Throughout the night, men from each army had continued to arrive, clogging the roads with their supplies and baggage carts. The French marched along the roads and meadows to their front line in the pitch-dark, their path lit only by the occasional flashes of lightning which forked through the sky. The rain drove straight into their faces, and the water soaked into their greatcoats, weighing them down still further. They were wet and tired and hungry. They were also thirsty, despite the rain which poured down upon them. Some men could take no more, and fell over into the mud. Others crawled into hedges, or under trees, to try to escape the driving rain. They may have been fortified by the knowledge that they were advancing while their enemies were retreating, but the chase had been long and arduous, and they were in no shape for battle.
As the morning broke, the rainclouds gradually lifted, but they never quite disappeared; they hung over the battleground, protecting the world’s gaze from the horrors which would enfold. The sun’s rays eventually broke through the cloud cover, but only as if puncturing it, so that misty shafts of light travelled to the ground. Dawn was the signal for the armies to repair the damage of the night before. Lt.-Col. William Tomkinson, of the 16th Light Dragoons, looked at the battlefield with a dispassionate, professional eye: ‘The whole field was covered with the finest wheat, the soil was strong and luxuriant; consequently, from the rain that had fallen, was deep, heavy for the transport and moving of artillery, and difficult for the quick operation of cavalry. The heavy ground was in favour of our cavalry from the superiority of horse, and likewise, in any charge down the face of the position, we had the advantage of moving downhill, and yet we felt the inconvenience in returning uphill with distressed horses after a charge.’ Tomkinson, quiet and unassuming, but nonetheless decisive, was the fourth son of a Cheshire squire, who had joined the ‘Scarlet Lancers’ eight years earlier at the age of seventeen. An excellent rider, as his upbringing might suggest, he had been promoted to captain in 1811 on Wellington’s recommendation, and he later wrote a diary of his experience as a cavalry officer.
Muskets were dried and cleaned, and then fired to check that they were still in working order, that the damp had not penetrated the powder. The rapid, if irregular, sound of gunfire echoed round the countryside as if battle had already commenced. The noise of drums, bugles and trumpets could be heard from both sides, raising the spirits before the final call to arms. Staff officers galloped off in different directions, checking on the position of the men who had bivouacked overnight, issuing orders for them to regroup so that each unit of each army was in the position determined by its commander. Lt. John Kincaid had spent the night on the Namur road behind the farm of La Haye Sainte. His leader had been lucky enough to find a mud cottage for his quarters: ‘We made a fire against the wall of Sir Andrew Barnard’s cottage, and boiled a huge camp-kettle full of tea, mixed with a suitable quantity of milk and sugar, for breakfast; and, as it stood on the edge of the high road, where all the bigwigs of the army had occasion to pass, in the early hour of the morning, I believe almost every one of them … claimed a cupful.’
The French had the larger force, so long as the Prussians failed to arrive. Napoleon had nearly 72,000 men under his command, and 246 guns. The Anglo-Allied army amounted to 67,661 men, and it had only 157 guns, and only 15,000 of its infantry were British, less than half of which had been on a battlefield before. The lower ranks came mainly from the lower reaches of society, deemed by Wellington to be ‘the scum of the earth’, and they were attracted to the army simply because they found it was hard to earn a living as a manual worker or a tradesman. Half of the 23rd Foot, for example, were labourers, and many had been textile workers; the rest were from the trades, among them watchmakers, bookbinders and gunsmiths. In the 73rd Foot, too, most of the regiment were labourers; among the rest, men whose occupation reflected the level of the country’s industrial progress: there were several bakers, butchers, brass founders, carpet weavers, cordwainers, cotton spinners, cutlers, framework knitters, gunmakers, hosiers, tailors, locksmiths, miners, ribbon weavers and shoemakers. There were two clerks, potters, musicians, stonemasons and woolcombers, and there was a single blacksmith, bleacher, bricklayer, bronze maker, chairmaker, coach harness maker, cabinet maker, collier, cooper, currier, farmer’s boy, farrier, gardener, gun-stocker, hatter, iron founder, leather grinder, needle maker, miller, painter, plater, ropemaker, sword-blade maker, tinsmith and watchmaker. There were soldiers as young as sixteen and veterans of more than sixty, though the average soldier was in his twenties.
Some of the troops were very raw. Ensign George Keppel, the future 6th Earl of Albemarle, had been commissioned into the 3/14th Foot when he was fifteen, and was sixteen only five days before the battle. In his memoirs, he said that his battalion ‘was one which in ordinary times would not have been considered fit to be sent on foreign service at all, much less against an enemy in the field. Fourteen of the officers and 300 of the men were under twenty years of age. These last, consisting principally of Buckinghamshire lads straight from the plough, were called at home “the Bucks”, but their unbuckish appearance procured for them the appellation of “the Peasants.”’ Few of the infantry regiments, which were notionally based on county names in order to encourage recruitment, had as much connection with their locality as their titles suggested, and many were filled out with volunteers from the militias, coerced by persuasion and bribery, with a payment on enlisting.
Ensign William Leeke, the most junior subaltern in the 1/52nd, was only seventeen, and his father, a Hampshire squire, had wanted him to enter the church. Leeke had refused to become a cleric, and thought briefly of becoming a lawyer. Fourteen years after the battle, he did indeed become a curate, at West Ham, but as a young man his imagination had been captured by an officer who had told him of the delights of serving under Wellington. Leeke persuaded his family to buy him a commission, and he was about to go to India when Napoleon escaped from Elba. Leeke realised that the Napoleonic wars were not over after all, and ditched his plans to go abroad. Instead he wrote to a cousin in the 52nd, caught up with the regiment in Belgium, and joined up just five weeks before the battle. He did not suffer on the way: he bought the best of everything in London shops before departing, including unbreakable wine glasses, a soup tureen and several pints of brandy.
Private Tom Morris was not yet twenty, a Cockney gunmaker, who had joined the Loyal Volunteers of St George’s, Middlesex in 1812, when he was only sixteen, and a year later he had enlisted with his brother’s regiment, the 2nd Battalion of the 73rd, after accidentally meeting a friend of his brother. That same night he wrote a note for his parents, asking for their forgiveness. ‘I made up my mind to take life as it should come,’ he decided, aware of the privations which would face him. A kindly sergeant suggested he should pretend to be eighteen, so that he could qualify for extra pay and a pension.
Most of the officers came from the rural gentry, or from leading military families, or from backgrounds in commerce, or the professions. The gentry, naturally, knew how to handle a gun and ride a horse, and a battle required both those abilities, as well as a chivalric disregard for danger. The bloody course of the Napoleonic wars could be traced in the careers of many of the officers. John Kincaid, the officer who thought everyone might be killed at Waterloo, was a gentleman and a Scot, who had held a lieutenant’s commission in the North York Militia. In 1809, he had volunteered to join the 2nd Battalion of the famous Rifles, taking part in the Walcheren expedition where he had caught the swamp-based fever which had destroyed the campaign. Nonetheless, he said he had joined up because it was the glamorous thing to do, and in 1811 he was to be found fighting in the Peninsula, defending the lines of Torres Vedras, and taking part in all the great battles from Fuentes to Vittoria. At the age of twenty-eight, he was already a battle-hardened veteran.
Few of the officers were from the aristocracy, but most had risen through the recommendation of a person of importance either in society or in the army, or through buying their promotion, and both methods of progression required a degree of social standing. One ensign, Rees Gronow, was an old Etonian, whose family came from the landed gentry of Glamorganshire, and it was natural that he should see the army as a career, either in itself, or as a springboard for success in life. He was a dandy who had persuaded Sir Thomas Picton to let him go to battle, even though his own battalion had been left at home. So that he might fight in style, he borrowed two hundred pounds, tripled his money through gambling, and with the profits bought a new uniform and two horses. Appearances could be deceptive: