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disrupt any general French advance. Reille’s assault at roughly 11.30 a.m. was only intended as a diversion, with the hope that Wellington would have to weaken his line by sending in reserves to reinforce the heavily-pressed farmhouse. Not only did this not happen, but the very reverse became the case: it was the French who steadily poured more and more troops into the effort to take Hougoumont, which continued throughout the day. A serious attempt to take the farmhouse would have required heavy artillery fire against the gate and walls, which for some reason was not employed. Napoleon never rode over towards Hougoumont during the course of the battle; had he done so he would immediately have spotted the vast numbers of Jérôme’s troops that were being committed to the struggle to capture the château. The generally stationary position he adopted, in great contrast to Wellington’s highly peripatetic approach to command, worked against the Emperor.

The siege was only finally raised when the rest of the French army had been repulsed from the slopes of Mont St Jean, and the defence by a collection of Coldstream Guards, 3rd Foot (later Scots) Guards, 900 Nassauers, a Brunswick battalion and two companies of the 1st (later Grenadier) Guards was heroic. It is estimated that the 2,600 Anglo-Allied troops at Hougoumont occupied the attentions of 12,700 Frenchmen for much of this vital ‘battle within a battle’.

At one point a detachment of thirty French troops from the 1st Light Infantry managed to enter the farmhouse, led by a huge Frenchman nicknamed ‘I’Enforceur who was armed with an axe, but Lieutenant-Colonel James Macdonnell, along with nine others including Corporals James and Joseph Graham of the Coldstream Guards, managed to close the gate again and the Frenchmen were all massacred save for a fourteen-year-old drummer boy. When many years later a bequest was made in a vicar’s will ‘to the bravest man in the British army at Waterloo’, Wellington — who was asked to nominate the beneficiary — stated that ‘the success of the battle turned upon closing the gates at Hougoumont’, and so Corporal James Graham, by then a sergeant, was tracked down with the help of Macdonnell and awarded the money.

Cotton recorded how some time after the gates had been closed, Graham had

asked permission to fall out for a few minutes, a request which surprised Colonel Macdonnell, and induced him to inquire the motive. Graham replied that his brother was lying in the buildings wounded, and, as the flames were then fast extending, he wished to remove him to a place of safety. The request was granted, and Graham, having rescued his brother from the fate which menaced him, speedily returned to his post.5

(James Graham died an inmate of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, in 1845.)

If the gates had been forced open for long enough there can be little doubt that all those caught inside the perimeter would have been killed. Of all the emotionally moving places on today’s battlefield — at least for a Briton — Hougoumont is the most powerfully evocative, with its wall plaques, gravestones, chapel and the loopholes in the walls through which the Guards wreaked such havoc on the French attacking through the adjacent wood. Byron etched his name on the walls when he visited the following year. (When visiting it is important to remember that the walls of the farmhouse were higher in 1815 than they are today.)

Hougoumont’s defenders were aided by Wellington’s order to Captain Robert Bull to fire howitzers at the wood from which the French, having taken it expensively from the Nassau and Hanoverian infantry, were beginning to emerge. The slaughter outside the walls as the French tried unsuccessfully to scale them was appalling. Later in the day howitzers were deployed by the French, which set fire to the château itself and to other outbuildings, but the Guards continued defending the walled garden and were never dislodged from it. Many are the tales of valour from Hougoumont, on both sides, and the story of its defence is not unlike that of Rorke’s Drift in the