Waterloo_ June 18, 1815_ The Battle for Modern Europe - Andrew Roberts [37]
Almost impregnable to cavalry, squares are nonetheless highly vulnerable to infantry and artillery due to their highly compact nature and the paucity of muskets that can be brought to bear on any one spot, and so the carnage was terrific. After dreadful punishment, the Guard were ordered to fall back to La Belle Alliance by the Emperor, who rode off with some mounted chasseurs to try to find another position from which to rally his stricken forces, deciding upon Genappe.
It was during the Guards’ retreat that General Cambronne was asked whether he would surrender, to which he reputedly merely answered: ‘Merde!’ A myth was soon created that he had in fact replied: ‘La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas.’ (‘The Guard dies, it does not surrender.’) By the time the units reached La Belle Alliance their hitherto admirable order had collapsed. At this point, the Guard neither died nor surrendered; it simply ran, just like the rest of Napoleon’s army.
Lobau’s troops managed to protect the fleeing Armée du Nord as it swarmed back down the Charleroi road, whence it had come in such high expectations the previous day. The track itself was torn up by the ceaseless pounding of Prussian roundshot, fired from the by now re-recaptured village of Plancenoit (where General Duhesme was killed). Meanwhile the Prussian cavalry gave murderous chase, taking every advantage to revenge themselves on the men who had devastated their Fatherland nine years before during the Jena campaign.
Frenchmen were being lanced in the back by Prussian cavalry for as long as there was still daylight enough for the uhlans to carry out their long-awaited work of retribution. Their methodical vengeance helped turn a devastating and decisive defeat for France into an utter rout. Sergeant-Major Cotton of the 7th Hussars recorded: ‘That the French in their flight from Waterloo were unnecessarily butchered during many hours by the exasperated Prussians, is a fact, which I can more easily explain than justify.’9
In the course of the rout some terrible things happened on the Allied side, too, as when Captain Mercer’s horse artillery battery came under heavy enfilading ‘friendly’ fire from a Prussian battery, forcing Mercer to break off his pursuit of the French; the bombardment disabled his guns and killed no fewer than 140 of his 200 horses.
Crying, ‘Come and see a Marshal of France die!’, Ney put himself at the head of a brigade which by then consisted of only two battalions. It was not too tempting an offer for a unit that belonged to Durutte’s division of d’Erlon’s corps, and so which had therefore seen plenty of fighting already, and the counterattack that Ney led soon petered out. As he explained to Joseph Fouché on 26 June: ‘As for myself, constantly with the rearguard which I followed on foot, having had all my horses killed under me, being worn out with fatigue, covered with contusions, and having no longer the strength to march, I owed my life to a corporal, who supported me on the road.’
Napoleon himself, escorted by a small staff and even smaller bodyguard, got back to Le Caillou, where he discovered the 1st Battalion of the 1st Chasseurs of the Guard, which accompanied him on the road back to Charleroi and eventually to Paris.
One month after Waterloo, Napoleon surrendered to the Royal Navy man-of-war HMS Bellerophon, and was transported first to Plymouth and then to exile on St Helena, where he remained for the almost six years that remained to him before his death in May 1821.
As the good luck of a dedicated journal-keeper would have it, Ensign Gronow was present at La Belle Alliance, the inn that had been behind Napoleon’s lines at the start of the battle, when Blücher met Wellington there at 9 p.m. ‘The Duke of Wellington, who had given rendezvous to Blücher at this spot, then rode up, and the two victorious generals shook hands in the most