and his British ally. At Quatre Bras, Wellington finally learned what had happened to the Prussians, an event witnessed by Captain George Bowles of the Coldstream Guards: ‘The Duke of Wellington came to me and said he was surprised to have heard nothing of Blücher. At length a staff-officer arrived, his horse covered with foam, and whispered to the Duke, who without the least change of countenance gave him some orders and dismissed him. He then turned round to me and said, “Old Blücher has had a damned good licking and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles. As he has gone back we must go back too. I suppose in England they will say we have been licked. I can’t help it; as they are gone back, we must go too.”’ The need to withdraw to safer ground was urgent. There would be no repeat of the tactical mess and barren terrain he had inherited at the crossroads.
In retreat, Wellington showed his strategic brilliance, ensuring that all four main routes into Brussels would be blocked by his army. It was a manoeuvre that was witnessed by Lieutenant Basil Jackson. Jackson was one of the longest-surviving Waterloo veterans, dying in 1889 at the age of ninety-four. The son of a major, he had entered military college in 1808, from where he was transferred to the Royal Staff Corps, where he was taught engineering, and the duties of the Quartermaster-General’s department. With this background, he could appreciate the organisational skill of Wellington’s retreat: he remembered that ‘the first intimation that the army was about to retire was the getting in of the wounded; troopers were sent to the front, who placed such disabled men as could manage to sit, on their horses, they themselves rendering support on foot. At times a poor fellow might be seen toppling from side to side, requiring two men to keep him on his seat; the horses moving gently, as if conscious that their motions were torturing the suffering riders. Some again required to be carried in a blanket, so that every man with life in him was in one way or another brought in and sent to the rear. It was about mid-day ere this important duty was completed, and the troops then began to move off by brigades …’ The men who had fought for Quatre Bras were to pull back along the main Charleroi highway, with their retreat covered by cavalry and horse artillery, and about two battalions of light troops, led by Lt.-Gen. Henry William Paget, the Earl of Uxbridge. Behind their shield, some 46,000 men would attempt to slip away by the road north, to fight another day. Invaluably, for three hours, their protection was not needed, and Wellington’s men were eight miles up the road before the French attacked the crossroads they had left. It was just as well, for the retreat was a logistical nightmare. The entire centre column of artillery and two brigades of heavy cavalry, with the 7th Hussars and 23rd Light Dragoons, the smallest light dragoon regiment, in the rearguard, had to cross a small river by the narrow bridge at Genappe.
Only when the truth dawned on Napoleon that Wellington’s army had escaped, did he give the order to advance. Manning a gun battery at the crossroads, Captain Mercer was in effective charge of the gunners, drivers and horses of ‘G’ troop of the Royal Horse Artillery. He saw the enemy silhouetted against the horizon as the sky darkened threateningly overhead. Mercer was thirty-two, and he had been brought up in a military family. His father had been a general in the
Royal Engineers, and he had already spent half his life in the army: after training at the military academy in Woolwich, he was commissioned at sixteen, serving in Ireland after the rebellion and, in 1808, he had joined Lt.-Gen. John Whitelocke’s ill-fated expedition to Buenos Aires, part of an ambitious, even absurd, attempt to seize the Spanish colonies of South America. But Mercer was a far more rounded individual than his background suggests: he had a quizzical view of life that enabled him to see the occasional eccentricities of military service and he enjoyed painting and writing, which he did in a descriptive, even poetic, vein. On this night, he wrote, ‘large isolated masses of thundercloud, of the deepest, almost inky black hung suspended over us, involving our position in deep and gloomy obscurity; whilst the distant hill lately occupied by the French army still lay bathed in brilliant sunshine.’ Heavy rain started to fall, and the ditches on either side of the road filled with water. Blinding flashes of lightning followed clap after clap of thunder. Uxbridge ordered Mercer to fire a round at the advancing French, then retreat as quickly as possible. ‘We galloped for our lives through the storm,’ wrote Mercer. ‘Retreat now became imperative. The order was given, and away we went, helter-skelter – guns, gun-detachments, and hussars, all mixed pele-mele, going like mad, and covering each other with mud, to be washed off by the rain, which, before sufficiently heavy, now came down again as it had done at first in splashes instead of drops, soaking us anew to the skin … The obscurity caused by the splashing of the rain was such, that at one period I could not distinguish objects more than a few yards distant. Of course we lost sight of our pursuers altogether, and the shouts and halloos, even laughter, they had first sent forth were either silenced or drowned in the uproar of the elements and the noise of our too rapid retreat … In this state we gained the bridge of Genappe.’
At Genappe, Uxbridge halted to make a stand against his pursuers. ‘Squadron after squadron appeared on the hill we had passed, and took up their positions, forming a long line parallel to ours,’ Mercer recalled. The French lancers moved into the town, their flanks protected by houses on either side. The 7th Hussars charged at them, but failed to make any impact, so Uxbridge sent in the heavy cavalry, the 1st Life Guards, the senior regiment, which smashed into the enemy, trapping it in the narrow streets. The rocket division sent missiles flying towards the French army, causing them to desert their gun batteries in alarm as the rockets spluttered and sparked and burst overhead. But the missiles, though spectacular, were notoriously inaccurate and Mercer noted that none of them ever followed the same course ‘whilst some actually turned back upon ourselves – and one of these, following me like a squib until its shell exploded, actually put me in more danger than the fire of the enemy throughout the day.’ Uxbridge thought that his cavalry had deployed ‘beautifully’ but the ground was so heavy from the downpour that the horses were quickly exhausted and he ordered their retreat. And still it rained.
The Mont St Jean ridge, chosen by Wellington as the ground on which he would make his stand after the retreat from Quatre Bras, was a defensive line in the exact image of Torres Vedras of the Peninsula, a natural fortification, a barrier against which, he hoped, the enemy forces would throw themselves and be wrecked in the process. The difference, however, was that the Portugal campaign had been long and drawn-out, a trial of patience and delay. This next battle would be warfare at its rawest and most concentrated, conflict distilled into a single day, as if Wellington and Napoleon had conspired to boil down the military art into its ultimate, bloody essence.
‘I had never yet heard of a battle in which everybody was killed,’ thought Lt. John Kincaid of the 95th Rifles. ‘But this seemed likely to be an exception.’
But there was still hope. An hour before midnight, on the night before the battle, the terms of the deal between the two armies which faced Napoleon were finally sealed. Blücher, at Wavre, received full details of the Anglo-Allied army’s position, and heard Wellington’s request for the assistance of one corps. ‘Gneisenau has given in,’ Blücher told the British officer waiting for a reply. ‘We are going to join the Duke.’ He promised to lead the troops himself against the enemy’s right flank as soon as Napoleon made any move against the Duke. The two armies would cooperate after all.
But the day ahead would stretch their fragile trust to breaking-point. William Siborne would find that it had still not been repaired when he came to make his Model.
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