The Regency Years: During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern by Robert Morrison

Author:Robert Morrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published: 2019-04-28T23:00:00+00:00

PUBLISHED IN April 1816, this illustration of the farm compound of La Haye Sainte plainly shows the damage it sustained ten months earlier during the Battle of Waterloo.

Time and again the French cavalry charged and was repulsed. Time and again the French artillery tore into the British squares, where dead soldiers were dragged to the center and piled higher and higher, while the next redcoat stepped forward to fill the gap in the line. “Hard pounding, this, gentlemen,” Wellington remarked; “try who can pound the longest.” By five o’clock there were massive casualties on both sides, and while the British squares continued to stand firm amid the relentless French onslaught, Wellington knew his side could not hold out much longer. “Night or the Prussians must come,” he murmured.15 At six-fifteen Napoleon unleashed yet another strike on La Haye Sainte, and this time—with the allied forces exhausted, badly outnumbered, and low on ammunition—he succeeded. The center of the battlefield at last belonged to him. With the day now hanging in the balance, soldiers were spotted to the east moving steadily toward the carnage.

It was Blücher and the Prussians, who had set off from Wavre early that morning and arrived exactly when and where Wellington needed them most. Napoleon ordered his crack troops—the “Old Guard”—to the front to break the British before the Prussians could join them. Wellington put a line of soldiers along the ridge, and then instructed the bulk of his men to lie down on its reverse slope. The French easily bested the British line, but as they approached the crest of the ridge, the remaining British infantrymen stood up and launched a salvo directly into the Old Guard. The surprise devastated the French assault. Within minutes it was in disarray. Wellington stood up in his stirrups, raised his hat in the air, and gave the order for his entire army to advance. The French, their willingness to fight for Napoleon finally shattered, turned and fled over the debris of previous assaults. The discipline and determination of the British soldiers, coupled with the crucial arrival of Blücher’s men to siphon off French forces, had carried the day. But just. As the duke famously remarked, the battle of Waterloo was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”16

News of the allied victory traveled fast, and before long thousands upon thousands of Britons flocked to Belgium to see Wellington’s battlefield. John Scott was there soon enough to pick a “trophy” right off the ground (a twelve-pound cannonball), while many other early tourists bought mementos from local peasants who had scoured the fields and were doing a booming trade in caps, helmets, cuirasses, bayonets, feathers, brass eagles, empty cartridges, cannon-wadding, and so on. Robert Peel spoke directly to Wellington one month after his triumph, and then drove out in the pouring rain to see the scene of it. The writer Charlotte Anne Waldie visited when the effluvia rising up from the grave pits “was horrible.” The smell of putrefaction still

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