troubles were far from over:
The charge was sounded and our soldiers went through the hedges. [We] went down a sunken road obstructed by felled trees, vehicles, harrows and ploughs and we got past these obstacles only after much difficulty and under fire from the Prussians concealed by the hedges. At last we overcame these obstacles and, firing as we went, entered the village. When we reached the church our advance was halted by a stream and the enemy, in houses, behind walls and on rooftops inflicted considerable casualties by musketry, grapeshot and cannon balls which assailed us from in front and from the flanks.
François tells how three battalion commanders, five captains, two adjutants and nine lieutenants were killed in this savage fighting. Out of the two battalions that made the attack close to 700 men were killed or wounded, and it was no surprise that a Prussian counter-attack drove the French back out of the village. Franz Lieber, the seventeen-year-old who had volunteered in Berlin, was part of the counter-attacks:
Our ardour now led us entirely beyond the proper limits; the section to which I belonged ran madly, without firing, towards the enemy, who retreated. My hindman fell; I rushed on … the village was intersected with thick hedges, from behind which the grenadiers fired upon us, but we drove them from one to the other. I, forgetting altogether to fire and what I ought to have done, tore the red plume from one of the grenadiers’ bearskin-caps, and swung it over my head.
Franz Lieber reaches the centre of the village, steps round a house and is faced by a French infantryman just a dozen paces away.
He aimed at me, I levelled my rifle at him. ‘Aim well, my boy,’ said the sergeant-major, who saw me. My antagonist’s ball grazed my hair on the right side; I shot and he fell; I found I had shot through his face; he was dying. This was my first shot ever fired in battle.
The battle is a desperate struggle, reduced to hand-to-hand fighting in the villages. A French officer said the dead in the main street ‘were piled two or three deep. The blood flowed from them in streams … the mud was formed from crushed bones and flesh.’ The clouded sky is thickened with great gouts of powder smoke belched by massive cannon that fill the air with man-made thunder. Prussian advantage of numbers is holding the French at bay, but the superior quality of the French troops is slowly eroding the Prussian defence. After one French counter-attack a Prussian gunner, Captain von Reuter, seeing a skirmish line approach, assumed it was from his own infantry and ordered his gunners to keep firing at the distant enemy cannon. It was his battalion surgeon who noticed that the skirmishers were French. ‘I at once bellowed the order, “grape on the skirmishers!”’ von Reuter recalled:
At the same moment they gave us a volley . . and by that volley, and the bursting of a shell or two, every horse except one belonging to my left flank gun was killed or wounded … in another moment I saw my left flank taken in the rear, from the Ligny brook, by a French staff officer and about fifty horsemen. As these charged us the officer shouted in German ‘Surrender, gunners, for you are all prisoners!’ With these words he charged down with his men and dealt a vicious cut at my wheel driver, who dodged it by flinging himself over his dead horse. The blow was delivered with such force that the sabre cut deep into the saddle and was stuck fast there. Gunner Sieberg snatched up the handspike of one of the twelve-pounders and with the words, ‘I’ll show him how to take prisoners,’ dealt the officer such a blow on his bearskin that he rolled with a broken skull from the back of his grey charger.
As the afternoon shades into a grey evening the battle is still undecided. The Prussians are holding, but of course General d’Erlon’s Corps is coming to fall like a thunderbolt on their exposed right flank.
Or rather it is supposed to fall like a thunderbolt, but instead the hapless General d’Erlon becomes the leading actor in a French farce. Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Count d’Erlon, was the son of a carpenter and as a youth had been apprenticed to a locksmith, but in 1780, aged seventeen, he joined the pre-Revolutionary army and rose to the rank of Corporal. It took the Revolution to reveal his talent, and after that his rise was swift until, in 1815, he is a Marshal of France and Count d’Erlon, commanding the 1st Corps of l’Armée du Nord. He leads almost 17,000 infantry, 1,700 cavalry, a corps of engineers and 46 guns, and his first orders on that fateful Friday had been to march to Ney’s support. His powerful Corps would help Ney clear Quatre-Bras, then swing right on the Nivelles road to fall on the Prussians, but Napoleon realizes he needs help sooner and so sends a messenger to recall d’Erlon, who had almost, at last, reached Ney’s troops.
D’Erlon obediently reverses his march, a cumbersome process which takes time as the guns and their limbers are turned around on the narrow roads. He marches back towards the Emperor, but the orders have been confusing and, instead of taking his men north onto the Prussian flank he arrives on the flank of General Vandamme’s Corps, which is engaged in the brutal fight for the village of Saint-Amand.
It is early evening, the sky is clouded, the terrain obscured by drifting gun smoke, and Vandamme at first believes that the approaching troops are Prussians, or maybe British. He sends an urgent message to Napoleon, who has just massed his Imperial Guard to make a last massive assault on the Prussian centre, and the Emperor, alarmed, delays that attack until he can discover the identity of these newly arrived troops. They are his own men, but in the wrong place, so a messenger rides to d’Erlon ordering him to turn northwards and assault the Prussian flank, but just then yet another courier arrives, this one from Marshal Ney, demanding that d’Erlon return to Quatre-Bras immediately.
D’Erlon assumes that Ney is in desperate trouble and so he turns his Corps around and sets off a second time for Quatre-Bras. The Emperor has launched his great attack, but by the time he realizes d’Erlon is not engaged, the 1st Corps has vanished. Thus did those 22,000 men spend that Friday, marching between two battlefields and helping at neither. D’Erlon arrived at Quatre-Bras too late, the fighting had ended at sundown and his powerful Corps, which could have swung either the battle at Ligny or the fighting at Quatre-Bras, had achieved nothing. It is the French equivalent of the Grand Old Duke of York, except d’Erlon spent his day halfway between two fights, neither up nor down, and his prevarication denied Napoleon the crushing victory he expected.
Because Ligny was a victory. The final assault of the Imperial Guard captures the villages at the centre of the Prussian line and sends Blücher’s army reeling back. The pretty village of Ligny, with its thatched houses, is a charnel house, especially the church and graveyard which saw the severest fighting. Marshal Blücher, despite his age, tried to restore the position by attacking with his own cavalry. He was unhorsed and ridden over by French heavy cavalry, but Blücher’s aide-de-camp, with great presence of mind, draped a cloak over the Marshal’s medals and braid, so obscuring his eminent status, and in the failing light the French cavalry did not recognize him, so that at last he could be rescued by his own men. He was bruised and dazed, and his army was beaten, but it was not destroyed. The ‘ifs’ of history are generally pointless, but there can be little doubt that d’Erlon’s men, if they had done what the Emperor wanted, would have made the difference. The final successful attack would have been made earlier in the evening, giving the French more time to complete the enemy’s destruction, and d’Erlon’s Corps could have rolled up the Prussian right flank and, in all probability, caused such panic and chaos that Blücher’s army might have ceased to exist.
But it did exist. It had been wounded, but the two flanks were still coherent, and Blücher was alive and, though they had been beaten, they managed to withdraw from the battlefield in reasonable order and the French made no effort to pursue in the gathering dark. One Prussian officer recalled:
The men looked dreadfully tired after the fighting. In the great heat gunpowder smoke, sweat and mud had congealed into a thick crust of dirt so that their faces looked like mulattos … and many who had been unwilling to leave the ranks because of a slight wound wore bandages they had made
