Went the Day Well? Page 23
Throughout virtually the whole battle this no-man’s land between the two armies was swarming with French sharpshooters, and his anonymous saviour had no sooner moved on than another Tirailleur was kneeling behind him for cover and chatting gaily away to Ponsonby as he fired. The last thing he told him before he slipped away was that the French were about to retreat, but with cannon ploughing up the ground around him, flinging the wounded and dead into endlessly new caricatures of life, even the swelling roar of the allied guns came as a mixed blessing.
Half-conscious or not, though, Ponsonby was soldier enough to be able to know what that sound meant – ‘the finest thing I ever heard,’ he called it – but as dusk fell and the oaths and defiant French roars gave way to the groans of the dying and moments of still more un-manning silence, it seemed ‘the night would never end’. Two squadrons of Prussian cavalry had trampled over him during the allied advance, and with roaming Prussians taking their turn to search him and a dying soldier of the Royals – the air from the poor man’s last, convulsive breaths issuing in a hissing sound from a wound in his side – pinning down his legs, it seemed only a matter of time before Frederick Ponsonby joined all those other clay soldiers that lay around him.
Eight, nine, ten … sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, the hours passed for Ponsonby while across the field of Waterloo, among the gardens, orchards and charred ruins of Hougoumont and the shattered walls of La Haye Sainte and Papelotte, among the flattened crops of the hollow and on the plateau where the British squares had stood, along the hedges of the Ohain road and the sandpit by the chaussée, the dead and dying and wounded lay in their thousands under a clear, moonlit night. Propped up against the wall of La Haye Sainte, where he had crawled bleeding from his wounds, the dead Jack Shaw sat with his cheek cradled in his hand. Near him lay Dakin, last seen killing two men with ‘cuts five and six’, and close to them – his face carved in two as he gave Private Hodgson one last, entreating look for mercy – the bald head and white hairs of the elderly French officer who, for months to come, would haunt the dreams of Benjamin Haydon’s ‘Achilles’.
Within the yard at Hougoumont, where the Guards lay in heaps, the charred and legless corpses of men who had tried to crawl from the flames told their story, while out in the orchard, wrapped up in his blanket among the shattered apple trees and the 2,000 corpses of both sides – ‘the Guards in their usual red jackets, the German Legion in Green, and the French dressed in blue’ – William Wheeler lay fast asleep. Keppel was alive too – spattered with the brains of a bugler and epaulette horribly ‘mutilated’, but alive and glad it was ‘fit’. And so was Wheatley, dazed and unsteady still and a prisoner somewhere behind what had once been the French lines. Against the wall of a garden, he had paused to look at ‘a foot-soldier sitting, his head back and both his eyeballs hanging on his cheek, a ball having entered the side of his head and passed out at the other. Nothing could equal the horror of his situation, his mouth was open,’ remembered Wheatley, ‘stiff and clotted, clear blood oozed out of his ears and the purulent matter from his empty sockets emitted a pale stream from the vital heat opposed to the evening cold. So much for honour! thought I. Will it replace his orbs, No. As Falstaff says, “Who was it? He that died yesterday? No!! ’Tis a word coined by an apprentice over his sparkling glass”, and the Morning Advertiser.’
Who was it? Among the Scots Greys it was the armless corpse of Colonel Jamie Hamilton, the bright and fearless son of the retired soldier William Anderson, adopted by the childless laird of Murdostoun, Lanarkshire, and given his name and made his heir. On the flank above Hougoumont he was the young Edinburgh lad of the 71st, his legs taken off by a cannonball, who twelve hours ago had prayed for his parents’ forgiveness. In the 40th it was William Hooper of the company of Grenadiers, decapitated by a shell as they moved up to their positions. On the dead Picton’s staff, Gronow’s old friend Chambers, killed while taking the surrender of a French officer. In the 16th Light Dragoons, a neighbour of Sir James Hall’s, the young Cornet Hay. In the 69th, Hobhouse’s regiment, he was Crinnagan, Maxwell, Snell, Delicate. And in the 27th, the Inniskillings – quite literally, lying dead where they had stood in square at the north-east corner of the crossroads of the Ohain road and main Brussels chaussée – he was simply Legion.
And on the staff, too, few had got through the battle unscathed. The bloodied and exhausted Major Percy was untouched but Fitzroy Somerset had lost an arm, Sir Alexander Gordon was dying after the amputation of a leg, Canning was already dead, and Curzon, aide-de-camp to the wounded Prince of Orange, lying with his charger on the battlefield. ‘I found poor Curzon dead,’ a doctor – ‘one of the hardest and roughest diamonds,’ even in a notoriously unsentimental profession – told Gronow, ‘leaning his head upon the neck of his favourite horse, which seemed to be aware of the death of his master, so quiet did it remain, as if afraid to disturb his last sleep. As I approached, it neighed feebly, and looked at me as if it wanted relief from the pain of its shattered limb, so I told a soldier to shoot it through the head to put it out of its pain.’
Behind the lines, weary from their day’s butchery, the doctors were also at their trade. The Edinburgh-trained Charles Bell – of ‘Bell’s Palsy’ and ‘Bell’s Nerve’, who had given Haydon anatomy classes – had not come out yet, but in the rear of the British positions, close by the cottage where Sir William De Lancey lay forgotten, Dr Hume was at work. Gordon’s life was still in the balance – he had him moved back to the village of Waterloo after the operation – and Hume had just seen him to bed when Captain Seymour arrived with the news that Lord Uxbridge was being brought in from the field with a badly wounded knee. ‘I had hardly got to the end of the town,’ Hume wrote the next day, ‘when his Lordship made his appearance in a gig or Tilbury supported by some of his aides-de-camp. I followed him to his quarters and found on inspection that a grape that had struck him on the right knee close to the lower edge of the patella & entering on the inside of the ligament and having torn open the capsular ligament had made its exit behind fracturing the head of the tibula and cutting the outer hamstring in two.’
‘His Lordship was perfectly cool – his pulse was as calm and regular as if he had just risen from his bed,’ Hume wonderingly continued, and he showed ‘no expression of uneasiness’. He had been on horseback the whole day and ‘personally present’ at almost every one of the numerous cavalry actions, but ‘he was neither heated nor did he display the least agitation. There could be hardly a doubt of the expediency of amputating the limb but as I was not personally known to his Lordship I conceived it was a duty I owed to his family and to himself to do nothing rashly or without evincing to all the world that amputation was not only necessary but unavoidable.’
Hume’s caution was understandable – this was the allies’ cavalry commander in front of him – and going outside he recruited as many surgeons as he could find to spread the responsibility around. His own knife was blunt from a day’s cutting and, borrowing one that had never been used, he went back inside with his new recruits to find Uxbridge in exactly the same posture in which he had left him. With ‘the most placid smile’ Hume had ever beheld, Uxbridge wished them all a ‘good-evening’ and, he told them, resigned himself ‘entirely to your decision’. He was, of course, anxious ‘as any other man’ to save the limb if possible, but with his life being of infinitely more consequence to a numerous family he requested that they ‘act in such a way as to the best of your judgement is best calculated to preserve that’. ‘I replied, “Certainly my Lord, but” – he stopped me and said, “Why any buts, are you not the Chief? It is you I consult upon this occasion.”’
There was no more space for wriggling, and having arranged his assistants where he needed them, Hume applied the tourniquet and took his knife in his hand. ‘Lord Uxbridge said, “Tell me when you are going to begin.” I replied, “Now, my Lord.” He laid his head upon the pillow and putting his hand up to his ears said, “Whenever you please.”’ Hum
e began his incision by making one cut from above and another below, ‘beginning at the inner point or horn of the upper and keeping as nearly parallel as possible’. He completed this first part of the operation by joining the two points on the outside of the thigh, before retracting the skin as far as possible and, ‘with one stroke of the knife’, dividing the muscles down to the bone. It was now time for the saw, and Hume had got most of the way through the femur when his assistant holding the leg – ‘over apprehensive of splintering the bone’ – raised the limb and trapped the saw so ‘could not be pushed backwards or forwards. I did not perceive what was the cause and said angrily, “Damn the saw” when Lord Uxbridge lifting up his head said with a smile “What is the matter?” These words were the only words he spoke and during the whole of the operation he neither uttered groan or complaint nor gave any sign of impatience or uneasiness … His pulse which I was curious enough to count gave only 66 beats in the minute and so far was he from exhibiting any symptoms of what he had undergone in his countenance that I am quite certain had anyone entered the room they would have enquired of him where the wounded man was.’
History was again turning into the stuff of myth, but there was no sense of this at Waterloo that night. Seldom can a victory have produced so little sense of elation. The cost for everyone had been too great. Through the night one soldier of the 71st fought over and again in his dreams the day’s battle and, as to the south, the Prussians pressed on with their savage moonlight hunt, something like a profound depression had settled on the exhausted allied army. In the village of Waterloo the duke would grab a couple hours of sleep before waking to the news of Sir Alexander Gordon’s death and the first, tentative casualty lists brought to him by Dr Hume. As he listened to Hume reading out the names the tears rolled down his grime-covered face. ‘Well, thank God,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what it is to lose a battle; but nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.’
It would be, as Magdalene De Lancey said, a week for weeping. ‘I know not why,’ Sir Augustus Frazer had written to his wife before the battle, ‘but a great mass of armed men always brings to my mind strange associations and reflections; and in the midst of all that the poet calls “the pride and pomp of war”, the reflection which we are told made Xerxes burst into tears when his myriads crossed the Hellespont will intrude, that in a few years all these will have passed away.’
‘But what nonsense is all this!’ he had added, shrugging off the thought; but it did not feel like nonsense now. In a lull in the fighting he had buried his dear friend Ramsey, taking from the body the portrait of his wife that Ramsey always carried next to his heart. There was not a man there who had not been racked with convulsive sobs. And now, as he wrote to his own wife, enclosing the lock of hair he had cut from Ramsey’s head before they had put his ‘yet warm body in the grave’, the full sadness of it all returned. ‘Pray get me two mourning rings,’ he asked her, ‘I will describe them when I next write. All now with me is confused recollections of scenes yet passing before me in idea: the noise, the groans of the dying, and all the horrid realities of the field are yet before me. In this very house are poor Lloyd (leg shot off but not yet amputated), Dumaresque (General Byng’s aide-de-camp shot through the lungs and dying); Macdonald … I dare not enumerate their names … What a strange letter is this, what a strange day has occasioned it! To-day is Sunday! How often have I observed that actions are fought on Sundays. Alas! what three days have I passed, what days of glory, falsely so called and what days of misery to thousands.’
The day of Waterloo was drawing to its close. ‘What will they say of us at home?’ had been Corporal Dickson of the Scots Greys constant thought throughout the day, but the question now was: ‘What will we say to them?’ What could Frazer, as he held the snuff box neatly pierced by the bullet that had hit Ramsey in the heart, say to his widow? What comfort had Wellington to offer to Gordon’s brother, Lord Aberdeen, when no glory could compensate for his own sense of loss? Which of the Howards at Arundel was going to break the news to Frederick Howard’s pregnant wife? In Brussels, the Reverend Stonestreet would still be writing letters. And somewhere out in the night, Frederick Ponsonby could make out the darker shape of one last marauder picking his way through the piles of the dead towards him.
11 p.m.
Went the Day Well?
Behind the porticoed facade of Melbourne House in London’s Whitehall, a woman of twenty-nine, dressed in the costume of a young boy, was putting the final touches to the longest suicide note in history. For the best part of five years Lady Caroline Lamb had been threatening to do something along these lines, but not even those who had seen her slash her wrist at Lady Heathcote’s ball, or pursue Byron to his own lodgings disguised as a page, can have dreamed of the self-destructive anger that fuelled the solitary, candlelit vigils in Melbourne House through the June of 1815.
Night after night she had been scribbling – a gothic roman à clef of savage and vengeful portraits, of brilliant, incoherent tirades and wild attacks, of defiant self-justifications and harrowing self-knowledge, of nonsensical plotting, disguises, murders and political acumen – and now, as the day of Waterloo moved to its end, she was almost finished. She still had to write in her own tragi-heroic end before she gave John Murray the manuscript, and if no one would understand it – if few would ever get that far and those who did see nothing but the ravings of a delinquent child – Glenarvon’s Irish tale of political and moral self-destruction spoke with the shrill, half-cracked voice of prophecy.
Before her novel was even published, Lord Byron, the vampiric object of her hatred and vengeance, would be out of the country, a pariah like the Byronic doppelgänger of her novel among the people who had once idolised him, and if Caroline Lamb had looked out across Horse Guards and the park this evening she might have seen a very different kind of outcast making his way back to his apartments in St James’s Palace. He was a tall, thin, dangerous-looking man in his mid-forties, his heavily whiskered face disfigured by one closed eye and a sabre scar that gave to his handsome features an ugly, sinister cast that seemed, to his enemies, a chilling gateway to his brutal and caustic soul.
Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, had been born in 1771, the fifth of the seven large and largely unlovable sons of George III who defaced the public life of the country for the best part of fifty years. As a young man he had been packed off to university on the continent and then into the Hanoverian army, but after fighting bravely in the Netherlands campaign of 1793 he never had the chance to see active service again, being endlessly frustrated by the king or, his brother the Duke of York, of his wish for a significant command in the British Army or any real role in the war.
He had been at the Battle of Leipzig as an observer – and would have been at Waterloo if he had had his way – but with his military career baulked, his talents and fiercely reactionary instincts were left to fester on the extreme fringes of English Tory politics. There were deep suspicions in Whig circles that his influence over the spinelessly malleable Prinny posed a real danger, and with his violent opposition to Catholic emancipation he had become an object of loathing for liberal and radical England, a hate figure for the opposition press and caricaturists of whom anything and everything from incest and sodomy to multiple murder could be and was believed.
In any normal week of the year, in fact, the title of the Most Hated Man in England would have taken some winning – Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough, Lord Castlereagh, Prinny himself, would all have had their supporters – but when Cumberland was in town there was no competition. There was probably little or no truth in most of the accusations levelled against him, and yet there would always be just enough doubt to make sure that the suspicions and libels never went away.
There had been persistent rumours fifteen years before that he was the father of his sister Princess Sophia’s illegitimate child, but as he made his way back to his apartments in St James’s, it was another and
more dangerous scandal that hung over him. The duke had only been in the country a day, arriving alone from the continent early on Saturday morning, following his marriage at the end of May to his cousin, Princess Frederica of Solms-Braunfels. His travelling carriage had broken down on the other side of Dartford on the way up to London, and to the obvious satisfaction of the press he had been forced to hire a chaise for the rest of the journey, ‘alighting’ as the Morning Chronicle’s ‘Mirror of Fashion’ put it, in St James’s Park, and walking through the gardens to Carlton House to spend the day with his brother the Prince Regent. ‘The object of his journey,’ the paper continued, ‘is said to be to endeavour to reconcile the Royal Family to his marriage, and to prevail on Government to make an addition to his establishment on the occasion. He quotes the marriage of the Duke of York as a precedent for an increased allowance; in answer to which it is said that the cases are by no means similar.’
He had spent the whole of Saturday with the Prince Regent and most of Sunday seeing the prime minister, Lord Liverpool at Carlton House before joining Prinny at Windsor, but he had an uphill task in front of him. The vinegary old Queen Charlotte was dead set against his marriage to a woman who had already jilted one of her sons, and scandal stuck to his new bride as tenaciously as it did to Cumberland himself, with dark suspicions of poison surrounding the sudden and all-too-convenient death of her last husband, Prince Frederick William.
Cumberland and Frederica had, in fact, been deeply in love for a year – and would enjoy a long and happy marriage – but not even the novel prospect of a genuine royal love match was going to soften old hatreds. He had not been in the country since before Leipzig two years previously, but memories in Regency England were long and, as he walked now through St James’s Palace, he must have known that it was another old ghost lurking in its corridors that would reappear to haunt him.