The Face Of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme by Keegan John

Author:Keegan, John [Keegan, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781446496824
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-08-30T23:00:00+00:00

Disintegration

In the last hour of the battle which followed the Imperial Guard’s flight, the order which the tension of combat had imposed on both armies dissolved. Among the Allies, disorder manifested itself in a rash of accidental killings and woundings as units stumbled unrecognized upon each other in the gathering dark. Among the French, it took the form of a panicky or craven capitulation as regiments found their line of escape from the field impeded or threatened.

Accidental wounding is one of the major hazards of battle, and the desire to avoid it one of the principal reasons underlying the professional soldiers’ much derided obsession with drill. For among close-packed groups of men equipped with firearms, one’s neighbour’s weapon offers one a much more immediate threat to life than any wielded by an enemy. Lieutenant Strachan, of the 73rd, had been killed by the accidental discharge of a musket in the ranks on the retreat from Quatre Bras; and, without strict obedience to the sequence of ‘Load – Make Ready – Level – Fire’, many others would have met the same end on the field itself. As it was, Colonel Hay of the 16th Light Dragoons was shot by British Infantry during the repulse of d’Erlon’s attack (the 10th Hussars suffered several casualties from a battery of British artillery when riding in pursuit of some French cavalry who were the gunners’ real target), and the 52nd fired by mistake on the 23rd Light Dragoons following the repulse of the Guard (they managed to kill their own Colonel’s horse). Lieutenant Anderson overheard the colonel of the 23rd complain, at the sight of a ‘considerable number’ of his troopers lying dead or unhorsed around the 52nd, ‘It’s always the case, we always lose more men by our own people than we do by the enemy.’ This was an exaggeration. But there are numerous authentic accounts of losses by ‘friendly’ fire – or even ‘friendly’ swordcuts – at Waterloo. Mercer describes at length how he suffered from a Prussian battery which mistook his men for French, inflicted on them more casualties than they had suffered throughout the day’s fighting and were at length only silenced by the arrival of a Belgian battery – ‘beastly drunk and … not at all particular as to which way they fired’ – who in their turn mistook the Prussians for the enemy. Among the cavalry, the 11th Hussars nearly charged the 1st King’s German Legion Hussars, who were forming up to charge them (until they ‘recognised them by their cheer’) while the 10th and 18th Hussars did ‘exchange cuts’ with a regiment of Prussian cavalry, killing or wounding several. Tomkinson, of the 16th Light Dragoons, reveals in an aside of his own how woundings could occur even between people well known to each other: a Frenchman had feigned surrender and then fired; ‘Lieutenant Beck-with … stood still and attempted to catch this man on his sword; he missed him and nearly ran me through the body. I was following the man at a hand gallop.

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