How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) by Stephen Clarke Page B

mortally wounded man gave his dying breath without expressing his devotion to the Emperor.’ But they probably weren’t shouting ‘Vive Jérôme!’
    Not that any of this was Napoleon’s fault, according to his French admirers. Lacking competent marshals, he had no choice but to trust his young brother, and after all he had given Jérôme a very simple task that should have been within even his limited capabilities.
    In
Les Misérables
, Victor Hugo seems to excuse the waste of lives by suggesting that Hougoumont was a vital strategic point on the battlefield. He ironises about ‘a dung pit, a few hoes and spades, some carts, an old well with its iron wheel, a hopping foal, a jumping turkey … This is the farmyard that Napoleon dreamed of capturing … If he had managed to take this little patch of land, he might have won the world.’
    The trouble was that there was a very large patch of land to the east that was still held by Wellington’s men, who showed no sign of wanting to leave.
II
    These days it is generally agreed that sending massed ranks of infantrymen marching in full view towards a well-armed enemy is rather heartless. We have all read about World War One soldiers climbing out of their trenches and immediately falling in their thousands to withering machine-gun fire. Machine guns didn’t exist in 1815, but there were plenty of weapons deadly enough to wipe out whole lines of advancing men. The worst was probably the innocuous-sounding grapeshot, fn1 a mass of grape-sized lumps of metal that could be fired from a cannon in a scatter-pattern, killing or mutilating far more efficiently than a single cannonball. Grapeshot was often augmented with chains, nails and any odd bits of shrapnel that were handy – when firing hot metal at short range at an enemy, it was important to maim as many bodies as possible.
    This deadly hailstorm, as well as straightforward cannonballs, was what Napoleon’s infantry now faced as he sent them marching towards the centre of Wellington’s line. And that was before they came in range of the muskets awaiting them on the top of the ridge.
    There has been much criticism of Napoleon’s full-frontal assault, especially because the soldiers were made to advance in densely packed columns, 200 men wide and twenty-four rows deep, so that they were much easier to mow down with cannon and grapeshot than a wider line. Some French historians try to explain the attack by alleging that Napoleon’s orders were misinterpreted, but Napoleon himself had always shown that he saw no moral problem with sending large numbers of men to an almost certain death, if it meant winning the day. In 1813 he had warned the Austrian negotiator Metternich that he was willing to take huge casualties to defend France (and his own throne, of course): ‘A man like me cares little about the lives of a million men.’ Napoleon had also told parliament that ‘Any man who values his own life more than national glory and the esteem of his comrades has no place in the French army.’ In other words, you’re cannon fodder and you’d better enjoy it.
    At about 1.30 p.m., Napoleon therefore sent about 16,000 men on a one-kilometre walk across the muddy fields of soaked rye, with English cannons scything through the ranks as if harvesting the cereals. The soldiers marched valiantly on, terrifying a front line of Belgo-Dutch troops, who scattered before them. Thinking they had broken the English defences, the French began to cheer, and charged forward. But there was a line of British troops on the ridge, and they unleashed a volley of musket fire at almost point-blank range. The surviving French infantrymen decided they had had enough and began to dash back towards their lines.
    This was where Sir William Ponsonby and Lord Uxbridge famously led the British cavalry charging heroically downhill, trampling the fleeing infantrymen, and galloping so far forward that they ran into a superior force of better-armed French