A Model Victory

To Lord Fitzroy Somerset, Military Secretary to the Duke of Wellington From Sir James Willoughby Gordon, Quartermaster-General

PRIVATE

1 November, 1834

My dear Lord Fitzroy,

It appears to me that the clearest point of view under which both armies could be represented on a Model upon a large scale would be that of their position at the commencement of the action, when each successive movement could best be followed up by an attentive study of the Duke’s Despatch – whereas if the action is to be represented as it stood at the close, and the information to be obtained from each commanding officer or perhaps from others even less informed, this must in great measure tend to weaken the high authority of the Duke’s Despatch and to substitute in its stead divers minor accounts and those too not detailed at the time but after a lapse of 20 years.

This is the way in which the matter strikes me, and I merely throw it out for the better judgement of those who have thought more about it.

Yours faithfully,

J.W. Gordon

The military authorities who came to oppose William Siborne’s Model had a simple reason for doing so. It was not that they objected in principle to his plans, but that they could not abide the practice. Partly this was because of their view of history: Siborne was gathering information about the Battle of Waterloo in greater detail than anyone before him, so that he was becoming a repository of knowledge and expertise which far outstripped that held by the military commanders. Yet history was held to be the preserve of those who led the soldiers into battle, rather than the rank and file themselves. When Captain Michael Childers, of the 11th Light Dragoons, forwarded a letter to Siborne from his commander, Lt.-Col. James Sleigh, he took the liberty of commenting that it ‘only shows how hopeless it is to expect (after such a lapse of time) an account from those who were actors in what then took place, in which we should all agree.’ Wellington could not have put it better. History was like an army: it had to be led, controlled and organised by those in charge.

But armies have to adapt to events, and despite the unwelcome democracy of its evidence-gathering, Siborne’s project would have been supported by the military leaders who had sanctioned it, if they had not objected to his specific choice of which battle-scene to represent. He was determined to model the end of the battle, at which Prussian troops were present, and in doing so he unwittingly brought himself into conflict with the military authorities whose view of history was very different from his. That the defiance of Napoleon had lasted all day, without Prussian support, and that many glorious individual deeds were performed by British soldiers, only sharpened the desire for a model to celebrate the role of the British. In particular, the authorities wished William Siborne to model the ‘commencement of the action’.

That the morning of 18 June 1815 provided a glorious spectacle, there is no doubt. On the easternmost side of the Anglo-Allied line, the officers of the 18th Hussars wore blue-grey overalls with scarlet stripes, as if they were trying to draw attention to themselves; gold or silver or crimson lace adorned the uniforms of the 11th and 12th Light Dragoons, and they had yellow and black stripes on their breeches; three cavalry regiments had dark blue facings and gold lace on their uniforms; four branches of the Royal Horse Artillery had blue and gold braided jackets and a white sash. Officers in the 23rd Light Dragoons sported turquoise jackets; for the rest, including the Foot Guards and the Corps of Royal Engineers, there was a theme of red and white.

Then there were the hats – a vast, swirling, colourful array of military headgear. The Life Guards had a black and red woollen crest and a white plume curling over their helmets, like a squirrel’s tail; the Scots Greys wore bearskin caps with a red cloth patch bearing the white horse of Hanover. There were red shakos, bell-topped shakos, Belgic shakos covered with oilskin, stovepipe shakos and dark-blue shakos, bonnets and busbies. There were white pompoms and yellow pompoms, green pompoms and light-blue pompoms, white plumes, black plumes, green plumes and red plumes, red and white plumes and yellow and white plumes, and for officers in the Brunswick Lancer Squadron a vast, absurd plume of blue and yellow.

Napoleon’s army was no less colourful than Wellington’s. Among the elite Imperial Guard, there were bright blue uniforms for the heavy cavalry, the Grenadiers à Cheval, and green for the Guard’s Dragoons, both edged with orange lace. The 1st and 2nd Carabiniers were dressed in white, with sky-blue collars and cuffs of red and white or sky-blue and white, while the helmets of their officers and troopers sprouted a vast red quiff. Then there were the red pompoms of the tirailleurs, and the green pompoms of the voltigeurs; the great black plumes of both the cuirassiers and of the dragoons; the black or red wool crests on the brass helmets and fur turbans of the Chevaux-Légers-Lanciers. Among the hussars, colours varied widely from regiment to regiment as if each was trying to outdo the others, sky-blue and red, red and yellow, green and red, sky-blue and white and yellow. This was not the age of camouflage. Men faced death in colour.

But if there was one thing the men agreed upon when they wrote their own histories, and when they gave William Siborne their eyewitness accounts, it was the depths of misery they had suffered on the night before the battle. No model could have reflected that. The three armies had spent hours sitting on their knapsacks, sleepless in the pouring rain, ankle-deep in mud. The soldiers knew the enormity of the battle ahead, and they knew too that many of them would die. But their bodies had more pressing concerns. They were cold, and damp and hungry, and their limbs ached from the many miles they had marched, and from the battles already fought. There was little shelter in the midst of such an overwhelming storm, except for a few trees and some brushwood. Captain Mercer remembered how their horses were better provided for than the men. One soldier had found a sack of corn in the road near Genappe, and he had carefully transported it all the way on an ammunition waggon, so the horses had plenty to eat. ‘For ourselves we had nothing! – absolutely nothing!’ said Mercer.

Both sides sent out search parties to forage for food and wood; every house in the area, and every farm, was looted. Animals spilled their blood as liberally as the men would the next day, with the soldiers using their bayonets and bullets to slaughter any cattle they came across. Hogs and hens, chickens and cows died to feed the soldiers, while shutters and doors, tables and chairs were sacrificed to warm their bodies. For miles around, hundreds of small fires twinkled in the gloom, some extinguished by the rain before they could catch hold, others burning fiercely as the furniture caught light. John Gordon Smith, an assistant surgeon, recalled bivouacking with his regiment, the 12th Light Dragoons, in open clover fields, behind the farm of Mont St Jean. For Smith and the men with him, the nearby village furnished fuel in abundance. Doors and window-shutters, furniture of every description, carts, ploughs, harrows, wheelbarrows, clock-cases, casks and tables were carried to the bivouac, and set alight in the rain. Chairs were bought by the officers for two francs each, the price of a seat for the night. Others were less comfortable. Private Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars found some beanstalks at the farm Mont St Jean and sat on those all night. Twenty years after the battle, after he had risen to become a sergeant-major, he would come to live in the village, marrying a local woman and writing a book about his experiences, called A Voice from Waterloo. He died a wealthy man from many years of acting as a battlefield guide, and from collecting relics, which he displayed in his own museum.

Other soldiers tried to put up small tents, or fill trenches with straw. But both soon filled with water. William Gibney, an assistant surgeon of the 15th Hussars, felt thoroughly miserable: ‘There was no choice; we had to settle down in the mud and filth as best we could … we got some straw and boughs of trees, and with these tried to lessen the mud and make a rough shelter against the torrents of rain which fell all night; wrapping around us our cloaks, and huddling close together … it was almost ludicrous to observe the various countenances of us officers, smoking cigars and occasionally shivering, we stood round the watch-fire giving out more smoke than heat.’ Twenty-year-old Private Matthew Clay of the 3rd Foot Guards tried to rig up a blanket for shelter: ‘we fixed our muskets perpendicular at each end of the blankets and then slipping the loop of the cord around the muzzle of both muskets … All four of us crept under the cover, taking the remainder of our equipment with us. The storm still continued with equal force and our covering became very quickly soaked…’

The only comfort for the Anglo-Allied army was that it was the same for the enemy. Lieutenant J.L. Henckens was a member of Napoleon’s light cavalry, the 6th Châsseurs. Neither he nor his horse could sleep, nor could they lie down on the soaked ground, so he spent the night leaning against his horse as it slept. No one could stay dry for long, and some simply gave up the attempt, choosing to walk all night, waiting for dawn and for the weather to let up. Of that, there was little sign. Rumbles of thunder continued to echo through the night, a dull angry sign of disquiet with the men below whose guns had so impudently sounded at the battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny. If it had been light, the British would have noticed that the rain had caused the dye in their red coats to run, staining their white belts, so that it appeared as if they were bleeding.

Throughout the night, men from each army had continued to arrive, clogging the roads with their supplies and baggage carts. The French marched along the roads and meadows to their front line in the pitch-dark, their path lit only by the occasional flashes of lightning which forked through the sky. The rain drove straight into their faces, and the water soaked into their greatcoats, weighing them down still further. They were wet and tired and hungry. They were also thirsty, despite the rain which poured down upon them. Some men could take no more, and fell over into the mud. Others crawled into hedges, or under trees, to try to escape the driving rain. They may have been fortified by the knowledge that they were advancing while their enemies were retreating, but the chase had been long and arduous, and they were in no shape for battle.

As the morning broke, the rainclouds gradually lifted, but they never quite disappeared; they hung over the battleground, protecting the world’s gaze from the horrors which would enfold. The sun’s rays eventually broke through the cloud cover, but only as if puncturing it, so that misty shafts of light travelled to the ground. Dawn was the signal for the armies to repair the damage of the night before. Lt.-Col. William Tomkinson, of the 16th Light Dragoons, looked at the battlefield with a dispassionate, professional eye: ‘The whole field was covered with the finest wheat, the soil was strong and luxuriant; consequently, from the rain that had fallen, was deep, heavy for the transport and moving of artillery, and difficult for the quick operation of cavalry. The heavy ground was in favour of our cavalry from the superiority of horse, and likewise, in any charge down the face of the position, we had the advantage of moving downhill, and yet we felt the inconvenience in returning uphill with distressed horses after a charge.’ Tomkinson, quiet and unassuming, but nonetheless decisive, was the fourth son of a Cheshire squire, who had joined the ‘Scarlet Lancers’ eight years earlier at the age of seventeen. An excellent rider, as his upbringing might suggest, he had been promoted to captain in 1811 on Wellington’s recommendation, and he later wrote a diary of his experience as a cavalry officer.

Muskets were dried and cleaned, and then fired to check that they were still in working order, that the damp had not penetrated the powder. The rapid, if irregular, sound of gunfire echoed round the countryside as if battle had already commenced. The noise of drums, bugles and trumpets could be heard from both sides, raising the spirits before the final call to arms. Staff officers galloped off in different directions, checking on the position of the men who had bivouacked overnight, issuing orders for them to regroup so that each unit of each army was in the position determined by its commander. Lt. John Kincaid had spent the night on the Namur road behind the farm of La Haye Sainte. His leader had been lucky enough to find a mud cottage for his quarters: ‘We made a fire against the wall of Sir Andrew Barnard’s cottage, and boiled a huge camp-kettle full of tea, mixed with a suitable quantity of milk and sugar, for breakfast; and, as it stood on the edge of the high road, where all the bigwigs of the army had occasion to pass, in the early hour of the morning, I believe almost every one of them … claimed a cupful.’

The French had the larger force, so long as the Prussians failed to arrive. Napoleon had nearly 72,000 men under his command, and 246 guns. The Anglo-Allied army amounted to 67,661 men, and it had only 157 guns, and only 15,000 of its infantry were British, less than half of which had been on a battlefield before. The lower ranks came mainly from the lower reaches of society, deemed by Wellington to be ‘the scum of the earth’, and they were attracted to the army simply because they found it was hard to earn a living as a manual worker or a tradesman. Half of the 23rd Foot, for example, were labourers, and many had been textile workers; the rest were from the trades, among them watchmakers, bookbinders and gunsmiths. In the 73rd Foot, too, most of the regiment were labourers; among the rest, men whose occupation reflected the level of the country’s industrial progress: there were several bakers, butchers, brass founders, carpet weavers, cordwainers, cotton spinners, cutlers, framework knitters, gunmakers, hosiers, tailors, locksmiths, miners, ribbon weavers and shoemakers. There were two clerks, potters, musicians, stonemasons and woolcombers, and there was a single blacksmith, bleacher, bricklayer, bronze maker, chairmaker, coach harness maker, cabinet maker, collier, cooper, currier, farmer’s boy, farrier, gardener, gun-stocker, hatter, iron founder, leather grinder, needle maker, miller, painter, plater, ropemaker, sword-blade maker, tinsmith and watchmaker. There were soldiers as young as sixteen and veterans of more than sixty, though the average soldier was in his twenties.

Some of the troops were very raw. Ensign George Keppel, the future 6th Earl of Albemarle, had been commissioned into the 3/14th Foot when he was fifteen, and was sixteen only five days before the battle. In his memoirs, he said that his battalion ‘was one which in ordinary times would not have been considered fit to be sent on foreign service at all, much less against an enemy in the field. Fourteen of the officers and 300 of the men were under twenty years of age. These last, consisting principally of Buckinghamshire lads straight from the plough, were called at home “the Bucks”, but their unbuckish appearance procured for them the appellation of “the Peasants.”’ Few of the infantry regiments, which were notionally based on county names in order to encourage recruitment, had as much connection with their locality as their titles suggested, and many were filled out with volunteers from the militias, coerced by persuasion and bribery, with a payment on enlisting.

Ensign William Leeke, the most junior subaltern in the 1/52nd, was only seventeen, and his father, a Hampshire squire, had wanted him to enter the church. Leeke had refused to become a cleric, and thought briefly of becoming a lawyer. Fourteen years after the battle, he did indeed become a curate, at West Ham, but as a young man his imagination had been captured by an officer who had told him of the delights of serving under Wellington. Leeke persuaded his family to buy him a commission, and he was about to go to India when Napoleon escaped from Elba. Leeke realised that the Napoleonic wars were not over after all, and ditched his plans to go abroad. Instead he wrote to a cousin in the 52nd, caught up with the regiment in Belgium, and joined up just five weeks before the battle. He did not suffer on the way: he bought the best of everything in London shops before departing, including unbreakable wine glasses, a soup tureen and several pints of brandy.

Private Tom Morris was not yet twenty, a Cockney gunmaker, who had joined the Loyal Volunteers of St George’s, Middlesex in 1812, when he was only sixteen, and a year later he had enlisted with his brother’s regiment, the 2nd Battalion of the 73rd, after accidentally meeting a friend of his brother. That same night he wrote a note for his parents, asking for their forgiveness. ‘I made up my mind to take life as it should come,’ he decided, aware of the privations which would face him. A kindly sergeant suggested he should pretend to be eighteen, so that he could qualify for extra pay and a pension.

Most of the officers came from the rural gentry, or from leading military families, or from backgrounds in commerce, or the professions. The gentry, naturally, knew how to handle a gun and ride a horse, and a battle required both those abilities, as well as a chivalric disregard for danger. The bloody course of the Napoleonic wars could be traced in the careers of many of the officers. John Kincaid, the officer who thought everyone might be killed at Waterloo, was a gentleman and a Scot, who had held a lieutenant’s commission in the North York Militia. In 1809, he had volunteered to join the 2nd Battalion of the famous Rifles, taking part in the Walcheren expedition where he had caught the swamp-based fever which had destroyed the campaign. Nonetheless, he said he had joined up because it was the glamorous thing to do, and in 1811 he was to be found fighting in the Peninsula, defending the lines of Torres Vedras, and taking part in all the great battles from Fuentes to Vittoria. At the age of twenty-eight, he was already a battle-hardened veteran.

Few of the officers were from the aristocracy, but most had risen through the recommendation of a person of importance either in society or in the army, or through buying their promotion, and both methods of progression required a degree of social standing. One ensign, Rees Gronow, was an old Etonian, whose family came from the landed gentry of Glamorganshire, and it was natural that he should see the army as a career, either in itself, or as a springboard for success in life. He was a dandy who had persuaded Sir Thomas Picton to let him go to battle, even though his own battalion had been left at home. So that he might fight in style, he borrowed two hundred pounds, tripled his money through gambling, and with the profits bought a new uniform and two horses. Appearances could be deceptive: Gronow, with his neat moustache and perfectly coiffed hair, may have been fastidious about his appearance, but he was held to be the best pistol shot in the army. Later, he published his account of the battle in a book called Reminiscences of Captain Gronow and became MP for Stafford.

Among the Allied troops were 3300 King’s German Legion infantry, nearly 15,000 cavalry and infantry of Hanover; 6000 Brunswickers; 2880 independent Nassauers; and more than 17,000 infantry, cavalry and artillerymen from the United Netherlands. This army, commanded by the Prince of Orange, was a volatile mixture of Dutch, Belgian and Nassau soldiers, their mutual uneasiness stemming from their forced marriage. The Dutch were Protestant, the Belgians Catholic, and the latter had been hoping for independence from the geopolitical settlement which had decided Holland’s future a year before Waterloo. France had taken control of the country until Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, and the subsequent Treaty of London had created the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, to the Belgians’ disgust. Extraordinarily, two out of the three Netherlands divisional commanders had fought for France, and their men even wore blue uniforms which looked similar to those of the French. Many of them were inexperienced, and some of them would have preferred to fight for France. It did not provide a basis of trust within the Anglo-Allied army, before, during or after the battle.

Wellington had more faith in the crack troops of the King’s German Legion. Although it had been formed by refugees from Hanover, which Napoleon had overrun in 1803, it was less foreign than its name suggested. Indeed, it had been based at Bexhill-on-Sea for the last eleven years, and its increasingly distinguished service record had reached an apogee in the Peninsular War. It was more or less integrated within the British army, adopting its military structures and tactics on the battlefield and wearing the same uniform. But the Duke had less confidence in the men from Nassau and Hanover, and little or none in the Dutch and Belgian battalions which, generally, he placed well away from the front-line. ‘We were, take us all in all, a very bad army,’ thought a jaundiced John Kincaid of the 95th Rifles as he eyed the men. With few exceptions, he rated the foreign auxiliaries as little better than a raw militia. They were, he thought, ‘a body without a soul, or like an inflated pillow, that gives to the touch and resumes its shape again when the pressure ceases – not to mention the many who went clear out of the field, and were only seen while plundering our baggage in their retreat …’ Kincaid looked back enviously at past campaigns. ‘If Lord Wellington had been at the head of his old Peninsula army, I am confident that he would have swept his opponents off the face of the earth immediately after their first attack.’

In contrast, the French army was battle-hardened and united. Corporal John Dickson, of the 2nd (Royal North British) Dragoons, the Scots Greys, could see the enemy drawn up just a mile away. ‘The grandest sight was a regiment of cuirassiers dashing at full gallop over the brow of the hill opposite me, with the sun shining on their steel breastplates.’ Dickson had risen through the ranks from a humble Paisley background and, at the age of twenty-six, had eight years service under his belt. ‘It was a splendid show. Every now and then the sun lit up the whole country. No one who saw it could ever forget it.’ Then there was a sudden roll of drums along the whole of the enemy’s line. ‘A burst of music from the bands of a hundred battalions came to me on the wind. I seemed to recognize the Marseillaise, but the sounds got mixed and lost in the sudden uproar that arose. Then every regiment began to move. They were taking up position for battle.’ Dickson noted the great columns of infantry, and squadron after squadron of cuirassiers, red dragoons, brown hussars and green lancers, with little swallow-tail flags at the end of their lances.

At nine in the morning the rain finally ceased, though the ground was still boggy underfoot. In the hours ahead, the mud would save lives, becoming the captor of roundshot, a soft cushion for bursting shell. ‘We stood in the right square, not on rye, or wheat trampled down, but, I think, on clover or seeds which had been recently mown,’ William Leeke remembered. ‘I furnished information to Captain Siborne with regard to this crop … when he was forming his beautiful model of the Field of Waterloo, and was very anxious to procure accurate information on the subject. It was generally supposed that there would have been a much greater loss in killed and wounded at Waterloo, if the heavy rain on the nights of the 16th and 17th had not well saturated the ground.’ But the soldiers were not initially disposed to see the wet ground as their ally. It was another inconvenience, one of many, as they waited for their commanders to order them into battle. Napoleon inspected his lines, and the Emperor’s headquarters, under Marshal Soult, dispatched orders to the divisional commanders to be ready for battle. Otherwise, both sides held still as if waiting for the other to show its hand. For Wellington’s part, this was because he approached the battle like a game of chess, and he wanted to see what pieces Napoleon would move first before committing himself. Napoleon himself wanted the earth to dry out so that his troops could cover the ground which separated his forces from the Anglo-Allied army more freely and more quickly.

A quiet descended: the lull after the night’s storm. As the two sides prepared for action, they were observed by Edmund Wheatley, who, at twenty-one, was an ensign in the 5th Line Battalion of the King’s German Legion. Little is known of Wheatley’s career, though he lived in Hammersmith, and his diary suggests he was brave, if a little moody. He was certainly headstrong: he had already fought a duel with a rival from his schooldays, and he had joined the King’s German Legion at its depot in Bexhill in 1812, although the corps was considered vaguely unsuitable for an English gentleman. For much of the time Wheatley’s thoughts were with his girlfriend, Eliza Brookes, although her family had clearly forbidden her to see him: his diary begins with a secret assignation at Hyde Park Turnpike. Now the battle was upon him, and it was unclear if he would ever see her again. ‘About ten o’clock, the order came to clean out the muskets and fresh load them. Half an allowance of rum was then issued, and we descended into the plain, and took our position in solid Squares. When this was arranged as per order, we were ordered to remain in our position but, if we like, to lay down, which the battalion did.’

There was a feeling of excitement, almost of being on parade. As Wheatley looked around, ‘shoals of cavalry and artillery’ arrived behind him ‘as if by a magic wand. The whole of the horse guards stood behind us. For my part I thought they were at Knightsbridge barracks or prancing on St James’s Street.’

Wellington blended his troops carefully into the demands of the land. More than thirteen thousand men in the second line of the Anglo-Allied army, which was made up entirely of British and German cavalry, were concealed behind the reverse slope of the ridge, and in the hollows of the ground. Rather than following conventional military practice by protecting his flanks, he placed most of his cavalry behind the infantry on the centre and right of the ridge, where he thought that the battle would be concentrated.

The artillery was spread out along the front line, generally half a dozen guns at a time, in a wholly defensive role. The heaviest placements were on the army’s right, behind the two main roads – here, there was a gun or howitzer every twenty metres. To bolster the central defences of Wellington’s army, the horse artillery batteries were taken from the cavalry and made static, by placing them among the foot artillery. Their orders were to conserve ammunition, rather than try to destroy enemy guns. Early on, Captain Mercer disobeyed orders, irritated by the French batteries on the Nivelles road. His fire was returned with interest from guns ‘whose presence I had not even suspected, and whose superiority we immediately recognised by their rushing noise and long reach, for they flew far beyond us. I instantly saw my folly, and ceased firing … But this was not all. The first man of my troop touched was by one of these confounded long shot. I shall never forget the scream the poor lad gave when struck. It was one of the last they fired, and shattered his left arm to pieces as he stood between the waggons. The scream went to my very soul…’