The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc

The first deployment to meet the French advance, the watching of the retirement of Wellington’s main body, the continual appreciation of ground during a rapid and dangerous movement and in the worst of weather, the choice of occasional artillery positions—all these showed mastery, and secured the complete order of Wellington’s retreat.15

      The pursuit was checked at its most important point (where the French had to cross the river Dyle at Genappe) by a rapid deployment of the cavalry upon the slope beyond the stream, a rapid unlimbering of the batteries in retreat, and a double charge, first of the Seventh Hussars, next of the First Life Guards.

      These charges were successful, they checked the French, and during the remainder of the afternoon the pursuit to the north of the Dyle slackened off until, before darkness, it ceased altogether.

      Indeed, there was by that time no further use in it. The mass of Wellington’s army had reached, and had deployed upon, that ridge of the Mont St. Jean where he intended to turn and give battle. They were in a position to receive any immediate attack, and the purposes of mere pursuit were at an end.

      Facing that ridge of the Mont St. Jean, where, at the end of the afternoon and through the evening, Wellington’s troops were already taking up their positions, was another ridge, best remembered by the name of a farm upon its crest, the “Belle Alliance.” This ridge formed the natural halting-place of the pursuers. From the height above Genappe to the ridge of the Belle Alliance was but 5000 yards; and if a further reason be quoted for the cessation of the pursuit and the ranging into battle array of either force, the weather will provide that reason.

      The soil of all these fields is of a peculiar black and consistent sort, almost impassable after a drenching rain. The great paved high road which traverses it was occupied and encumbered by the wheeled vehicles and by the artillery. A rapid advance of infantry bodies thrown out to the right and left of the road, and so securing speed by parallel advance, was made impossible by mud, and the line grew longer and longer down the main road, forbidding rapid movement. From mud, that “fifth element in war” (as Napoleon himself called it), Wellington’s troops—the mass of them at least—had been fairly free. They had reached their positions before the downpour. Only the cavalry of the rearguard and its batteries had felt the full force of the storm. Dry straw of the tall standing crops had been cut on the ridge of the Mont St. Jean, and the men of Wellington’s command bivouacked as well as might be under such weather.

      With the French it was otherwise. Their belated units kept straggling in until long after nightfall. The army was drawn up only at great expense of time and floundering effort, mainly in the dark, drenched, sodden with mud, along the ridge of the Belle Alliance. It was with difficulty that the wood of the bivouac fires could be got to burn at all. They were perpetually going out; and all that darkness was passed in a misery which the private soldier must silently expect as part of his trade, and which is relieved only by those vague corporate intuitions of a common peril, and perhaps a common glory, which, down below all the physical business, form the soul of an army.

      Napoleon, when he had inspected all this and assured himself that Wellington was standing ranged upon the opposite ridge, returned to sleep an hour or two at the farm called Le Caillou, a mile behind the line of bivouacs. Wellington took up his quarters in the village of Waterloo, about a mile and a half behind the bivouacs of his troops upon the Mont St. Jean.

      In such a disposition the two commanders and their forces waited for the day.

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      There must, lastly, be considered, before the description of action is entered on, the nature of the field upon which it was about to be contested. That field had been studied by Wellington the year before. He, incomparably the greatest tactical defensive commander of his time, and one of the greatest of all time, had chosen it for its capacities of defence. They were formidable. Relying upon them, and confident of the Prussians coming to his aid when the battle was joined, he rightly counted upon success.

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      Let us begin by noting that of no battle is it more important to seize the exact nature of the terrain, that is, of the ground over which it was fought, than of Waterloo.

      To the eye the structure of the battlefield is simple, consisting essentially of two slight and rounded ridges, separated by a very shallow undulation of land.

      But this general formation is complicated by certain features which can only be grasped with the aid of contours, and these contours, again, are not very easy to follow at first sight for those who have not seen the battlefield.

      In the map which forms the frontispiece of this volume, and to which I will beg the reader to turn, I have indicated the undulations of land in pale green lines underlying the other features of the battle, which are in black, red, and blue. The contours are drawn at five metres (that is 16 feet 4 inches) distance; no contours are given below that of 100 metres above the sea. The valley floors below that level are shaded. Up to the 120-metre line the contours are indicated by continuous lines of increasing thickness. Above the 120-metre line they are indicated by faint dotted or dashed lines. I hope in this manner, though the task is a difficult one, to give a general impression of the field.

      The whole field, both slight ridges and the intervening depression, lies upon a large swell of land many square miles in extent, while it slopes away gradually to the east on one side and the west on the other. The highest and hardly distinguishable knolls of it stand about 450 feet above the sea. The site of the battle lies actually on the highest part, the water-parting; and the floors of the valleys, down which the streams run to the east and to the west, are from 150 to 200 feet lower than this confused lift of land between. To one, however, standing upon any part of the battlefield, this feature of height is not very apparent. True, one sees lower levels falling away left and right, and the view seems oddly wide, but the eye gathers the impression of little more than a rolling plain. This is because, in comparison with the scale of the landscape as a whole, the elevations and depressions are slight.

      Upon this rolling mass of high land there stand out, as I have said, those two slight ridges, and these ridges lie, roughly speaking, east and west—perpendicular to the great Brussels road, which cuts them from south to north. It was upon this great Brussels road that both Wellington and Napoleon took up, at distances less than a mile apart, their respective centres of position for the struggle. Though this line of the road did not precisely bisect the two lines of the opposing armies, the point where it crossed each line marked the tactical centre of that line: both Wellington and Napoleon remained in person upon that road.

      Now it must not be imagined that the shallow depression between the ridges stretches of even depth between the two positions taken up by Wellington and Napoleon, with the road cutting its middle; on the contrary, it is bridged, a little to the west of the road, by a “saddle,” a belt of fields very nearly flat, and very nearly as high as each ridge. The eastern half of the depression therefore rises continually, and gets shallower and shallower as it approaches the road from east westward, and the road only cuts off the last dip of it. Then, just west of the road there is the saddle; and as you proceed still further westward along the line midway between the French and English positions you find a second shallow valley falling away. This second valley does not precisely continue the direction of the first, but turns rather more to the north. In the first slight decline of this second valley, and a few hundred yards west of the road, lies the country-house called Hougomont, and just behind it lay the western end of Wellington’s line. The whole position, therefore, if it were cut out as a model in section from a block of wood, might appear as does the accompanying plan.

      In such a model the northern ridge P—Q some two miles in length is that held by Wellington. The southern one M—N is that held by Napoleon. Napoleon commanded from the point A, Wellington from the point B, and the dark band running from one to the other represents the great Brussels High Road. The subsidiary ridge O—O is that on which Napoleon, as we shall see, planted his great battery preparatory to the assault. The enclosure H is Hougomont, the enclosure S is La Haye