Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles. Bernard Cornwell
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made a straight line of, in the French and Prussian armies, three ranks, which faced towards the enemy. The British preferred a line of two ranks.
The line is an efficient way of utilizing a battalion’s firepower, but it is an extremely fragile formation. Attempting to march a line forward across anything except the smoothest parade ground led to disorder. Men straggled, stumbled, wavered, and the line would soon lose all cohesion. Worse, a line was very vulnerable to cavalry attack, especially if the enemy horsemen could attack from either end.
So the preferred method of advancing men across open country was to form a column. That is a slightly misleading term, suggesting a long thin block of men advancing like a spear shaft towards the enemy line. In fact the column was short and squat. A French battalion of around 500 men arrayed in column, such as that in which Captain François approached Ligny, might have a frontage of one or two companies. If the 30th of the Line closed on Ligny in a column just one company wide, then the Prussian defenders would have seen thirty men in the French front rank, and seventeen other ranks behind them. So the column is roughly twice as wide as it is deep. A two-company front (which was probably how François’s battalion attacked) had a front rank of about sixty men and only nine ranks in all.
The column had three advantages over the line. It was much easier to manoeuvre over rough ground, it was much less vulnerable to cavalry because there is no weak point that can be overwhelmed, and the very density of the formation was good for morale. In their haste to raise large armies at the beginning of the Revolution the beleaguered French discovered that large columns were doubly useful. Half-trained men could be marched into battle easily, and enemies were often overawed by the sheer size of the attacking columns. François’s 30th was not alone; his battalion was just one of several closing on the Prussians. In a couple of days the French would deploy a whole Army Corps in column, a massive block of men. A line, especially a British line just two ranks deep, would look very fragile against the advance of a dense column.
Yet if the column was psychologically powerful it also had two weaknesses. A column was desperately vulnerable to cannon fire, and only the men in the outer two ranks and files could use their muskets. If a column has seventeen ranks of thirty men each, totalling 510 men, then only the sixty in the first two ranks, and the two men on the outside of each rank, can actually fire at the enemy. So of the 510 men, fewer than a quarter can shoot their muskets. If they are approaching a line then they will be massively outgunned, because every man in the line can fire.
By 1815 the French are well aware of this weakness. In Spain French columns were mauled again and again by British, Portuguese and Spanish lines. At Busaco, where Ney received his drubbing from Wellington, it was British lines that blasted his columns off the hill. The answer to the problem was to utilize the ease of the column as a means to advance troops over rough ground, and then deploy into line as the columns closed on the enemy. That was what Charles François’s battalion did as they approached the hedges surrounding Ligny. But Captain François’s troubles were far from over:
The charge was sounded and our soldiers went through the hedges. [We] went down a sunken road obstructed by felled trees, vehicles, harrows and ploughs and we got past these obstacles only after much difficulty and under fire from the Prussians concealed by the hedges. At last we overcame these obstacles and, firing as we went, entered the village. When we reached the church our advance was halted by a stream and the enemy, in houses, behind walls and on rooftops inflicted considerable casualties by musketry, grapeshot and cannon balls which assailed us from in front and from the flanks.
François tells how three battalion commanders, five captains, two adjutants and nine lieutenants were killed in this savage fighting. Out of the two battalions that made the attack close to 700 men were killed or wounded, and it was no surprise that a Prussian counter-attack drove the French back out of the village. Franz Lieber, the seventeen-year-old who had volunteered in Berlin, was part of the counter-attacks:
Our ardour now led us entirely beyond the proper limits; the section to which I belonged ran madly, without firing, towards the enemy, who retreated. My hindman fell; I rushed on … the village was intersected with thick hedges, from behind which the grenadiers fired upon us, but we drove them from one to the other. I, forgetting altogether to fire and what I ought to have done, tore the red plume from one of the grenadiers’ bearskin-caps, and swung it over my head.
Franz Lieber reaches the centre of the village, steps round a house and is faced by a French infantryman just a dozen paces away.
He aimed at me, I levelled my rifle at him. ‘Aim well, my boy,’ said the sergeant-major, who saw me. My antagonist’s ball grazed my hair on the right side; I shot and he fell; I found I had shot through his face; he was dying. This was my first shot ever fired in battle.
The battle is a desperate struggle, reduced to hand-to-hand fighting in the villages. A French officer said the dead in the main street ‘were piled two or three deep. The blood flowed from them in streams … the mud was formed from crushed bones and flesh.’ The clouded sky is thickened with great gouts of powder smoke belched by massive cannon that fill the air with man-made thunder. Prussian advantage of numbers is holding the French at bay, but the superior quality of the French troops is slowly eroding the Prussian defence. After one French counter-attack a Prussian gunner, Captain von Reuter, seeing a skirmish line approach, assumed it was from his own infantry and ordered his gunners to keep firing at the distant enemy cannon. It was his battalion surgeon who noticed that the skirmishers were French. ‘I at once bellowed the order, “grape on the skirmishers!”’ von Reuter recalled:
At the same moment they gave us a volley . . and by that volley, and the bursting of a shell or two, every horse except one belonging to my left flank gun was killed or wounded … in another moment I saw my left flank taken in the rear, from the Ligny brook, by a French staff officer and about fifty horsemen. As these charged us the officer shouted in German ‘Surrender, gunners, for you are all prisoners!’ With these words he charged down with his men and dealt a vicious cut at my wheel driver, who dodged it by flinging himself over his dead horse. The blow was delivered with such force that the sabre cut deep into the saddle and was stuck fast there. Gunner Sieberg snatched up the handspike of one of the twelve-pounders and with the words, ‘I’ll show him how to take prisoners,’ dealt the officer such a blow on his bearskin that he rolled with a broken skull from the back of his grey charger.
As the afternoon shades into a grey evening the battle is still undecided. The Prussians are holding, but of course General d’Erlon’s Corps is coming to fall like a thunderbolt on their exposed right flank.
Or rather it is supposed to fall like a thunderbolt, but instead the hapless General d’Erlon becomes the leading actor in a French farce. Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Count d’Erlon, was the son of a carpenter and as a youth had been apprenticed to a locksmith, but in 1780, aged seventeen, he joined the pre-Revolutionary army and rose to the rank of Corporal. It took the Revolution to reveal his talent, and after that his rise was swift until, in 1815, he is a Marshal of France and Count d’Erlon, commanding the 1st Corps of l’Armée du Nord. He leads almost 17,000 infantry, 1,700 cavalry, a corps of engineers and 46 guns, and his first orders on that fateful Friday had been to march to Ney’s support. His powerful Corps would help Ney clear Quatre-Bras, then swing right on the Nivelles road to fall on the Prussians, but Napoleon realizes he needs help sooner and so sends a messenger to recall d’Erlon, who had almost, at last, reached Ney’s troops.
D’Erlon obediently reverses his march, a cumbersome process which takes time as the guns and their limbers are turned around on the narrow roads. He marches back towards the Emperor, but the orders have been confusing and, instead of taking his men north onto the Prussian flank he arrives on the flank of General Vandamme’s Corps, which is engaged in the brutal fight for the village of Saint-Amand.
It is early evening, the sky is clouded, the terrain obscured by drifting gun smoke, and Vandamme at first believes that the approaching troops are Prussians, or maybe British. He sends an urgent message to Napoleon, who has just massed his Imperial Guard to make a last massive assault on the Prussian centre, and the Emperor, alarmed, delays that attack until he can discover the identity