Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed

It was a wonderfully nineteenth-century thought that the two things might be opposites – another prince dressed in black had very little trouble squaring them – and Wellington for one would have settled for something more barbarous than the army of young boys that Brunswick had brought with him. In the weeks since arriving in the Belgian capital, Wellington had complained endlessly of the ‘infamous army’ he had been given to do the job, but by the time it had at last become clear that the French advance towards Quatre Bras and Brussels was not a feint, he was in no position to pick and choose whether it was his old Peninsula veterans or the raw and untested Brunswickers who would get him out of the fix he had got himself into.

That had been late on Thursday 15th, and that night anyway the duke had other things to do. He must have known as well as anyone that Bonaparte’s brilliant advance had not shown him at his best, but he had promised the Duchess of Richmond she could have her ball (‘Duchess, you may give your ball with the greatest safety, without fear of interruption,’ he had superbly told her) and he was damned if anything the French did now was going to show him up for a fool.

He had his other reasons for going to the Richmond ball that night, or would find them with hindsight – morale, psychology, a show of British sang-froid, a ‘marker’ for wavering Belgians – but the answer was probably no more complicated than pride. Throughout his career he had had to live with the carping of opposition politicians who hated the Wellesleys, and yet it was a very long time – probably the Siege of Seringapatam in the spring of 1799 and his first major battle – since he had had to justify or explain himself to his own officers and he had no intention of doing anything to undermine the extraordinary hold he had over them now.

‘Nobody can guess Lord Wellington’s intentions,’ Uxbridge’s sister Lady Caroline Capel had written just a week earlier, ‘& I dare say Nobody will know he is going till he is actually gone.’ If the women of Brussels did not know what he was doing then certainly no one else was going to. For an old Peninsula-hand like Sir Augustus Frazer there was nothing new in this, but for those who had never been around the duke before, there was something almost shocking in the dominance he exerted over officers who in any other situation and under anyone else were figures of substance in their own right. ‘Our movements are kept in the greatest secrecy. We know nothing that is going on,’ the Reverend George Stonestreet, the most unmilitary of Guards’ chaplains, wrote from 1st Division Headquarters to his brother-in-law, a broker in the City always keen for his own reasons to know what was happening in Belgium. ‘General Officers, even those commanding divisions are kept in ignorance by the great Duke … I am astonished to find the fear which exists, of at all offending the Duke; and the implicit submission and humility with which Men of talent courage and character shrink before his abrupt, hurried and testy manner.’

If anyone knew what was on his mind it was likely to be his latest dalliance, the pale and anorexically thin Byron cast-off, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, but it would have taken a brave man to have asked the duke what he was doing at the ball. Lord Fitzroy Somerset, Wellington’s secretary, had not understood why the army had not marched immediately that Thursday afternoon, but when it came to the point he was no bolder than the rest, tamely conceding that ‘as it was the place where every British officer of rank was likely to be found, perhaps for that reason the Duke dressed & went there’.

He was right in that at least, almost everyone but the De Lanceys was there. And if it might have been argued – and it was in angry Whig and opposition circles – that Wellington’s officers might have been better off with their regiment, nothing so vividly encapsulates the strange air of unreality that marked these last days before Waterloo. It was here at a rented house in the rue de Blanchisserie in the early hours of the 16th, as Wellington sat on a sofa and talked with Lady Dalrymple Hamilton, and the Duke of Brunswick gave a sudden, violent shudder of premonition, and Gordon Highlanders demonstrated their reels to the duchess’s guests, that the cumulative oddity of what would soon be dubbed ‘the 100 Days’ took on the surreal, climactic air of a macabre Regency Dance of Death. ‘There was the sound of revelry by night,’ Byron famously would write,

And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then

Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright

The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spoke again,

And all went merry as a Marriage bell;

But hush! Hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell.

Within a window’s niche in that high hall

Sate Brunswick’s fated chieftain; he did hear

That sound the first amidst the festival,

And caught its tone with Death’s prophetic ear;

And when they smiled because he deem’d it near,

His heart more truly knew that peal too well

Which stretch’d his father on a bloody bier,

And roused the vengeance blood alone could quell.

Even as the ball broke up into a hundred hurried farewells, the bizarre air of unreality still hung over Brussels. From the window of her hotel on the Parc the newly arrived Charlotte Waldie had watched a soldier turn back again and again to embrace his wife and child for a last time, and yet as the dawn exodus of Wellington’s army began, and market carts and vendors bringing their cabbages, cauliflowers, peas and early potatoes in from the surrounding countryside added their own note of burlesque to the sombre occasion, it was almost impossible to take in the fact that this really was war. ‘Soon afterwards the 42nd and 92nd Highland regiments marched through the Palace Royale and the Parc,’ wrote Charlotte Waldie, ‘with their bagpipes playing before them, whilst the bright beams of the rising sun shone full on their tartan bonnets. We admired their fine athletic forms, their firm erect military demeanour and undaunted mien. We felt proud that they were our countrymen: in their gallant bearing … Alas! We little thought that even before the fall of night these brave men, whom we now gazed at with so much interest and admiration, would be laid low.’

As the sound of the last fife melted away from a suddenly silent Brussels, the first units of the army entered into the gloom of the dense Soignes Forest that stretched out to the south on either side of the Charleroi road. It might have occurred to some of the more experienced troops that this would be no road to retreat along if things went badly, but in the warm still of the morning, with no sound of canon ahead to concentrate the mind, and Guards officers, coats open, snuff boxes in hand, trotting towards the battle along the cobbled chaussée in their smart cabriolets as if they were making for Epsom or Ascot, it was hard to believe that there was a French army less than twenty miles away.

It was partly a failure of imagination, it was partly sang-froid, part show and part utterly genuine, but at the bottom of it all was a supreme confidence in the man who led them. Over the last few months Wellington might have seemed more interested in his love affairs than in Bonaparte, but the moment the fighting started he was always a different man; the ‘Beau’, as his staff called him, gone, and the general worth a division against any enemy back in command. ‘Where indeed, and what is not his forte?’ Augustus Frazer asked his wife. ‘Cold and indifferent, nay apparently careless in the beginning of battles, when his moment of difficulty comes intelligence flashes from the eyes of this wonderful man; and he rises superior to all that can be imagined.’

That ‘moment’ had come. But if he knew exactly where he wanted to fight his battle – he had used a thumb to mark out a long low ridge, crossing the Charleroi road just south of the Soignes Forest, on the Duke of Richmond’s map only hours before – the time had long gone when he could fight the enemy on the ground he chose. The last report he had was that the French were already in Frasnes near Quatre Bras, and with the Prussians about to be engaged at Ligny to the east of the crossroads and the bulk of his army still marching from the west, the only force that stood between Bonaparte and Brussels was the reserve strung out behind him along the main north–south Charleroi road.

Wellington was certainly luckier than he deserved. A combination of inertia and confused orders and priorities had wasted an overwhelming French advantage and meant that Quatre Bras was still in allied hands when he reached the crossroads at ten. The army opposing a token allied force of 7,000 troops was three times as strong in men and still more in guns, but Wellington knew that if they could hold the critical line of the chaussée linking Quatre Bras and Ligny three miles to the east until fresh units arrived, the odds must slowly but inexorably swing his way.

There was nothing pretty about the battle that followed, nothing scientific – shot, grape, shell and musket, hand-to-hand fighting in the woods and long rye; wave after wave of cavalry breaking against British squares – but gradually a battle that should have been lost before it had begun started to move Wellington’s way. Over the next hours the issue still remained in doubt, but as each unit arrived and was thrown in the odds had already begun to shift. As night fell, with the woods to the south-west of the crossroads and the farm buildings straddling the Charleroi road again in allied hands, the field was Wellington’s. At savage cost Quatre Bras had been saved and the road to Brussels held.

Over the battlefield a giant and perfect pyramid of smoke, visible for miles, hung like a funeral pall. Around the crossroads, where the foul-mouthed Sir Thomas Picton, Wellington’s great ‘fighting general’ from the Peninsula, had rallied the 28th with the battle cry of ‘Remember Egypt’, and where Wellington had leaped a hedge of bayonets into the safety of a Highland square, lay the dead and wounded of both sides. French casualties were over four thousand, allied closer to five. In the course of the action, the 92nd – the Gordon Highlanders – whose sergeants, only hours earlier, had been reeling for the Duchess of Richmond’s guests, had lost five commanding officers. The 42nd, the Black Watch, had suffered some 300 killed and wounded; the 69th from Lincolnshire more than forty per cent; the 30th very nearly as many, the Guards’ heavy losses clearing out Bossu Wood, the Dutch and ‘death’s-head’ Brunswickers the same. ‘In no battle did the British infantryman display more valour or more cool courage than at Quatre Bras,’ wrote Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars. ‘Cavalry we had none that could stand the shock of the French; the Brunswick and Belgian cavalry, it is true, made an attempt, but were scattered like chaff before the wind by the veteran Cuirassiers … The British cavalry had had a long march, some nearly forty miles, and consequently did not arrive until the battle was over. The gallant Picton, seeing the cavalry driven back, led on our infantry in squares into the centre of the enemy’s masses of cavalry, facing charging squadrons with squares, and in line against heavy columns of infantry.’

Even though that old combination of Picton and the British infantryman had bailed Wellington out, it was no victory. To their left, long after the guns fell silent at Quatre Bras, the sound of cannon continued in the direction of Ligny. The allies had secured the road to Brussels but the French in their turn had prevented them joining up with the Prussians. It was, at the best, a draw. Deployed across a forward slope, and facing the main body of Bonaparte’s Army of the North, Blücher’s Prussians had been badly beaten, and as they retreated north and east towards Wavre, Wellington had no choice but to retire as well.

It was a dejected army that buried its dead, and on Saturday 17th, under cover of cavalry and of an apocalyptic storm, began their withdrawal towards Brussels. The rains had turned the paths and fields into canals and quagmires, but at 2 a.m. on this Sunday morning, as the thunder crashed and the rain lashed down, and the Duke of Brunswick lay in his coffin, they finally halted along a ridge just south of the Soignes Forest. The 92nd, or what was left of them – one colonel, one major, four captains, twelve lieutenants, four ensigns, twelve sergeants and about 250 rank had failed to answer the roll call – had stopped near a farm building called La Haye Sainte, taking up their position on either side of the Brussels road. The name would have meant nothing to them, but then except perhaps for Wellington and De Lancey it would have meant little to anyone. On the day before, Sir Augustus Frazer, in command of the army’s horse artillery, had been told that Wellington was heading towards a place called Waterloo. He could not even find it on his map. What, he asked, was its real name? He was about to find out. The ‘trumpet of fame’, as Edward Cotton called it, would never sound as it should for the dead of Quatre Bras, but Wellington would have his battle where he had wanted it.

3 a.m. (#ua0d38e15-c319-53ca-86de-1325a3a073d6)

A Dying World

The short midsummer night was over on the tiny Isle of Scalpaigh. From the highest point on the island, Skye and the dark line of the Ross-shire hills would have been visible in the distance, but if anyone was stirring down by the shoreline they had not yet seen, lying beside a cairn on the rough track that led from the MacLennans’ stone house to the family well, a torn and bloodied bundle that contained the remains of a newborn child.

It was the Sabbath with all that meant in the Scottish islands, and if the star that the young William Hazlitt saw over a Shropshire cottage had ever shone above the heather thatch of the thin scattering of croft houses that lined the narrow sound separating Scalpaigh from Harris, it had long since set. Thirty-odd years before, the retired captain of an East Indiaman from Berneray had bought Harris from his MacLeod cousin and settled crofters here, glimpsing in the sheltered, rocky inlets of its eastern coastline with its infinite supply of kelp and teeming abundance of fish – cod from November to June, ling from June through to September, dog fish during the calm summer months, skate and eel, oysters, herring and salmon in every bay and loch – a Hebridean cornucopia that need never fail.

Captain Alexander MacLeod of Berneray was a landlord and innovator in the great tradition of doomed philanthropists and improvers who over the next 150 years would bedevil the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. He had originally made his fortune as captain of the Mansfield and in his late fifties established himself at Rodel at the southern tip of Harris, where he built a large, handsome house and set about improving a wonderful natural harbour with everything needed for a year-round fishing industry. ‘Within the bay of Rowdill, on the north side, there is an opening, through a channel of only 30 yards wide to one of the best sheltered little bays in the Highlands,’ reported the elderly John Knox, another philanthropic improving Scot, after visiting Rodel in 1786, ‘from which, on the opposite side, there is an opening of the same dimensions to the sea. This has water for vessels to enter or depart at any time of the tide, and Captain MacLeod had deepened the south passage to fifteen feet at common spring tides. The circumference of the little harbour or bason is nearly an English mile, and here the ships lie always afloat, and as safe as in Greenock dock. Here the Captain has made an excellent graving bank, and formed two keys … where ships may load or discharge afloat, at all times of the tide.’

This is the voice of a pragmatist and surveyor talking – Knox was reporting on the west coast for the British Society for Extending the Fisheries, part of that earnest eighteenth-century effort to claim the Scottish Highlands for civilisation – but for all his commercial instincts, MacLeod was a romantic and Rodel a place to dream. On the hill above the harbour a sixteenth-century MacLeod had rebuilt the church of St Clement’s, and in some crucial sense Alexander was as much a throwback as a sign of things to come, a relic of an idealised world of ‘Charity, Piety, integrity of life’ and social responsibility that if it had ever existed had been dealt its death blow at Culloden.

And yet if there can be few more beautiful places in Britain than Rodel on a June morning, with a view stretching away southwards down the long line of islands towards Barra, and eastwards to Skye and the distant mainland, Harris was as much a place of blighted hopes as it was of dreams. Forty years earlier the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, had sought refuge on Scalpaigh during his flight into exile after Culloden, and in the decades since the failure of the ’45, Harris had struggled to come to terms with the shifting, harder, commercialised relationship of owner and tenant and the vanguard of the sheep that would signal the end of the old Highland order.

There were the mainland canals to navvy on and there was still the army – there were women on the island this Sunday morning who did not yet know they were widows of Quatre Bras – but even in the good years it was a harsh life for the crofter. ‘All the bread is generally consumed by the end of June,’ the Reverend John MacLeod had recorded in 1792, ‘and such as then cannot afford to purchase imported meal, subsist chiefly on the milk of their cows and sheep, with what fish they may chance to catch, till their wants are relieved by the first fruits of their potato crop early in harvest.’

It is a tragic irony that of all the measures Captain Alexander MacLeod introduced to improve these lives – the house, the school, the better tracks, the fishing stations, the boat yard, the Orkney yawls, the restored church of St Clement’s – his abiding legacy to them was one of bitter hardship and failure. In the early days of his ownership there had been some spectacular success with commercial fishing, but when he died in 1790 it was not the ‘silver darlings’ of the herring trade or a balanced island economy that interested his absentee son and grandson but the easy fortunes to be had out of the inexhaustible supply of kelp in the myriad bays and inlets of Harris’s rocky eastern coastline.

It would prove a dangerous dependency for the islanders but for an absentee landlord only concerned with the short-term the profits were immense – landlords would go to court to dispute possession of an outcrop of useless rocks – and the young Alexander MacLeod had been lucky in his timing. In the years before the outbreak of war with France the seaweed had principally been used in the islands to fertilise the soil, but with the disruption of trade and the end of crucial and cheaper imports from Napoleonic Europe the mineral-rich kelp ash used in the glass and soap industries suddenly soared in value.

Along the exposed western side of the island, where the Atlantic winter storms threw up vast dumps of kelp down its long line of white, shell-sand beaches, the harvesting was a simple if occasional business, but on the eastern ‘bays’ it was another matter. In the past these inhospitable inlets had only been used for summer grazing, but the fortunes to be made in kelp shifted the whole focus of the economy from west to east, from the sporadic collection of sea-ware for manuring the crofters’ fields to its systematic farming for the precious ash.

It was a brutally harsh and primitive life for the crofters who had been resettled along the northern shore of East Loch Tarbert, but as long as the war had continued they had at least been able to survive. The huge bulk of the profits inevitably disappeared off the island to line the pockets of MacLeod’s absentee heirs, and yet if the work was grim and unhealthy – backbreaking hours spent thigh-deep in the cold sea felling the kelp or tending the pits that burned along this shoreline with their sullen, acrid, blinding smoke – kelp offered the only way, short of emigration, or Quatre Bras, out of the inflationary Malthusian spiral of mounting rents, higher food prices and rising population of which the crofters were the helpless, inarticulate victims.

It was to one of these small isolated settlements on the shore of East Loch Tarbert, perched precariously between the sea and the stark lunar interior of North Harris, that some ten years earlier a young girl from the other side of the island called Eury MacLeod had come to work. There had almost certainly been the odd hovel on this site before old Alexander MacLeod’s days, but like Urgha and Carriegrich to the west of it, Caolas Scalpaigh survived as a reminder of those heady days of the captain’s fisheries projects, when it seemed that the silver darlings could never fail and that Harris was set to harvest its own improbable bonanza of war.

There were twenty crofting lots at Caolas Scalpaigh when war had ended in 1814, with their rental fixed to the stretch of shore rather than to the size of the holding, and it is likely that the Malcolm MacLeod, for whom Eury had come to work, was her relative. The MacLeods held crofts No 2 and 3 at this time, and if that might have made them marginally better off than the rest of Caolas Scalpaigh, an exorbitant rent of £9 a year – by far the highest in the whole settlement – still left them tottering on the edge of a disaster that only the kelp could keep at bay.

For more than ten years Caolas Scalpaigh had been Eury MacLeod’s whole world, the view through the smoke of the kelp pits over the narrow sound to the Isle of Scalpaigh the limits of her horizon, when sometime in the early summer of 1815 she discovered that she was pregnant. She had a vague sense that she had not conceived before the previous Martinmas, 11 November, but beyond that and the name of the father – Roderick Macaskill, a twenty-five-year-old crofter’s son from Caolas Scalpaigh who had since left the island to find work as a labourer on the construction of the Caledonian canal – she could not even have told anyone how old she was.

She was never able to say when she first realised her condition, and she had certainly told no one when on the 14 May 1815 – Whitsun – she had left the house of Malcolm and Marion MacLeod and crossed the narrow sound to live with her sister and her brother-in-law on the Isle of Scalpaigh. It is just possible that she hoped that somehow she could have the child undetected on the near-empty island, but there seems something so dumbly and hopelessly passive about Eury MacLeod’s whole story that it is hard to imagine that calculation ever entered into it.

There was only one house of any size on Scalpaigh, the MacLennans’ house – where in the days when Donald Cameron had been tacksman, the Young Pretender had hidden for four days during his flight into exile – and it was near here, on either Friday 16th or the Friday before, that Eury MacLeod had crawled out of her brother-in-law’s house in the middle of the night and given birth to a stillborn baby boy. By the time the scattered remains were found on the 19th it was impossible to know how long they had been lying there, and long before Eury would be well enough to give any coherent account, exhaustion and fever had reduced her recollections to a blur from which only the barest facts ever emerged.

‘At the time the Declarant came to … her sister’s house,’ read the official statement taken down in English from Eury’s confession by the Rodel schoolmaster for the Sub-Sheriff, and read back to her in her native Gaelic, ‘her sister’s children [she said] were ill of a fever and that her sister attended them, that about twenty days after her going to her sister’s house the Declarant was herself attacked by the fever, which confined her to her bed.’ For four or five days Eury had been too ill to move, but ‘on a Friday evening’ – which Friday she could not say – she had ‘found herself very much pained’, and putting on her ‘cloaths’ and letting herself out of her sister’s house, had followed the track to near the MacLennans’ store house ‘where she was delivered of a male child’.

The boy was stillborn, ‘not having come into its full time’, and ‘finding the child dead … and being unable to bring it home’, Eury had wrapped her petticoat about the body tying the string about the middle. ‘She had laid the child by the side of a stone on the road to the MacLennans’ well, and had then gone back to her sister’s, intending, she told the schoolmaster, to come back for the child’s body the next morning ‘but she was too ill to do so’.