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By Root 263 0

he did of you last night at my house. It may not be of any service but at any rate it is pleasant to be spoken well of by so great a Man. I have been invited to the Duchess’s parties and am engaged to one on Thursday next. If we remain but from what I hear from very good authority I think that the army will move away soon. I hope we shall make a good hand of it, but I wish we had the Army the Duke had in Spain. The British Infantry is in five Divisions (another division is forming at Ghent) consisting in Effectives not more than four thousand R & I in each Division. The Cavalry British seven thousand very fine & there is a great force of Artillery. I suppose the whole British cannot be much more than thirty five thousand Effectives. There are 29 thousand Belgians, not I fear to be trusted as they all have served under Bone [Bonaparte]. The Dutch are about 30 thousand. I am told pretty good [but] I have not seen them. The Hanoverians are fine both Cavalry and Infantry. Each British division has a brigade of them. It is said Soult has arrived to take the Command of the Army. Approved by Wellington. A Blow will be struck by one side or other before the 23rd of this month. I am astonished Bone does not attack either Prussians or us before the whole of the Russians arrive. He might beat us in detach. I have not seen [his brother-in-law Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. William George] Harris [who was to command the 2nd Battalion of the 73rd Regiment at Waterloo] as yet. I have been intending to go every day but something or other has always prevented me. My Horses have lamed one another & are hardly able to move & one I was obliged to shoot yesterday for the Flanders malady. I had him in a different stable from the others or I should have lost all of them and have been ruined. I heard from Harris yesterday he was quite well.

I am ever

Your Dutiful Son

R. H. D.

APPENDIX II

Captain Fortune Brack’s Letter of 1835

This is taken from the letter written twenty years after the battle by Captain Fortune Brack of the 2nd Chevaux-légers Lancers of the Guard, who might well have been instrumental in catapulting Ney’s cavalry towards its disastrous series of attacks against the British squares. It was originally quoted in Digby Smith’s Charge!: Great Cavalry Charges of the Napoleonic Wars (Greenhill Books) in 2003. Considering what catastrophe sprang from Captain Brack’s actions, it is unlikely that he would have wished to invent his testimony. Certainly, one may search in vain for the name of Captain Brack in books on Waterloo. In my view Mr Smith has made a significant contribution to the sum of our knowledge of why, ultimately, Napoleon fell from power. Here is Brack’s explanation, which is worth reprinting at length not only for its intrinsic evidence, but also for the superb description of what it was like for a lancer to charge a square:

Impassioned by our recent success against Ponsonby, and by the forward movement that I had noticed being executed by the cuirassiers on our right, I exclaimed, ‘The English are lost! The position on which they have been thrown back makes it clear. They can only retreat by one narrow road confined between impassable woods. One broken stone on this road and their entire army will be ours! Either their general is the most ignorant of officers, or he has lost his head! The English will realise their situation — there — look — they have uncoupled their guns.’

I was ignorant of the fact that the English batteries usually fought uncoupled.

I spoke loudly, and my words were overheard. From the front of our regiment a few officers pushed forward to join our group. The right hand file of our regimental line followed them; the movement was copied in the squadrons to the left to restore the alignment, and then by the Chasseurs-à-Cheval of the Guard. This movement, of only a few paces at the right, became more marked [as it was copied] to the left. The brigade of the Dragoons and the Grenadiers-à-Cheval, who were awaiting the order to charge at any moment, believed this had been given.

They set off —