Carnage made even the Iron Duke weep
THe butcher’s bill for the battle was diabolical. Dead and wounded are thought to number 50,000, and that may well rise.
Those who died quickly and cleanly were the fortunate ones, for they were spared the agony of lying for hours in the field, eviscerated by a bayonet or a leg blown in two by a cannonball, their life blood oozing away with no prospect of help.
Throughout the day, while the fighting continued, the wounded dragged themselves along the road to Brussels. ‘Nothing could exceed the misery,’ according to a British Army surgeon. He was a man used to the horrors of war, but found the bloodshed at Waterloo near-impossible to bear.
‘ Here a man with an arm suspended only by a single muscle, another with his head horribly mangled by a sabre, one with half his face shot away. The hardest heart must have recoiled from this horror.’
once the battle was over and the cheers for victory had rung from the throats of Wellington’s men, the sight of the battlefield strewn with countless bodies gave every man who saw it pause for thought.
From time to time a figure would half rise, then with a despairing groan f all back. Those who managed to stand would stagger a few paces and then sink again to the ground, often to rise no more. In places where the fighting had been fiercest, corpses lay not singly on the ground but in heaps.
As for the wounded, ‘we could not shut our ears to their frightful cries, yet we were powerless to help them’.
An infantry sergeant spotted a soldier sitting upright against his horse’s body. ‘I thought I heard him to call to me. I went towards him and offered my hand to lift him up. But my hand passed through his body, and I saw both he and his horse had been killed by a cannonball.’
A British major had been in many battles: ‘But I had never seen anything to compare with what I saw at Waterloo. The whole field from right to left was a mass of dead bodies. everywhere officers and men were leaning and weeping over some dead or dying brother or comrade.’
Wellington, the victor, was deeply affected by the bloodbath he had been party to. Back at his HQ, in an inn opposite the church in Waterloo, he stripped off his clothes and slept for a few hours, naked but still covered in grime. He awoke to be told that an aide, Lt- Col sir William Gordon, had died in the next room after his leg, shattered by a musket ball, was amputated.
Tears ran from the Duke’s eyes as he declared: ‘I don’t know what it is like to lose a battle, t hank God. But certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.’