Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed. David Crane

reasons for going to the Richmond ball that night, or would find them with hindsight – morale, psychology, a show of British sang-froid, a ‘marker’ for wavering Belgians – but the answer was probably no more complicated than pride. Throughout his career he had had to live with the carping of opposition politicians who hated the Wellesleys, and yet it was a very long time – probably the Siege of Seringapatam in the spring of 1799 and his first major battle – since he had had to justify or explain himself to his own officers and he had no intention of doing anything to undermine the extraordinary hold he had over them now.

      ‘Nobody can guess Lord Wellington’s intentions,’ Uxbridge’s sister Lady Caroline Capel had written just a week earlier, ‘& I dare say Nobody will know he is going till he is actually gone.’ If the women of Brussels did not know what he was doing then certainly no one else was going to. For an old Peninsula-hand like Sir Augustus Frazer there was nothing new in this, but for those who had never been around the duke before, there was something almost shocking in the dominance he exerted over officers who in any other situation and under anyone else were figures of substance in their own right. ‘Our movements are kept in the greatest secrecy. We know nothing that is going on,’ the Reverend George Stonestreet, the most unmilitary of Guards’ chaplains, wrote from 1st Division Headquarters to his brother-in-law, a broker in the City always keen for his own reasons to know what was happening in Belgium. ‘General Officers, even those commanding divisions are kept in ignorance by the great Duke … I am astonished to find the fear which exists, of at all offending the Duke; and the implicit submission and humility with which Men of talent courage and character shrink before his abrupt, hurried and testy manner.’

      If anyone knew what was on his mind it was likely to be his latest dalliance, the pale and anorexically thin Byron cast-off, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, but it would have taken a brave man to have asked the duke what he was doing at the ball. Lord Fitzroy Somerset, Wellington’s secretary, had not understood why the army had not marched immediately that Thursday afternoon, but when it came to the point he was no bolder than the rest, tamely conceding that ‘as it was the place where every British officer of rank was likely to be found, perhaps for that reason the Duke dressed & went there’.

      He was right in that at least, almost everyone but the De Lanceys was there. And if it might have been argued – and it was in angry Whig and opposition circles – that Wellington’s officers might have been better off with their regiment, nothing so vividly encapsulates the strange air of unreality that marked these last days before Waterloo. It was here at a rented house in the rue de Blanchisserie in the early hours of the 16th, as Wellington sat on a sofa and talked with Lady Dalrymple Hamilton, and the Duke of Brunswick gave a sudden, violent shudder of premonition, and Gordon Highlanders demonstrated their reels to the duchess’s guests, that the cumulative oddity of what would soon be dubbed ‘the 100 Days’ took on the surreal, climactic air of a macabre Regency Dance of Death. ‘There was the sound of revelry by night,’ Byron famously would write,

      And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then

      Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright

      The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

      A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

      Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

      Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spoke again,

      And all went merry as a Marriage bell;

      But hush! Hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell.

      Within a window’s niche in that high hall

      Sate Brunswick’s fated chieftain; he did hear

      That sound the first amidst the festival,

      And caught its tone with Death’s prophetic ear;

      And when they smiled because he deem’d it near,

      His heart more truly knew that peal too well

      Which stretch’d his father on a bloody bier,

      And roused the vengeance blood alone could quell.

      Even as the ball broke up into a hundred hurried farewells, the bizarre air of unreality still hung over Brussels. From the window of her hotel on the Parc the newly arrived Charlotte Waldie had watched a soldier turn back again and again to embrace his wife and child for a last time, and yet as the dawn exodus of Wellington’s army began, and market carts and vendors bringing their cabbages, cauliflowers, peas and early potatoes in from the surrounding countryside added their own note of burlesque to the sombre occasion, it was almost impossible to take in the fact that this really was war. ‘Soon afterwards the 42nd and 92nd Highland regiments marched through the Palace Royale and the Parc,’ wrote Charlotte Waldie, ‘with their bagpipes playing before them, whilst the bright beams of the rising sun shone full on their tartan bonnets. We admired their fine athletic forms, their firm erect military demeanour and undaunted mien. We felt proud that they were our countrymen: in their gallant bearing … Alas! We little thought that even before the fall of night these brave men, whom we now gazed at with so much interest and admiration, would be laid low.’

      As the sound of the last fife melted away from a suddenly silent Brussels, the first units of the army entered into the gloom of the dense Soignes Forest that stretched out to the south on either side of the Charleroi road. It might have occurred to some of the more experienced troops that this would be no road to retreat along if things went badly, but in the warm still of the morning, with no sound of canon ahead to concentrate the mind, and Guards officers, coats open, snuff boxes in hand, trotting towards the battle along the cobbled chaussée in their smart cabriolets as if they were making for Epsom or Ascot, it was hard to believe that there was a French army less than twenty miles away.

      It was partly a failure of imagination, it was partly sang-froid, part show and part utterly genuine, but at the bottom of it all was a supreme confidence in the man who led them. Over the last few months Wellington might have seemed more interested in his love affairs than in Bonaparte, but the moment the fighting started he was always a different man; the ‘Beau’, as his staff called him, gone, and the general worth a division against any enemy back in command. ‘Where indeed, and what is not his forte?’ Augustus Frazer asked his wife. ‘Cold and indifferent, nay apparently careless in the beginning of battles, when his moment of difficulty comes intelligence flashes from the eyes of this wonderful man; and he rises superior to all that can be imagined.’

      That ‘moment’ had come. But if he knew exactly where he wanted to fight his battle – he had used a thumb to mark out a long low ridge, crossing the Charleroi road just south of the Soignes Forest, on the Duke of Richmond’s map only hours before – the time had long gone when he could fight the enemy on the ground he chose. The last report he had was that the French were already in Frasnes near Quatre Bras, and with the Prussians about to be engaged at Ligny to the east of the crossroads and the bulk of his army still marching from the west, the only force that stood between Bonaparte and Brussels was the reserve strung out behind him along the main north–south Charleroi road.

      Wellington was certainly luckier than he deserved. A combination of inertia and confused orders and priorities had wasted an overwhelming French advantage and meant that Quatre Bras was still in allied hands when he reached the crossroads at ten. The army opposing a token allied force of 7,000 troops was three times as strong in men and still more in guns, but Wellington knew that if they could hold the critical line of the chaussée linking Quatre Bras and Ligny three miles to the east until fresh units arrived, the odds must slowly but inexorably swing his way.

      There was nothing pretty about the battle that followed, nothing scientific – shot, grape, shell and musket, hand-to-hand fighting in the woods and long rye; wave after wave of cavalry breaking against British squares – but gradually a battle that should have been lost before it had begun started to move Wellington’s way. Over the next hours the issue still remained in doubt, but as each unit arrived and was thrown in the odds had already begun to shift. As night fell, with the woods to the south-west of the crossroads and the farm buildings straddling the Charleroi road again in allied hands, the field was Wellington’s.