An Infamous Army (Alastair-Audley Tetralogy 4)

‘Not yet, but we’ll be in for it soon, or I’m a Dutchman. Never saw so many guns massed in my life at the batteries they’re bringing up in the centre. There you are—all right and tight!’

It was now nearly one o’clock, and for an hour and a half the most bitter struggle had been raging for the possession of Hougoumont. The Duke, who seemed to have been everywhere at once, cantered back to the centre of the position, to where an elm tree stood on the highest point of the ground, to the west of the Charleroi chaussée. He had no sooner arrived there than an artillery officer came up to him in a great state of excitement, stating that he could clearly perceive Bonaparte and all his staff before the farm of La Belle Alliance, and had no doubt of being able to direct his guns on to them.

This suggestion was met by a frosty stare, and a hasty: ‘No, no, I won’t have it! It is not the business of general officers to be firing upon each other!’

‘Just retire quietly,’ said Gordon, in the chagrined officer’s ear. ‘Forget that you were born! You had better not have been, you know.’

Colonel Fremantle’s description of the guns being assembled upon the opposite ridge had not been exaggerated. During the struggle about Hougoumont, battery after battery had been brought up on the French side, covering the whole of the Allied centre, from Colin Halkett’s brigade on the right of Alten’s division to Prince Bernhard’s Nassauers at Papelotte. Nearly eighty guns had been massed upon the ridge, and at one o’clock the most infernal cannonade broke out. Shells screamed through the air, ploughing long furrows in the ground as they fell, blowing the legs off horses, exploding in the Allied lines, and scattering limbs and brains over men crouching behind the meagre shelter of the quick-set hedges. The infantry set its teeth and endured. Young soldiers, determined not to lag behind their elders in courage, gulped and smiled waveringly as the blood of fallen comrades spattered in their faces; veterans declared that this was nothing, and went on grimly cracking their jokes. On the high ground under the elm tree balls hummed and whistled round the Duke and his brilliant staff, until he said in his cool way: ‘Better separate, gentlemen: we are a little too thick here.’

Shortly after one o’clock, Reille’s guns, away to the right, succeeded in setting fire to the haystack in the yard of Hougoumont. In the centre of the line, smoke was beginning to lie thickly in the valley between the opposing ridges. The air was hot and acrid; and a curious noise, like the hum of a gigantic swarm of bees, was making novices ask anxiously: ‘What’s that? What’s that buzzing noise?’

Baron Müffling, after a short colloquy with the Duke, rode away to take up his position with the cavalry brigades on the left flank. Messenger after messenger went galloping off to try to gain some intelligence of the Prussian advance, for it was plain that the cannonade was a prelude to an attack upon the Allied centre, which, held by Picton’s and Alten’s divisions on either side of the chaussée, was the weakest part of the line.

At half past one, the cannonade slackened, and above the diminishing thunder could be heard the French drums beating the pas de charge.

‘Here comes Old Trousers at last!’ sang out a veteran, uncorking his muzzle stopper and slipping off his lock cap. ‘Now for it, you Johnny Newcomes!’

On the ridge of La Belle Alliance, a huge mass of infantry was forming, flanked by squadrons of cuirassiers. Sharp-eyed men on the Allied front swore they could discern Bonaparte himself; that he was there was evident from the shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and the dipping of colours, as the regiments filed past the group beside the chaussée. The rub-a-dub of drums and the blare of trumpets now mingled with the roar of artillery. Four divisions of infantry, led by Count D’Erlon, began to advance down the slope to the hollow road, in ponderous columns at 400 pace intervals, showing fronts from 160 to 200 files. The battalions of each division were deployed, and placed one behind the other, except on the French left, where Allix’s division was formed into two brigades side by side, under Quiot and Bourgeois. These moved forward to encircle the farm of La Haye Sainte, Quiot branching off to the west of the chaussée and Bourgeois advancing to the east of it. A determined musketry fire from the orchard and the windows of the farm met them, but Baring’s Germans were soon driven from the orchard and gardens into the building itself. While the other divisions moved in three columns down the slope towards the Allied left centre, the Lüneberg field battalion was detached from Count Kielmansegg’s brigade, and sent forward to try to reinforce Baring. These young troops advanced boldly down the slope, but wavered under the French fire. The sight of their own skirmishers falling back took the heart out of them. They began to retreat; the cuirassiers, covering Quiot’s left flank, swept down upon them, and in their disordered state killed and rode over many of them, driving the rest back with great loss to their own lines.

Upon the eastern side of the chaussée the three other columns, led by Donzelot, Marcognet, and Durutte, moved steadily down upon the Allied line. As each column cleared its own guns on the ridge behind it, and descended the slope into the valley, these began firing again, until the thunder and crash of artillery drowned the roll of the drums and the shrill blare of the trumpets.

To the eyes that watched this tidal advance, it seemed as though the whole slope was covered with men. European armies had seen these columns, and had broken and fled before them, appalled by the sheer weight of infantry opposed to them. The British had time and again proved the superiority of line over column, but Count Bylandt’s Dutch-Belgic bri

gade, badly placed on the slope confronting the French position, already demoralised by the heavy cannonading, could not stand the relentless march of the columns towards them. They had suffered considerably at Quatre-Bras, had had no rations served out to them since the morning of the previous day, and had seen Count Bylandt carried off the field. The men in their gay uniforms and white-topped shakos began to waver, and before the head of the column immediately in their front had reached the valley below them, they fled. The exertions of their officers, frantically trying to check the rout, were of no avail. The men, some of them flinging down their arms, broke through the hedge in their rear, and retreated in the wildest confusion through the interval between Kempt’s and Pack’s brigades. Byleveld’s battery was swept back in the rush, and a great gap yawned in the Allied line.

The Dutch-Belgians were met by derisive calls from Pack’s Highlanders. Not a man in the 5th Division caught the infection of that mad panic; instead, the Scots helped the terrified foreigners to the rear with sly bayonet thrusts, while the men of Kempt’s left, until called to order by their officers, fired musketballs into the retreating mass.

In the confusion, Colonel Audley, desperately trying with a handful of others to stem the rush, came upon Lavisse, livid and cursing, laying about him with the flat of his sword. ‘That’s no use, man!’ he shouted. ‘Christ, can’t you fellows get your men together? Form them up in the rear, and bring them on again, for God’s sake! We can’t afford this gap!’

‘Damn you, do I not know?’ Lavisse gasped.

‘Och, sir, let the puir bodies gang!’ shouted a sergeant of the Gordons. ‘We dinna want furriners hired to fight for us!’

The three companies of the 95th Rifles, posted on the knoll and in the sandpit in front of Kempt’s right, were firing steadily into Bourgeois’ and Donzelot’s columns, advancing on either side of them; and two of Ross’s 9-pounders, guarding the chaussée, caused Bourgeois’ brigade to swerve away from La Haye Sainte to its right, where it was thrown against Donzelot’s division, and advanced with it in one unwieldy mass. The riflemen stood their ground until almost hemmed in by the sea of French, but were forced at last to abandon the sandpit and retreat to the main position.

Bylandt’s men had forced their way right to the rear, and although Byleveld’s troop had extricated itself from the mêlée and was in the front line again, firing into the head of the column already starting to deploy in the valley, over two thousand Dutch-Belgians had deserted from the line, leaving three thousand men of Picton’s decimated division to face the charge of thirteen thousand Frenchmen.

Picton, wasting no time in trying to bring Bylandt’s men to the front again, deployed Kempt’s brigade into an attenuated two-deep line, to fill the breach. Below, in the hollow road and the cornfields beyond it, the French columns were also trying to deploy in the constricted space afforded for such a movement. The whole valley swarmed with blue-coated infantry, struggling in the press of their own numbers to get into line. The front ranks charged up the banks of the hedge concealing the British troops, shouting and cheering, confident that the flight of the large body of troops in their front had left the field open to them through the Allied centre. Picton’s voice blared above the roar of cannon: ‘Rise up!’

The men of Kempt’s brigade, crouched behind the hedge, leaped to their feet; the French saw the bank crowned by a long line of red, overlapping their column on either side. Every musket was at the present; a volley riddled the advancing mass; and as the French recoiled momentarily under it, Picton roared: ‘Charge! Hurrah!’ and Kempt’s warriors, with the British cheer the French had learned to dread, charged with bayonets levelled.

To the east of Donzelot, Marcognet’s column was surging up the bank to where Pack’s Highlanders waited, a little drawn back from the crest. ‘Ninety-second! Everything has given way in front of you!’ Pack shouted. ‘You must charge!’

A yell of ‘Scotland ever!’ answered him. The skirl of pipes soared above the din, and the men of the Black Watch, the Royals, and the Gordons, all with the deaths of comrades to avenge, hurled themselves through the hedge at the advancing column.

In Kempt’s brigade, the Camerons, attacked by a devastating crossfire from Bourgeois’ column on their right, began to give way. Picton shouted to one of Uxbridge’s aides-de-camp: ‘Rally the Highlanders!’ The next instant he fell, shot through the right temple. Captain Seymour rode forward to obey this last command, but it was the Duke, watching the crash of the two armies from the high ground in the centre, who galloped before him into the thick of the fight, and succeeded in rallying the Camerons and the hard-pressed riflemen.

‘Stand fast, Ninety-fifth! We must not be beaten!’ he shouted. ‘What will they say in England?’

A ragged cheer answered him; he re-formed the 79th himself, and directed them to fire upon the column that had driven them back, only withdrawing out of the heat of the battle when he saw that they stood firm.

The guns on both sides had ceased fire as the French and the British troops met, but in the valley smoke lay thick, and muskets spat and crackled. The French were hampered by the size of their own columns, but although the men of Picton’s depleted division had checked their advance by the sheer ferocity of their charge, they could not hope to hold such overwhelming numbers at bay. West of the chaussée, the cuirassiers, having routed the Lüneberg battalion, re-formed under the crest of the Allied position. Ignorant of what the reverse slope of the ground concealed, they charged up the bank, straight at Ompteda’s men, hidden behind it. But the Germans had opened their ranks to permit the passage of cavalry through them. Before the cuirassiers had reached the crest, they heard the thunder of hooves above them, and the next instant the Household Brigade was upon them, led by Uxbridge himself, at the head of the 1st Life Guards.

With white crests, and horses’ manes flying, the Life Guards came up at full gallop and crashed upon the cuirassiers in flank. The earth seemed to shudder beneath the shock. The Hyde Park soldiers never drew rein, but swept the cuirassiers from the bank, and across the hollow road in the irresistible impetus of their charge. Swords rang against the cuirasses; someone yelled above the turmoil: ‘Strike at the neck!’ and the cuirassiers, already a little disorganised by their encounter with the German infantry, were flung back in fighting confusion. The Life Guards and the 1st Dragoon Guards hurled their left flank past the walls of La Haye Sainte in complete disorder, and scattered Quiot’s brigade of infantry assailing the farm. The right flank of the cuirassiers swerved sharply to the east, and plunged down on to the chaussée to escape from the fury of six-foot men on huge horses, who seemed to have no idea of charging at anything slower than a full gallop. Not more than half their number had crossed the chaussée to the valley where Donzelot was driving his congested ranks against Kempt’s brigade, when the rest of the Household Cavalry, coming up on the left of the Life Guards, fell upon them in hard-riding squadrons, and crumpled them up. The abattis, so painstakingly built up by the riflemen, was scattered in an instant; the cuirassiers were cut down in hundreds, and the Dragoon Guards rode over them to charge full tilt into the column of French infantry pressing Kempt’s men back.

At the same moment, an aide-de-camp rode up from the rear to the hedge beyond which Pack’s Highlanders were fighting fiercely with the men of Marcognet’s division. For one moment he stood there, closely observing the state of the battle raging in the valley; then he took off his cocked hat and waved it forwards.

There was yell of: ‘Now then, Scots Greys!’ and the next instant the whole of the Union Brigade came thundering up the reverse slope. The French, disordered through their inability to deploy their enormous column before the Highlanders charged them, appalled hardly more by the fury of the kilted devils who rushed on them than by the unearthly music of the pipes playing Scots, Wha’ Hae in the hell of blood and smoke and clashing arms that filled the valley, heard the cavalry thundering towards them, and looked up to see great grey horses clearing the hedge above them.