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During the battle our squares presented a shocking sight. Inside we were nearly suffocated by the smoke and smell from burnt cartridges. It was impossible to move a yard without treading upon a wounded comrade, or upon the bodies of the dead; and the loud groans of the wounded and dying were most appalling. At four o’clock our square was a perfect hospital, being full of dead, dying and mutilated soldiers.11

They had two more hours of such hell to go before the cavalry attacks — some counted fourteen in all — ceased. There was some vigorous countercharging by British cavalry in protection of the squares, which inflicted significant losses on the French, albeit at a high cost.

If any part of the Anglo-Allied line, such as the Brunswickers, had indeed broken and fled the field during that part of the battle of Waterloo, it is easy to envisage a general collapse. The psychology of troops under unimaginable pressure and peril makes a fascinating study, and when panic grips a unit it can spread with astonishing speed throughout an army. At the battle of Marengo fifteen years earlier, for example, Napoleon’s Armée de Réserve was hard-pressed, indeed retreating before the Austrians. His vigorous counterattack, spearheaded by Desaix, Marmont and Kellermann, suddenly created a sense of panic in the enemy after only half an hour, with the result that Marengo is considered almost as great a Napoleonic victory as Austerlitz.

Ney, now personally taking command of the last cavalry reserve of the French army, a brigade of mounted carabiniers, led one of the last charges of that part of the engagement, but this had no more success than the previous ones. Several French generals had been killed, horses were blown, casualties were tremendous, and the survivors were exhausted. On occasion the cavalry ‘charges’ had hardly taken place even at a trot, more like a fast walk. The last of these have been described as ‘death-rides’as opposed to serious attempts to sweep the Anglo-Allied infantry off the plateau.

It is impossible to underrate the courage of the French cavalrymen who took part in these attacks, to which Gronow, as well as many others, paid honourable tribute:

The charge of the French cavalry was gallantly executed, but our well-directed fire brought men and horses down, and ere long the utmost confusion arose in their ranks. The officers were exceedingly brave, and by their gestures and fearless bearing did all in their power to encourage their men to form again and renew their attack.12

What Gronow meant by ‘well-directed fire’ was the order to aim low, shooting at the horses rather than their riders, ‘so that … the ground was strewed with the fallen horses and their riders, which impeded the advance of those behind them and broke the shock of the charge’. For all the tactical sense this made, Gronow did not hide the fact that ‘It was pitiable to witness the agony of the poor horses, which really seemed conscious of the dangers which confronted them: we often saw a poor wounded animal raise its head, as if looking for its rider to afford him aid.’

One myth, propagated by the great French author Victor Hugo, still occasionally appears in Waterloo historiography, and needs to be dispelled. Just as when one visits Waterloo today, the way that the battle is presented might allow one to miss the fact that Napoleon lost, so the more chauvinistic French accounts sometimes claim that there was a chemin creux d’Ohain (‘hollow way of Ohain’), or even a ‘Ravine of Death’, down which Ney’s cavalrymen fell head-first to their and their horses’ deaths. (This myth is given credence in the visually superb but historically flawed 1973 movie Waterloo, which starred Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as Wellington.)

In fact the hollow way, the Ohain road, was no ravine, merely an ordinary country lane slightly sunk below the level of the rest of the ground. Captain Becke in 1914 estimated that:

At its deepest part, along Wellington’s battle-line, it was merely an easy in-and-out jump, complicated