An Infamous Army (Alastair-Audley Tetralogy 4)

‘Good!’ His lordship pulled on his hessians, shrugged himself into his coat, and strode into the adjoining room, where Müffling awaited him. ‘Hallo, Baron! Fitzroy tells me the weather’s beginning to clear.’

‘It is very bad still, however, and the ground in many places a morass.’

‘My people call this sort of thing “Wellington weather”,’ observed his lordship. ‘It always rains before my battles. What’s the news from the Marshal? Hope he’s no worse?’

The Marshal Prince had been last heard of as prostrate from the results of having been twice ridden over by cavalry when his horse was shot under him at Ligny. It would not have been surprising had an old gentleman of over seventy years of age succumbed to this rough usage, but Marshal Forwards was made of stern stuff. He was dosing himself with a concoction of his own, in which garlic figured largely, and had every intention of leading his army in person again. He had ordered General Bülow to march at daybreak, through Wavre, on Chapelle St Lambert, with the Second Army Corps in support; and wrote asking for information, and promising support.

After a short conference with the Duke, Müffling went back to his own quarters to send off the intelligence that was wanted, and to represent to General Gneisenau in the plainest language the propriety of moving to the support of the Allied Army without any loss of time.

The Duke, apparently quite refreshed by his short nap, sat down to write letters. ‘Pray keep the English quiet if you can,’ he wrote to Sir Charles Stuart. ‘Let them all be prepared to move, but neither be in a hurry nor a fright, as all will yet turn out well.’

But his lordship had not forgotten the bugbear of his right wing. Only a few hours earlier, he had sent orders to General Colville, at Braine-le-Comte, to retire upon Hal, and had instructed Prince Frederick to defend the position between Hal and Enghien for as long as possible. It was his opinion that Bonaparte’s best strategy would be to outflank him, and seize Brussels by a coup de main. ‘Il se peut que l’ennemi nous tourne par Hal,’ he wrote to the Duc de Berri. ‘Si cela arrive, je prie votre Altesse Royale de marcher sur Anvers et de vous cantonner dans le voisinage.’

His lordship found time to send a note to his Brussels flirt, too. His indefatigable pen warned that her family ought to make preparations to leave Brussels, but added: ‘I will give you the earliest intimation of any danger that may come to my knowledge. At present I know of none.’

His letters all written and despatched, his final dispositions checked, the Duke sent for his shaving water; and Thornhill, his phlegmatic cook, began to prepare breakfast. His lordship was notoriously indifferent to the food he ate (he had, in fact, once consumed a bad egg at breakfast before one of his battles in Spain, merely remarking in a preoccupied tone, when he had finished it: ‘By the by, Fitzroy, is that egg of yours fresh? for mine was quite rotten’), but Thornhill had his pride to consider, and might be trusted to concoct a palatable meal out of the most unpromising materials.

Just before the Duke left his Headquarters, a lieutenant of hussars rode into Waterloo at a gallop, and flung himself out of the saddle at the door of the little inn. His gay dress was generously splattered with mud, but Colonel Audley, leaning against the doorpost, had no difficulty in recognising an officer of his own regiment, and hailed him immediately: ‘Hallo! Where are you from?’

The lieutenant saluted. ‘Lindsay, sir, of Captain Taylor’s squadron on picket duty at Smohain. Message for his lordship from General Bülow!’

‘Come in, then. What’s the news at the front?’

‘Nothing much our way, sir. It’s stopped raining, but there’s a heavy mist lying on the ground. Captain Taylor saw two corps of French cavalry, in close column, dismounted, within a carbine shot of our vedettes, and a patrol of heavy cavalry moving off to the east: to feel for the Prussians, he supposed. Captain Taylor had just moved our squadron into Smohain village when a Prussian officer with a patrol arrived with the news that General Bülow’s corps was advancing and was three-quarters of a league distant. Captain Taylor sent me off at once with the intelligence.’

‘You’ll be welcome,’ said the Colonel, and handed him over to Lord Fitzroy.

The Duke set out to join the Army at an early hour, and was accompanied by a numerous suite. In addition to his aides-de-camp a brilliant corps diplomatique rode with him, in all the splendour of their various uniforms. Prussia, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, and little Sardinia were represented in the persons of Barons Müffling and Vincent, Generals Pozzo di Borgo and Alava, Counts van Reede and D’Aglié, and their satellites. Orders and gold lace glittered and plumes waved about his lordship, a neat plain figure, mounted on a hollow-backed horse of little beauty and few manners.

The Duke whom his troops had christened Beau Douro, was dressed, with his usual care and complete absence of ostentation, in a blue frock, short blue cloak, white pantaloons, and tasselled hessians. The only touch of dandyism he affected was a white cravat instead of a black stock. His low-crowned cocked hat had no plume, but bore beside the black cockade of England, three smaller ones in the colours of Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. He held his telescope in his hand, and sat an ugly horse with no particular grace.

His lordship cared nothing for the appearance of his horse. ‘There may be faster horses, no doubt many handsomer,’ he said, ‘but for bottom and endurance I never saw his fellow.’ Indeed, he had paid a long price for Copenhagen, and had used him continually in Spain. He was an unpleasant brute to ride, but he seemed to delight in going into action, and evinced far more delight at the sight of troops than the troops felt at his too near approach. ‘Take care of that there ’orse! We know him!’ said the Peninsular veterans, keeping wary eyes on his powerful hindquarters. ‘’E kicks out!’

The position which the Allied Army had taken up on the previous night was some two miles south of Waterloo, before the village of Mont St Jean, and immediately in rear of the hollow road which led westward from Wavre to the village of Braine-l’Alleud. The ground had been surveyed the preceding year, and a map drawn of it, and although it was not perhaps ideal, it possessed one feature at least which commended it to the Duke. It fell away in a gentle declivity to the north, which enabled his lordship to keep all but the front lines of his troops out of sight of the enemy. The hollow road, which dipped in some places between steep, hedge-crowned banks, was intersected by the chaussée leading from Brussels to Charleroi, and, farther west, by the main road from Nivelles, which joined the chaussée at Mont St Jean. In itself it nearly everywhere constituted the front line of the position, but there were several outposts, like bastions, dotted along the position. On the extreme left there were the farm of Ter La Haye, and the village of Papelotte, occupied by Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar’s Nassau troops. On the left centre, situated three hundred yards south of the hollow road, upon the western side of the Charleroi chaussée, was La Haye Sainte, a semi-fortified farm, with a garden and orchard attached; and on the right, where the hollow road took a southerly bend before crossing the Nivelles highway, was the château and wood of Hougoument, whose main gate gave on to the short avenue leading to the Nivelles road, down which, so short a time before, Lady Worth had driven in an open barouche, on an expedition of pleasure.

The country was undulating, and to the east of the Charleroi road a valley separated the Allied front line from the ridge, where, as soon as day broke, French troops could be seen assembling. To the west of the chaussée, the banks of the hollow road became less steep; behind Hougoumont, and overlooking it, was a high plateau, bounded on the right by the ravine through which the Nivelles road ran. Across this road, another plateau was occupied by Lord Hill’s Corps, drawn back en potence, and occupying the villages of Braine-l’Alleud and Merbe Braine.

The Army, retreating to this position through the storm of the previous afternoon, had spent a miserable night, exposed to a downpour that turned the ground into a bog, saturated coats and blankets, and streamed through the canvas tents. Straw, beanstalks, sheaves of rye and barley had been collected by the men to form mattresses, but nothing could keep the wet out. Gunners sought shelter under the gun carriages; infantrymen huddled together under the lee of hedges, and many, abandoning all attempt to sleep, sat round the campfires, deriving what comfort they could from their pipes, and a comparison of these conditions with those endured in Spain. Peninsular veterans assured the Johnny Newcomes that the miseries they were undergoing were as nothing to the sufferings met with in the Pyrenees. One or two recalled the retreat of Sir John Moore’s army upon Corunna, till the raw recruits, listening wide-eyed to the description of forced marches, barefoot over mountain passes deep in snow, began to feel that they were not so very badly off after all. No rations had been served out overnight, but quite a number of skinny fowls had been looted by seasoned campaigners, and were broiled in kettles over the campfires.

The rain ceased shortly before daybreak, but the atmosphere was vapoury, and heavy with damp. Men got up from their sodden beds shaking as though with ague, their garments clammy over their numb bodies, and their teeth rattling in their heads with a chill that seemed to have penetrated into their very bones. A double allowance of gin served out at dawn helped to bring a little warmth to them, but there were some who, lying down exhausted the night before, did not wake in the morning.

The v

icious spitting of musketry had sounded up and down the line of pickets at intervals during the night, but with the daylight a general popping began, as the men fired their pieces in the air to clean the barrels of rust. The vedettes and the sentries were withdrawn; optimists declared the weather to be fairing up; old soldiers became busy drying their clothes and cleaning their arms; young soldiers stared over the dense mist in the valley to the ridge where the French were beginning to show themselves.

At five o’clock, drums, bugles, and trumpets all along the two-mile front sounded the Assembly. Staff officers were seen galloping in every direction; brigades began to move into their positions: here a regiment of Light Dragoons changed ground; there a battalion of blue-coated Dutch-Belgians marched along the hollow road with their quick, swinging step; or a troop of horse artillery thundered over the ground to a position in the front line. A breakfast of stir-about was served to the men; a detachment of riflemen, posted in a sandpit on the left side of the Charleroi road, immediately south of its junction with the hollow road, began to make an abattis across the chaussée with branches of trees.

A tumbledown cottage on the main road, between Mont St Jean and the hollow way, had been occupied during the night by the Colonel of the 95th Rifles, and some of his officers and men had kindled a fire against one of its walls, and had boiled a huge camp kettle full of tea, milk, and sugar over it. The Duke stopped there for a cup of this sticky beverage on his way from Waterloo; and Colonel Audley, standing beside his horse, and also sipping tea from a pannikin, found himself accosted by Captain Kincaid, whose invincible gaiety did not seem to have been in the least impaired by a night spent in the pouring rain. He had slept soundly, waking to find his clothes drenched and his horse, which he had tethered to a sword stuck in the ground, gone.

‘Just drew his sword, and marched off!’ he said. ‘Did you ever hear of an adjutant going into action without his horse? You might as well go without your arms.’

‘Johnny, you crazy coot!’ the Colonel exclaimed, laughing.

‘How was I to know the brute had no proper feeling towards me? He’s a low fellow: I found him hobnobbing half a mile off with a couple of artillery horses.’

‘You know, you have the luck of the devil!’ the Colonel told him.

‘I have, haven’t I? You’d have said I might as well have looked for a needle in a haystack as for one horse in this mob. Have some more tea? That kettle of ours ought to get its brevet for devotion to duty. It has supplied everyone of the bigwigs with tea, from the Duke downwards.’