A Close Run Thing

PART THREE. AFTERMATH

Were you at Waterloo?

I have been at Waterloo.

’Tis no matter what you do

If you were at Waterloo!

Popular ditty

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.THE AUDIT OF WAR

Before Dawn, 19 June

At his headquarters, the inn on the Brussels chaussee at the village of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington slept. He had returned after dark, eaten some supper with those of his staff who had survived, and then sat down to write his dispatch to the prince regent. When he had finished, he had instructed the headquarters physician, Dr Hume, to bring him the casualty list at first light so that he might attach it. One of his ADCs, Sir Alexander Gordon, had lain mortally wounded in the duke’s camp-bed, so he had, instead, lain down in an adjacent room, wrapped in his cloak. Hume crept in silently and placed the list by the sleeping commander-in-chief. When he returned after daybreak he found the duke up, studying it intently. His face was still grimy from the previous day, and there were traces of tears.

On the other side of the battlefield, Hervey, wrapped also in a cloak, slept, too. And death, in the shape of a comrade, was likewise but a few feet away. Johnson roused him as late as he dared before the squadrons paraded for stand-to.

‘Are there no orders for the pursuit?’ he asked as he took the canteen of coffee (the beans were Johnson’s sole find in the inn’s cellars).

There were none. And RSM Lincoln had disquieting news: there had been no contact during the night with Sir Hussey Vivian or his staff.

‘Very well, then, RSM,’ said Hervey resolutely as he rose (stiffly), ‘We must stand-to with extra vigilance lest there has been some unaccountable reverse since last light.’

‘Shall I detail parties to search for our wounded, sir?’

Most of their losses had been on the ridge at Mont St-Jean: they would surely by now have been recovered. ‘No, Mr Lincoln,’ he concluded, ‘I cannot spare even a dozen. We must trust to the medical services.’ Had he but known that these were already overwhelmed, that the wounded were yet lying on the ridge — and that some would do so another night — he might have dispensed with all caution and taken the whole regiment back to scour for their fallen. ‘Ask the RM to get the squadrons collecting loose horses, if you please, but not to venture beyond carbine-range: we shall need all the prize money we can lay in for widows’ pensions.’ The RSM saluted and made to leave, but Hervey had one more concern. ‘Is Corporal Sandbache fit, Mr Lincoln?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he replied dubiously.

‘Then, I wish him to read the burial service over Serjeant Strange; he is a preacher, is he not?’

Hervey made his rounds in silence, except for the briefest word here and there to warn for an outlying picket, and he held the squadrons a full quarter-hour beyond first light, for without knowledge of who else was about he would not risk an encounter with stragglers. There was a mood of numb relief about the Sixth. All they wanted to do was get away from this place, for never before had they halted where they fought, so that the sights, the sounds and the smell of the battlefield had remained with them as they lay, recruits and older hands alike unnerved by the strangeness of it. All night long there had been moaning and shouts for help. Those of the regiment who had not been called for duty, and who had slept soundly, had indeed been fortunate. Those who had stood sentinel would tell of the moaning, the cries, the screams, and the ghoulish sights which the moon had shone upon. They had seen men sitting clutching at a stomach ripped open by a sabre slash or a piece of shrapnel, one by one succumbing to death as their life-blood drained away. Others, less dreadfully injured, or possessed of some last strength, had risen and staggered off into the darkness, only to fall down again after a few steps. There were horses, too, that suffered no less, and claimed more pity by their helplessness. Some still lay with their entrails hanging out (and yet some of these would live), attempting to rise from time to time, only to fall back again in the manner of their fellow, human sufferers. And then, all strength spent, their eyes would close gently, there would be one last convulsive struggle, and their suffering would be at an end. All this as close, in places, as a dozen yards. Yet few, even the usual Samaritans, had dared to venture out of the lines that night, for there were too many roaming the field intent on evil business, and shots had punctuated the small hours as the wounded who tried to resist the looters were sent to join the dead.

He walked through the lines of tethered troop-horses, casting an eye over each to gauge their condition, and exchanging a word here and there with a dragoon who felt the need of something to say. It amounted to little, however, since the exhilaration of the gunfire and stirrup-charges had passed, and the reality — thinned ranks and lost comrades — was grimly apparent in the daylight. As he neared the inlying picket-post the corporal (the ubiquitous Collins) rousted its troopers for a salute. ‘Picket! Commanding officer approaching. Pree-sent … arms!’

Hervey glowered at him, but Collins returned the look with defiant pride. As far as he was concerned Hervey was commanding officer irrespective of rank: arms would be presented, not a mere butt-salute.

He left the bivouac and crossed the rutted road to see the ground over which they had fought with such resolve. Smoke still drifted in places, but to his left and right he saw clearly the shattered remains of Bonaparte’s folly. Where, the day before, there had been magnificence — proud cuirassiers, fine horses, burnished guns, fluttering lance-pennants, the bearskins of the Garde, eagles, tricolours, and everywhere ‘Vive l’empereur’ — there was now only desolation. Even the silence was melancholy. No wind, no rain — not even the skylark was tempted to song. Here and there a single shot rang out as a horse, too badly injured to be worth hobbling with to the meat-market, was put out of its protracted misery. And long, chilling screams, ending as abruptly as they had begun, reminded him that death, were it to come, were best to come quickly in his profession.

In the distance the sight was no less doleful, for on the slopes of the ridge at Mont St-Jean — the sea wall against which the French-blue waves had battered all day — was the red of Wellington’s dauntless infantry. But they lay in lines rather than standing upright in squares. Was there so great a difference ‘twixt a battle lost and this?

‘De l’eau, monsieur — pour l’amour de Dieu, de l’eau,’ cried one of Bonaparte’s gunners, propped up against a limber wheel. His pipeclayed-white breeches were blood-darkened from the oozings of the slash across his chest — a slash which one of the Sixth’s own troopers must have made. Hervey stooped to pick up a water-canteen from a gunner who no longer had need of it, and put it to the man’s lips. The water trickled down his tunic, for he had not the strength to swallow, and he slumped to one side, eyes open in a look of bewilderment — yet stone-dead. Hervey closed them with his thumbs. ‘Into thy hands O Lord …,’ he murmured.

He opened a pocket of the man’s tunic to see who this soldier of France might be. Gaspard Juvenal, said his papers, from Saintes in the Charente-Maritime — a provincial Frenchman whose blood had flowed into foreign soil. Had he served these guns in the Peninsula? Had they met before in battle? Or had Gaspard Juvenal ventured even further from the Gironde, perhaps to Muscovy, and seen the basilicas of the tsar’s capital?

‘That ’un dead an’ all, sir?’ called an orderly, examining each body in what remained of the battery.