Such an order presupposed Grouchy’s ability to act upon it; Napoleon took that ability for granted. But Grouchy, as a fact, could not act upon it in time. Hard riding could not get Napoleon’s note to Grouchy’s quarters within much less than an hour and a half. When it got there Grouchy himself must be found, and that done his 33,000 must be got together in order to take the new direction. Further, the Emperor could not know in what state Grouchy’s forces might be, nor what direction they might already have taken. It should be mentioned, however, to explain Napoleon’s evident hope at the moment of things going well, that the prisoner had told the Emperor it was commonly believed in the Prussian lines that Grouchy was actually marching to join him, Napoleon, at that moment. Napoleon sent some cavalry off eastward to watch the advent of the Prussians; he ordered his remnant of one army corps, the Sixth, which he had kept in reserve behind his line,[19] to march down the hill to the village of Plancenoit and stand ready to meet the Prussian attack; and having done all this, he made ready for the assault upon the ridge which Wellington’s troops held.
That assault was to be preceded, as I have said, by artillery preparation from the great battery of eighty guns which lay along the spur to the north and in front of the French line. For half an hour those guns filled the shallow valley with their smoke; at half-past one they ceased, and Erlon’s First Corps d’Armée, fresh to the combat, because it had so unfortunately missed both Ligny and Quatre Bras, began to descend from its position, to cross the bottom, and to climb the opposite slope, while over the heads of the assaulting columns the French and English cannon answered each other from height to height.
The advance across the valley, as will be apparent from the map, had upon its right the village of Papelotte, upon its left the farm of La Haye Sainte, and for its objective that highway which runs along the top of the ridge, and of which the most part was in those days a sunken road, as effective for defence as a regular trench.
Following a practice which he never abandoned, which he had found universally successful, and upon which he ever relied, the Duke of Wellington had kept his British troops, the nucleus of his defensive plan, for the last and worst of the action. He had stationed to take the first brunt those troops upon which he least relied, and these were the first Dutch-Belgian brigade under Bijlandt. This body was stationed in front of the sunken road (at the point marked A in red upon the map). Behind it he had put Pack’s brigade and Kemp’s, both British; to the left of it, but also behind the road, Best’s Hanoverian brigade. Papelotte village he held with Perponcher’s Belgians.
It will be seen that the crushing fire of the French eighty guns maintained for half an hour had fallen full upon the Dutch-Belgians, standing exposed upon the forward slope at a range of not more than 800 yards.[20] At the French charge, though that was delivered through high standing crops and over drenched and slippery soil up the slope, Bijlandt’s brigade broke. It is doubtful indeed whether any other troops would not have broken under such circumstances. Unfortunately the incident has been made the subject of repeated and most ungenerous accusation. A body purposely set forward before the whole line to stand such fearful pounding and to shelter the rest; one, moreover, which in two days of fighting certainly lost one-fourth of its number in killed and wounded, and probably lost more than one-third, is deserving of a much more chivalrous judgment than that shown by most historians in its regard. Anyhow, Kemp’s brigade quickly filled the gap left by the failure of the Netherlanders, and began to press back the French charge.
Meanwhile the French right, which had captured Papelotte, was compelled to retreat upon seeing the centre thus driven back, while the French left had failed to carry the farm of La Haye Sainte. Indeed upon this side, that is, in the neighbourhood of the great road, the check and reverse to the French assault had been more complete than elsewhere. An attempt to drive its first success home with a cavalry charge had been met by a countercharge, deservedly famous, in which, among other regiments, the First and Second Lifeguards, the Blues, the King’s Dragoons, had broken the French horse and followed up the French retirement down the slope. The centre of that retirement was similarly charged by the Scots Greys; and in the end of the whole affair the English horsemen rode up to the spur where the great battery stood, sabred the gunners, and then, being thus advanced so uselessly and so dangerously from their line, were in their turn driven back to the English positions with bad loss.
When this opening chapter of the battle closed, the net result was that the initial charge of the First Corps under Erlon had failed. It had left behind it many prisoners; certain guns which had advanced with it had been put out of action; it had lost two colours.
Save for the furious inconsequent and almost purposeless fighting that was still raging far off to the left round Hougomont, the battle ceased. The valley between the opposing forces was strewn with the dead and dying, but no formed groups stood or moved among the fallen men. The swept slopes had all the appearance during that strange halt of a field already lost or won. The hour was between three and half-past in the afternoon, and so ended the first phase of the battle of Waterloo. It had lasted rather over two hours.
The Second Part of the Action
The second and decisive phase of the battle of Waterloo differed from the first in this: In the first phase Napoleon was attacking Wellington’s command alone. It was line against line. By hammering at the line opposed to him on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, Napoleon confidently expected to break it before the day should close. His first hammer blow, which was the charge of the First Army Corps under Erlon, had failed, and failed badly. The cavalry in support of that infantry charge had failed as well as their comrades, and the British in their turn had charged the retiring French, got right into their line, sabred their gunners, only to be broken in their turn by the counter-effort of further French horse.