After reading Rebecque’s despatch, Wellington remained at the ball for twenty minutes, then quietly asked his host if there was a good map in the house. The Duke of Richmond took him upstairs into his own dressing-room, and as the two men pored over the chart, the full impact of Napoleon’s lightning strike became clear. It was only now that Wellington realised how disastrously he had miscalculated. Famously, he was said to have declared, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God! He has gained twenty-four hours’ march on me,’ and he ordered men to move to Quatre Bras. ‘But we shall not stop him there,’ Wellington reflected, ‘so, I must fight him here.’ And he put his thumbnail on the map, on the village of Mont St Jean, just south of Waterloo.
Wellington was to say afterwards that this was the first he had heard of Napoleon’s attack on the Prussian outposts. But the Prussians were convinced that Wellington had received news of the attack which they had sent in the afternoon, and that he had broken his promise to support them. Tonight, there would be no help for the Prussians from the Duke of Wellington’s army, and they would come to connect his apparent failure to help them with the terrible defeat they were to suffer the next day. With every minute that went by, and with every mile his men pushed on into Belgium, Napoleon was on his way to victory.
Both armies paid the price for Wellington’s mistake. At the crossroads of Quatre Bras on 16 June the gunfire started at first light. Eight thousand men in the Dutch-Belgian army had spread out in a wide circle, south of the crossroads, facing twenty-eight thousand of the enemy. There were not enough of them to hold the French but there were enough to delay them if Wellington’s men arrived, and their skirmishers were already at work, sniping at enemy forces. But they would have to wait several hours for reinforcements, for Wellington’s orders of the night before were only just beginning to get through to some units, so that new orders which referred to previous orders confused the men who had not received the first set of paperwork. Captain Alexander Cavalié Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery was told to head for Braine-le Comte: ‘that we were to move forward, then, was certain … but the suddenness of it, and the importance of arriving quickly at the appointed place, rather alarmed me … First, all my officers were absent; secondly, all my country waggons were absent; thirdly, a whole division (one-third of my troop) was absent at Yser-ingen.’ Ensign Edward Macready, who was the brother of a famous actor, William Charles Macready, had lost contact with his regiment, the 30th (Cambridgeshire), which had been billeted in the little town of Soignes, the headquarters of the 3rd British Division. Macready was only seventeen, and had joined the 2nd Battalion of the 30th Foot the previous year as a volunteer, serving in Holland. He kept a private journal of his experiences. That morning he had ridden over to the regiment ‘and pulling up in the market-place, was thunder-struck. Not a soul was stirring. The silence of the tomb reigned where I should have met 10,000 men. I ran into a house and asked, “where are the troops?” “They marched at two this morning,” was the chilling reply.’ If it was a shock for such a young soldier, then soon he was acting like a veteran: by the end of the Battle of Waterloo, such was the casualty rate, he was commanding his own light company.
When Wellington arrived to take charge at Quatre Bras, he was facing a crisis of his own making. Not only were the defending forces in disarray, but he had to fight the battle in a place which was not of his own choosing. The landscape was flat and featureless, its only features a brook which ran parallel to the Nivelles road and the Bossu Wood towards which it meandered, where the Dutch troops had taken shelter. There could be no question of the Duke developing a considered strategy or dictating the pace of events. His army was not yet fully assembled and it would grow incoherently and unpredictably as the hours went by, so that each fresh unit would be flung straight into the fray as soon as it arrived.
Wellington improvised brilliantly to disguise the weakness of his forces and his lack of cavalry. He pushed forward two brigades, to slow down the French advance and to stop the enemy from moving beyond the lake. But his army took heavy casualties. Sergeant James Anton, shrewd and tough, was a Scottish soldier who had joined the 42nd Regiment ten years earlier. Coming from a poor background, and brought up by his mother after his father died when he was still a child, he was so small that he had only been accepted by the Aberdeen militia at his second attempt, by standing on tip-toe. He made up for his lack of inches by being steady under fire: ‘We instantly formed a rallying square; no time for particularity; every man’s piece was loaded, and our enemies approached at full charge; the feet of their horses seemed to tear up the ground. Our skirmishers … fell beneath their lances, and few escaped death or wounds; our brave colonel (Sir Robert Macara) fell at this time, pierced through the chin until the point of the lance reached the brain … Colonel Dick assumed the command … and was severely wounded; Brevet-Major Davidson succeeded, and was mortally wounded; to him succeeded Brevet-Major Campbell. Thus, in a few minutes, we had been placed under four different commanding officers.’
Lt. Frederick Pattison of the 33rd Regiment, who published a short account of his experiences fifty years after the battle, remembered the impact of the French artillery: ‘The destruction was fearful. At this time, Captain Haigh, having moved from the head of his company to encourage the face of the square, fronting the enemy, was cut in two by a cannonball, and poor Arthur Gore’s brains were scattered upon my shako and face.’
Reinforcements again came to Wellington’s rescue, two more Brunswick battalions and the 1st British (Guards) Division led by Maj.-Gen. George Cooke, which moved into the Bossu Wood. For the first time in the battle, Wellington had more men than the French, though he was still short of cavalry, and for the first time, too, he could dictate the pace of events. When his left wing captured the village of Piraumont, to the east, he gambled on a central push against the enemy. The 92nd was sent forward to tackle the French infantry which had occupied a house just east of the Charleroi road, braving the fire which rained down on them from the windows and from behind the hedge which ran from the back of the house. They took severe casualties. At the end of the battle, Lieutenant Robert Winchester of the 92nd – who was wounded at both Quatre Bras and Waterloo – recalled that ‘Sir Thomas Picton, to whose division we belonged, saw the remains of the regiment, and when he enquired what this was, he was told it was the 92nd, on which he asked, “Where is the rest of the regiment?”’ But the 92nd’s bravery was a crucial turning-point, allowing Wellington’s army to push south along both sides of the road. In the space of half an hour, the battle swung decisively towards the Duke, and the Anglo-Allied army recaptured all the ground lost by the Dutch-Belgians in the morning.
But Wellington’s success had been costly. More than two thousand British troops lay dead or wounded. Ensign Robert Batty of the 1st Foot Guards remembered that ‘as we approached the field of action we met constantly waggons full of men, of all the various nations under the Duke’s command, wounded in the most dreadful manner. The sides of the road had a heap of dying and dead, very many of whom were British … too much cannot be said in praise of the division of Guards, the very largest part of whom were young soldiers and volunteers from the militia, who had never been exposed to the fire of an enemy, or witnessed its effects.’ The 32nd had two hundred casualties in its ranks, and the 79th, three hundred; half the 42nd and half the 92nd were dead or wounded, more than five hundred men in all.
It