There was worse news still for an attacker. If a man was to gaze north from La Belle Alliance he would be blind to what lay behind the ridge where the elm tree grew. In the far distance, if the battle smoke permitted, he might see rising pastureland leading to the forest of Soignes, but he would see nothing of the dead ground behind the ridge, and would not know that a hidden farm lane ran east and west behind the crest that would allow his enemy to shift reinforcements swiftly to wherever the ridge was threatened most,
But perhaps that blindness did not matter if the attacker was the Emperor of the French, for Napoleon Bonaparte was a man in love with war, a man accustomed to glory, a man confident of victory, and the leader of over a hundred thousand veterans who had already defeated the Prussians and sent the British reeling back from Quatre Bras. Besides, the ridge where the elm tree grew was not steep. A man could stroll up its face without feeling any strain in his legs or any shortening of his breath, and the Emperor knew that his enemy had few good troops to defend that gentle slope. Indeed the Emperor knew much about his enemy for all day long the Belgian deserters had flocked to his colours and told their tales of panic and flight. Some of the Emperor’s Generals who had been defeated by Wellington in Spain advised caution, but the Emperor would have none of their cavils. The Englishman, he said, was a mere Sepoy General, nothing but a man who had learned his trade against the undisciplined and ill-armed tribal hordes of India, while the Emperor was Europe’s master of war, blooded and hardened by battles against the finest troops of a continent. Napoleon did not care where Wellington chose to make his stand; he would beat him anyway, then march triumphant into Brussels.
The Duke of Wellington chose to make his stand on the ridge where the solitary elm tree grew.
And there, in the rain, his army waited.
The rain slackened, but did not end. As the last of the retreating British infantry passed La Belle Alliance they could see the great swathes of water sweeping west from the trees about Hougoumont. Not that they cared. They just slogged on, each man carrying his pack, haversacks, pouches, canteen, billhook, musket and bayonet; seventy pounds of baggage for each man. Some of the troops had marched most of the previous night and now they had marched all Saturday through the piercing, chilling rain. Their shoulders were chafed bloody by the wet straps of the heavy packs. Only their ammunition, wrapped in oiled paper and deep in rainproof cartouches, was dry. They had long outstripped their supply wagons, so, apart from whatever food any man might have hoarded, they went hungry.
The supply wagons, which had never reached Quatre Bras, were still struggling on flooded minor roads to reach the crossroads at Mont-St-Jean. The wagons carried spare ammunition, spare weapons, spare flints, and barrels of salt beef, barrels of twice-baked bread, barrels of rum, and crates with the officers’ crystal glasses and silver cutlery that added a touch of luxury to the battalions’ crude bivouacs. The army’s women walked with the supply wagons, trudging through the cold mud to where their men waited to fight.
Those men waited behind the ridge where the elm tree grew. The Quartermasters marked bivouac areas for the various battalions in the soaking fields. Fatigue parties took axes and billhooks back to the forest to cut firewood. Provbsts stood guard in Mont-St-Jean, for the Duke was particular that his men did not steal from the local populace, but, despite the precaution, every chicken in the hamlet was soon gone. Men made fires, sacrificing cartridges to ignite the damp wood. No one tried to make shelters, for there was not enough timber immediately available and the rain would have soaked through anything but the most elaborate huts of wood and turf. The red dye from the infantrys’ coats ran to stain their grey trousers, though gradually, as they settled into their muddy homes, all the mens’ uniforms turned to a glutinous and filthy brown.