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