A Model Victory

Waterloo and the Battle for History

Dedication

Henry Balen

Epigraph

The duty of the Historian of a battle … is to prefer that which has been officially recorded and published by public responsible authorities; next, to attend to that which proceeds from Official Authority … and to pay least attention to the statements of Private Individuals.

The Duke of Wellington, 24 September 1842

The communication by the media of information … on matters of public interest and importance is a vital part of life in a democratic society. However the right to communicate such information is subject to the qualification … that false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians, should not be made.

Lord Hutton, 28 January 2004

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

A Note on Military Terms

Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I

Truth is history, and history without truth does not deserve the name; and I am anxious for the sake of the gallant men I commanded, that one day at least the truth may be known.

Sir Richard Hussey Vivian, letter to William Siborne, 18 January 1830

The advice is always to walk a battlefield, and so this is what the officer did. In itself, then, his action was not remarkable, but what was surprising to those who did not know him was the level of his commitment, a devotion to duty which was reflected in the time he spent crossing and re-crossing a few miles of rolling countryside outside Brussels. A day, perhaps, would have been deemed too short a time for most visitors, as if they were in an almost indecent haste to see the killing-fields, but a week at most would have sufficed. To go for eight months, therefore, was the sign of an interest bordering on obsession.

But then the lieutenant, prim and proper, was no ordinary tourist, and if he was there for pleasure (and it gave him plenty, although he might have cavilled at using such a word in so bloody a context) then this was an incidental benefit of the curious military exercise that he had campaigned so hard to carry out. His task was both arduous and precise but it was made the more so by his unrelenting search for perfection, for he was not a man to tolerate a hair out of place. Perhaps we should say, given the military training which lay behind his approach, he could not abide a tunic button which did not shine as brightly as the Duke of Wellington’s star still shone in the firmament of British society. It was the Duke, indeed, who was unwittingly responsible for the officer’s task though it was not one which came to meet with the approval of the great commander. This was one of many curiosities which came to attach themselves to the lieutenant’s project as the years went by.

That Wellington should become at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the officer’s work was in itself an oddity because, in truth, the lieutenant was doing little more than paying homage to him, an act of obeisance that was charted by the pen and paper which accompanied him as he trudged across the land. For he had set out to map the ground of the Duke’s most famous victory, the glory of his life, the triumph which exceeded all others in a military career which had glittered as none other: the defeat of Napoleon on the fields of Waterloo, fifteen years before.

It was entirely in character that the lieutenant intended his map to be the most accurate the army had ever seen. It may have been his military training which infused him with a taste for exactitude, so that, as he grew older, he even changed the spelling of his name as if to render it more accurate: he was called William Siborn, and why he became Siborne at thirty-seven years of age, we do not know. He was born near the century’s turn, on 18 October 1797, at Greenwich in south London: a meridian child who became fascinated by maps. His father was called Benjamin, and his mother Charlotte, and he was an only son. Perhaps his upbringing gave him a taste for isolation, for self-containment, for favouring a world which was neat and tidy and above all precise.

It was an upbringing which revolved around the army. A year after his birth his father became an ensign in the West Kent militia, and a year later moved into the 9th (East Norfolk) Regiment, where he stayed for two decades. Unlike his son, Siborn senior saw active service. We find him first in the 2nd Battalion under General Sir John Moore in 1808/9; then at Walcheren in 1809, under Lord Chatham; we glimpse him in the Peninsula with Wellington from 1810; and then at the Battle of Nivelles, where, on 10 November 1813, he was gravely wounded, never fully to recover. At the end of the war he sailed with his regiment to Canada, returning too late to take part in the Battle of Waterloo. The trail ends on 14 July 1819 at St Vincent in the West Indies, where Siborn was serving on peacetime duties, and where finally he succumbed to his wartime wounds.

William Siborne, brought up in a country perpetually at war and proud of his father’s exploits in Spain, devoted himself to a military career, too: while still fourteen, he became a gentleman cadet at the Royal Military College, first at Great Marlow and then at Sandhurst. He was one of the first professionally trained staff officers, and he was educated in mathematics, languages and military drawing. He was commissioned as an ensign in the same regiment as his father, the 9th Foot, in 1813, but he was too young for the great Napoleonic battles of his era, serving, somewhat less glamorously, at Chatham and Sheerness. The nearest he came to fighting was in the year after he had passed out from Sandhurst with distinction: in 1815 he joined his father as a member of the army of occupation in Paris, once the Battle of Waterloo had been fought and won. If the son ever felt the need to win the approval of higher authority (and, at the end, he came to resent it) his father’s distinguished battlefield career may have played its part. Perhaps it made the son feel that while his father had seen action, his role was merely to record it, a task which made him feel part of the glorious whole which was the victorious British army, but left him curiously unsatisfied as a man.

We know what William Siborne looked like from a single surviving portrait. For this we must thank a man of many parts – Samuel Lover, sometime novelist, musician, and painter. Granted, the pose is a touch mannered, too ornamental even, as if, through the surrounding objects, the artist is trying to invest him with a status which he does not yet possess. In his blue military undress coat, William Siborne leans on a prop, a tiny cannon, and his left hand holds a plumed hat. He has a high forehead framed by brown curls; a pair of steady eyes; a long, large nose, and a round jaw, which in combination with the domed forehead, make his face seem curiously egg-shaped. A precise, exact, soft face, of which the most certain feature is the mouth: a small, pursed mouth, resolute and hard-set. It says he is a determined man; an exact man; a man who likes order; a man who likes things just so.

Fittingly, for such an exact man, the killing-fields of Waterloo were divided into areas of geometrical precision.

A large triangle with Brussels at its northern apex is formed by two long roads, one running south to Nivelles, the other, which lies further east, heads to Charleroi. The triangle’s base is a shorter road which runs between the two. Heading south from Brussels, the Charleroi road cuts through the Forest of Soignes, emerging from dense wood at Waterloo, then heads for the village of Mont St Jean. Leaving Mont St Jean, a traveller can journey along a smaller triangle of roads, by stopping at the crossroads of Quatre Bras, turning west to Nivelles, and then returning north to where he started.

The base of another shape, an imperfect rectangle, is formed by the road which runs east from Nivelles to Namur, with Ligny just outside it; the Brussels to Charleroi road forms its western side, while its eastern side runs from Louvain, twenty miles east of Brussels, to Namur. In the centre of the rectangle lies Wavre. Quatre Bras, Ligny, Wavre and Mont St Jean: four places linked by the battles which determined the fate of Europe in four days of June, though all were overshadowed by the name which was given, imprecisely, to the last, the most famous conflict of them all: the Battle of Waterloo.

Waterloo has earned its lasting fame by virtue of being one of the bloodiest and most decisive one-day battles in European history. Never before had armies deployed a mixture of old and new forms of warfare with such destructive consequences. Men rode to war on horseback, their swords flashing, or formed themselves into protective squares of infantry to resist attack, but guns and shellfire were deployed too, to devastating effect. Rarely had there been slaughter on such a scale.

Though the glory of the victory soon came to overshadow any notion of its gore, nearly fifty thousand died or were wounded in the single bloody day which it took to conclude the business. A few weeks afterwards, one visitor, Charlotte Waldie, recalled how she had seen a long line of burial pits: ‘the effluvia which arose from them … was horrible; and the pure west wind of summer, as it passed us, seemed pestiferous, so deadly was the smell that in many places pervaded the field. The fresh-turned clay which covered those pits betrayed how recent had been their formation. From one of them the scanty clods of earth which had covered it had in one place fallen, and the skeleton of a human face was visible. I turned from the place in indescribable horror.’

It was fitting, then, for such a bloody confrontation, that victory brought with it such a conclusive prize, an outcome which defined the course of the nineteenth century. Waterloo was one of the most conclusive armed confrontations of the century, the crucible in which modern Europe was fashioned. It saw Britain and Prussia emerge triumphant, the two countries eclipsing the shattered might of France. It also marked the military and political end to the career of the greatest soldier of modern times, the soldier who dared to become an emperor.

Over the years, the horror of the battle had diminished, eroded by the passage of time and the growth of legend, which dwelt more on the triumph than on the cost in flesh and blood. It is here, in this cleansed landscape, that Siborne tried to make order of the ground which had played host to the carnage, mapping the land as exactly as he knew how, an academic exercise imposed on human slaughter. First, he prepared his drawing-board as if he was following a recipe in the kitchen, to guard against the expansion and contraction of the paper in the atmosphere. ‘Lay upon that side of the sheet of paper which is to be fixed to the board the white of an egg well beat up,’ he told students of his methods. ‘Press the paper gently and gradually down upon the board from one side to the opposite one, and paste the edges which hang over to the under part of the board.’ Not even a downpour would put him off. ‘With drawing-boards thus prepared,’ he declared solemnly, ‘I have stood with an umbrella over the instrument during heavy showers of rain, without the slightest alteration taking place in the smoothness or firmness of the paper.’

If Siborne had followed the exact sequence of the battles as he mapped the countryside, and it would have been in character, he would have started at the River Sambre, with Napoleon’s unexpected crossing into Belgium, so sudden and brilliant a manoeuvre that, by noon on the first day, the town of Charleroi had fallen. The topographer in Siborne would have noted how rapidly the terrain changes, falling away into the valley of the River Orme, between Genappe and Gembloux. Within five miles, the land is broken up into hills and valleys around the River Dyle, and as the river meanders north to Louvain, the country becomes close and wooded.

Then comes the landscape of the final battle. Near the hamlet of Frischermont, there is a crossroads where a lane becomes a track, and about four hundred yards later it dips into a slope which leads, through a long hollow, to the village of Plancenoit, near the Lasne stream. Both the French and Allied positions can be seen from here, perhaps the finest general view of Waterloo that Siborne could have obtained, indeed a clearer view than the participants gained for themselves, surrounded as they were by battle-smoke and the head-high crops. At the church at Plancenoit, a few battalions of the French Old Guard held off thousands of young, inexperienced Prussians, until the Prussians finally won the day. Further north still, and the road from Braine l’Alleud to Ohain follows the crest of the Mont St Jean plateau, which formed a natural obstacle along the entire front of Wellington’s army. A lone elm tree on the ridge, on the west side of the crossroads, marked Wellington’s position during much of the battle. But it is the Duke’s advanced defences which stand out for inspection – the farm of La Haye Sainte, and the château of Hougoumont. La Haye Sainte was the centre of the Allied line, from where Major George Baring’s small band of men threw tiles at the attackers, and where, the night before the battle, they tore down the great barn doors for firewood, unaware that they would have to defend the building the next day. The enemy dead, piled up on the threshold, proved to be a barricade which was almost as effective.

Hougoumont was the key to the Allied position, a fortification whose defences never fell, despite the terrible punishment its occupiers endured, and whose resistance served as a metaphor for Wellington’s tactics during that long day. By the close of battle, hundreds of its defenders had died, but Hougoumont’s survivors claimed divine protection when a fire stopped, miraculously and marvellously at the feet of the figure of Our Saviour in the chapel, and barely singed His toes. Charlotte Waldie, on holiday in Brussels, visited the château a few weeks after the battle and found herself in a different world.

‘The carnage here had been dreadful. Amongst the long grass lay remains of broken arms, shreds of golden lace, torn epaulets, and pieces of cartridge-boxes; and upon the tangled branches of brambles fluttered many a tattered remnant of a soldier’s coat. At the outskirts of the wood, and around the ruined walls of the Château, huge piles of human ashes were heaped up, some of which were still smoking. The countrymen told us that so great were the numbers of the slain, that it was impossible entirely to consume them. Pits had been dug, into which they had been thrown, but they were obliged to be raised far above the surface of the ground. These dreadful heaps were covered with piles of wood, which were set on fire, so that underneath the ashes lay numbers of human bodies unconsumed.

‘At the garden gate I found the holster of a British officer, entire, but deluged with blood. In the inside was the maker’s name – Beazley and Hetse, No. 4, Parliament Street. All around were strewed torn epaulets, broken scabbards, and sabre tashes stained and stiffened with blood.’

When it was over, the French had lost half their men, while the two opponents who had united against them, the Anglo-Allied army led by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian army led by General Blücher, had lost a third: out of 190,000 men who took part in the battle, the French casualties totalled more than 30,000, the British and Dutch, under Wellington, about 15,000, and the Prussians lost about 7000 men. At one point, 45,000 men lay dead or wounded within an area of three square miles. Half the 840 British infantry officers were dead, and their cavalry had lost a third of its number. The 12th Light Dragoons alone lost three officers, two sergeant-majors, five sergeants, three corporals and thirty-eight dragoons.

Despite the death toll, the soldiers themselves remembered it as a glorious victory. But in the stories they told of the battle they did not forget its horror, even if none of them appeared to dwell unduly on the cost. Among the survivors was Private Tom Morris of the 73rd Foot, who described how he had roamed the battlefield in search of water after the fighting had ended: ‘By the light of the moon I picked my way among the bodies of my sleeping as well as of my dead comrades … I thought I heard the man call to me, and the hope that I could render him some assistance overcame my terror. I went towards him, and placing my left hand on his shoulder, attempted to lift him up with my right; my hand, however, passed through his body, and then I saw that both he and his horse had been killed by a cannonball.’ Another soldier from Staffordshire, Frederick Mainwaring, found a loaf of bread in a French officer’s knapsack, covered in the brains of a British guardsman. Mainwaring was so hungry he scraped off the brains and ate the loaf. Captain Cavalié Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery remembered that ‘from time to time a figure would raise itself from the ground, and then, with a despairing groan, fall back again. Others, slowly and painfully rising, stronger, or having less deadly hurt, would stagger away with uncertain steps across the field in search of succour. Many of these I followed with my gaze until lost in the obscurity of distance; but many, alas! after staggering a few paces, would sink again on the ground, probably to rise no more. Horses, too, there were to claim our pity – mild, patient, enduring.’

Only at first light did the men begin to comprehend the enormity of their sacrifice. Captain Mercer buried one of his drivers, James Crammond, simply because his injuries were so horrifying. ‘I had not been up many minutes when one of my sergeants came to ask if they might bury Driver Crammond. “And why particularly Driver Crammond?” “Because he looks frightful, sir; many of us have not had a wink of sleep for him.” Curious! I walked to the spot where he lay, and certainly a more hideous sight cannot be imagined. A cannonshot had carried away the whole head except barely the visage, which still remained attached to the torn and bloody neck. The men said they had been prevented sleeping by seeing his eyes fixed on them all night; and thus this one dreadful object had superseded all the other horrors by which they were surrounded.’

An ensign, seventeen-year-old Edward Macready, calculated that of the 460 men in the 30th Foot, 279 were casualties. Sixty-nine of Captain Mercer’s horses were dead, and more than 1500 in all. ‘Some lay on the ground with their entrails hanging out, and yet they lived,’ wrote Captain Mercer. ‘These would occasionally attempt to rise, but, like their human bedfellows, quickly falling back again, would lift their poor heads, and, turning a wistful gaze at their side, lie quickly down again.’

Hougoumont, still smouldering, smelled of burnt flesh and death. It looked, thought John Kincaid of the 95th Rifles, as if the world had nearly come to an end. ‘The field of battle next morning presented a frightful scene of carnage; it seemed as if the world had tumbled to pieces and three-fourths of everything destroyed in the wreck. The ground running parallel to the front where we had stood was so thickly strewed with fallen men and horses, that it was difficult to step clear of their bodies; many of the former were still alive, and imploring assistance, which it was not in our power to bestow. 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?”’

The villages around Waterloo were filled with the injured, their churches acting as hospitals. In Brussels, the mayor launched an appeal for its citizens to take as much bedding as they could to the Hôtel de Ville, especially mattresses, bolsters, bedsheets and blankets, and to give linen or lint to their local priests. But it would take several days until all the injured had been recovered, taken by wagon to nearby farm buildings or cottages. Accidents caused the death toll to rise still further: ‘Two of our men, on the morning of the 19th, lost their lives by a very melancholy accident,’ Kincaid recalled. ‘They were cutting up a captured ammunition waggon for firewood, when one of their swords, striking against a nail, sent a spark among the powder. When I looked in the direction of the explosion, I saw the two poor fellows about twenty or thirty feet up in the air. On falling to the ground, though lying on their backs and bellies, some extraordinary effort of nature, caused by the agony of the moment, made them spring from that position five or six times, to the height of eight or ten feet, just as a fish does when thrown on the ground after being newly caught. It was so unlike a scene in real life that it was impossible to witness it without forgetting, for a moment, the horror of their situation.’

A professor of military surgery, John Thomson, saw one patient whose neck had been cut by a sabre, revealing part of the brain which was seen pulsating for eight weeks. There were many victims with sabre wounds to the face and neck, where the eyelids, nose, ears, cheeks and lips had been divided, wounds which were held together by adhesive straps, and by bandages. In many cases, bullets had passed directly through one or both eyeballs. There were many chest wounds, too, some inflicted by the lance and bayonet; but most by musketballs. There were patients whose bladders had been penetrated by musketballs, and, in several cases, men had lost large portions of the buttocks and thighs to cannonballs.

More than five hundred amputations were carried out by the surgeons in an age without anaesthetics, their most famous patient Lord Uxbridge, whose knee had been shattered. He talked calmly to his surgeons as they cut through his flesh and bone, in a house a few miles from the battlefield, and he was heard only once to complain, when he remarked that the knife did not seem very sharp. ‘Take a look at that leg,’ he commanded his visitor, Sir Hussey Vivian, pointing to the severed limb which was still in the room. He regretted its loss deeply. ‘Some time hence, I may be inclined to imagine it might have been saved.’

Wellington was far from immune to the human cost of victory, to the lives wrecked and to the men racked with pain in Brussels hospitals. Many of his friends and fellow-officers were dead, a mournful list which included a dozen of his senior staff. ‘Do not congratulate me. I have lost all my friends,’ he insisted, on his return to Brussels. Many men died from exposure as they lay on the battlefield for two, sometimes three days, waiting to be rescued, while scavengers moved among them, stripping valuables from the dead and injured before the stretcher parties arrived. ‘I hope to God,’ said Wellington later, ‘that I have fought my last battle. I always say that, next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.’