was a big stone-built farm called Gemioncourt. It would have helped Wellington enormously to hold that farm, but the French had driven out the Dutch defenders and had now garrisoned its thick walls. Once past the farm the streamlet trickled on to feed an artificial lake, the Materne Lake, beyond which was a hamlet called Piraumont which, to Wellington’s consternation, was also held by French infantry. Those enemy infantrymen were perilously close to the Nivelles road and, being to the east of the battlefield, threatened to cut the vital link between Wellington and Blücher.
The Frenchmen in Piraumont never did cut the road because Wellington contained them with the first reinforcements to arrive, the 95th Rifles, who were helped by a battalion of Brunswick infantry. That meant his left flank was safe for the moment, while his right was protected by the thick undergrowth of the Bossu Wood. The major fighting would take place in the mile-wide stretch of undulating country between the lake and the wood, and when he returned from his meeting with Blücher, around 3 p.m., that stretch of farmland was swarming with Frenchmen.
Rebecque, the clever Dutchman, had managed to assemble 8,000 troops at Quatre-Bras, but the newcomers had retreated in panic from the French while Saxe-Weimar’s men, still short of ammunition, had taken cover in the Bossu Wood. It must have seemed that there was nothing to stop the French advance, but fortuitously Sir Thomas Picton’s fine division was just arriving from Brussels. The 95th led them and they were sent left to stop the French breaching the road to Ligny, while the rest were deployed to face the attack coming straight up the Brussels highway. Some newly arrived British artillery unlimbered south of the crossroads, but almost immediately came under fire from French skirmishers concealed in the tall fields of rye. There were still some Dutch skirmishers in the rye, but they were being pressed relentlessly back and the French could spare men to fire at the British gunners and at the newly arrived infantry. Lieutenant Edward Stephens of the 32nd, a Cornish regiment, described the fire of the French skirmishers as ‘very galling … our men were falling in every direction’.
Skirmishers play a large part in the story of Waterloo. Essentially they are specialist infantrymen who fight neither in line nor in column (though they could and often did do both), but fought ahead of a line or column. They formed a skirmish line, a scatter of troops spread wide, whose job was to snipe at the enemy’s formation. Every battalion possessed a Light Company, and some whole battalions were light troops like the battalions of the 95th Rifles. The French had expanded the numbers of their skirmishers because, like the artillery, they were useful for weakening an enemy line before the column attacked. The best defence against skirmishers was other skirmishers, so in battle both sides had their light troops in extended order way ahead of their formations. Their scattered formation made them difficult targets for inaccurate muskets and not worth the price of a cannonball, though they were vulnerable to canister, an artillery round which turned the cannon into a giant shotgun. They fought in pairs, one man firing while his companion loaded. In an ideal world the French skirmishers, who were called voltigeurs or tirailleurs, would go ahead until they were in musket range of the enemy line and then they would open fire, hoping to bring down officers. Tirailleur, the official name, simply means a shooter, from the verb tirer, to shoot, while a voltigeur is a vaulter, or gymnast, because the ideal skirmisher was an agile, quick-moving man. They knelt or lay down to fire, making themselves small targets, and enough skirmishers could seriously hurt a line of troops, but only if they could get close. French skirmishers usually outnumbered the British, though the British had the advantage that many of their skirmishers were armed with rifles, a weapon that Napoleon refused to employ. The rifle’s drawback was that it was slow to load because the bullet, usually wrapped in a leather patch, had to be forced down the rifled barrel, and that took far longer than ramming a musket ball down a smoothbore barrel, but the advantage of the rifle was its accuracy. The British used the Baker rifle, a superb and dependable weapon, that was accurate far beyond the range of any musket.
Skirmishers dared not get too far ahead of their parent battalions because, in the deadly game of scissors, stone and paper which characterizes artillery, infantry and cavalry in the Napoleonic era, they were totally vulnerable to horsemen. Their scattered formation meant they could not form square or offer volley fire, so a few cavalrymen could decimate a skirmish line in a matter of seconds. But when Picton’s Division arrives at Quatre-Bras there is no cavalry to scour the French skirmishers away. The Black Legion of Brunswick reached the battlefield at the same time as Picton’s men, but the rest of the Duke’s cavalry regiments are still hurrying to reach the battlefield and so Wellington decides to attack the French skirmishers with his line of infantry. There were columns of French infantry beyond the enemy skirmishers, but British lines had never had trouble defeating French columns, and so the six battalions were ordered forward.
They were severely outnumbered. The French were coming in three columns. The largest with over 8,000 men was attacking northwards close to the Bossu Wood, the central column, advancing along the highway, had 5,400 men, while to their right were another 4,200 infantry, all of them supported by over fifty cannon and by troops of cavalry. The six battalions of British infantry had around 3,500 men between them who had to face at least 17,000 infantry, as well as the artillery and cavalry, but these battalions were among the best and most experienced in Wellington’s army.
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