Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

BERNHARD OF SAXE-WEIMAR’S 4,000 troops at Quatre-Bras were reinforced early on that Friday morning with another 4,000 men from the Dutch army, but luckily for them Marshal Ney hesitated. He feared the landscape, thinking it might conceal Wellington’s whole army, while in truth that army was still desperately trying to reach the crossroads.

The battle that was to develop at Quatre-Bras was a scrambling affair and one that stands out from all Wellington’s others. He is usually depicted, somewhat disparagingly, as a great defensive general. He was indeed a great defensive general, choosing the ground on which he would fight and using that ground to his men’s advantage as he had at Busaco, but to dismiss him as merely a defensive fighter is to wilfully ignore some of his greatest victories. When he was asked, much later in life, of what he was most proud he replied in one word, ‘Assaye’. Assaye was a battle fought in India, against a much larger army, and he turned the enemy’s flank, attacked and crushed them. Then there was Salamanca, in Spain, sometimes termed his masterpiece, where 40,000 Frenchmen were destroyed in 40 minutes. Salamanca was a brilliant offensive battle that took the French by surprise and routed them. Or Vitoria, the battle that cleared the French from Spain, another offensive masterpiece that left the enemy in ruins. He was, in truth, a great attacking general, but attacks are, broadly speaking, more expensive in men than defensive tactics, and Britain’s army was small and there were never enough replacements for battle casualties, and so the Duke preferred defensive battles where he could use the terrain to shelter his men from enemy artillery.

Quatre-Bras was, essentially, a defensive battle, but one fought on terrain that Wellington had not chosen. He had no time to prepare and little time to react to the enemy’s assaults, and for almost all of the day he was outnumbered. The story of Quatre-Bras is essentially that of allied troops arriving in the nick of time to stave off another crisis, yet it all began quietly enough. Wellington reached the crossroads at about ten in the morning and, finding that the French were still hesitating, he rode east to meet Blücher. That was the conference at the Brye windmill where Wellington promised to send troops to help the Prussians ‘provided I am not attacked myself’.

Yet by mid-afternoon he was being attacked and there would be small chance of sending any troops to assist the Prussians. Wellington needed every man who arrived. He had to defend the crossroads because that was his link to the allies, and the French had at last made up their minds to capture the vital junction. They were advancing in force and most of Wellington’s men were still marching in the sweltering heat to reach Quatre-Bras.

Most of the British troops arrived from Brussels, a march of 22 miles. Once at Quatre-Bras they faced a tight battlefield. In front of them was a stretch of gently rolling countryside in which sturdy stone-built farmsteads stood like small forts. Not that any man could see much. The landscape was obscured by thick stands of trees and by the fields of high, obstinate rye which grew between the pastureland. It was also hidden by gun smoke which gradually thickened.

The fighting was to take place south of the Nivelles road, the highway which led east to the Prussians. The western side of the battlefield was defined by a thick, almost impenetrable wood, the Bossu Wood, where Saxe-Weimar’s tired troops had taken refuge. A small stream rose inside the wood and trickled across the Brussels highway, though it was no obstacle to cavalry, infantry or guns. Where the highway met the stream, in the very centre of the battlefield, was a big stone-built farm called Gemioncourt. It would have helped Wellington enormously to hold that farm, but the French had driven out the Dutch defenders and had now garrisoned its thick walls. Once past the farm the streamlet trickled on to feed an artificial lake, the Materne Lake, beyond which was a hamlet called Piraumont which, to Wellington’s consternation, was also held by French infantry. Those enemy infantrymen were perilously close to the Nivelles road and, being to the east of the battlefield, threatened to cut the vital link between Wellington and Blücher.

The Frenchmen in Piraumont never did cut the road because Wellington contained them with the first reinforcements to arrive, the 95th Rifles, who were helped by a battalion of Brunswick infantry. That meant his left flank was safe for the moment, while his right was protected by the thick undergrowth of the Bossu Wood. The major fighting would take place in the mile-wide stretch of undulating country between the lake and the wood, and when he returned from his meeting with Blücher, around 3 p.m., that stretch of farmland was swarming with Frenchmen.

Rebecque, the clever Dutchman, had managed to assemble 8,000 troops at Quatre-Bras, but the newcomers had retreated in panic from the French while Saxe-Weimar’s men, still short of ammunition, had taken cover in the Bossu Wood. It must have seemed that there was nothing to stop the French advance, but fortuitously Sir Thomas Picton’s fine division was just arriving from Brussels. The 95th led them and they were sent left to stop the French breaching the road to Ligny, while the rest were deployed to face the attack coming straight up the Brussels highway. Some newly arrived British artillery unlimbered south of the crossroads, but almost immediately came under fire from French skirmishers concealed in the tall fields of rye. There were still some Dutch skirmishers in the rye, but they were being pressed relentlessly back and the French could spare men to fire at the British gunners and at the newly arrived infantry. Lieutenant Edward Stephens of the 32nd, a Cornish regiment, described the fire of the French skirmishers as ‘very galling … our men were falling in every direction’.

Skirmishers play a large part in the story of Waterloo. Essentially they are specialist infantrymen who fight neither in line nor in column (though they could and often did do both), but fought ahead of a line or column. They formed a skirmish line, a scatter of troops spread wide, whose job was to snipe at the enemy’s formation. Every battalion possessed a Light Company, and some whole battalions were light troops like the battalions of the 95th Rifles. The French had expanded the numbers of their skirmishers because, like the artillery, they were useful for weakening an enemy line before the column attacked. The best defence against skirmishers was other skirmishers, so in battle both sides had their light troops in extended order way ahead of their formations. Their scattered formation made them difficult targets for inaccurate muskets and not worth the price of a cannonball, though they were vulnerable to canister, an artillery round which turned the cannon into a giant shotgun. They fought in pairs, one man firing while his companion loaded. In an ideal world the French skirmishers, who were called voltigeurs or tirailleurs, would go ahead until they were in musket range of the enemy line and then they would open fire, hoping to bring down officers. Tirailleur, the official name, simply means a shooter, from the verb tirer, to shoot, while a voltigeur is a vaulter, or gymnast, because the ideal skirmisher was an agile, quick-moving man. They knelt or lay down to fire, making themselves small targets, and enough skirmishers could seriously hurt a line of troops, but only if they could get close. French skirmishers usually outnumbered the British, though the British had the advantage that many of their skirmishers were armed with rifles, a weapon that Napoleon refused to employ. The rifle’s drawback was that it was slow to load because the bullet, usually wrapped in a leather patch, had to be forced down the rifled barrel, and that took far longer than ramming a musket ball down a smoothbore barrel, but the advantage of the rifle was its accuracy. The British used the Baker rifle, a superb and dependable weapon, that was accurate far beyond the range of any musket.

Skirmishers dared not get too far ahead of their parent battalions because, in the deadly game of scissors, stone and paper which characterizes artillery, infantry and cavalry in the Napoleonic era, they were totally vulnerable to horsemen. Their scattered formation meant they could not form square or offer volley fire, so a few cavalrymen could decimate a skirmish line in a matter of seconds. But when Picton’s Division arrives at Quatre-Bras there is no cavalry to scour the French skirmishers away. The Black Legion of Brunswick reached the battlefield at the same time as Picton’s men, but the rest of the Duke’s cavalry regiments are still hurrying to reach the battlefield and so Wellington decides to attack the French skirmishers with his line of infantry. There were columns of French infantry beyond the enemy skirmishers, but British lines had never had trouble defeating French columns, and so the six battalions were ordered forward.

They were severely outnumbered. The French were coming in three columns. The largest with over 8,000 men was attacking northwards close to the Bossu Wood, the central column, advancing along the highway, had 5,400 men, while to their right were another 4,200 infantry, all of them supported by over fifty cannon and by troops of cavalry. The six battalions of British infantry had around 3,500 men between them who had to face at least 17,000 infantry, as well as the artillery and cavalry, but these battalions were among the best and most experienced in Wellington’s army.