Sharpe’s Waterloo: The Waterloo Campaign, 15–18 June, 1815. Bernard Cornwell

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men who survived that terrible day, his memory was shaky. Men saw little of the battle. Smoke hung thick across the field. For much of the day the allied infantry was sheltered on the reverse slope, unable to see into the valley where the killing took place. And what they did see was often confusing and terrifying. One British infantry officer said he hardly saw a Frenchman all day, just thick skeins of smoke being lit by musket flashes, so his men fired at the flashes. ‘I am endeavouring to do an impossibility,’ one young British officer wrote to his father just afterwards, ‘to describe a battle’. Captain Powell of the 1st Foot Guards was sure his battalion was attacked by 6,000 men of the Imperial Guard, but there could not have been more than 2,000 attackers. Ensign Leeke of the 52nd, who was engaged in the same fight against the Chasseurs, confidently believed they numbered about 10,000. This is not to criticize the men who were there, they were brave and they achieved greatness at Mont St Jean, but their recollections are not always accurate.

      Waterloo is a magnificent and terrible story, but it is not just the story of a great British triumph. It is the tale of an allied victory in which the British played a crucial part. When the Duke finally waved his line forward at the end of the day Von Müffling, the Duke’s Prussian liaison officer, recalled, ‘when the line of infantry moved forward small masses of only some hundred men, at great intervals, were seen everywhere advancing. The position in which the infantry had fought was marked, as far as the eye could see, by a red line caused by the red uniforms of the numerous killed and wounded who lay there.’

      That is a terrible image, a tideline of dead and dying men.

      No one knows how many died at Waterloo, or died of their injuries in the days that followed. A conservative estimate would be that about 12,000 men lay dead as night fell on 18 June, and some 30,000 to 40,000 wounded. Many of those wounded were doomed. The 32nd, a British regiment, had twenty-eight men killed in the battle and 146 wounded, but forty-four of those wounded subsequently died. The Prussians took ghastly casualties at Plancenoit, while the French probably suffered worst of all. They began the battle with close to 77,000 men, but a week or so later the musters showed only 44,000 still with the colours. Many of those missing men had deserted, of course, but far too many were dead or dying.

      Harry Smith, the Rifleman hero of the Peninsular Wars, wrote afterwards:

      I had been over many a field of battle, but with the exception of one spot at New Orleans and the breach of Badajos, I had never seen anything to compare with what I saw. At Waterloo the whole field from right to left was a mass of dead bodies. In one spot, to the right of La Haye Sainte, the French Cuirassiers were literally piled on each other; many soldiers not wounded lying under their horses; others, fearfully wounded, occasionally with their horses struggling on their wounded bodies. The sight was sickening … All over the field you saw officers, and as many soldiers as were permitted to leave the ranks, leaning and weeping over some dead or dying brother or comrade. The battle was fought on a Sunday, the 18th June, and I repeated to myself a verse from the Psalms of that day – 91st Psalm, 7th verse; ‘A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.’

      They were all brave men; Prussians, Hanoverians, Dutch, British and French. It was a terrible day, an awful battle, and no wonder that afterwards the Duke of Wellington was to say ‘I pray to God I have fought my last battle’.

      He had. And in winning his last, most desperate, battle he bequeathed us a magnificent story. The one you’re about to read is not inaccurate, merely one-sided. Sharpe and his companions fought desperately, that tideline of red uniforms was mute witness to their bravery, but so did the Dutch, the Hanoverians, the Prussians and the French.

      Waterloo was an allied victory. And a terrific story.

       Bernard Cornwell

       April 2015

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THE FIRST DAY

      CHAPTER ONE

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      It was dawn on the northern frontier of France; a border marked only by a shallow stream which ran between the stunted trunks of pollarded willows. A paved high road forded the stream. The road led north from France into the Dutch province of Belgium, but there was neither guardpost nor gate to show where the road left the French Empire to enter the Kingdom of the Netherlands. There was just the summer-shrunken stream from which a pale mist drifted to lie in shadowy skeins across the plump fields of wheat and rye and barley.

      The rising sun appeared like a swollen red ball suspended low in the tenuous mist. The sky was still dark in the west. An owl flew over the ford, banked into a beechwood and gave a last hollow call, which was lost in the dawn’s loud chorus that seemed to presage a bright hot summer’s day in this rich and placid countryside. The cloudless sky promised a day for haymaking, or a day for lovers to stroll through heavy-leafed woods to rest beside the green cool of a streambank. It was a perfect midsummer’s dawn on the northern border of France and for a moment, for a last heart-aching moment, the world was at peace.

      Then hundreds of hooves crashed through the ford, spattering water bright into the mist. Uniformed men, long swords in their hands, rode north out of France. The men were Dragoons who wore brass helmets covered with drab cloth so the rising sun would not reflect from the shining metal to betray their position. The horsemen had short-barrelled muskets thrust into bucket holsters on their saddles.

      The Dragoons were the vanguard of an army. A hundred and twenty-five thousand men were marching north on every road that led to the river-crossing at Charleroi. This was invasion; an army flooding across an unguarded frontier with wagons and coaches and ambulances and three hundred and forty-four guns and thirty thousand horses and portable forges and pontoon bridges and whores and wives and colours and lances and muskets and sabres and all the hopes of France. This was the Emperor Napoleon’s Army of the North and it marched towards the waiting Dutch, British and Prussian forces.

      The French Dragoons crossed the frontier with drawn swords, but the weapons served no purpose other than to dignify the moment with a suitable melodrama, for there was not so much as a single Dutch customs officer to oppose the invasion. There were just the mist and the empty roads, and the far-off crowing of cockerels in the dawn. A few dogs barked as the invading cavalrymen captured the first Dutch villages unopposed. The Dragoons hammered their sword hilts against doors and window shutters, demanding to know whether any British or Prussian soldiers were billeted within.

      ‘They’re all to the north. They hardly ever show themselves here!’ The villagers spoke French; indeed, they thought of themselves as French citizens and consequently welcomed the helmeted Dragoons with cups of wine and offers of food. To these reluctant Dutchmen the invasion was a liberation, and even the weather matched their joy; the sun was climbing into a cloudless sky and beginning to burn off the mist which still clung in the leafy valleys.

      On the main highway leading to Charleroi and Brussels the Dragoons were clattering along at a fine pace, almost as if this was an exercise in Provence instead of war. A lieutenant of Dragoons was so dismissive of any danger that he was eagerly telling his Sergeant how the new science of phrenology measured human aptitudes from the shape of a man’s skull. The Lieutenant opined that when the science was properly understood all promotion in the army would be based on careful skull measurements. ‘We’ll be able to measure courage and decisiveness, common sense and honesty, and all with a pair of calipers

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