How England Saved Europe, 1793-1815 Volume 4 (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

HOW ENGLAND SAVED EUROPE, 1793–1815

VOLUME 4

Waterloo and St. Helena

WILLIAM HENRY FITCHETT

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-5254-1

CONTENTS

PERIOD VI.—WATERLOO AND ST. HELENA

I. ON FRENCH SOIL

II. ACROSS THE NIVELLE

III. SOULT'S GREAT RALLY

IV.THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE ADOUR

V. TOULOUSE

VI. THE CLOSE OF A GREAT CAMPAIGN

VII. FROM MOSCOW TO ELBA

VIII. A FALLING EMPIRE

IX. THE EMPEROR OF ELBA

X. THE STRATEGY OF THE FOUR DAYS

XI. THE ACTORS IN THE NEW CAMPAIGN

XII. THE CURTAIN LIFTS!

XIII. QUATRE BRAS

XIV. LIGNY

XV. THE NIGHT BEFORE WATERLOO

XVI. THE FIELD AT WATERLOO

XVII. THE STORY OF THE GREAT FIGHT: THE FRENCH INFANTRY-ATTACKS

XVIII. THE STORY OF THE GREAT FIGHT: THE CAVALRY ONFALL

XIX. THE STORY OF THE GREAT FIGHT: THE SCENE ON THE RIDGE

XX. THE STORY OF THE GREAT FIGHT: THE DEFEAT OF THE OLD GUARD

XXI. AFTER WATERLOO

XXII. A LOST THRONE

XXIII. ST. HELENA

XXIV. AT THE BAR OF HISTORY

APPENDIX

LIST OF PLANS

THE PASSAGE OF THE ADOUR

BATTLE OF ORTHEZ

BATTLE OF TOULOUSE

WATERLOO CAMPAIGN, 1815

BATTLE OF QUATRE BRAS

BATTLE OF WATERLOO

PLAN OF HOUGOUMONT

PLAN OF LA HAYE SAINTE

FORMATION OF THE THIRD DIVISION AT WATERLOO

MAP OF ST. HELENA

(From Wellington's entrance into France, October 7, 1813, to the arrival of Napoleon at St. Helena, October 16, 1815.)

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

PERIOD VI

WATERLOO AND ST. HELENA

CHAPTER I

ON FRENCH SOIL

WHEN San Sebastian fell the tumult of battle on the Spanish frontier for a time seemed to die away. Soult, shaken by the terrible battles in the Pyrenees, was in no mood to take the offensive. He wrote to Paris, indeed, declaring that unless he had 50,000 men who had never met the British, he could not answer for the South of France! His army had been drained of veterans to strengthen Napoleon on the Elbe and the Rhine, and his conscripts had emerged with sorely shaken nerves from their rough wrestle with Wellington's war-hardened veterans in the Pyrenees. Soult, however, was busy with pick and spade along a front of more than twenty miles, turning the steep hills which form the French frontier into a great natural fortress, which, he hoped, would prove impregnable. Wellington, on the other hand, was recruiting his army, which had out-raced its supplies and marched itself almost barefoot, and was exhausted with the breathless haste, the bloody battles and sieges of the wonderful campaign just ended. Wellington, a cool soldier, understood his own art too well to undertake the actual invasion of France till he had gathered up adequate resources for that stupendous task. Pampeluna had not yet fallen. Napoleon, who had just won the great battle of Dresden, might compel the allied sovereigns to treat for peace, and that would enable him to hurl an overwhelming force on the audacious English who had dared to invade France.

Waiting thus till Pampeluna fell, till the situation on the Continent became clear, and till his own forces were reorganised, Wellington kept guard on the slopes and peaks of the Pyrenees. But there was much suffering in his mountain-camps. The weather was harsh and tempestuous; the supply of food was scanty; and, from their bleak and wind-scourged bivouacs, Wellington's troops looked down on the rich plains of France with longing eyes. It is a curious fact that, exactly as was the case at Torres Vedras, there was a continual stream of desertions from Wellington's lines to those of Soult. In less than four months more than 1200 such desertions took place. The British private of that period was a magnificent fighter, but inaction galled him. The sense of patriotism was weak. To shiver through cold days and stormy nights, hungry and ill-clad, on the crests of the Pyrenees, after the hurrying excitements of Vittoria and San Sebastian, taxed his patience too severely, and the warm plains of France beckoned him too alluringly. Hence this curious drift of desertions from a victorious army to the very forces they had defeated.

Both the British Cabinet and the Allied sovereigns were eager that Wellington should cross the Bidassoa and display the British flag on French soil. The moral effect of the invasion of France by the victorious English would be immense. It would proclaim to the world the completeness of the French overthrow in Spain. It would dissipate, as with the prick of Ithuriel's spear, the spell of Napoleon's invincibility. To see France invaded on the south while Napoleon himself was fighting desperately for existence on the east, would give new courage to banded Europe. And, as a political stroke rather than an effort of sound strategy, Wellington, with Pampeluna still unsubdued in his rear, determined to pass the Bidassoa.

The passage of this river was a soldierly deed, planned with magnificent skill and executed with magnificent courage. Graham, on the left, with the 1st and 5th divisions and some Portuguese, was to ford the Bidassoa near its mouth. The current was swift; the tides rose and fell sixteen feet. No one imagined that troops could cross such a stream in the face of a strongly entrenched enemy. But some Spanish fishermen had discovered three perilous and uncertain fords, and Wellington was resolved on the attempt. Its very difficulty, in a sense, made it practicable; for the French counted the passage impossible and kept careless watch. On the right, the Light Division, with the Spaniards under Longa and Giron, were to attempt an equally desperate task. They were to storm a difficult line of crags, rising like stairs till they reached the Great Rhune, the whole line of mountain steeps being strongly entrenched, and held by 5000 good troops.

On the night of October 6 the British were in movement. There was blackness of rain and tempest in the sky above as the columns moved down the rough slopes of the Pyrenees, and there was blackness of vast defiles, opaque with night and depth, beneath them. The gleaming lightning might show to vigilant French sentinels the sparkle of metal from the muskets of the soldiers, or from the huge brass plates on their hats; and the troops as they marched were ordered to reverse their arms and turn the brass plates on their caps to the rear, so as to escape that risk. The British columns had reached their positions while the stars were still shining. As the day slowly dawned, obscure with rain and bitter with cold, the 5th division broke from its cover, and, in two columns, moved swiftly across the sands left by the ebbing tide, and waded deep into the current of the Bidassoa. The swiftly sliding waters reached almost to the men's armpits. The startled French from the farther shore poured hasty volleys upon them; but Graham's troops, as they came quickly up and in succession pressed into the river, were cheering loudly, the regimental bands playing the National Anthem. Without a check the columns crossed the fords and reached French soil. The 1st division followed. Maucune, who played so gallant a part at Salamanca, held the French bank with 5000 troops, but nothing could stop the British. Position after position was carried; eight guns were captured, and the French right was driven roughly back in a retreat which threatened to become a flight.

When Graham's columns had reached the French bank a rocket soared aloft from the steeple of Fuenterabia, and in an instant Wellington's whole attack was uncovered. Seven columns, along a front of five miles, were in movement. The Bidassoa was crossed by ford or bridge at as many different points, and the attack of Wellington's right on the great mountain defences, the climax of which was the peak of La Rhune, was pushed with audacious valour.

The range of mountains attacked forms an acute angle with the course of the Bidassoa. As depicted on the map, it resembles a gigantic centipede, its tail touching the Bidassoa; the great Rhune, at a distance of nearly ten miles, forms its erected head, and the lateral spurs, running down into the valleys, its claws. This hilly centipede stretches almost from the Bidassoa to the Nivelle, on whose stream the high peak of La Rhune looks down. The crest of the great range and all its flanking hills looking towards the Bidassoa were strongly entrenched. The long crest, it may be added, bore a series of names. The tail of the centipede is formed by the Mandale mountain; next comes the Bayonette ridge, from which, as a huge shoulder, the Commisari juts out. Then comes a steep and lofty spine called the Saddle, while, farthest of all and high above all, rises the Great Rhune.

Three columns were launched in parallel attack on this range of entrenched hill-summits. Giron, with his Andalusians, assaulted the Saddle; another column climbed the steep road—twisting with a hundred sudden turns, and blocked every few yards with abattis and retrenchments—which crossed the ridge under the frowning height of the Commisari. The hardest task was reserved for the men of the Light Division, who had to carry the Bayonette. From that frowning height a shoulder runs down more than half the flank of the mountain to a tiny plateau. There it splits into three diverging ridges which sink into the deep valley below. Each of these ridges was strongly entrenched. A star redoubt stood at their junction; half way up the mountain shoulder was another entrenchment; on the crest of the Bayonette itself frowned a huge redoubt. But up that great mountain stair, seamed with trenches and guarded by batteries, the men of the Light Division raced with hardly a check. The French were thrust back over their entrenchments, bayonetted in their redoubts, or flung as mere scattered human spray down the flanks of the ridges before the rush of the British. One curious check, it is true, took place. The Rifles were leading, and as their panting files struggled out of the tangled brushwood on to the little natural platform where the three ascending ridges met, and which was guarded by a star-shaped fort, they closed rapidly in upon that work to carry it.

The French, however, took the Rifles, from their dark uniforms, to be Portuguese, and, plucking up courage against such opponents, they charged in a solid mass out of the redoubt, and drove the Rifles back with loss over the edge of the descent. Just then the 52nd came in sight. They were following the Rifles up the steep ascent, and the mere sight of their red uniform in an instant checked the exultant French. They had no mind to meet British troops in a frank charge. They hesitated; they began to fall back, the backward movement became a rush. The 52nd, running forward, stormed into the work with their enemies, the Rifles racing round its flank; and through the redoubt and up to the very crest of the Bayonette the flight and pursuit swept.

Giron was checked in his attack on the Saddle ridge. Two French regiments, their front covered by a heavy line of abattis, barred the advance of the Spaniards with their fire, and nothing would induce the Spaniards to make the resolute push needed to break the French line. While the Spaniards hung sullenly back, refusing to follow their officers, a youthful member of Alten's staff came up at speed to learn the cause of the check. He was but a lad, a frank-faced British lad, and his boyish valour promptly solved the difficulty. Waving his hat, he shouted to the Spaniards to follow him; and, putting spurs to his horse, at one leap cleared the abattis, and broke in on the astonished French. The challenge of that boyish voice, the sight of the youthful figure leaping on the French bayonets, kindled the Spaniards to sudden fire, and with a clamour of shouts for el chico bianco—the fair lad—they followed him over the abattis, and the French were tumbled into disordered retreat.

Night by this time had fallen, and under its darkness the French abandoned that part of the Great Rhune which was still unattacked. Wellington had thus crossed a dangerous tidal river, and carried a range of mountains which Soult, with the labours of a month, had scarred with entrenchments; and he had done it all with little more than five hours' fighting, and the loss of less than 1600 men. The French, as a matter of fact, fought ill. The shadow of their defeats in the Pyrenees still lay chill and black upon their spirits.

On October 31 Pampeluna fell, vanquished by mere hunger. Its garrison held out with great stubbornness, and, when the gates were finally opened to the besiegers, not merely the horses and the mules, but the very dogs, the cats, the rats, the reeds that grew upon the glacis, had passed into the stomachs of the hunger-wasted garrison. Wellington was now free to push his operations on French soil. But first he had to teach his own troops, and particularly the Spaniards, that he meant to wage war in France in a civilised fashion.

He knew that unless he sternly repressed outrages on the French peasantry there would break out against him the flame of a guerilla warfare such as had wasted the strength and crippled the strategy of the French in Spain. And even if savage warfare did not bring in its train such a penalty, it was intolerable to the character of Wellington and to the temper of the English people. Wellington accordingly issued a proclamation calling upon his troops to observe the utmost order and humanity in their dealings with the French; and he supplemented his proclamation with the sternest punishments. I do not care, he wrote, whether I command a large or a small army; but, large or small, I will be obeyed, and I will not suffer pillage. I have lost, he wrote at a later date, 20,000 men in this campaign, and it was not that General Morillo or anybody else might plunder the French peasantry; and I distinctly declare that I will not suffer it where I command.

Wellington issued a proclamation inviting the French peasantry to seize and bring to his head-quarters all plunderers, promising to pay for the damage they had committed, and to punish the offenders. The inhabitants of one French village shot an English soldier dead who was plundering, wounded his comrade and brought him to head-quarters, where he was promptly hanged. If I had 20,000 Spaniards, paid and fed, Wellington wrote some weeks later to Lord Bathurst, I should have Bayonne. If I had 40,000, I do not know where I should stop. Now I have both the 20,000 and the 40,000 . . . but if they plunder they will ruin all. And finally Wellington sent back 25,000 good Spanish troops into Spain, because he could not trust them in France, and he was willing to postpone victory rather than to win it at a shameful cost.

Wellington's policy stands out in vivid and noble contrast with the savage methods adopted by all other combatants in the great strife then raging. Napoleon's methods in Spain are still the shame of history. At the very moment when, on the southern frontier, Wellington was sending back his Spaniards, and robbing himself of an army rather than suffer outrages to be committed, the Allied sovereigns on the eastern frontier were letting loose their Cossacks to spread havoc through the French provinces. Wellington's more humane policy was amply justified by results. How did it come to pass that Wellington in the south could effect more with a mixed force of 60,000 troops than the Allied sovereigns with 500,000 could accomplish on the opposite side of France? It was not merely that Wellington was opposed by Soult instead of by Napoleon. The justice and humanity he showed towards the French peasantry prevented the fire of a guerilla warfare being kindled against him. He had no foes except the troops arrayed under Soult. Perfect tranquillity reigned about his bivouacs, and followed him to the very edge of the battlefield. Nay, there ran before him the fame of his humanity, of the order and discipline of his troops, and this won him friends everywhere. He was able to secure more abundant supplies in France than Soult himself. The English general's policy, and the good discipline he maintains, does us more harm, wrote a French officer at that period, than ten battles; every peasant wishes to be under his protection. Soult himself complained of the French peasantry that they appear more disposed to favour the invaders than to second the army. It is scarcely possible to obtain a carriage for transport, he wrote, and I shall not be surprised to find in a short time these inhabitants taking arms against us.

The tempestuous weather now once more laid its arresting spell on military operations. It was wintertime—the winter of the Pyrenees; and the snows and storms in the mountain passes were not more trying than the incessant dissolving rains in the plains below. The country was one great clay bed, laced with streams, and liquefying over wide stretches into vast marshes. The roads were mere ribbons of mud; the streams were bridgeless; the landscape was one rain-scourged quagmire. Soult, with a fortified camp and a great fortress as his base, and with paved roads linking his divisions together, had an advantage over his great opponent. The incessant rains were his safeguard. A hard frost, or forty-eight hours' sun, would have ruined him. But Wellington's divisions were parted from each other by moist stretches of mud almost as hopelessly as by spaces of fathomless sea itself. On the cross-roads, which formed the only lines of communication betwixt Wellington's camps, the guns sank to their axles, the infantry to mid-leg, the cavalry to their saddle-girths. There was nothing for it but to stand on guard and wait.

CHAPTER II

ACROSS THE NIVELLE

DURING this interval of waiting, the outposts of the rival armies fell into the oddest relations of friendship. They had a rough code of signals by which they could communicate with each other; and if either side wanted, for a time, a particular post, it would be yielded with good-humoured frankness. The officers in charge of the French working parties on the Little Rhune, busy throwing up entrenchments, chatted pleasantly with the officers in charge of the British outposts, and exchanged bantering pleasantries as to what would happen when the business of storming these entrenchments was taken in hand. The sentries on either side exchanged news, or bartered tobacco for spirits, &c.

One curious example of the terms established betwixt the men at the outposts is given by Napier. The 43rd fell into line one morning, within twenty yards of a French out-sentry. The Frenchman during the whole operation composedly walked to and fro on his beat, with his knapsack lying on the ground to ease his shoulders. When the 43rd was ordered to advance, a British sergeant went forward, helped the Frenchman to replace his pack, and told him to go away. Then the 43rd opened fire. Next morning the French, in exactly the same way, warned a sentry of the 43rd to retire. The soldiers were on terms of war with each other, in brief, but not of wanton murder.

In his Adventures of a Soldier Costello gives what we may call the view from the ranks, the sentiment of the privates; and his testimony is very striking. Ours, indeed, he says, "was a noble enemy. They never permitted us to flag, but kept us ever on the qui vive. We anticipated little terror from capture, and though we ever found them to be our roughest antagonists, yet we always experienced a most generous opposition. Indeed there was, on the whole, such a chivalrous spirit between us, that our men had a kind of respect for even a wound inflicted by a Frenchman. Speaking again of the pause in the fighting which took place on the Bidassoa, Costello says, Such a good feeling reigned among the French and our men, that they frequently went into each other's picquet-houses—terms of intimacy which they extended to neither the Spanish nor Portuguese troops, for whom they expressed an unmeasured contempt."

Wellington, however, had sterner cares. He would sometimes complain, with a touch of bitter humour, that he had deadlier foes behind him than in front. From amid his bivouac fires he had to watch the plots of Spanish and Portuguese statesmen, and his correspondence at this period reflects vividly the ceaseless anxieties these caused him. At the very time he was busy out-generalling Soult, Wellington warned the British Cabinet that there was a real peril of coming to open war with Spain, and he discussed how, in that event, he might be able to embark the British army at Passages, in spite of all the French and Spanish armies united. But, he added, I should be much more certain of getting clear off, as we ought, if we had possession of San Sebastian; and he urged Ministers to demand that a British garrison should be admitted into that fortress.

History is rich in satire, but what more striking example of the irony of history can be imagined than this—that at the very moment when England was spending the blood of her soldiers and the gold of her citizens to deliver Spain from Napoleon, she had also to consider the possibility of the nation she had delivered attacking her! The soil of Spain had been sown thick with British graves, but from that gallant seed sprang no harvest of gratitude. It was, says Napier, with an enemy at his back more to be dreaded than the foe in his front that Wellington invaded the South of France.

Wellington's difficulties, on the whole, and at this distance of time, are hardly realisable. The Spanish authorities waged what was scarcely less than open war on his hospitals and communications. His great hospitals were at Santander, and the Spanish officials suddenly placed them all—doctors and patients—under rigid quarantine. Betwixt June and December 1813, 30,000 British soldiers had been wounded in the service of Spain. The return offered by Spanish gratitude was to make these wounded men close prisoners, with the view of driving Wellington to fix his hospitals in England!

And if Wellington suffered much from the jealousy and ignorance of Spanish authorities, he suffered almost as much from the stupidity of the British Cabinet. Reinforcements which would have enabled him to crush Soult were intercepted, and despatched on an irrelevant expedition to Holland under Graham. Wellington's troops were left to shiver, half clad, many of them barefooted, on the bleak slopes of the Pyrenees. His muleteers were twenty-six months in arrears, his troops seven months. Napier describes him at the end of 1813—when all the victories of the Peninsula were behind him—as having not a shilling to pay for anything in the country, and his credit gone. It is a fact that he had to borrow privately the money necessary to send a courier to Clinton on the east coast of Spain. He was so overwhelmed with debt that he describes himself as scarcely able to quit his quarters for the multitude of creditors lying in wait for him. The astonishing British Cabinet wished to despatch Wellington and his veterans to Holland, and Wellington had to remind them that a British