming just too late, necessarily failed, and at the same moment yet another reinforcement--the first British division of the Guards, and a body of Na.s.sauers, with a number of guns--came up to increase the now overwhelming superiority of Wellington's line.[10]

There was even an attempt at advance upon the part of Wellington.

As the evening turned to sunset, and the sunset to night, that advance was made very slowly and with increasing difficulty--and all the while Ney's embarra.s.sed force, now confronted by something like double its own numbers, and contesting the ground yard by yard as it yielded, received no word of Erlon.

The clearing of the Wood of Bossu by the right wing of Wellington's army, reinforced by the newly arrived Guards, took more than an hour. It took as long to push the French centre back to Gemioncourt, and all through the last of the sunlight the walls of the farm were desperately held. On the left, Pierrepont was similarly held for close upon an hour. The sun had already set when the Guards debouched from the Wood of Bossu, only to be met and checked by a violent artillery fire from Pierrepont, while at the same time the remnant of the cuira.s.siers charged again, and broke a Belgian battalion at the edge of the wood.

By nine o'clock it was dark and the action ceased. Just as it ceased, and while, in the last glimmerings of the light, the major objects of the landscape, groups of wood and distant villages, could still be faintly distinguished against the background of the gloom, one such object seemed slowly to approach and move. It was first guessed and then perceived to be a body of men: the head of a column began to debouch from Frasnes. It was Erlon and his 20,000 returned an hour too late.

All that critical day had pa.s.sed with the First Corps out of action. It had _neither_ come up to Napoleon to wipe out the Prussians at Ligny, _nor_ come back in its countermarch in time to save Ney and drive back Wellington at Quatre Bras. It might as well not have existed so far as the fortunes of the French were concerned, and its absence from either field upon that day made defeat certain in the future, as the rest of these pages will show.

Two things impress themselves upon us as we consider the total result of that critical day, the 16th of June, which saw Ney fail to hold the Brussels road at Quatre Bras, and there to push away from the advance on Brussels Wellington's opposing force, and which also saw the successful escape of the Prussians from Ligny, an escape which was to permit them to join Wellington forty-eight hours later and to decide Waterloo.

The first is the capital importance, disastrous to the French fortunes, of Erlon's having been kept out of both fights by his useless march and countermarch.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ELEMENTS OF QUATRE BRAS.]

The second is the extraordinary way in which Wellington's command came up haphazard, dribbling in by units all day long, and how that command owed to Ney's caution and tardiness, much more than to its own General's arrangements, the superiority in numbers which it began to enjoy from an early phase in the battle.

I will deal with these two points in their order.

As to the first:--

The whole of the four days of 1815, and the issue of Waterloo itself, turned upon Erlon's disastrous counter-marching between Quatre Bras and Ligny upon this Friday, the 16th of June, which was the decisive day of the war.

What actually _happened_ has been sufficiently described. The useless advance of Erlon's corps d'armee towards Napoleon and the right--useless because it was not completed; the useless turning back of that corps d'armee towards Ney and the left--useless because it could not reach Ney in time,--these were the determining factors of that critical moment in the campaign.

In other words, Erlon's zigzag kept the 20,000 of the First Corps out of action all day. Had they been with Ney, the Allies under Wellington at Quatre Bras would have suffered a disaster. Had they been with Napoleon, the Prussians at Ligny would have been destroyed. As it was, the First Army Corps managed to appear on _neither_ field. Wellington more than held his own; the Prussians at Ligny escaped, to fight two days later at Waterloo.

Such are the facts, and they explain all that followed (see Map, next page).