"Let us think of them that sleepFull many a fathom deepBy thy wild and stormy deep,Elsinore!"—CAMPBELL.
"I have been in a hundred and five engagements, but that of to-day is the most terrible of them all." This was how Nelson himself summed up the great fight off Copenhagen, or the battle of the Baltic as it is sometimes called, fought on April 2, 1801. It was a battle betwixt Britons and Danes. The men who fought under the blood-red flag of Great Britain, and under the split flag of Denmark with its white cross, were alike the descendants of the Vikings. The blood of the old sea-rovers ran hot and fierce in their veins. Nelson, with the glories of the Nile still ringing about his name, commanded the British fleet, and the fire of his eager and gallant spirit ran from ship to ship like so many volts of electricity. But the Danes fought in sight of their capital, under the eyes of their wives and children. It is not strange that through the four hours during which the thunder of the great battle rolled over the roofs of Copenhagen and up the narrow waters of the Sound, human valour and endurance in both fleets were at their very highest.
Less than sixty years afterwards "thunders of fort and fleet" along all the shores of England were welcoming a daughter of the Danish throne as
"Bride of the heir of the kings of the sea."
And Tennyson, speaking for every Briton, assured the Danish girl who was to be their future Queen—
"We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee."
What was it in 1801 which sent a British fleet on an errand of battle to Copenhagen?
It was a tiny episode of the long and stern drama of the Napoleonic wars. Great Britain was supreme on the sea, Napoleon on the land, and, in his own words, Napoleon conceived the idea of "conquering the sea by the land." Paul I. of Russia, a semi-lunatic, became Napoleon's ally and tool. Paul was able to put overwhelming pressure on Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia, and these Powers were federated as the "League of Armed Neutrality," with the avowed purpose of challenging the marine supremacy of Great Britain. Paul seized all British ships in Russian ports; Prussia marched troops into Hanover; every port from the North Cape to Gibraltar was shut against the British flag. Britain, stood alone, practically threatened with a naval combination of all the Northern Powers, while behind the combination stood Napoleon, the subtlest brain and most imperious will ever devoted to the service of war. Napoleon's master passion, it should be remembered, was the desire to overthrow Great Britain, and he held in the palm of his hand the whole military strength of the Continent. The fleets of France and Spain were crushed or blockaded: but the three Northern Powers could have put into battle-line a fleet of fifty great ships and twenty-five frigates. With this force they could raise the blockade of the French ports, sweep triumphant through the narrow seas, and land a French army in Kent or in Ulster.
Pitt was Prime Minister, and his masterful intellect controlled British policy. He determined that the fleets of Denmark and of Russia should not become a weapon in the hand of Napoleon against England; and a fleet of eighteen ships of the line, with frigates and bomb-vessels, was despatched to reason, from the iron lips of their guns, with the misguided Danish Government. Sir Hyde Parker, a decent, unenterprising veteran, was commander-in-chief by virtue of seniority; but Nelson, with the nominal rank of second in command, was the brain and soul of the expedition. "Almost all the safety and certainly all the honour of England," he said to his chief, "is more entrusted to you than ever yet fell to the lot of a British officer." And all through the story of the expedition it is amusing to notice the fashion in which Nelson's fiery nature strove to kindle poor Sir Hyde Barker's sluggish temper to its own flame.
The fleet sailed from Yarmouth on March 12, and fought its way through fierce spring gales to the entrance of the Kattegat. The wind was fair; Nelson was eager to sweep down on Copenhagen with the whole fleet, and negotiate with the whole skyline of Copenhagen crowded with British topsails. "While the negotiation is going on," he said, "the Dane should see our flag waving every time he lifts up his head." Time was worth more than gold; it was worth brave men's lives. The Danes were toiling day and night to prepare the defence of their capital. But prim Sir Hyde anchored, and sent up a single frigate with his ultimatum, and it was not until March 30 that the British fleet, a long line of stately vessels, came sailing up the Sound, passed Elsinore, and cast anchor fifteen miles from Copenhagen. Nothing could surpass the gallant energy shown by the Danes in their preparation for defence, and Nature had done much to make the city impregnable from the sea.
The Battle of the Baltic, April 2nd, 1801. From Brenton's Naval History.[Illustration: The Battle of the Baltic, April 2nd, 1801.From Brenton's Naval History.]
The Battle of the Baltic, April 2nd, 1801. From Brenton's Naval History.[Illustration: The Battle of the Baltic, April 2nd, 1801.From Brenton's Naval History.]
The Sound is narrow and shallow, a mere tangle of shoals wrinkled with twisted channels and scoured by the swift tides. King's Channel runs straight up towards the city, but a huge sandbank, like the point of a toe, splits the channel into two just as it reaches the harbour. The western edge runs up, pocket-shaped, into the city, and forms the actual port; the main channel contracts, swings round to the south-east, and forms a narrow passage between the shallows in front of the city and a huge shoal called the Middle Ground. A cluster of grim and heavily armed fortifications called the Three-Crown Batteries guarded the entrance to the harbour, and looked right up King's Channel; a stretch of floating batteries and line-of-battle ships, a mile and a half in extent, ran from the Three-Crown Batteries along the edge of the shoals in front of the city, with some heavy pile batteries at its termination. The direct approach up King's Channel, together with the narrow passage between the city and the Middle Ground, were thus commanded by the fire of over 600 heavy guns. The Danes had removed the buoys that marked all the channels, the British had no charts, and only the most daring and skilful seamanship could bring the great ships of the British fleet through that treacherous tangle of shoals to the Danish front. As a matter of fact, the heavier ships in the British fleet never attempted to join in the desperate fight which was waged, but hung as mere spectators in the offing.
Meanwhile popular enthusiasm in the Danish capital was at fever-point. Ten thousand disciplined troops manned the batteries; but peasants from the farms, workmen from the factories, merchants from the city, hastened to volunteer, and worked day and night at gun-drill. A thousand students from the university enrolled themselves, and drilled from morning till night. These student-soldiers had probably the best military band ever known; it consisted of the entire orchestra of the Theatre Royal, all volunteers. A Danish officer, sent on some message under a flag of truce to the British fleet, was required to put his message in writing, and was offered a somewhat damaged pen for that purpose. He threw it down with a laugh, saying that "if the British guns were not better pointed than their pens they wouldn't make much impression on Copenhagen." That flash of gallant wit marked the temper of the Danes. They were on flame with confident daring.
Nelson, always keen for a daring policy, had undertaken to attack the Danish defences with a squadron of twelve seventy-fours, and the frigates and bomb-vessels of the fleet. He determined to shun the open way of King's Channel, grope through the uncertain passage called the Dutch Deep, at the back of the Middle Ground, and forcing his way up the narrow channel in front of the shallows, repeat on the anchored batteries and battleships of the Danes the exploit of the Nile. He spent the nights of March 30 and 31 sounding the channel, being himself, in spite of fog and ice, in the boat nearly the whole of these two bitter nights. On April 1 the fleet came slowly up the Dutch Deep, and dropped anchor at night about two miles from the southern extremity of the Danish line. At eleven o'clock that night, Hardy—in whose arms Nelson afterwards died on board theVictory—pushed off from the flagship in a small boat and sounded the channel in front of the Danish floating batteries. So daring was he that he actually sounded round the leading ship of the Danish line, using a pole to avoid being detected.
In the morning the wind blew fair for the channel. Nelson's plans had been elaborated to their minutest details, and the pilots of the fleet were summoned at nine o'clock to the flagship to receive their last instructions. But their nerve failed them. They were simply the mates or masters of Baltic traders turned for the moment into naval pilots. They had no charts. They were accustomed to handle ships of 200 or 300 tons burden, and the task of steering the great British seventy-fours through the labyrinths of shallows, with the tide running like a mill-race, appalled them. At last Murray, in theEdgar, undertook to lead. The signal was made to weigh in succession, and one great ship after another, with its topsails on the caps, rounded the shoulder of the Middle Ground, and in stately procession, theEdgarleading, came up the channel. Campbell in his fine ballad has pictured the scene:—
"Like leviathans afloatLay their bulwarks on the brine,While the sign of battle flewOn the lofty British line.It was ten of April morn by the chime;As they drifted on their pathThere was silence deep as death,And the boldest held his breathFor a time.But the might of England flushedTo anticipate the scene,And her van the fleeter rushedO'er the deadly space between."
The leading Danish ships broke into a tempest of fire as the British ships came within range. TheAgamemnonfailed to weather the shoulder of the Middle Ground, and went ignobly ashore, and the scour of the tide kept her fast there, in spite of the most desperate exertions of her crew. TheBellona, a pile of white canvas above, a double line of curving batteries below, hugged the Middle Ground too closely, and grounded too; and theRussell, following close after her, went ashore in the same manner, with its jib-boom almost touching theBellona'staffrail. One-fourth of Nelson's force was thus practically out of the fight before a British gun was fired. These were the ships, too, intended to sail past the whole Danish line and engage the Three-Crown Batteries. As they werehors de combat, the frigates of the squadron, under Riou—"the gallant, good Riou" of Campbell's noble lines—had to take the place of the seventy-fours.
Meanwhile, Nelson, in theElephant, came following hard on the ill-fatedRussell. Nelson's orders were that each ship should pass her leader on the starboard side, and had he acted on his own orders, Nelson too would have grounded, with every ship that followed him. The interval betwixt each ship was so narrow that decision had to be instant; and Nelson, judging the water to the larboard of theRussellto be deeper, put his helm a-starboard, and so shot past theRussellon its larboard beam into the true channel, the whole line following his example. That sudden whirl to starboard of the flagship's helm—a flash of brilliant seamanship—saved the battle.
Ship after ship shot past, and anchored, by a cable astern, in its assigned position. The sullen thunder of the guns rolled from end to end of the long line, the flash of the artillery ran in a dance of flame along the mile and a half of batteries, and some 2000 pieces of artillery, most of them of the heaviest calibre, filled the long Sound with the roar of battle. Nelson loved close fighting, and he anchored within a cable's length of the Danish flagship, the pilots refusing to carry the ship nearer on account of the shallow depth, and the average distance of the hostile lines was less than a hundred fathoms. The cannonade raged, deep-voiced, unbroken, and terrible, for three hours. "Warm work," said Nelson, as it seemed to deepen in fury and volume, "but, mark you, I would not be elsewhere for thousands." The carnage was terrific. Twice the Danish flagship took fire, and out of a crew of 336 no fewer than 270 were dead or wounded. Two of the Danish prams drifted from the line, mere wrecks, with cordage in rags, bulwarks riddled, guns dismounted, and decks veritable shambles.
The battle, it must be remembered, raged within easy sight of the city, and roofs and church towers were crowded with spectators. They could see nothing but a low-lying continent of whirling smoke, shaken with the tumult of battle, and scored perpetually, in crimson bars, with the flame of the guns. Above the drifting smoke towered the tops of the British seventy-fours, stately and threatening. The south-east wind presently drove the smoke over the city, and beneath that inky roof, as under the gloom of an eclipse, the crowds of Copenhagen, white-faced with excitement, watched the Homeric fight, in which their sons, and brothers, and husbands were perishing.
Nothing could surpass the courage of the Danes. Fresh crews marched fiercely to the floating batteries as these threatened to grow silent by mere slaughter, and, on decks crimson and slippery with the blood of their predecessors, took up the fight. Again and again, after a Danish ship had struck from mere exhaustion, it was manned afresh from the shore, and the fight renewed. The very youngest officer in the Danish navy was a lad of seventeen named Villemoes. He commanded a tiny floating battery of six guns, manned by twenty-four men, and he managed to bring it under the very counter of Nelson's flagship, and fired his guns point-blank into its huge wooden sides. He stuck to his work until the British marines shot down every man of his tiny crew except four. After the battle Nelson begged that young Villemoes might be introduced to him, and told the Danish Crown Prince that a boy so gallant ought to be made an admiral. "If I were to make all my brave officers admirals," was the reply, "I should have no captains or lieutenants left."
The terrific nature of the British fire, as well as the stubbornness of Danish courage, may be judged from the fact that most of the prizes taken in the fight were so absolutely riddled with shot as to have to be destroyed. Foley, who led the van at the battle of the Nile, was Nelson's flag-captain in theElephant, and he declared he burned fifty more barrels of powder in the four hours' furious cannonade at Copenhagen than he did during the long night struggle at the Nile! The fire of the Danes, it may be added, was almost as obstinate and deadly. TheMonarch, for example, had no fewer than 210 of its crew lying dead or wounded on its decks. At one o'clock Sir Hyde Parker, who was watching the struggle with a squadron of eight of his heaviest ships from the offing, hoisted a signal to discontinue the engagement. Then came the incident which every boy remembers.
The signal-lieutenant of theElephantreported that the admiral had thrown out No. 39, the signal to discontinue the fight. Nelson was pacing his quarterdeck fiercely, and took no notice of the report. The signal-officer met him at the next turn, and asked if he should repeat the signal. Nelson's reply was to ask if his own signal for close action was still hoisted. "Yes," said the officer. "Mind you keep it so," said Nelson. Nelson continued to tramp his quarter-deck, the thunder of the battle all about him, his ship reeling to the recoil of its own guns. The stump of his lost arm jerked angrily to and fro, a sure sign of excitement with him. "Leave off action!" he said to his lieutenant; "I'm hanged if I do." "You know, Foley," he said, turning to his captain, "I've only one eye; I've a right to be blind sometimes." And then putting the glass to his blind eye, he exclaimed, "I really do not see the signal!" He dismissed the incident by saying, "D—— the signal! Keep mine for closer action flying!"
As a matter of fact, Parker had hoisted the signal only to give Nelson the opportunity for withdrawing from the fight if he wished. The signal had one disastrous result—the little cluster of frigates and sloops engaged with the Three-Crown Batteries obeyed it and hauled off. As the Amazon, Riou's ship, ceased to fire, the smoke lifted, and the Danish battery got her in full sight, and smote her with deadly effect. Riou himself, heartbroken with having to abandon the fight, had just exclaimed, "What will Nelson think of us!" when a chain-shot cut him in two, and with him a sailor with something of Nelson's own genius for battle perished.
By two o'clock the Danish fire began to slack. One-half the line was a mere chain of wrecks; some of the floating batteries had sunk; the flagship was a mass of flames. Nelson at this point sent his boat ashore with a flag of truce, and a letter to the Prince Regent. The letter was addressed, "To the Danes, the brothers of Englishmen." If the fire continued from the Danish side, Nelson said he would be compelled to set on fire all the floating batteries he had taken, "without being able to save the brave Danes who had defended them." Somebody offered Nelson, when he had written the letter, a wafer with which to close it. "This," said Nelson, "is no time to appear hurried or informal," and he insisted on the letter being carefully sealed with wax. The Crown Prince proposed an armistice. Nelson, with great shrewdness, referred the proposal to his admiral lying four miles off in theLondon, foreseeing that the long pull out and back would give him time to get his own crippled ships clear of the shoals, and past the Three-Crown Batteries into the open channel beyond—the only course the wind made possible; and this was exactly what happened. Nelson, it is clear, was a shrewd diplomatist as well as a great sailor.
The night was coming on black with the threat of tempest; the Danish flagship had just blown up; but the white flag of truce was flying, and the British toiled, as fiercely as they had fought, to float their stranded ships and take possession of their shattered prizes. Of these, only one was found capable of being sufficiently repaired to be taken to Portsmouth. On the 4th Nelson himself landed and visited the Crown Prince, and a four months' truce was agreed upon. News came at that moment of the assassination of Paul I., and the League of Armed Neutrality—the device by which Napoleon hoped to overthrow the naval power of Great Britain—vanished into mere space. The fire of Nelson's guns at Copenhagen wrecked Napoleon's whole naval policy.
It is curious that, familiar as Nelson was with the grim visage of battle, the carnage of that four hours' cannonade was too much for even his steady nerves. He could find no words too generous to declare his admiration of the obstinate courage shown by the Danes. "The French and Spanish fight well," he said, "but they could not have stood for an hour such a fire as the Danes sustained for four hours."
"Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife;The morn the marshalling in arms—the dayBattle's magnificently stern array!The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rentThe earth is cover'd thick with other clay,Which her own clay shall cover, heap'd and pent,Rider and horse—friend, foe—in one red burial blent!"—BYRON.
"I look upon Salamanca, Vittoria, and Waterloo as my three best battles—those which had great and permanent consequences. Salamanca relieved the whole south of Spain, changed all the prospects of the war, and was felt even in Prussia. Vittoria freed the Peninsula altogether, broke off the armistice at Dresden, and thus led to Leipsic and the deliverance of Europe; and Waterloo did more than any other battle I know of towards the true object of all battles—the peace of the world."—WELLINGTON,Conversation with Croker.
On June 18, 1815, the grey light of a Sunday morning was breaking over a shallow valley lying between parallel ridges of low hills some twelve miles to the south of Brussels. All night the rain had fallen furiously, and still the fog hung low, and driving showers swept over plain and hill as from the church spires of half-a-dozen tiny villages the matin bells began to ring. For centuries those bells had called the villagers to prayers; to-day, as the wave of sound stole through the misty air it was the signal for the awakening of two mighty armies to the greatest battle of modern times.
More ink has, perhaps, been shed about Waterloo than about any other battle known to history, and still the story bristles with conundrums, questions of fact, and problems in strategy, about which the experts still wage, with pen and diagram, strife almost as furious as that which was waged with lance and sword, with bayonet and musket, more than eighty years ago on the actual slopes of Mont St. Jean. It is still, for example, a matter of debate whether, when Wellington first resolved to fight at Waterloo, he had any express promise from Blücher to join him on that field. Did Wellington, for example, ride over alone to Blücher's headquarters on the night before Waterloo, and obtain a pledge of aid, on the strength of which he fought next day? It is not merely possible to quote experts on each side of this question; it is possible to quote the same expert on both sides. Ropes, for example, the latest Waterloo critic, devotes several pages to proving that the interview never took place, and then adds a note to his third edition declaring that he has seen evidence which convinces him it did take place! It is possible even to quote Wellington himself both for the alleged visit and against it. In 1833 he told a circle of guests at Strathfieldsaye, in minute detail, how he got rid of his only aide-de-camp, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, and rode over on "Copenhagen" in the rain and darkness to Wavre, and got from Blücher's own lips the assurance that he would join him next day at Waterloo. In 1838, when directly asked by Baron Gurney whether the story was true, he replied, "No, I did not see Blücher the day before Waterloo." If Homer nodded, it is plain that sometimes the Duke of Wellington forgot!
Battle of Waterloo, June 18th, 1815.[Illustration: Battle of Waterloo, June 18th, 1815.]
Battle of Waterloo, June 18th, 1815.[Illustration: Battle of Waterloo, June 18th, 1815.]
Clearness on some points, it is true, is slowly emerging. It is admitted, for example, that Napoleon took the allies by surprise when he crossed the Sambre, and, in the very first stage of the campaign, scored a brilliant strategic success over them. Wellington himself, on the night of the famous ball, took the Duke of Richmond into his dressing-room, shut the door, and said, "Napoleon has humbugged me, by ——; he has gained twenty-four hours' march on me." The Duke went on to explain that he had ordered his troops to concentrate at Quatre Bras; "but," he added, "we shall not stop him there, and I must fight him here," at the same time passing his thumb-nail over the position of Waterloo. That map, with the scratch of the Duke's thumb-nail over the very line where Waterloo was afterwards fought, was long preserved as a relic. Part of the surprise, the Duke complained, was due to Blücher. But, as he himself explained to Napier, "I cannot tell the world that Blücher picked the fattest man in his army (Muffling) to ride with an express to me, and that he took thirty hours to go thirty miles."
The hour at which Waterloo began, though there were 150,000 actors in the great tragedy, was long a matter of dispute. The Duke of Wellington puts it at ten o'clock. General Alava says half-past eleven, Napoleon and Drouet say twelve o'clock, and Ney one o'clock. Lord Hill may be credited with having settled this minute question of fact. He took two watches with him into the fight, one a stop-watch, and he marked with it the sound of the first shot fired, and this evidence is now accepted as proving that the first flash of red flame which marked the opening of the world-shaking tragedy of Waterloo took place at exactly ten minutes to twelve.
As these sketches are not written for military experts, but only pretend to tell, in plain prose, and for younger Britons, the story of the great deeds which are part of their historical inheritance, all the disputed questions about Waterloo may be at the outset laid aside. It is a great tale, and it seems all the greater when it is simply told. The campaign of Waterloo, in a sense, lasted exactly four days, yet into that brief space of time there is compressed so much of human daring and suffering, of genius and of folly, of shining triumph and of blackest ruin, that the story must always be one of the most exciting records in human history.
"Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands,And of armèd men the hum;Lo! a nation's hosts have gatheredRound the quick alarming drum,—Saying, 'Come,Freeman, come,Ere your heritage be wasted,' said the quick alarming drum.
******
'Let me of my heart take counsel:War is not of life the sum;Who shall stay and reap the harvestWhen the autumn days shall come?'But the drumEchoed, 'Come!Death shall reap the braver harvest,' said the solemn-sounding drum.
What if, 'mid the cannons' thunder,Whistling shot and bursting bomb,When my brothers fall around me,Should my heart grow cold and numb?'But the drumAnswered, 'Come!Better there in death united, than in life a recreant,—Come!'"—BRET HARTE.
For weeks the British and Prussian armies, scattered over a district 100 miles by 40, had been keeping guard over the French frontier. Mighty hosts of Russians and Austrians were creeping slowly across Europe to join them. Napoleon, skilfully shrouding his movements in impenetrable secrecy, was about to leap across the Sambre, and both Blücher and Wellington had to guess what would be his point of attack; and they, as it happened, guessed wrongly. Napoleon's strategy was determined partly by his knowledge of the personal characters of the two generals, and partly by the fact that the bases of the allied armies lay at widely separate points—the English base at Antwerp, the Prussian on the Rhine. Blücher was essentially "a hussar general"; the fighting impulse ran riot in his blood. If attacked, he would certainly fight where he stood; if defeated, and driven back on his base, he must move in diverging lines from Wellington. That Blücher would abandon his base to keep touch with Wellington—as actually happened—Napoleon never guessed. Wellington, cooler and more methodical than his Prussian fellow-commander, would not fight, it was certain, till his troops were called in on every side and he was ready. Blücher was nearer the French frontier. Napoleon calculated that he could leap upon him, bar Wellington from coming to his help by planting Ney at Quatre Bras, win a great battle before Wellington could join hands with his ally, and then in turn crush Wellington. It was splendid strategy, splendidly begun, but left fatally incomplete.
Napoleon fought and defeated Blücher at Ligny on June 16, attacking Quatre Bras at the same time, so as to occupy the English. Wellington visited Blücher's lines before the fight began, and said to him, "Every general knows his own men, but if my lines were drawn up in this fashion I should expect to get beaten;" and as he cantered back to his own army he said to those about him, "If Bonaparte be what I suppose he is, the Prussians will get a —— good licking to-day." Captain Bowles was standing beside the Duke at Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th, when a Prussian staff-officer, his horse covered with sweat, galloped up and whispered an agitated message in the Duke's ear. The Duke, without a change of countenance, dismissed him, and, turning to Bowles, said, "Old Blücher has had a —— good licking, and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles. As he has gone back, we must go too. I suppose in England they will say we have been licked. I can't help it! As they have gone back, we must go too." And in five minutes, without stirring from the spot, he had given complete orders for a retreat to Waterloo.
The low ridge on which the Duke took up his position runs east and west. The road from Brussels to the south, just before it crosses the crest of the ridge, divides like the upper part of the letter Y into two roads, that on the right, or westward, running to Nivelles, that on the left, or eastward, to Charleroi. A country road, in parts only a couple of feet deep, in parts sunk from twelve to fifteen feet, traverses the crest of the ridge, and intersects the two roads just named before they unite to form the main Brussels road. Two farmhouses—La Haye Sainte, on the Charleroi road, and Hougoumont, on that to Nivelles—stand out some 250 yards in advance of the ridge. Thus the cross-road served as a ditch to Wellington's front; the two farmhouses were, so to speak, horn-works guarding his right centre and left centre; while in the little valley on the reverse side of the crest Wellington was able to act on his favourite tactics of keeping his men out of sight till the moment for action arrived. The ridge, in fact, to the French generals who surveyed it from La Belle Alliance seemed almost bare, showing nothing but batteries at intervals along the crest, and a spray of skirmishers on the slopes below.
Looked at from the British ridge, the plain over which the great fight raged is a picture of pastoral simplicity and peace. The crops that Sunday morning were high upon it, the dark green of wheat and clover chequered with the lighter green of rye and oats. No fences intersect the plain; a few farmhouses, each with a leafy girdle of trees, and the brown roofs of one or two distant villages, alone break the level floor of green. The present writer has twice visited Waterloo, and the image of verdurous and leafy peace conveyed by the landscape is still most vivid. Only Hougoumont, where the orchard walls are still pierced by the loop-holes through which the Guards fired that long June Sunday, helps one to realise the fierce strife which once raged and echoed over this rich valley with its grassy carpet of vivid green. Waterloo is a battlefield of singularly small dimensions. The British front did not extend for more than two miles; the gap betwixt Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, through which Ney poured his living tide of cavalry, 15,000 strong, is only 900 yards wide, a distance equal, say, to a couple of city blocks. The ridge on which Napoleon drew up his army is less than 2000 yards distant from that on which the British stood. It sloped steadily upward, and, as a consequence. Napoleon's whole force was disclosed at a glance, and every combination of troops made in preparation for an attack on the British line was clearly visible, a fact which greatly assisted Wellington in his arrangements for meeting it.
The opposing armies differed rather in quality than in numbers. Wellington had, roughly, 50,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, a little less than 6000 artillerymen; a total of 67,000 men and 156 guns. Napoleon had 49,000 infantry, nearly 16,000 cavalry, over 7000 artillery; a total of, say, 72,000 men, with 246 guns. In infantry the two armies were about equal, in cavalry the French were superior, and in guns their superiority was enormous. But the French were war-hardened veterans, the men of Austerlitz and of Wagram, of one blood and speech and military type, a homogeneous mass, on flame with warlike enthusiasm. Of Wellington's troops, only 30,000 were British and German; many even of these had never seen a shot fired in battle, and were raw drafts from the militia, still wearing the militia uniform. Only 12,000 were old Peninsula troops. Less than 7000 of Wellington's cavalry were British, and took any part in the actual battle. Wellington himself somewhat ungratefully described his force as an "infamous army"; "the worst army ever brought together!" Nearly 18,000 were Dutch-Belgians, whose courage was doubtful, and whose loyalty was still more vehemently suspected. Wellington had placed some battalions of these as part of the force holding Hougoumont; but when, an hour before the battle actually began, Napoleon rode through his troops, and their tumultuous shouts echoed in a tempest of sound across to the British lines, the effect on the Dutch-Belgians in Hougoumont was so instant and visible that Wellington at once withdrew them. "The mere name of Napoleon," he said, "had beaten them before they fired a shot!" The French themselves did justice to the native fighting quality of the British. "The English infantry," as Foy told the Emperor on the morning of Waterloo, "are the very d—— to fight;" and Napoleon, five years after, at St. Helena, said, "One might as well try to charge through a wall." Soult, again, told Napoleon, "Sire, I know these English. They will die on the ground on which they stand before they lose it." That this was true, even of the raw lads from the militia, Waterloo proved. But it is idle to deny that of the two armies the French, tried by abstract military tests, was far the stronger.
The very aspect of the two armies reflected their different characteristics. A grim silence brooded over the British position. Nothing was visible except the scattered clusters of guns and the outposts. The French army, on the other side, was a magnificent spectacle, gay with flags, and as many-coloured as a rainbow. Eleven columns deployed simultaneously, and formed three huge lines of serried infantry. They were flanked by mail-clad cuirassiers, with glittering helmets and breast-plates; lines of scarlet-clad lancers; and hussars, with bearskin caps and jackets glittering with gold lace. The black and menacing masses of the Old Guard and of the Young Guard, with their huge bearskin caps, formed the reserve. As Napoleon, with a glittering staff, swept through his army, the bands of 114 battalions and 112 squadrons poured upon the peaceful air of that June Sunday the martial cadences of the Marseillaise, and the "Vive l'Empereur!" which broke from the crowded host was heard distinctly by the grimly listening ranks of the British. "As far as the eye could reach," says one who describes the fight from the French ranks, "nothing was to be seen but cuirasses, helmets, busbies, sabres and lances, and glittering lines of bayonets."
As for the British, there was no tumult of enthusiasm visible among them. Flat on the ground, in double files, on the reverse side of the hill, the men lay, and jested in rough fashion with each other, while the officers in little groups stood on the ridge and watched the French movements. Let it be remembered that many of the troops had fought desperately on the 16th, and retreated on the 17th from Quatre Bras to Waterloo under furious rain, and the whole army was soddened and chilled with sleeping unsheltered on the soaked ground. Many of the men, as they rose hungry and shivering from their sleeping-place in the mud, were so stiff and cramped that they could not stand upright.
"The trumpets sound, the banners fly,The glittering spears are rankèd ready,The shouts o' war are heard afar,The battle closes thick and bloody."—BURNS.
The ground was heavy with the rains of the night, and Napoleon lingered till nearly noon before he launched his attack on the British lines. At ten minutes to twelve the first heavy gun rang sullenly from the French ridge, and from the French left Reille's corps, 6000 strong, flung itself on Hougoumont. The French are magnificent skirmishers, and as the great mass moved down the slope, a dense spray of tirailleurs ran swiftly before it, reached the hedge, and broke into the wood, which, in a moment, was full of white smoke and the red flashes of musketry. In a solid mass the main body followed; but the moment it came within range, the British guns keeping guard over Hougoumont smote it with a heavy fire. The French batteries answered fiercely, while in the garden and orchard below the Guards and the French fought almost literally muzzle to muzzle.
Hougoumont was a strong post. The fire from the windows in the main building commanded the orchard, that from the orchard commanded the wood, that from the wood swept the ridge. The French had crossed the ridge, cleared the wood, and were driving the Guards, fighting vehemently, out of the orchard into the hollow road between the house and the British ridge. But they could do no more. The light companies of the Foot Guards, under Lieut.-Colonel Macdonnell, held the buildings and orchard, Lord Saltoun being in command of the latter. Muffling, the Prussian commissioner on Wellington's staff, doubted whether Hougoumont could be held against the enemy; but Wellington had great confidence in Macdonnell, a Highlander of gigantic strength and coolest daring, and nobly did this brave Scotsman fulfil his trust. All day long the attack thundered round Hougoumont. The French masses moved again and again to the assault upon it; it was scourged with musketry and set on fire with shells. But steadfastly under the roar of the guns and the fierce crackle of small-arms, and even while the roofs were in flames above their heads, the gallant Guardsmen held their post. Once the main gateway was burst open, and the French broke in. They were instantly bayoneted, and Macdonnell, with a cluster of officers and a sergeant named Graham, by sheer force shut the gate again in the face of the desperate French. In the fire which partially consumed the building, some of the British wounded were burned to death, and Mercer, who visited the spot the morning after the fight, declared that in the orchard and around the walls of the farmhouse the dead lay as thick as on the breach of Badajos.
More than 2000 killed and wounded fell in the long seven hours' fight which raged round this Belgian farmhouse. More than 12,000 infantry were flung into the attack; the defence, including the Dutch and Belgians in the wood, never exceeded 2000 men. But when, in the tumult of the victorious advance of the British at nightfall, Wellington found himself for a moment beside Muffling, with a flash of exultation rare in a man so self-controlled, he shouted, "Well, you see Macdonnell held Hougoumont after all!" Towards evening, at the close of the fight, Lord Saltoun, with the wreck of the light companies of the Guards, joined the main body of their division on the ridge. As they came up to the lines, a scanty group with torn uniforms and smoke-blackened faces, the sole survivors of the gallant hundreds who had fought continuously for seven hours, General Maitland rode out to meet them and cried, "Your defence has saved the army! Every man of you deserves promotion." Long afterwards a patriotic Briton bequeathed 500 pounds to the bravest soldier at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington to be the judge. The Duke named Macdonnell, who handed the money to the sergeant who was his comrade in the struggle at the gate of Hougoumont.
"But on the British heart were lostThe terrors of the charging host;For not an eye the storm that view'dChanged its proud glance of fortitude.Nor was one forward footstep staid,As dropp'd the dying and the dead."—SCOTT.
Meantime a furious artillery duel raged between the opposing ridges. Wellington had ordered his gunners not to fire at the French batteries, but only at the French columns, while the French, in the main, concentrated their fire on the British guns. French practice under these conditions was naturally very beautiful, for no hostile bullets disturbed their aim, and the British gunners fell fast; yet their fire on the French masses was most deadly. At two o'clock Napoleon launched his great infantry attack, led by D'Erlon, against La Haye Sainte and the British left. It was an attack of terrific strength. Four divisions, numbering 16,000 men, moved forward in echelon, with intervals between them of 400 paces; seventy-two guns swept as with a besom of fire the path along which these huge masses advanced with shouts to the attack, while thirty light guns moved in the intervals between them; and a cavalry division, consisting of lancers and cuirassiers, rode on their flank ready to charge the broken masses of the British infantry. The British line at this point consisted of Picton's division, formed of the shattered remains of Kempt's and Pack's brigades, who had suffered heavily at Quatre Bras. They formed a mere thread of scarlet, a slender two-deep line of about 3000 men. As the great mass of the enemy came slowly on, the British line was "dressed," the men ceased to talk, except in monosyllables, the skirmishers lying flat on the trampled corn prepared to fire. The grape of the French guns smote Picton's red lines with fury, and the men fell fast, yet they closed up at the word of command with the most perfect coolness. The French skirmishers, too, running forward with great speed and daring, drove in the British skirmishers, who came running back to the main line smoke-begrimed and breathless.
As the French masses began to ascend the British slope, the French guns had to cease their fire for fear of striking their own forces. The British infantry, too, being drawn slightly back from the crest, were out of sight, and the leading French files saw nothing before them but a cluster of British batteries and a this line of quickly retreating skirmishers. A Dutch-Belgian brigade had, somehow, been placed on the exterior slope of the hill, and when D'Erlon's huge battalions came on, almost shaking the earth with their steady tread, the Dutch-Belgians simply took to their heels and ran. They swept, a crowd of fugitives, through the intervals of the British lines, and were received with groans and hootings, the men with difficulty being restrained from firing upon them.
A sand-pit lay in the track of the French columns on the left. This was held by some companies of the 95th Rifles, and these opened a fire so sudden and close and deadly that the huge mass of the French swung almost involuntarily to the right, off its true track; then with fierce roll of drums and shouts of "En avant!" the Frenchmen reached the crest. Suddenly there rose before them Picton's steady lines, along which there ran, in one red flame from end to end, a dreadful volley. Again the fierce musketry crackled, and yet again. The Frenchmen tried to deploy, and Picton, seizing the moment, ordered his lines to charge. "Charge! charge!" he cried. "Hurrah!"
It is yet a matter keenly disputed as to whether or not D'Erlon's men actually pierced the British line. It is alleged that the Highlanders were thrown into confusion, and it is certain that Picton's last words to his aide-de-camp, Captain Seymour, were, "Rally the Highlanders!" Pack, too, appealed to the 92nd. "You must charge," he said; "all in front have given way." However this may be, the British regiments charged, and the swift and resolute advance of Picton's lines—though it was a charge of 3000 men on a body four times their number—was irresistible. The leading ranks of the French opened a hurried fire, under which Picton himself fell shot through the head; then as the British line came on at the double—the men with bent heads, the level bayonets one steady edge of steel, the fierce light which gleams along the fighting line playing on them—the leading battalions of the French halted irresolute, shrunk back, swayed to and fro, and fell into a shapeless receding mass.
There were, of course, many individual instances of great gallantry amongst them. Thus a French mounted officer had his horse shot, and when he struggled from beneath his fallen charger he found himself almost under the bayonets of the 32nd. But just in front of the British line was an officer carrying the colours of the regiment, and the brave Frenchman instantly leaped upon him. He would capture the flag! There was a momentary struggle, and the British officer at the head of the wing shouted, "Save the brave fellow!" but almost at the same moment the gallant Frenchman was bayoneted by the colour-sergeant, and shot by a British infantryman.
The head of the French column was falling to pieces, but the main body was yet steady, and the cuirassiers covering its flank were coming swiftly on. But at this moment there broke upon them the terrific counterstroke, not of Wellington, but of Lord Uxbridge, into whose hands Wellington, with a degree of confidence quite unusual for him, had given the absolute control of his cavalry, fettering him by no specific orders.