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Home The Napoleonic War, 1803-1815 The "Hundred Days", 1815 1815; Part 3 |
1815; Part 3The battle began soon after eleven o'clock with an attack on Hougoumont, but twelve hundred Guardsmen repulsed this and subsequent attacks made during the day by some suffered severely by charging too far. About 4 p.m. came renewed attacks by the French, this time on Wellington's right centre. The British and Hanoverian regiments had to form square to resist a succession of magnificent charges, some fifteen or sixteen in number, made by the French cavalry, whilst in the intervals of these charges they came under the fire of the French skirmishers and artillery. La Haye Sainte was vigorously attacked, and lack of ammunition caused its defenders about 6.30 p.m. to surrender.This was the crisis of the battle; if fresh reinforcements had been sent by Napoleon, Wellington's centre might have been pierced. But meanwhile the Prussians had kept their promise - though somewhat tardily, for they should have arrived at noon and did not arrive till 4.30 - and, unmolested by Grouchy, who was still some miles away, captured Plancenoit on Napoleon's left. Not till it was recaptured did Napoleon give orders for the last great charge of the French - the charge of the Guard - -against Wellington's right and centre. This was at 7.15 p.m., and by that time another column of the Prussians had attached itself to Wellington's left flank and allowed him to reinforce his centre and right. The charge of the French Guard was triumÂphantly repulsed, and the Prussians then undertook the pursuit of the defeated French army (The Duke described the battle in a letter: "Never did I see such a pounding match. Both were what the boxers call gluttons. Napoleon did not manoeuvre at all; he just moved forward in the old style, in columns, and was driven off in the old style. ... I never saw the British infantry behave so well." To someone else the Duke described the battle, the day after it was fought, "as the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life". It is said that a Guardsman confessed to having felt bored at the battle of Waterloo; but, on the other hand, a boy of fourteen, who had left Eton to take part in the campaign, wrote to his mother after the battle was over: "Dear Mamma, Cousin Tom and I are all right. I never saw anything like it in my life"). Napoleon's cause was now hopeless. On June 22 he abdicated, and subsequently surrendered ten thousand French troops. There followed, about 1.30, an artillery attack, which was the prelude to a great infantry advance of D'Erlon's corps, twenty-four battalions in four columns, each twenty-four deep, against Wellington's left and left centre. But Wellington's infantry, and Picton's brigade in particular, shattered the heads of the columns with its volleys and charged. Then the British cavalry completed the rout of the French infantry - though they to the commander of a British man-of-war, and was sent by the British government as a prisoner to St. Helena, where he died six years later (1821). In conclusion we must glance at the territorial arrangements begun at the Congress of Vienna, before Napoleon's escape from Elba, and completed after the battle of Waterloo by the Treaty of Paris. Of her conquests, Great Britain kept Malta, the Mauritius, and the Cape of Good Hope - the potential value of which was not realized at that time. France kept, with small differences, the boundaries she possessed before the Revolution broke out. Belgium - or the Austrian Netherlands - was joined to Holland. The Czar was given a large part of Poland, Prussia obtained half of Saxony and large districts on the Rhine, and Austria got Lombardy and Venetia. The German States - now thirty-nine in number - were formed into a Confederacy under the presidency of Austria. To Spain and the Italian States their old rulers were returned. |
Chronology |
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