An Infamous Army (Alastair-Audley Tetralogy 4)

Vandeleur had come up from the left flank with his brigade of light dragoons, and, passing behind Vivian, had formed his squadrons more to the right, immediately in rear of Count D’Aubremé’s Dutch-Belgian line battalions, brought up from Vieux Foriez to fill a gap on the right centre. Here they were exposed to a galling fire, but D’Aubremé’s men in their front were weakening, and to have withdrawn out of range of the guns would have left the road open to the Dutch-Belgians for retreat. They closed their squadron intervals, and Vivian had done, to prevent the infantry passing through to the rear, and stood their ground, while Vandeleur, with some of his senior officers, bullied and persuaded the Dutch-Belgians into forming their front again.

At seven o’clock things looked very serious along the Allied front. To the west, only some Prussian cavalry had arrived to guard the left flank; Papelotte and the farm of Ter La Haye were held by Durutte, whose skirmishers stretched to the crest of the Allied position; the gunners and the tirailleurs at La Haye Sainte were raking the centre with their fire; and although twelve thousand men of Reille’s Corps d’Armée had failed all day to dislodge twelve hundred British Guards from the ruins of Hougoumont, all along the Allied line the front was broken, and in some places utterly disorganised.

The Duke remained calm, but kept looking at his watch. Once he said: ‘It’s night, or Blücher,’ but for the most part he was silent. An aide-de-camp rode up to him with a message from his general that his men were being mowed down by the artillery fire, and must be reinforced. ‘It is impossible,’ he replied. ‘Will they stand?’

‘Yes, my lord, till they perish!’

‘Then tell them that I will stand with them, till the last man.’

Turmoil and confusion, made worse by the smoke that hung heavily over the centre, and the débris that littered the ground from end to end of the line, seemed to reign everywhere. Staff officers, carrying messages to brigades, asked mechanically: ‘Who commands here?’ The Prince of Orange had been taken away by March; three generals had been killed; five others carried off the field, too badly wounded to remain; the adjutant-general and the quartermaster-general had both had to retire. Of the Duke’s personal staff, Canning was dead; Gordon dying in the inn at Waterloo; and Lord Fitzroy, struck in the right arm while standing with his horse almost touching the Duke’s, had left the field in Alava’s care. Those that were left had passed beyond feeling. It was no longer a matter for surprise or grief to hear of a friend’s death: the only surprise was to find anyone still left alive on that reeking plain. Horse after horse had been shot under them; sooner or later they would probably join the ranks of the slain: meanwhile, there were still orders to carry, and they forced their exhausted mounts through the carnage, indifferent to the heaps of fallen red-coats sprawling under their feet, themselves numb with fatigue, their minds focused upon one object only: to get the messages they carried through to their destinations.

Just before seven o’clock, a deserting colonel of cuirassiers came galloping up to the 52nd Regiment, shouting: ‘Vive le Roi!’ He reached Sir John Colborne, and gasped out: ‘Napoléon est là avec les Gardes! Voilà l’attaque qui se fait!’

The warning was unnecessary, for it had been apparent for some minutes that the French were mustering for a grand attack all along the front. D’Erlon’s corps was already assailing with a swarm of skirmishers the decimated line of Picton’s 5th Division; and to the west of La Haye Sainte, on the undulating plain facing the Allied right, the Imperial Middle Guard was forming in five massive columns.

Colonel Audley was sent on his last errand just after seven. He was mounted on a trooper, and the strained and twisted strapping round his thigh was soaked with blood. He was almost unrecognizable for the smoke that had blackened his face, and was feeling oddly light-headed from the loss of blood he had suffered. He was also very tired, for he had been in the saddle almost continually since the night of June 15th. His mind, ordinarily sensitive to impression, accepted without revulsion the message of his eyes. Death and mutilation had become so common that he who loved horses could look with indifference upon a poor brute with the lower half of its head blown away, or a trooper, with its forelegs shot off at the knees, raising itself on its stumps, and neighing its sad appeal for help. He had seen a friend die in agony, and had wept over him, but all that was long past. He no longer ducked when he heard the shots singing past his head; when his trooper shied away, snorting in terror, from a bursting shell, he cursed it. But there was no sense in courting death unnecessarily; he struck northwards, and rode by all that was left of the two heavy brigades, drawn back since the arrival of Vivian and Vandeleur some three hundred paces behind the front line. An officer in the rags of a Life Guardsman’s uniform, his helmet gone, and a blood-stained bandage tied round his head, rode forward, and hailed him.

‘Audley! Audley!’

He recognised Lord George Alastair under a mask of mud, and sweat, and bloodstains, and drew rein. ‘Hallo!’ he said. ‘So you’re alive still?’

‘Oh, I’m well enough! Do you know how it has gone with Harry?’

‘Dead,’ replied the Colonel.

George’s eyelids flickered; under the dirt and the blood his face whitened. ‘Thanks. That’s all I wanted to know. You saw him?’

‘Hours ago. He was dying then, in one of Maitland’s squares. He sent you his love.’

George saluted, wheeled his horse, and rode back to his squadron.

The Colonel pushed on to the chaussée. His horse slithered clumsily down the bank on to it; he held it together, and rode across the pavé to the opposite bank and scrambled up, emerging upon the desolation of the slope behind Picton’s division. He urged the trooper to a ponderous gallop towards the rear of Best’s brigade. A handful of Dutch-Belgians were formed in second line; he supposed them to be some of Count Bylandt’s men, but paid little heed to them, wheeling round their right flank, and plunging once more into the region of shot and shell bursts.

He neither saw nor heard the shell that struck him. His horse came crashing down; he was conscious of having been hit; blood was streaming down his left arm, which lay useless on the ground beside him, but there was as yet no feeling in the shattered elbow-joint. His left side hurt him a little; he moved his right hand to it, and found his coat torn, and his shirt sticky with blood. He supposed vaguely that since he seemed to be alive this must be only a flesh wound. He desired nothing better than to lie where he had fallen, but he mastered himself, for he had a message to deliver, and struggled to his knees.

The sound of horse’s hooves galloping towards him made him lift his head. An adjutant in the blue uniform and orange facings of the 5th National Militia dismounted beside him, and said in English: ‘Adjutant to Count Bylandt, sir! I’m directed by General Perponcher to—Parbleu! it is you, then!’

Colonel Audley looked up into a handsome, dark face bent over him, and said weakly: ‘Hallo, Lavisse! Get me a horse, there’s a good fellow!’

‘A horse!’ exclaimed Lavisse, going down on one knee, and supporting the Colonel in his arms. ‘You need a surgeon, my friend! Be tranquil: my General sends to bear you off the field.’ He gave a bitter laugh, and added: ‘That is what my brigade exists for—to succour you English wounded!’

‘Did you succeed in rallying your fellows?’ asked the Colonel.

‘Some, not all. Do not disturb yourself, my rival! You have all the honours of this day’s encounter. My honour is in the dust!’

‘Oh, don’t talk such damned theatrical rubbish!’ said the Colonel irritably. He fumbled with his right hand in his sash, and drew forth a folded and crumpled message. ‘This has to go to General Best. See that it gets to him, will you?—or, if he’s been killed, to his next in command.’

A couple of orderlies and a doctor had come up from the rear. Lavisse gave the Colonel into their charge, and said with a twisted smile: ‘You trust your precious message to me, my Colonel?’

‘Be a good fellow, and don’t waste time talking about it!’ begged the Colonel.

He was carried off the field as the attack upon the whole Allied line began. On the left, Ziethen’s advance guard had reached Smohain, and the Prussian batteries were in action, firing into Durutte’s skirmishers; while somewhere to the south-east Bülow’s guns could be heard assailing the French right flank. Allix and all that was left of Marcognet’s division once more attacked the Allied left; Donzelot led his men against Ompteda’s and Kielmansegg’s depleted ranks, while the Imperial Guard of Grenadiers and Chasseurs moved up in five columns at rather narrow deploying intervals, in echelon, crossing the undulating plain diagonally from the chaussée to the Nivelles road. Each column showed a front of about seventy men, and in each of the intervals between the battalions two guns were placed. In all, some four thousand five hundred men were advancing upon the Allied right, led by Ney, le Brave des Braves, at the head of the leading battalion.

The sun, which all day had been trying to penetrate the clouds, broke through as the attack commenced. Its setting rays bathed the columns of the Imperial Guard in a fiery radiance. Rank upon rank of veterans who had borne the Eagles victorious through a dozen fights advanced to the beat of drums, with bayonets turned to blood-red by the sun’s last glow, across the plain into the smoke and heat of the battle.

Owing to their diagonal approach the columns did not come into action simultaneously. Before the battalions marching upon the British Guards had reached the slope leading to the crest of the Allied position, Ney’s leading column had struck at Halkett’s brigade and the Brunswickers on his left flank.

Over this part of the line the smoke caused by the guns firing from La Haye Sainte lay so thick that the Allied troops heard but could not see the formidable advance upon them. Colin Halkett had fallen, wounded in the mouth, rallying his men round one of the Colours; two of his regiments were operating as one battalion, so heavy had been their losses; and these were thrown into some confusion by their own light troops retreating upon them. Men were carried off their feet in the surge to the rear; the Colonel, on whom the command of the brigade had devolved, seemed distracted, saying repeatedly: ‘What am I to do? What would you do?’ to the staff officer sent by the Duke to ‘See what is wrong there!’ The men of the 33rd, fighting against the tide that was sweeping them back, re-formed, and came on, shouting: ‘Give them the cold steel, lads! Let ’em have the Brummagum!’ A volley was poured in before which the deploying columns recoiled; to the left, the Brunswickers, rallied once more by the Duke himself, followed suit, and the Imperial Guard fell back, carrying with it a part of Donzelot’s division.