Free The Battle by Alessandro Barbero Page A

Bourbons with my mother's milk, and besides, when I was a child, I saw them every day") Napoleon's unexpected return and Louis XVIII's precipitous flight had convinced Desales that he should present himself to the emperor and ask to reenter his service on condition that he be allowed to keep the general's rank to which he had been promoted after the emperor's abdication. Napoleon, who very much needed technical experts, recognized Desales's rank, and the general commanded the forty-six guns of I Corps's artillery.
    On the ridge behind the Papelotte farm at the extreme left of the Allied line, the three Hussar regiments of Sir Hussey Vivian's brigade were laboriously getting themselves back in order after a disastrous night, during which their horses, frightened by the thunderclaps and the lightning, had prevented everyone from catching as much as a wink of sleep. The officers of the Tenth Hussars took refuge in a small farmhouse, lit a fire in the chimney, and stood about naked as their uniforms dried. The prince regent was the honorary colonel of this cavalry regiment, which was at the time quite fashionable and known to London gossips as "the Prince's Dolls"; its select company included the Duke of Rutland's son, the Earl of Carlisle's son, and the grandsons of four other lords. But all the officers were new to the regiment, and so they hardly knew one another. The previous year, Colonel George Quentin, commander of the Tenth, had appeared before a court-martial, accused of cowardice in the face of the enemy All the officers in the regiment at the time backed up this accusation; nevertheless, Quentin was acquitted, and afterward the officers were transferred en masse. But the colonel wasn't exactly popular among his new officers, either. When they were putting their clothes back on, one of them, Captain Wood, noticed with satisfaction that "Old Quentin" had burned the soles of his boots and was having great trouble getting them on his feet again.
    At the chateau of Hougoumont, abandoned the previous day by proprietor and peasant alike, Private Matthew Clay of the Third Foot Guards began searching through the empty buildings, looking for something to eat. He found a piece of stale bread and a boiling-pot with a pig's head in it, but the meat wasn't completely cooked, and Clay found it too revolting even to taste. After consuming the bread, he decided to adjust his clothing. Like all his comrades, he was soaking wet, but the previous day he'd come across the corpse of a German soldier and had had the foresight to remove the dead man's underwear, so now he could at least put on something dry. He changed his undershirt and underpants, slipped back into his still-damp red coat, and went looking for a bit of dry straw to sit on while he waited for his orders.
    The men of the Eighty-fifth Ligne 5 had spent the night in the mud, with no shelter from the rain. Because it had been formed in the Normandy port towns of Granville and Cherbourg, the Eigvcvchty-fifth included a great many former prisoners of war, men who had been captured in Spain and subsequently released from the hellish pontoons, the prison-barges where the British segregated enemy captives. In the opinion of Captain Chapuis, none of these veterans could wait to come to grips with the Inglisman and pay them back for the mistreatment suffered at their hands; the men of the 85th Ligne, Chapuis thought, would sooner die than be taken prisoner a second time. As he looked around that morning, however, the captain could discern little of the combative spirit that had animated the troops when they set out for the war. At roll call, the gloomy silence in the ranks was a sign that the miserable night had left the men exhausted and that they would need a few hours of genuine rest before they could march against the enemy.
     
    Sir Augustus Frazer, commander of the Allied horse artillery, slept under a roof in the village of Waterloo and arose feeling fairly well rested. At the