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A message that Wellington sent Macdonnell during the assault illustrates the desperation of the situation once the French howitzers had done their job:

I can see that the fire has communicated from the hay stack to the roof of the chateau. You must however still keep your men in those parts to which the fire does not reach. Take care that no men are lost by the falling in of the roof, or floors: after they will have fallen in occupy the ruined walls inside of the garden; particularly if it should be possible for the enemy to pass through the embers in the inside of the house.6

The fighting at Hougoumont sucked in more and more French troops throughout the day. ‘No troops but the British could have held Hougoumont, and only the best of them at that,’ was Wellington’s encomium to the defenders. After the battle, in the hearing of Ensign Gronow, Major-General Peregrine Maitland told Lord Saltoun, whose 1st Foot Guards had held the orchard of Hougoumont: ‘Your defence saved the army: nothing could be more gallant. Every man of you deserves promotion.’ Saltoun replied that it had been ‘touch and go — a matter of life and death — for all within the walls had sworn that they would never surrender’. Saltoun’s adjutant added, ‘Our officers were determined never to yield, and the men were resolved to stand by them to the last.’7

The attacks on Hougoumont continued at various levels of intensity for over eight hours, but at about 1.30 p.m. a second phase of the battle opened up when, after a bombardment by the French artillery, General d’Erlon was given his second opportunity to affect the course of the campaign.

* The practice of dividing Waterloo into five distinct but overlapping phases was begun by Sir James Shaw Kennedy, who took part in the battle, has been followed by later historians such as Captain A.F. Becke, Sir John Keegan, Elizabeth Longford and Ian Fletcher, and is still easily the best way of making sense of it.

2

The Second Phase

MUCH OF THE ART of warfare in the Napoleonic era depended not on the technology of weaponry, which had altered very little since the wars of Marlborough, but upon the skilled interaction of the three main military elements of the day: cavalry, infantry and artillery. When these were deployed in a coordinated way, complementing and supporting each other in attack and anchoring each other in defence, they could be a formidable, indeed campaign-winning juggernaut. Yet time and again in the battle of Waterloo the French strategists, by which must principally be meant Napoleon, his chief of staff Marshal Soult and his battlefield commander Marshal Ney, failed to employ the three arms to their best advantage.

Each of the three arms had its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of manoeuvrability, firepower and offensive potential. A regiment of infantry that had formed itself into a square was almost impregnable to a conventional cavalry charge, but highly vulnerable to an artillery bombardment or the volleying of another infantry unit formed in line, while cavalry charging cannon could do so in a quarter of the time that infantry could, with consequently fewer losses. Artillery meanwhile employed different kinds of shot for different tasks. The key in a fastchanging battle was to deploy each arm in such a way as to play to its strengths and to support the achievements of the other two. This simply did not happen much on the French side at Waterloo, but was a crucial factor in Wellington’s flexible defence.

Napoleon hoped that after half an hour of cannonading his Grand Battery would have so weakened the Anglo-Allied left-centre that a frontal assault by d’Erlon’s corps marching in column would be able to punch a hole in Wellington’s line. Yet because, in part, of Wellington’s technique of deploying his men behind the crest of the slopes, sometimes even lying down, the death toll amongst the Anglo-Allied infantry was nothing like what it had been for the more visible Prussian troops at Ligny.

A nine-or twelve-pound cannonball fired at high velocity was a terrifying