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

Wish It Was Fit

      There was no more sign of Hazlitt’s bright star of liberty, or any other star, rising over the sodden slopes of Flanders this Sunday morning than there was on the Isle of Scalpaigh. To the old Peninsula men who remembered the nights before Salamanca and Vittoria, the thunder and lightning were omens of victory, but for the exhausted young boys of the 14th of Foot, Buckinghamshire farm lads in the main and still mostly in their teens, hungry, soaked to the skin, caked in mud, and un-bloodied in war, there was only the cold, numbing rain and fear.

      ‘What a sight to we old campaigners, but more particularly to the young soldiers,’ wrote home one Peninsula veteran, William Wheeler, camped with the 51st of Foot in a cornfield just beyond the 14th at the far right of the allied line that stretched out along the defensive ridge nine miles to the south of Brussels; ‘being close to the enemy we could not use our blankets, the ground was too wet to lie down, we sat on our knapsacks until daylight without fires, there was no shelter against the weather: the water ran in streams from the cuffs of our Jackets, in short we were as wet as if we had been plunged over head in a river. We had one consolation, we knew the enemy were in the same plight.’

      Along the whole length of the line, officers and men were making the best of whatever shelter they could find, hunkering down under hedges or beneath cannon with only their pipes, brandy, gin and sheer exhaustion to anaesthetise the misery. ‘It was as bad a night as I ever witnessed,’ recalled another campaigner, a cavalryman from the 7th Hussars, who had already fought one bruising action against French lancers that day while covering the infantry withdrawal from Quatre Bras. ‘The uproar of the elements seemed to have been the harbinger of the bloody contest. We cloaked, throwing a part over the saddle, holding by the stirrup leather, to steady us if sleepy; to lie down with streams under us was not desirable, and to lie among the horses not altogether safe.’

      It ought to have been impossible to sleep in such conditions, but a public school was perhaps as good a training in discomfort as a Scottish glen, and sixteen-year-old Ensign George Keppel of the 3rd Battalion of the 14th of Foot could not have stayed awake to save his life. From the day he had disembarked at Ostend, Keppel seemed to have done nothing but march and counter-march across Belgium, and it was late in the afternoon of the 17th, after one last weary haul from Nivelles, that his colonel had pointed out to him ‘a spot in the distance’ that he had never heard of, called Waterloo.

      Had the young George Keppel been in any condition to take the long view of things, however, or just a fraction more self-important, he might have seen the hand of destiny at work in the bizarre chain of events that had brought him to an obscure Belgian village. His great-uncle Frederick had been a Bishop of Exeter and Dean of Windsor during the early years of George III’s reign, but with the exception of that genial, pluralist blot on the family honour, the Keppels had traditionally been courtier-warriors since they had arrived with ‘Dutch’ William in 1688, generals and admirals who had played their part in almost every British conflict from Oudenarde and Ramillies to Dettingen, Fontenoy, Culloden, Havana and Quiberon Bay.

      While his father, the fourth earl, was something of a disappointment – a Whig courtier and racing man destined to spend most of his life waiting for the return of the good days – the young George, with all the easy, good-natured charm of the first earl, the spirit of his great-uncle who had circumnavigated the globe with Admiral Anson, and the liberal, populist instincts of all the staunchly Whig Keppels, was a throwback to a freer and more robust age. In the spring of 1815 he was still a schoolboy at Dr Page’s Westminster; but school had never been much more than a minor distraction for him, an alternative London address equally handy for the theatres or duck shoots, a convenient base from which he could as easily slip off to see the Princess Charlotte as join in with the mob stoning his father’s Portland Street house during the anti-Corn Law riots.

      If the eighteenth century, in all its dubious and scandalous licence, survived into the early nineteenth century anywhere, it was in the English public schools, and pedigree and character had equipped Keppel to enjoy its freedoms to the full. In the memoirs of other Westminsters of only a slightly later generation, the talk is all of ‘shadows’ and ‘substances’ and the other ludicrous arcana of public school life, but in Keppel’s we get the authentic taste of an aristocratic Regency London, a world of prize-fighting, carriage-racing, bull-baiting, mail-coach driving, badger-drowning and the great clown Grimaldi – a world, in short, closer to that of his grandfather’s days than to the God-fearing institutions that would soon be taking shape in the dreams of George’s Winchester near-contemporary, Thomas Arnold.

      There was not an ounce of malice, or what Arnold would darkly think of as ‘vice’, in the young Keppel, only boundless animal spirits and a happy, democratic talent for mixing as easily with gallows-bound ruffians down by the river as the heir presumptive to the throne. If he thought about his future at all it was in the vaguest terms of a career in the law and maybe a safe family seat in Parliament, but at the age of fifteen the Bar or the House of Commons – or anything in fact beyond the immediate confines of his schoolboy’s London world – all seemed to belong to a period with which he need not unduly concern himself.

      Even the escape of Bonaparte from Elba had made almost no impression on a lad more interested in the exotic Madame Oldenburg’s hats than in politics, but in the mock-heroic drama Keppel liked to make of his life, their planets had already begun to converge. From his first days at Westminster he had used Abbot Livingstone’s wall in Great College Street to get in and out of Mother Grant’s boarding house, and on a night in the middle of March 1815, just as ‘another truant on a larger scale’ was about to enter Paris, George had slipped quietly back through Dean’s Yard after a night at the theatre to find waiting for him the rope ladder that the school Crispin – ‘Cobbler Foot by name, an old man-of-war’s man’ – had run up for precisely these eventualities.

      It was a well-rehearsed routine – the scaling ladder hanging down on the street side, a convenient lean-to that the school authorities (‘not wise in their generation’, as Keppel sadly recorded) had kindly provided on the drop side, a straw dummy tucked up in his bed – and there seemed no reason to think anything was wrong. He had made his way over the wall without any difficulty and got safely back to his room; and it was only when he opened his door to find his bedding flung back and the straw doppelgänger strewn across the floor that he knew he was in trouble.

      In the past he could invariably rely on his old childhood playmate, the Prince Regent’s capricious daughter and heir presumptive, Princess Charlotte, to come up with a lie on his behalf, but this time there was no way out. The next morning he had been ‘sorely puzzled’ at the silence which greeted him when he went into school, but ‘the mystery’ was solved the next day when a letter from his father informed him that his ‘school days had come to an end’, along with another ‘from Dr Page … recommending him to choose [a profession] in which physical rather than mental exertion would be a requisite’.

      If nothing in his school career became him quite like the leaving, his father was never likely to see it that way, and retribution was fast. His older brother, Lord Bury, was already in the army and bound for Belgium, and the first that George knew that he was going to be joining him was when the next day Bury greeted him with the cheery news that from now on George would have to call him Sir.

      A week earlier or a week later and George would almost certainly have been safe, but his timing could not have been worse, and he got home to find that his father had procured him a commission into the 14th of Foot. The first two battalions of the 14th were already on service in India and Italy, but in 1813 a third battalion had been raised and when the news from Elba reached London, the existing order to disband was hastily revoked and the battalion – the youngest and least experienced in the whole British army – was ordered for Ostend and the Low Countries.

      Keppel was still well short of his sixteenth birthday, but as another brother disarmingly put it, there were ‘plenty of us’ Keppel children, and one younger son more or less was not going to make a lot of difference. In 1809 the three-week-old Henry – a future Admiral of the Fleet – was already in his father’s footpan for burial in the garden when a faint whimper brought the nurse, and sentiment was in equally short order when the young Ensign Keppel of the 14th of Foot, tricked