LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

was not and could not have been the Emperor who ordered that false step. It is even uncertain whether the whole body of horsemen that moved had been summoned by Ney, or whether the rearmost did not simply follow the advance of their fellows. At any rate, the great group of mounted men21 which lay in reserve behind the First Army Corps, and to the west of the road, passed in its entirety through the infantry, and began to advance at the trot down the valley for the assault upon the opposite slope.

      I repeat, it is not certain whether Ney called upon all this mass of cavalry and deliberately risked the waste of it in one blow. It is more probable that there was some misunderstanding; that Desnoettes’ command, which was drawn up behind Milhaud’s, followed Milhaud’s, under the impression that a general order had been given to both; that Ney, seeing this extra body of horse following, imagined Napoleon to have given it orders. At any rate, Napoleon never gave such orders, and, from the height upon which he stood, could not have seen the first execution of them, for the first advance of that cavalry was hidden from him by a slight lift of land.

      There were 5000 mounted men drawn up in the hollow to the west of the Brussels road for the charge. It was not until they began to climb the slope that Napoleon saw what numbers were being risked, and perceived the full gravity of Ney’s error.

      To charge unshaken infantry in this fashion, and to charge it without immediate infantry support, was a thing which that master of war would never have commanded, and which, when he saw it developing under the command of his lieutenant, filled him with a sense of peril. But it was too late to hesitate or to change the disposition of this sudden move. The 5000 climbed at a slow and difficult trot through the standing crops and the thick mud of the rising ground, suffered—with a moment’s wavering—the last discharge of the British guns, and then, on reaching the edge of the plateau, spurred to the gallop and charged.

      It was futile. They passed the line of guns (the gunners had orders to abandon their pieces and to retire within the infantry squares); they developed, in too short a start, too slight an impetus; they seethed, as the famous metaphor of that field goes, “like angry waves round rocks”; they lashed against every side of the squares into which the allied infantry had formed. The squares stood.

      Wellington had had but a poor opinion of his command. It contained, indeed, elements more diverse and raw material in larger proportion than ever he, or perhaps any other general of the great wars, had had to deal with, but it was infantry hitherto unshaken; and the whole conception of that false movement, the whole error of that cavalry action, lay in the idea that the allied line had suffered in a fashion which it had been very far from suffering. Nothing was done against the squares; and the firmest of them, the nucleus of the whole resistance, were the squares of British infantry, three deep, against which the furious close-sabring, spurring, and fencing of sword with bayonet proved utterly vain. Upon this mass of horsemen moving tumultuous and ineffectual round the islands of foot resisting their every effort, Uxbridge, gathering all his cavalry, charged, and 5000 fresh horse fell upon the French lancers and cuirassiers, already shredded and lessened by grape at fifty yards and musket fire at ten. This countercharge of Uxbridge’s cleared the plateau. The French horsemen turned bridle, fled to the hollow of the valley again, and the English gunners returned to their pieces. The whole fury of the thing had failed.

      But it had failed only for a moment. What remained of the French horse reformed and once again attempted to charge. Once again, for all their gravely diminished numbers, they climbed the slope; once again the squares were formed, and the torment of horsemen round about them struck once more.

      Seen from the point where Napoleon stood to the rear of his line, the high place that overlooked the battlefield, it seemed to eyes of less genius than his own that this second attempt had succeeded. Indeed, its fierce audacity seemed to other than the French observers at that distance to promise success. The drivers of the reserve batteries in the rear of Wellington’s line were warned for retreat, and Napoleon, reluctant, but pressed by necessity, seeing one chance at last of victory by mere shock, himself sent forward a reserve of horse to support the distant cuirassiers and lancers. He called upon Kellerman, commanding the cavalry of the Guard, to follow up the charge.

      He knew how doubtful was the success of this last reinforcement, for he knew how ill-judged had been Ney’s first launching of that great mass of horse at an unbroken enemy; but, now that the thing was done, lest, unsupported, it should turn to a panic which might gain the whole army, he risked almost the last mounted troops he had and sent them forward, acting thus like a man throwing good money after bad for fear that all may be lost.

      A better reason still decided Napoleon so to risk a very desperate chance, and to hurl Kellerman upon the heels of Milhaud. That reason was the advent, now accomplished, of the Prussians upon his right, and the necessity, imperative and agonised, of breaking Wellington’s line before the whole strength of the newcomers should be felt upon the French flank and rear.

      Let us turn, then, and see how far and with what rapidity the Prussians at this moment—nearly half-past five o’clock—had accomplished their purpose.

      * * * * *

Of the four Prussian corps d’armée bivouacked in a circle round Wavre, and unmolested, as we have seen, by Grouchy, it was the fourth, that of Bulow, which was given the task of marching first upon the Sunday morning to effect the junction with Wellington. It lay, indeed, the furthest to the east of all the Prussian army,22 but it was fresh to the fight, for it had come up too late to be engaged at Ligny. It was complete; it was well commanded.

The road it had to traverse was not only long, but difficult. The passage of the river Lasne had to be effected across so steep a ravine and by so impassable a set of ways that the modern observer, following that march as the present writer has followed it, after rain and over those same fields and roads, is led to marvel that it was done in the time which Blucher’s energy and the traditional discipline of the Prussian soldiers found possible. At any rate, the heads of the columns were on the Waterloo edge of the Wood of Fischermont23 (or Paris) before four o’clock, and ready to debouch. Wellington had expected them upon the field by two o’clock at latest. They disappointed him by two hours, and nearly three, but the miracle is that they arrived when they did; and it is well here to consider in detail this feat which the Fourth Prussian Army Corps had accomplished, for it is a matter upon which our historians of Waterloo are often silent, and which has been most unfortunately neglected in this country.

      The Fourth Prussian Army Corps, under Bulow, lay as far east as Liège when, on the 14th of June, Napoleon was preparing to cross the Sambre. Its various units were all in the close neighbourhood of the town, so none of them were spared much of the considerable march which all were about to undertake to the west; even its most westward detachment was no more than three miles from Liège city.

      Bulow should have received the order to march westward at half-past ten on the morning of the 15th. The order, as we have seen in speaking of Ligny, was not delivered till the evening of that day. The Fourth Army Corps was told to concentrate in the neighbourhood of Hannut and a little east of that distant point. The corps, as a whole, did not arrive until the early afternoon of Friday the 16th.

      It is from this point—Hannut—that the great effort begins.

      Bulow, it must be remembered, commanded no less than 32,000 men. The fatigues and difficulties attendant upon the progress of such a body, most of it tied to one road, will easily be appreciated.

      During the afternoon of the 16th, while Ligny was being fought, he advanced the whole of this body to points immediately north and east of Gembloux. Not a man, therefore, of his great command had marched less than twenty miles, many must have marched over twenty-five, upon that Friday afternoon.

      Then followed the night during which the other three defeated corps fell back upon Wavre.

      That night was full of their confused but unmolested retreat. With the early morning of the Saturday

Скачать книгу