The Longest Afternoon by Brendan Simms

Author:Brendan Simms [Simms, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465039944
Publisher: Basic Books

Napoleon now staked everything on a last throw. The Prussians were arriving in large numbers on his right flank and could no longer be stopped. If he could plough through the allied centre and crush Wellington at the crossroads, however, the emperor could still save the day. The Imperial Guard were sent up the road towards La Haye Sainte, before wheeling left, attacking the allied line between the farmhouse and the château of Hougoumont. On their right flank, d’Erlon’s 1st Corps, or what had been reassembled after the British cavalry charges in the early afternoon, climbed the slope on the east side of La Haye Sainte to attack the crossroads. They advanced slowly, in column square to be ready for all eventualities.

The first of d’Erlon’s columns, led by the fresh men of Pegot’s brigade, soon hit what was left of Ompteda’s forces around the sunken road. By now, the whole area behind the farm ‘was strewn with wounded’, as one British cavalry officer recalls, ‘over whom it was barely possible to avoid moving. Wounded or mutilated horses wandered or turned in circles. The noise was deafening, and the air of ruin and desolation that prevailed wherever the eye could reach gave no inspiration of victory.’38 Brigade Adjutant von Einem was hit in the abdomen by a musket ball. As he fell on to the neck of his horse, he called out: ‘I am done for.’ He then asked Brandis to take his watch and money for safe-keeping. Brandis refused, encouraged him to hang on and brought the stricken adjutant on horseback to a nearby Hanoverian square, where four men carried him away in a blanket.39 The divisional commander General von Alten was injured. At around the same time, Baring lost his third horse, which took a bullet to the head and fell on top of him, pinning his right leg to the ground in the deep clay. It took some time for a rifleman to emerge from the sunken road to help him. Baring managed to get out from under the horse, but his leg – though not broken – was out of action. He begged his men to fetch him another horse, offering them large sums of money to do so.

After more than five hours of almost constant fighting, and about half an hour after they had abandoned the farm, Baring’s command began to crumble. Unwounded soldiers headed for the rear area ‘in search of ammunition’. The officers and men ignored Baring’s pleas for a horse. ‘People who called themselves my friend,’ he recalled bitterly, ‘forgot this word and thought only of themselves.’40 Brandis ran into Baring as he stood ‘completely isolated without a single man of his battalion’.41 Eventually the commander of the 2nd Light Battalion staggered to a house behind the line, where an Englishman caught one of the riderless horses crashing around, provided it with a saddle and helped him to mount up. He then rode back to the sunken road, but found that his men had left, supposedly to find more bullets.

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