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

the battlefield a giant and perfect pyramid of smoke, visible for miles, hung like a funeral pall. Around the crossroads, where the foul-mouthed Sir Thomas Picton, Wellington’s great ‘fighting general’ from the Peninsula, had rallied the 28th with the battle cry of ‘Remember Egypt’, and where Wellington had leaped a hedge of bayonets into the safety of a Highland square, lay the dead and wounded of both sides. French casualties were over four thousand, allied closer to five. In the course of the action, the 92nd – the Gordon Highlanders – whose sergeants, only hours earlier, had been reeling for the Duchess of Richmond’s guests, had lost five commanding officers. The 42nd, the Black Watch, had suffered some 300 killed and wounded; the 69th from Lincolnshire more than forty per cent; the 30th very nearly as many, the Guards’ heavy losses clearing out Bossu Wood, the Dutch and ‘death’s-head’ Brunswickers the same. ‘In no battle did the British infantryman display more valour or more cool courage than at Quatre Bras,’ wrote Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars. ‘Cavalry we had none that could stand the shock of the French; the Brunswick and Belgian cavalry, it is true, made an attempt, but were scattered like chaff before the wind by the veteran Cuirassiers … The British cavalry had had a long march, some nearly forty miles, and consequently did not arrive until the battle was over. The gallant Picton, seeing the cavalry driven back, led on our infantry in squares into the centre of the enemy’s masses of cavalry, facing charging squadrons with squares, and in line against heavy columns of infantry.’

      Even though that old combination of Picton and the British infantryman had bailed Wellington out, it was no victory. To their left, long after the guns fell silent at Quatre Bras, the sound of cannon continued in the direction of Ligny. The allies had secured the road to Brussels but the French in their turn had prevented them joining up with the Prussians. It was, at the best, a draw. Deployed across a forward slope, and facing the main body of Bonaparte’s Army of the North, Blücher’s Prussians had been badly beaten, and as they retreated north and east towards Wavre, Wellington had no choice but to retire as well.

      It was a dejected army that buried its dead, and on Saturday 17th, under cover of cavalry and of an apocalyptic storm, began their withdrawal towards Brussels. The rains had turned the paths and fields into canals and quagmires, but at 2 a.m. on this Sunday morning, as the thunder crashed and the rain lashed down, and the Duke of Brunswick lay in his coffin, they finally halted along a ridge just south of the Soignes Forest. The 92nd, or what was left of them – one colonel, one major, four captains, twelve lieutenants, four ensigns, twelve sergeants and about 250 rank had failed to answer the roll call – had stopped near a farm building called La Haye Sainte, taking up their position on either side of the Brussels road. The name would have meant nothing to them, but then except perhaps for Wellington and De Lancey it would have meant little to anyone. On the day before, Sir Augustus Frazer, in command of the army’s horse artillery, had been told that Wellington was heading towards a place called Waterloo. He could not even find it on his map. What, he asked, was its real name? He was about to find out. The ‘trumpet of fame’, as Edward Cotton called it, would never sound as it should for the dead of Quatre Bras, but Wellington would have his battle where he had wanted it.

3 a.m.

      A Dying World

      The short midsummer night was over on the tiny Isle of Scalpaigh. From the highest point on the island, Skye and the dark line of the Ross-shire hills would have been visible in the distance, but if anyone was stirring down by the shoreline they had not yet seen, lying beside a cairn on the rough track that led from the MacLennans’ stone house to the family well, a torn and bloodied bundle that contained the remains of a newborn child.

      It was the Sabbath with all that meant in the Scottish islands, and if the star that the young William Hazlitt saw over a Shropshire cottage had ever shone above the heather thatch of the thin scattering of croft houses that lined the narrow sound separating Scalpaigh from Harris, it had long since set. Thirty-odd years before, the retired captain of an East Indiaman from Berneray had bought Harris from his MacLeod cousin and settled crofters here, glimpsing in the sheltered, rocky inlets of its eastern coastline with its infinite supply of kelp and teeming abundance of fish – cod from November to June, ling from June through to September, dog fish during the calm summer months, skate and eel, oysters, herring and salmon in every bay and loch – a Hebridean cornucopia that need never fail.

      Captain Alexander MacLeod of Berneray was a landlord and innovator in the great tradition of doomed philanthropists and improvers who over the next 150 years would bedevil the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. He had originally made his fortune as captain of the Mansfield and in his late fifties established himself at Rodel at the southern tip of Harris, where he built a large, handsome house and set about improving a wonderful natural harbour with everything needed for a year-round fishing industry. ‘Within the bay of Rowdill, on the north side, there is an opening, through a channel of only 30 yards wide to one of the best sheltered little bays in the Highlands,’ reported the elderly John Knox, another philanthropic improving Scot, after visiting Rodel in 1786, ‘from which, on the opposite side, there is an opening of the same dimensions to the sea. This has water for vessels to enter or depart at any time of the tide, and Captain MacLeod had deepened the south passage to fifteen feet at common spring tides. The circumference of the little harbour or bason is nearly an English mile, and here the ships lie always afloat, and as safe as in Greenock dock. Here the Captain has made an excellent graving bank, and formed two keys … where ships may load or discharge afloat, at all times of the tide.’

      This is the voice of a pragmatist and surveyor talking – Knox was reporting on the west coast for the British Society for Extending the Fisheries, part of that earnest eighteenth-century effort to claim the Scottish Highlands for civilisation – but for all his commercial instincts, MacLeod was a romantic and Rodel a place to dream. On the hill above the harbour a sixteenth-century MacLeod had rebuilt the church of St Clement’s, and in some crucial sense Alexander was as much a throwback as a sign of things to come, a relic of an idealised world of ‘Charity, Piety, integrity of life’ and social responsibility that if it had ever existed had been dealt its death blow at Culloden.

      And yet if there can be few more beautiful places in Britain than Rodel on a June morning, with a view stretching away southwards down the long line of islands towards Barra, and eastwards to Skye and the distant mainland, Harris was as much a place of blighted hopes as it was of dreams. Forty years earlier the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, had sought refuge on Scalpaigh during his flight into exile after Culloden, and in the decades since the failure of the ’45, Harris had struggled to come to terms with the shifting, harder, commercialised relationship of owner and tenant and the vanguard of the sheep that would signal the end of the old Highland order.

      There were the mainland canals to navvy on and there was still the army – there were women on the island this Sunday morning who did not yet know they were widows of Quatre Bras – but even in the good years it was a harsh life for the crofter. ‘All the bread is generally consumed by the end of June,’ the Reverend John MacLeod had recorded in 1792, ‘and such as then cannot afford to purchase imported meal, subsist chiefly on the milk of their cows and sheep, with what fish they may chance to catch, till their wants are relieved by the first fruits of their potato crop early in harvest.’

      It is a tragic irony that of all the measures Captain Alexander MacLeod introduced to improve these lives – the house, the school, the better tracks, the fishing stations, the boat yard, the Orkney yawls, the restored church of St Clement’s – his abiding legacy to them was one of bitter hardship and failure. In the early days of his ownership there had been some spectacular success with commercial fishing, but when he died in 1790 it was not the ‘silver darlings’ of the herring trade or a balanced island economy that interested his absentee son and grandson but the easy fortunes to be had out of the inexhaustible supply of kelp in the myriad bays and inlets of Harris’s rocky eastern coastline.

      It would prove a dangerous dependency for the islanders but for an absentee landlord only concerned with the short-term the profits