Free The Battle by Alessandro Barbero

warriors of a skirmish between outposts. Hygienic conditions must have been frightful, and yet we know that many soldiers—perhaps more than would be the case today—took the opportunity of those first hours of light to shave and perhaps even to put on a fresh shirt, "because soldiers," as a French officer said, "don't like to fight when they're dirty."
    Captain Verner of the Seventh Hussars had spent the whole night in the saddle, as had all the members of his squadron, sitting astride their horses in a field of rye so tall they almost disappeared in it; from this advanced position, the captain and his comrades were charged with covering the right wing of the Allied army This order had mightily displeased the captain when he received it the previous evening, because his men had been severely engaged during the retreat from Quatre Bras. Naturally, however, he'd obeyed without a word and followed the regiment's sergeant major in the pitch dark to the place where the picket would take up its position. After having remained there all night, on horses sinking up to their knees in mud and with rainwater running into their boots, the Hussars were glad of the dawn, but then it revealed to them that their position was, in fact, only a few meters from their own front line and so their all-night vigil had been perfectly useless. Verner declared that he had never seen his men so weary and depressed, not even during the hardest moments of the war in Spain.
    In the center of Wellington's deployment, the regiments of Sir Colin Halkett's brigade were trying to shake off their nocturnal torpor. The men of the Thirtieth Regiment had eaten no warm food for three days. The day before, they had started to cook their rations during a halt in the retreat, but almost at once the march began again in great haste, and they had poured out the soup and meat in the fields. Since then, no supply wagon had caught up with them, and so they had been compelled to face the night without anything to eat, except for whatever remained of the three and a third pounds of bread issued to each of them two days before. In the morning, the regiment's officers realized that their men—most of whom had been under fire for the first time at Quatre Bras—were "almost petrified with cold, many could not stand, and some were quite stupefied."
    Farther left, the men of Sir Denis Pack's brigade—also known as the Scottish Brigade—were no better off. "Men and officers, with their dirty clothes, and chins unshorn, had rather a disconsolate look in the morning," reported one. Many officers who had been wounded two days before at Quatre Bras but had refused to abandon their men "were unable to hold out any longer, and were persuaded to go to Brussels about eight o'clock in the morning." In case they should not survive the battle, those who remained wrote their last wills in pencil on slips of paper and entrusted them to their wounded comrades. "Kempt's and Pack's brigades had got such a mauling on the 16th, that they thought it as well to have all straight. The wounded officers shook hands, and departed for Brussels."
    General Desales, the I Corps artillery commander, had yielded his lodgings to his superior officer, Count d'Erlon, and had therefore spent the night in bivouac drenched to the skin. Eager to change his clothes and put on dry linen, the general wandered among the artillery wagons until he found an open, abandoned coach, climbed in immediately, disrobed, and put on whatever dry items he could find in his bags. Desales was famous for having constructed bridges over the Danube in record time during Napoleon's Wagram campaign. As a result of his service, he was raised to the rank of baron and granted an estate worth four thousand francs a year. Like many other French officers, Desales had adapted fairly well to the return of the Bourbons in 1814; he had, after all, been born at Versailles, the son of a former servant of the royal family. ("I sucked in love for the