24 Hours at Waterloo by Robert Kershaw

Author:Robert Kershaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448133864
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2017-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

3 pm to 4.15 pm

Charge à la Sauvage

At about 3 pm the 1/27th Inniskillings and the rest of Lambert’s 10th Brigade, Peninsula veterans, newly arrived from North America, were ordered forward. They had had plenty of time to reflect on their mortality. As Lieutenant Edward Drewe with the 1/27th remembered, the battle had begun to their right at Hougoumont, ‘gradually extended to the left, apparently extremely hot in the centre on each side of the road leading towards La Haye Sainte’. The men, he observed, had been ‘quite unconscious and apparently careless of the part they were shortly to take’. Many were sleeping off the effects of the march and the rum they had plundered while clearing the Brussels road through the Forest of Soignes the night before. ‘Some of them were wounded by a few straggling shot that passed from the enemy over or through our advanced lines,’ he recalled, ‘and a few killed.’ Thus far, they were relatively unscathed by this battle.

Major Arthur Rowley Heyland, commanding the 40th Regiment in the brigade, was a sober and consummate professional. ‘It appears to me of no consequence whether a man dies young or old,’ he had just written to his wife, ‘provided he be employed in fulfilling the duties of the situation he is placed in this world.’ Heyland had written this to his wife, Mary, the day before. She was the same age as he, 34 years, and pregnant again. Arthur Heyland had six other children and loved them all. ‘What dear children, my Mary, I leave you,’ he wrote, because despite having ‘no desponding ideas on entering the field’, he was convinced and ‘cannot help thinking it almost impossible I should escape either wounds or death’. He had witnessed battles as intense as this before in Portugal and the Spanish Peninsula. After being wounded at Talavera in 1809 he was back for the epic and costly sieges of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz three years later, when his company had suffered over 400 casualties and he was wounded a second time. In 1813 he survived the bloody battle of Vittoria, but was seriously wounded again a month later in July. Heyland knew he was lucky to be alive, so much so, that on his return to Cork in 1814 he sought permission to retire. When Napoleon escaped Elba, he was however, recalled to command the 40th.

After so many close shaves, Heyland did not rate his survival chances highly. His letter to Mary was therefore composed with infinite care. He wanted two of his sons, John and Alfred, to join the infantry, while Kyffin ‘might try the artillery service’. His wife was advised to invest 60 per cent of his income and not scruple to accept ‘the usual government allowance for officer’s children and widows’ and take up residence in Wales. ‘Let my children console you, my love, my Mary,’ he wrote, assuring her ‘that the happiest days of my life have been from your love and affection, and that I die loving only you’.

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