Friendly Fire at Waterloo
1815
Reckless Firing
Andrew Uffindell, UK
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Reckless firing probably inflicted as many casualties on friendly units as were caused by incidents of mistaken identity. Lieutenant Basil Jackson found that the Prussians were so disordered in the evening of 18 June that he really thought that he was 'in considerable danger of being shot.' [27]
Such recklessness was not confined to the Prussians. The British 95th Rifles held Wellington's eastern flank at Quatre Bras on 16 June, supported by the Brunswick 2nd Light battalion. Lieutenant Johnny Kincaid recalled that these Brunswickers were raw troops who had never before come under fire. Instead of advancing, they stood still and blazed away wildly with musketry and the 95th had to send word back that the Brunswickers were shooting at them. Later, after becoming used to battle, the Brunswickers behaved gallantly. [28]
Indeed, the sheer terror, the sudden shock of seeing comrades killed and the relentless noise confused many soldiers. Lieutenant Edmund Wheatley of the King's German Legion described how 'the clashing of swords, the clattering of musketry, the hissing of balls, and shouts and clamours produced a sound, jarring and confounding the senses, as if hell and the Devil were in evil contention.'[29] Captain Mercer ended the battle exhausted, thirsty, hoarse and all but deafened. [30] One British infantryman, blinded by blood from a head wound, dashed away to seek help behind the lines. But he ran the wrong way, towards the advancing French cavalry, who brutally cut him down. [31]
Fatigue leads to errors that otherwise might be avoided; few soldiers managed to snatch much sleep on the soaked mud on the night before Waterloo. Some men drank excessive amounts of alcohol on the morning of the battle; this made them fight better but would also have made them more likely to commit errors. [32]
'The enemy fired a great deal,' wrote Captain William Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons, 'yet at times, I thought, rather wildly.' [33] Indeed, when the 12th Light Dragoons pursued a mass of broken infantry, Captain Alexander Barton noticed that the French artillery fired indiscriminately on their own infantry and on the charging British dragoons. [34] Captain Barton's commander, Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. Frederick Ponsonby, even thought that for every Briton that fell, the French canister killed three of their own men.
[35]
During the same charge, Lieutenant-Colonel James Hay, the commander of the 16th Light Dragoons, was shot through the back. 'It was, at the time, supposed he could not live,' recalled William Tomkinson. 'He has recovered. I think he was shot by our own infantry firing to check the enemy, and not perceiving our advance to charge. There is little doubt of it.' [36]
British cavalrymen also criticised some of Wellington's gunners for their irresponsible fire. In the evening of Waterloo, Major-General Sir Hussey Vivian's light cavalry brigade advanced to charge the broken French army. Wellington's batteries stood in the front line, and as Captain Thomas Taylor of the 10th Hussars passed a battery on his right, he saw a gunner about to fire. Taylor bellowed at him not to blow his hussars away, only to receive the insolent reply, 'out of the way, then, and let me have my shot.'
Taylor ordered his men to rein back and the gunner immediately fired. The shot scared all the horses and almost grazed some of their noses. Later, Taylor learnt that an officer had seen one hussar knocked forward off his saddle by a cannonball, 'probably from our zealous friends, who had so good a sight of the French retiring that they did not like to cease firing.' [37] Sergeant Matthew Coglan of the 18th Hussars remembered that 'the first regiment I saw during our rapid advance was the 10th Hussars, many of them were stretched out, killed and wounded by our own guns, whose front they must have crossed, on the ground we passed over.' [38]
However, during this stage of the battle, the 23rd Light Dragoons were the cause as well as the victims of another incident of friendly fire. The 52nd Light infantry were pressing forward into the valley when they saw cavalry charging towards them through the smoke. In fact, a squadron of the 23rd Light Dragoons was falling back in disorder before some cuirassiers but the 52nd could not have known that. The light dragoons wore blue jackets and their shakos were similar to those of French chasseurs à cheval; moreover, dusk was approaching. 'We took them all for the enemy,' sighed Ensign William Leeke, 'and they were fired on and lost some men before it was discovered that many of them were English.' [39]
The light dragoons were wholly responsible for this incident. They should have ridden round the flanks and not towards the centre of the 52nd's line. Some of the 52nd did recognise them as friendly and opened a gap in the centre of the regiment to let them pass. In fact, with the French cuirassiers so close, the 52nd would have been justified in maintaining their line and firing at friend and foe alike in order to save itself from the threat of being overrun by the French horsemen.
Ensign Leeke believed that the horsemen were all French and so went to try and fill the gap. He lowered the colour he was carrying, intending to use it as a lance against the leading horseman but the man fell shot dead only six feet away. Leeke heard a shout: 'They are English' and the firing ceased. The cuirassiers declined to press home their pursuit of the light dragoons on to the 52nd.
'I may remark,' concluded Leeke, 'that if all our soldiers, cavalry and infantry, wore the scarlet uniform, these unfortunate mistakes of taking friends for foes would be of less frequent occurrence.' An aggrieved officer of the light dragoons was less philosophical: 'it's always the case,' he exclaimed. 'We always lose more men by our own people than we do by the enemy.' [40]
Wellington rode up and Lieutenant-Colonel Sir John Colborne, the commander of the 52nd, complained: 'it is our own Cavalry which has caused this firing.' In reply, Wellington urged him: 'never mind, go on, go on.' [41] The Duke knew the importance of pressing on regardless of such inevitable mishaps, for the enemy was receiving far worse. [42]
Friendly fire was an ever-present risk. Street fighting made it much more likely, for the close formations used in open country could not be maintained in a built-up area. Officers therefore found it difficult to exercise command and control. Individual soldiers needed lightning reactions in such close-quarter fighting but could not rely on guidance from their superiors.
Prussian sources admit that in the street fighting at the battle of Ligny two days before Waterloo, 'more than one Prussian fell ... to Prussian musket-balls.' [43] The Prussian chief-of-staff, Lieutenant-General Count August von Gneisenau, had wanted Wellington to bring his army to Ligny to act as a reserve for the Prussians. Wellington correctly disagreed with this, for the feeding of British units piecemeal into the Prussian battle-line would have resulted in immense confusion and many friendly fire incidents. Few, if any, British privates could have recognised all the varied Prussian uniforms as belonging to friendly troops.
Fighting in woodland caused similar problems. At the battle of Quatre Bras, fought on the same day as Ligny, the British 1st Guards had to recapture Bossu wood. First, the two light companies entered it, followed by a succession of two companies at a time in support. Consequently, according to Ensign George Standen, the 1st Guards 'lost most of their men by shooting each other.' [44]
Preventing such tragic incidents was difficult. In cases of doubt, holding one's fire was more dangerous than firing first and asking questions later. At Quatre Bras, the 42nd Highlanders saw some cavalry advancing and wrongly assumed that they were friendly Brunswickers. 'I think we stood with too much confidence,' commented Sergeant James Anton, 'gazing towards them as if they had been our friends.' Alerted in the nick of time, the 42nd successfully formed a defensive square formation but only after desperate fighting and heavy casualties. [45]
Similarly, a French unit broke the 71st Light Infantry at the battle of Vitoria in 1813 during the Peninsular war. The 71st had assumed that these Frenchmen, who wore greatcoats and white shako-covers, were friendly Spaniards and had marched on, only to receive a volley from behind. [46]
Nonetheless, some basic, commonsense preventive measures were taken at Waterloo. For instance, at least some of the units holding Wellington's far eastern flank were warned that friendly Prussian troops were expected to arrive there. Captain Thomas Taylor of the 10th Hussars recalled that: 'I had notice sent me that we were not to fire on troops coming up from the left.' [47]
In the evening, once Wellington had advanced into the valley and routed the French army, he ordered his units to keep to the west of the Brussels road. Hence he left the eastern side, and the road itself, to the Prussians. This establishment of exclusive zones of operations was a simple but immensely effective way of minimising friendly fire.
Wellington left the pursuit of the routed French to the Prussians, partly because the Prussians were fresher since they had not fought so long. An equally important reason was to avoid the friendly fire incidents which would inevitably have occurred in the confusion of the pursuit.
Accidental friendly fire is familiar to the general public. Less well-recognised are the numerous incidents of troops deliberately firing on forces they know to be friendly. In some cases, a unit has no choice but to open fire in order to save itself. The 1st Grenadiers of Napoleon's Guard was one of the few units that stood firm when the French army dissolved into rout after Waterloo. The grenadiers had to fire on the disordered fugitives who rushed on them for shelter lest they force open the ranks of the squares for the enemy to penetrate. 'We had to inflict this evil in order to avoid a greater one,' explained the regiment's commander, Lieutenant-General Baron Jean Petit. [48]
In many other incidents, the perpetrators of the deliberate friendly fire were in no danger. They fired out of anger or resentment, often at the perceived cowardice of the victim. Thus Ensign Edward Macready of the British 30th Foot recalled how some Dutch–Belgian cavalry refused to charge the French and then turned tail and fled. 'As they passed the right face of our square,' related Macready, 'the men, irritated by their rascally conduct, unanimously took up their pieces and fired a volley into them, and "many a good fellow was destroyed so cowardly".' [49]
Earlier in the battle, the bulk of Major-General Count van Bijlandt's Dutch–Belgian infantry brigade broke under the impact of a massed attack by the French 1st Corps. Ensign William Mountsteven of the British 28th Foot wrote that the Netherlanders ran away in formation. 'I saw their officers cutting at them with their swords to make them halt. They nearly ran over the Grenadiers of the 28th, who were so enraged that they were with difficulty prevented from firing into them.'
[50]
Lieutenant Johnny Kincaid and his comrades of the 95th Rifles watched French cuirassiers riding down the 5th Line battalion of the King's German Legion, 'stooping and stabbing at the wounded men as they lay on the ground.' This brutal spectacle could hardly have favourably disposed the riflemen to horsemen in general and the weak, tardy counter-attack by some allied light cavalry was too much to bear. According to Kincaid, as the 95th were 'not more than half pleased with the luke warm charge of our dragoons I very much doubt whether half the shots were not aimed at them – but this is entre nous' [51]
At the battle of Ligny, one French divisional commander turned his own cannon on his men to stop them fleeing. [52] Often the threat of friendly fire is necessary to make fugitives see enemy fire as being the lesser of two dangers. After Waterloo, Captain Robinaux of the French 2nd Line infantry aimed a musket at some dragoons to halt them and eventually collected a force of some dozen horsemen and sixty infantrymen.
Major Lemonnier-Delafosse, a French ADC, also tried to halt the stream of fugitives. His reward was to receive in his left arm a bayonet thrust intended for his body. The looting that accompanied the fugitives everywhere indicated that French discipline had totally broken down and their army had become a mere mob. The individual fugitive ceased to think of the enemy in the wider sense and thought only of the personal enemy that prevented his escape to safety.
[53]
Likewise, at Waterloo Captain Mercer watched a French cavalry column repulsed by fire from his famous 'G' Troop, Royal Horse Artillery: 'every discharge was followed by the fall of numbers, whilst the survivors struggled with each other, and I actually saw them using the pommels of their swords to fight their way out of the mêlée.' [54]
Indiscipline was the root cause of most deliberate friendly fire. Wellington himself experienced this. Shortly before the battle of Waterloo began, he inspected his strongpoint of Hougoumont, whose wood was held by assorted troops, including some companies of the 2nd Nassau Infantry. According to Wellington, some of these Nassauers broke and fled. Perhaps they were merely hurrying back to adopt a new, more favourable position, but in any case Wellington rode over to rally them. Then, as he departed, some of the Nassauers fired a few shots in his direction.
It is highly unlikely that the Nassauers were aiming to kill and, indeed, Wellington himself laughed the incident off. After Waterloo, Captain Mercer's battery shared the same route as a Nassau battalion. As they marched along a sunken lane, the Nassauers bad-temperedly struck the gunners' horses and pricked them with their bayonets. The Nassauers do not seem to have been well-disposed to interference from their allies and probably did not recognise the horseman with the hooked nose and civilian clothes who rallied them at Hougoumont as their commander–in–chief. [55]
Looters had no scruples about murdering wounded soldiers from friendly units. A Prussian soldier promptly stabbed to death a young British ensign who refused to surrender one of his possessions. Two British soldiers then arrived, learnt what had happened, killed the Prussian and took his loot. [56]
A fellow officer of the 52nd Light Infantry told Ensign William Leeke that when the regiment advanced in the evening of Waterloo, he noticed a Belgian soldier following. The Belgian tried to take money from a wounded Frenchman but met resistance and dealt him an apparently fatal blow with the butt of his musket. The officer of the 52nd was so enraged that he immediately slew the Belgian. 'He asked me what I should have done under the circumstances,' wrote Leeke. 'I replied, that I most likely should have done the same; but that I was not sure it was the right thing to do; yet, as the scoundrel had left his own corps in search of plunder, and had under those circumstances taken away life, his own life seemed to be fairly forfeited.' [57]
Captain William Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons wrote scathingly of the fugitives from the Netherlands and Hanoverian cavalry. Not content with abandoning the battlefield, they plundered the baggage of their allies in the rear, cut at the batmen and seized the horses. The batmen of Tomkinson's regiment actually fought the looters off with swords. [58]
For inhabitants living in the vicinity of the battlefield, the soldiers of all armies could pose both a threat and a potential source of riches. Some civilians could be as ruthless as the soldiers in looting the wounded and they made no distinction between friend and foe. One local woman cut off the fingers of an injured but living Prussian officer in order to steal the jewelled rings he was wearing. [59]
An interesting related topic to deliberate friendly fire is how soldiers or units of opposing armies often forbore to fire on each other. Infantrymen sometimes felt more sympathy for the enemy's infantry than for their own cavalry. At the battle of Salamanca in 1812, British footsoldiers had readily sheltered broken French infantry who rushed to them to escape a British cavalry charge. [60] One of Wellington's Belgian soldiers at Waterloo protected two French officers who gave him the masonic sign. [61] A French cavalryman was about to cut at Colonel Felton Hervey, an Assistant Quarter-master-General, when he noticed that the colonel had an empty sleeve; the Frenchman instantly lowered his sword and rode on. [62] The British and French had fought a gentlemen's war right through the Peninsula, and maintained friendly relations between their advanced posts. [63]
Accidents also claimed many friendly lives at Waterloo. In 'G' Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, one gunner tripped and flung out his arms to break his fall, just as his gun fired. The blast blew off both his arms and he later bled to death. [64] Towards the end of the battle, a shrapnel shell burst in the barrel of a gun and severely wounded Captain Charles Napier of Captain Samuel Bolton's battery. [65]
The Congreve rockets employed by the Rocket Troop of Captain Edward Whinyates were particularly dangerous to friendly forces. Captain Mercer noted on 17 June how none of the rockets ever followed the same flight. One rocket even doubled back upon the firers and chased Mercer like a squib. According to Mercer, this 'actually put me in more danger than all the fire of the enemy throughout the day.' [66] At Waterloo itself, the Rocket Troop fired over the heads of the 28th Foot and Ensign William Mountsteven saw the first rocket deviate slightly and nearly fall into the ranks of the 28th. [67]
A freak accident killed Lieutenant Joseph Strachan of the 73rd Foot on 17 June. The soldiers were carrying their muskets horizontally in their hand instead of vertically on their shoulder. One man's musket was still loaded and some tall corn became caught in the trigger. The musket went off and shot the lieutenant dead. [68]
That musket should not have been loaded. Drill and training were necessary to reduce the number of accidents caused by inexperienced soldiers. If the charge inside a musket failed to ignite, a raw recruit might in the heat of action load another charge on top and if this happened on a sufficient number of occasions, the barrel would eventually explode, killing those nearby in the packed ranks. After Waterloo, two British soldiers lost their lives when they foolishly cut up a French powder waggon for firewood. One of their axes struck a nail, causing sparks which ignited the powder. [69]
Confusion and limited visibility made speed hazardous on a crowded battlefield. Some of the 92nd Highlanders had no time to make way for the famous charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo. The horses knocked them down and made one young highlander protest: 'eh! but I didna think ye wad ha'e hurt me sae".' [70]
Many wounded men died when wheels or hooves ran over them, particularly in the evening of the battle when Wellington's army advanced into the carnage-strewn valley to drive off the beaten French. Captain Thomas Dyneley of 'E' Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, wrote: 'the slaughter throughout the day had been dreadful and the ground was so completely covered with killed and wounded that it was with great difficulty we could pick our way so as to prevent driving over them, and I saw hundreds of poor fellows ridden over.' [71]
Captain William Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons charged so fast that he nearly fell victim to an accidental wounding. He galloped after a Frenchman while his comrade Cornet William Beckwith stood still and tried to catch the man on the point of his sword. Beckwith missed and nearly ran Tomkinson through the body. [72]
Similarly, at Quatre Bras on 16 June, the wounded Captain Archibald Menzies of the 42nd Highlanders was struggling on the ground with a French officer. A French lancer rode up and thrust at Menzies but the Highlander suddenly heaved the officer above him to take the fatal lance thrust as a human shield. Menzies then lay trapped beneath the corpse for ten minutes.
The rout after Waterloo inevitably inflicted many accidental fatalities on friendly troops. Panic-stricken French fugitives overturned waggons blocking the main road. Many of these waggons contained wounded men and some ended upside down in the ditch at the edge of the road, where most of the invalids suffocated. [73]
Moreover, Lieutenant John Hibbert of the 1st (King's) Dragoon Guards commented that the Prussian pursuers kept up a continual fire on the fugitives and thus killed as many British prisoners as Frenchmen. [74] This was, of course, an exaggeration but some British prisoners undoubtedly fell to friendly fire during and after the battle. Lieutenant Edmund Wheatley of the King's German Legion found himself in French hands on their side of the battlefield and under heavy artillery fire from Wellington's guns. 'I was in imminent danger of dying disgracefully in the midst of the enemy,' he later wrote; fortunately, one of his captors pushed him into the shelter of a ditch. [75]
Soldiers left wounded in front of their army's position were also at risk of friendly fire. A wounded officer sent a message after Waterloo to Ensign Edward Macready of the 30th Foot, 'to reproach me with having allowed the skirmishers to fire over – or, I believe the poor fellow said at – him, as he lay on the ground.' [76]
Waterloo is a well-documented battle. Many survivors wrote down their experiences and they mentioned scores of casualties caused by friendly fire. [77] But these recorded incidents represent only the tip of the iceberg. The brightly coloured uniforms of Waterloo posed as many problems of recognition as they solved. Uniforms were rarely designed primarily to be distinguishable from the foe and troops did not receive sufficient training to recognise their allies.
At Waterloo, a comprehensive allied recognition sign, like the white star used on Allied vehicles in Europe in World War Two, would have saved many lives. As it was, once soldiers spotted a unit they had to identify it using telescopes and mounted reconnaissance alone, without the benefit of modern instant communication by radio and without night-vision technology.
In fact, just such a universal recognition sign did appear in the allied armies in northern France, in the final days of the 1814 campaign. A Russian officer, Baron Woldemar von Löwenstern, wrote: 'I noticed that everyone was seeking to acquire a [white] handkerchief ... as a band for his right arm. The sovereigns had ordered the whole army to decorate itself with these for recognition purposes. For the coalition armies, made up of troops with so many colour uniforms, needed a general sign. Several times soldiers killed each other in the mêlée for lack of a general rallying sign, as had unfortunately happened to the English Colonel Campbell, who had received some lance thrusts from our Cossacks. [78] The French imagined that we had adopted the colour of the Bourbons, but this was a big mistake. No one thought of that. Our soldiers seized all the bed sheets they could obtain and managed very quickly to use this sign, which the whole coalition army adopted.' [79]
Such white arm-bands would have been invaluable at Waterloo.
Wellington's soldiers were often, in his own words, 'the scum of the earth.' This is no longer acceptable: the army now has the cream of the earth, not the scum. Weapons today are increasingly powerful; thus the soldiers who use them must, more than ever before, be intelligent, self-reliant and quick-thinking. Self-discipline is vital.
But ultimately, the sad conclusion from an analysis of the Waterloo campaign is that friendly fire can never be wholly prevented but merely reduced to a minimum.
[1] H. Siborne ed., The Waterloo letters (1983), p.217; for a similar incident, apparently involving Dutch artillery and British light dragoons, see W. Hay, Reminiscences 1808–15, under Wellington (1901), pp.172–3.
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