The Battle (46 page)
Authors: Alessandro Barbero
I
n the first light of dawn, the battlefield at Waterloo presented a frightful spectacle, that could not be shut out by covering one's face or closing one's eyes, because the air was full of even more terrible sounds. Pistol shots of soldiers putting suffering horses out of their misery and hammer blows of blacksmiths removing the dead horses' shoes overlaid the cries of the wounded, who were dying of dehydration and crying out for water in many languages, their bodies already livid and swollen like so many corpses.
However horrid the scene, the first spectators soon began to arrive from Brussels, having come out expressly to see it, but perhaps without imagining what they would find. Captain Mercer saw an elegantly dressed gentleman, top hat and all, climb out of his carriage, pressing a perfumed white handkerchief to his nose. The captain watched this man approach: "[He stepped] carefully to avoid the bodies (at which he cast fearful glances
en passant),
to avoid polluting the glossy silken hose that clothed his nether limbs. Clean and spruce, as if from a bandbox, redolent of perfume, he stood ever and anon applying the 'kerchief to his nose."
Eager to impress this unrepeatable spectacle on their memories, many officers also turned into tourists. Lieutenant Pattison spent the morning wandering over the battlefield, filled with compassion for the fate of the men and especially the horses, both dead and wounded, that were lying everywhere. The body of an enemy artilleryman attracted his attention: "A French gunner, whose back had been placed in an erect position against the wheel of a broken gun-carriage, wore an expression so life-like it required almost minute examination to realize that the vital spark had fled. His shako, which lay at his right side, had fallen from his head, and completely exposed his face. His large blue eyes seemed fixed on me, and wore even in death a living expression. His right hand was raised as if under great excitement, and for a second I imagined him to be yet alive, and in the act of enthusiastically exclaiming: 'Vive
l'Empereur!'"
But not all the officers moving over the battlefield were impelled there by curiosity. Many regiments sent out patrols to collect their own wounded and bury their dead. Major Harry Smith, the commander of one such squad, had seen many battles, but none so devastating. "At Waterloo the
whole
field from left to right was a mass of dead bodies," Smith wrote. "In one spot, to the right of La Haye Sainte, the French cuirassiers were literally piled on each other." Recalling that the battle had been fought on a Sunday, the major silently recited the Ninety-first Psalm: "A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee." Not far from the main road, the officers of the Ninety-fifth Rifles had their men dig a common grave and bury their fallen comrades; the green uniforms of their regiment made them easy to identify. All around them were the echoes of isolated shots fired by Prussian patrols finishing off those too gravely wounded to be transported, including their own.
Both armies evacuated the area long before they had completed the task of burying the dead, which required some ten or twelve days in all; the gruesome work was left to the local peasants. The corpses were collected and transported in carts to common graves, great square holes in the earth six feet deep; thirty or forty corpses were haphazardly unloaded into each one. The bodies were completely naked; to the poorest peasants, even a pair of broken shoes or a torn coat seemed valuable. A witness recalled having watched the activity around one such grave: "The followers of the army were stripping the bodies before throwing them into it, whilst some Russian Jews were assisting in the spoliation of the dead by chiseling out their teeth, an operation which they performed with the most brutal indifference. The clinking hammers of these wretches jarred horribly upon my ears, and mingled strangely with the occasional reports of pistols [which] proceeded from the Belgians, who were killing the wounded horses." The carcasses of the horses were gathered and burned, and at least one eyewitness claimed to have seen the same procedure being applied to the bodies of French soldiers.
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Captain Mercer was in the courtyard at Hougoumont on the morning of June 19, and his account left no doubt about the treatment given to the bodies of the dead, and particularly to those of the defeated. In the midst of the swollen and blackened corpses of the men who had burned to death in the fire, local peasants and German soldiers were busying themselves, paying no attention at all to any survivors, although "amongst this heap of ruins and misery many poor devils yet remained alive, and were sitting up endeavouring to bandage their wounds." Mercer was speaking with a German dragoon when two of the local peasants, "after rifling the pockets, &c, of a dead Frenchman, seized his body by the shoulders, and, raising it from the ground, dashed it down again with all their force, uttering the grossest abuse, and kicking it about the head and face— revolting spectacle!—doing this, no doubt, to court favor with us. It had a contrary effect, which they soon learned. I had scarcely uttered an exclamation of disgust, when the dragoon's sabre was flashing over the miscreants' heads, and in a moment descended on their backs and shoulders with such vigour that they roared again, and were but too happy to make their escape."
The wounded suffered tragically. During the night, many had been trampled by maddened horses running wildly over the battlefield, kicking out at whatever they encountered, or crushed by artillery wagons. Lieutenant Ingilby was certain that only the French artillery could be so inhuman as to pass over the bodies of the wounded, but his account nevertheless suggested that the danger was omnipresent: "In traversing the field, following the flight of the French, it was hardly possible to clear with the Guns the bodies of both Armies which strewed the ground, and afterwards late at night when dispatched to bring up some artillery wagons, it was with difficulty we could avoid crushing many of the wounded in the road near La Haye Sainte, that had crawled there in hopes of more ready assistance. There were some in whom life was not yet extinct that we supposed the French Artillery had crushed by passing over in their retreat." Even the next day, those who were incapable of moving were not safe; Tomkinson used the flat of his sword to drive off a Belgian peasant whom he surprised tugging off the boots of a still-living British soldier.
Even when the wounded were not abandoned on the battlefield, their fate was not to be envied. Private Hechel, wounded in the stomach during the fight for Smohain, was carried by his comrades to a medical station; but the surgeon, after barely looking at him, refused to take him under his care: "Drop him over there, he won't last two hours." Before his companions left him, Hechel gave them his watch, which had cost him thirty francs. "Had I thought about it," he later wrote, "I would also have given them the five thalers I had sown in the lining of my coat two years before, when I had to leave my dear homeland, and which I had not touched since." The room where Hechel was lying together with many other wounded men was next to a stable, where many full milk jugs were standing. The wounded men were suffering badly from thirst, but the peasant had no desire to waste his milk on them. At last, he carried in a big cooking pot filled with water and left it in the middle of the room. Hechel drank so much he made himself sick, and water began to flow from his wound. He remained there for three days, without care or nourishment, while most of the other sufferers around him died off, one by one. Finally, the few survivors called on God, praying that he would put an end to their torments. "But the Lord says, 'My thoughts are not your thoughts.'" At the end of the third day, the survivors were loaded onto a cart and taken to a hospital in Brussels, enduring terrible suffering as the cart jolted along the cobblestone road.
The hospital, where the wounded from the Battle of Quatre Bras had already been taken a few days previously, had by then become one of the circles of hell. Sergeant Costello of the Ninety-fifth Rifles met a German boy there, a lad not yet twenty years old, who had been recruited as an artillery driver. He had lost both his legs to a cannonball; as he lay on the ground, a cuirassier had broken one of his arms with a saber blow, and a stray bullet had wounded him in the other arm. In the hospital, the surgeons had been forced to amputate both his arms, one above the elbow, and the other below. "The unfortunate youth," Costello wrote, "lay a branchless trunk, and up to the moment I left, though numbers died from lesser wounds, survived." Hospital admission did not do much to improve a wounded man's chances of survival; many died from peritonitis, gangrene, and loss of blood, aggravated by the bleedings which, together with amputations, formed the principal care the surgeons provided. Statistics show that the wounded kept on dying for months, right through the end of 1816, and that in the end the number of dead had risen by at least 50 percent over the number calculated the day after the battle.
T
he losses of the victorious army had been so fearful that, in those first hours of relative calm, many officers could think of nothing else. Kincaid remarked, "The usual salutation on meeting an acquaintance of another regiment after an action was to ask who had been hit, but on this occasion it was 'Who's alive?'" Shortly before midnight, Sir Augustus Frazer wrote his wife one of the long letters she had grown accustomed to receiving. "How shall I describe the scenes through which I have passed since morning? I am now so tired that I can hardly hold my pen. We have gained a glorious victory, and against Napoleon himself. Never was there a more bloody affair, never so hot a fire. . . . I have escaped very well. Maxwell's horse, on which I rode at first, received a ball in the neck, and I was afterwards rolled over by a round of case shot, which wounded my mare in several places, a ball grazing my right arm, just above the elbow, but without the slightest pain; and I now write without any inconvenience. I buried my friend Ramsay, from whose body I took the portrait of his wife, which he always carried next his heart. Not a man assisted at the funeral who did not shed tears. Hardly had I cut from his head the hair which I enclose, and laid his yet warm body in the grave, when our convulsive sobs were stifled by the necessity of returning to the struggle. . . . So many wounded, that I dare not enumerate their names. Bolton of ours is killed, so is young Spearman. What a strange letter is this, what a strange day has occasioned it! To-day is Sunday!"
Many other officers wrote home to give assurances that they were still alive, and to narrate what they had done. On the morning of the nineteenth, Captain Taylor of the Tenth Hussars led the regiment's horses to graze in a field of clover and then entered a nearby farmhouse, which he found "full of Officers writing to England." In many of these letters, even though they were meant to be reassuring, one finds the same anguished tone, the same distress over the army's terrible losses, that color Frazer's words to his wife. Wray of the Fortieth Regiment, unable to write an account of his experiences, could only give a casualty list: "Poor Major Heyland (who commanded) was shot through the heart, and poor Ford was shot through the spine of his back but did not die for a short time after he was carried away. Poor Clarke lost his left arm, and I am much afraid Browne will lose his leg, he is shot through the upper part of the thigh and the bone terribly shattered. There are eight more of our officers wounded, but all doing well except little Thornhill, who was wounded through the head. Anthony got his eighth wound and is doing well." Kelly, of the First Life Guards, wrote to his wife, addressing her as "My dearest dear love," to inform her that he was alive, though wounded, but there was nothing triumphant about the tone of his letter: "All my fine Troopers knocked to pieces . . ."
Other letters were written in a much different tone. Before finally going to sleep, Blucher wrote to his wife: "Together with my friend Wellington, I have brought Napoleon's dance to an end. His army is completely routed, and the entirety of his artillery, caissons, baggage, and equipage is in my hands. I have just been brought the insignia of all the different decorations he had won, found in a box in his carriage. Yesterday I had two horses killed under me. Soon it will be all over with Bonaparte." At two o'clock in the morning, the Prince of Orange wrote a letter in French to his parents, the king and queen of the Netherlands:
"Victoire!
Victoire! Mes ires chers parents,
we have had a magnificent affair against Napoleon today. It was my corps which principally gave battle and to which we owe the victory, but the affair was entirely decided by the attack which the Prussians made on the enemy's right. I am wounded by a ball in the left shoulder, but only slightly. A
vie et a mort tout a vous, Guillaume."
Among the British officers, paradoxically, the youngest and most frivolous, those least inclined to reflect upon the tragedy of their losses, seem to have first grasped the full significance of the events they had just lived through. Thirty-year-old Sir William Gomm, a lieutenant colonel in the Coldstream Guards and assistant quartermaster to Picton's division, wrote a letter to reassure his sister. He told her of the two bruises he had suffered, which were of little importance, and of his two wounded horses, which were very important indeed. He went on: "I am so hoarse at hurrahing all yesterday, that I can scarcely articulate. I have been four days without washing face or hands, but am in hourly expectation of my lavender water." But underneath his dandy's pose is his certainty of having witnessed a historic day, comparable only to Marlborough's great victories against the armies of Louis XIV: "We have done nothing like it since Blenheim."
Ensign Howard of the Thirty-third was also aware of the importance of what had happened, but the memory of the dangers he had passed dampened his enthusiasm. "Thank God I am safe," he wrote to his brother. "I had a very narrow escape that day, a bullet passed through my cap and must have been within the eighth of an inch of my head. I intend bringing the cap to England. I can scarcely fancy myself alive and writing to you after what I have seen. We may almost say England conquered France in one battle."