would be an invincible infantry assault, as large an attack as any of the Napoleonic Wars. D’Erlon’s corps numbered around 16,000 men, over a quarter of Napoleon’s entire army at Waterloo; a tremendous force to launch at the centre-left of the Anglo-Allied line. Had it broken through there can be little doubt that Napoleon would have won the day, since with the forest at his back Wellington would have had no room to manoeuvre his army together as a single unit again. Halting and reversing the mass of men as they marched towards Wellington’s line, their drums beating and flags flying, was therefore of the utmost importance.
The uneven ground which the corps had to traverse, about 1,300 yards of it, moreover in places allowed some cover to the French troops. To walk the ground of d’Erlon’s advance today takes some fifteen to twenty minutes, even without the six-foot-high corn and the mud underfoot that slowed his troops then. In 1815 it must have taken just as long, if not longer, an excruciating time to advance under cannon-fire.
There is still much debate among historians as to the exact formation that d’Erlon chose for his four divisions to press home the attack. It has given rise to the accusation that the French commanders, by choosing a column rather than a line formation, were myopic and clumsy. This cannot necessarily be levelled at Napoleon himself, who could not be expected to have attended to such a detail in person, so much as at Ney as the battlefield commander and d’Erlon as the corps commander, and possibly also the four divisional commanders — Donzelot, Quiot, Marcognet and Durutte. D’Erlon’s corps was protected by cavalry on both its flanks, but the problem would come from the centre.
It appears from the account we have from one of the captains who took part in the assault, a veteran named Duthilt, that the divisions attacked not in single columns but divisional columns formed up in battalions of three ranks each with 130 or so men in each, eight groups of three ranks each per division. A new and unfamiliar formation, it would doubtless have been greatly distorted during the march forward, but it was probably better in terms of firepower than the formations so often turned back in the Peninsular War, in which d’Erlon, Ney, Soult and several of the divisional commanders had all fought. Yet it is not by any means certain that this was in fact the formation adopted.
Eighty years ago, the historian Captain A.F. Becke put forward the intriguing theory that an order was garbled from ‘
D’Erlon managed some initial successes: Durutte succeeded in capturing the hamlet of Papelotte, and Donzelot diverted a brigade of his division to try to seize La Haye Sainte from the King’s German Legion, taking its garden and orchard. A German infantry battalion that was sent to support Major Georg Baring in that very isolated position was badly cut up by a cuirassiers brigade on d’Erlon’s left flank. If Donzelot had been supported by enough artillery to blow a breach in the wall of La Haye Sainte, or to set the place on fire, it might have been disastrous for Wellington’s centre at that still early stage of the battle, but this basic act of forethought had not been carried out, as with so many others in the area of inter-arm communication on the French side.
One of the Frenchmen marching towards the British lines in d’Erlon’s corps was Captain Duthilt, who had fought since the Revolutionary Wars and therefore had twenty-two years’ experience of leading men in battle. He was concerned about several factors in the attack, massive though it was. The strength of Wellington’s defences, the muddiness underfoot, the strange formation chosen for the corps by the generals, and the way in which the men’s zealotry had been built up too early, all left him worried.2 ‘This rush and enthusiasm were becoming too disastrous,’ the veteran recorded in his memoirs, admittedly with hindsight, ‘in that the soldier still had a long march to make before meeting the enemy, and was soon tired out by the difficulty of manoeuvring on this heavy churned up soil, which ripped off gaiter straps and even lost shoes … there was soon disorder in the ranks, above all as the head of the column came within range of enemy fire.’3
D’Erlon’s men must be given credit for reaching the very crest of the slope on the Anglo-Allied left-centre, despite the heavy and accurate fire they were soaking up as they marched up the low ridge. To make matters worse for them there was a thick, six-foot-high hedge at the top, but in places they passed both that and the sunken road behind. When they reached von Bijlandt’s Dutch-Belgian brigade it broke and ran, fleeing past Major- General Sir Thomas Picton’s 5th Division. Although the brigade has occasionally been excoriated for cowardice, it ought to be recalled that it had been badly mauled at Quatre Bras, was therefore severely under-strength, had already withstood ninety minutes’ cannonading at short range, and above all was not made up of men whose hearts were in the fight politically, ideologically or racially. If d’Erlon had been capable of consolidating his position on the crest of the ridge he could have turned Wellington’s flank. A crisis of the battle was at hand.
D’Erlon also had the satisfaction of forcing some companies of the 95th Rifle Brigade — whose firepower was far more accurate over far longer distances owing to its employment of Baker rifles rather than muskets — out of the Sandpit to join the rest of their battalion behind the Wavre road. (It is an interesting fact of the Napoleonic Wars that other than the rifling of gun-barrels — which was in its infancy and which had the disadvantage of making reloading slower — there had been hardly any technological advance in firearms since the campaigns of Marlborough. The Brown Bess musket had been introduced in 1745, and a
Picton himself was killed almost immediately afterwards, shot through the right temple with the words ‘Charge! Charge! Hurrah!’on his lips, as the brigades of Donzelot and Quiot clashed with Kempt’s, Marcognet’s with Pack’s, and Durutte attempted to deal with the Hanoverians.4 (It was only after Picton’s body was laid out at Brussels the day after the battle that it was discovered that he had received a severe contusion at Quatre Bras on 16 June that he had kept secret.)
‘Ninety-second, everything has given way on your right and left and you must charge this column!’ cried Pack. With cheers the 92nd Regiment — which had been reduced to only 220 men — responded to the call. The fixing of the bayonet is the work of a moment, and as one British officer recalled, ‘When the Scots Greys charged past the flanks of the 92nd, both regiments cheered, and joined in the heart-touching cry of “Scotland forever!’” For it was at this key psychological moment, when d’Erlon’s advance had seemed to lose its momentum, that Lord Uxbridge ordered a mass cavalry attack upon it.
Uxbridge had had a difficult relationship with Wellington ever since he had run away with Wellington’s sister- in-law (whom he did at least subsequently marry). Wellington nevertheless appreciated his abilities and appointed him to command the cavalry in the Waterloo campaign, albeit with the joke to another officer: ‘I’ll take good care he doesn’t run away with me!’5 Uxbridge had served with distinction under Sir John Moore in the Peninsula, but had to give up the command of the cavalry when Wellington arrived there. This was to be the first time the two men had served together since the scandal. Apart from Wellington’s refusal to discuss his plans for the battle with his second-in-command, merely letting drop a few semi-sarcastic remarks, they got on well enough.
Wellington had been harsh about the cavalry arm in the Peninsula, once accusing it of ‘galloping at everything’ without proper thought to the consequences, and the charge of the Union and Household Brigades at Waterloo also gave him opportunity for criticism. At the moment of the initial attack on d’Erlon, however, Uxbridge’s action met with superb success as it charged through gaps in the hedge and around it to fall upon the French infantry.
The French cavalry protecting d’Erlon’s corps on its left flank were swept away by the Household Brigade. Now, totally exposed and caught by surprise, d’Erlon’s corps reeled from the combined onslaught of Picton’s division, Major-General Sir William Ponsonby’s Union Brigade (Royals, Scots Greys and Inniskillings dragoons) and,
