“Few of these men’s stories survive or were ever recorded, but using regimental enrolment and service records it is possible to begin to piece together a composite picture of these ordinary soldiers.”

By Graeme Callister

ON JUNE 18, 1815, in a shallow valley a few miles south of the then little-known Belgian village of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte fought what would prove to be the final battle of his illustrious and bloody career.

Over the course of the afternoon, the French emperor launched attack after futile attack in an attempt to smash the Duke of Wellington’s polyglot Anglo-allied army before Blücher’s Prussians could arrive to reinforce them. 

We know that these attacks ultimately failed, and that the French army ended the day in complete rout. But who were the men fighting for Napoleon? How had they come to be in those muddy Belgian fields – and how did their lives and careers to that point shape their experience of the battle?

Few of these men’s stories survive or were ever recorded, but using regimental enrolment and service records it is possible to begin to piece together a composite picture of these ordinary soldiers. This article uses those records to shed new light on a single division of Napoleon’s army – the 1st Division – whose men fought and died on that mid-June day.

Designated to be part of the Comte d’Erlon’s I Corps in Napoleon’s Armée du Nord, 1st Division comprised two battalions each of the 28th, 54th, 55th and 105th Line infantry. Like the rest of I Corps, 1st Division missed the battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny on June 16 due to a combination of confused command and poor staff work, and did not come into action until the day of Waterloo. The division was very heavily engaged during the battle, predominantly in attacking the allied centre around the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte.

So, who were the soldiers of the 1st Division? A total of some 7,352 soldiers passed through its four regiments from the reorganization of the French army in summer 1814 to the Waterloo campaign the following year, although only around 4,000 men and officers took the field. The rest formed cadres for 3rd, 4th and 5th battalions in each regiment, or were discharged, deserted, or transferred to other units (most commonly the Imperial Guard or Artillery Train) as the army prepared for the renewal of hostilities.

Napoleon’s armies were famously manned by conscripts, but individual enrolment records show that the soldiers who marched to war in June of 1815 were no callow youths; the mean age of 1st Division’s rank-and-file was 24.6 years old (median 24), and they were mostly experienced troops with on average around five years of service by the time of Waterloo. However, the median enrolment year of 1812 shows that over half of the men had served only through the years of defeat of 1812 to 14. They were a division with experience, but not necessarily experience of great victories, and without the blithe confidence that comes from repeated triumph.

Many men of course had considerably more service. Some 122 soldiers across the eight field battalions had been in service since before the Napoleonic Wars began in 1803 and had seen action in many of the major battles of the empire – with 69 of these men found in the two battalions of the 54th Line. The longest serving man was Pierre Henache, Drum Sergeant Major of the 105th, who had been in service for over three decades since joining the Navarre Regiment of the old royal army on June 6, 1784.

Several of the most experienced veterans in 1st Division had actually been discharged or given unlimited congés (leave) after Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814, but had rallied to the colours after their emperor’s return in spring 1815. Although many were placed in depot battalions as cadre for new recruitment, others found themselves marching to war once again. One typical example is 30-year-old Fusilier Etienne Clausier, whose army career stretched back to 1803. He presented himself for service in the 105th and was placed in the grenadier company of the 2nd battalion – and went on to become a casualty at Waterloo.

Yet even in this experienced force, by no means all soldiers in the division were veterans. Records show several men joining the army for the first time after peace in 1814. Others volunteered just before the campaign, such as 18-year-old Antoine Corrège, a carpenter from Montrichard in Loir-et-Cher. Corrège only arrived in the 105th Line on May 15, and was assigned to the 2nd battalion (4th company) for the campaign.

Some men with ostensibly long service records also had little experience of actual campaigning. To take just one example, 39-year-old Jean-Baptiste Devoir from Oise had joined the army in 1799, but had been seconded to the French navy in 1805. He saw action at the Battle of Trafalgar before being taken prisoner at Cape Ortegal two weeks later. He remained a prisoner from 1805 until 1814, missing almost the whole of the Napoleonic Wars, before joining 105th on his return to France. Similarly, some 50 conscripts in the 54th Line had been taken prisoner after only a few weeks’ service when British troops captured the town of Flushing in August 1809, meaning that their six years in the army before Waterloo consisted entirely of garrison duty and prisoner-of-war camps.

Time spent as prisoners-of-war could be particularly unpleasant, and Napoleon actually invoked the spectre of the horrors of captivity to motivate his men at the campaign’s outset. The dozens of soldiers captured by the British in either the Iberian Peninsula or Low Countries would have had dark tales to tell of overcrowded prisons or the detested prison hulks. At least one man in the 28th Line had even survived the horrific conditions of five years’ incarceration on Spain’s Cabrera Island after the infamous capitulation of Bailén in 1808. However, most of the 1st Division’s 767 recorded former prisoners-of-war were captured in 1813, and mostly in central Europe.

As might be imagined in composite units of returned prisoners, veterans, new recruits, and relatively recent conscripts, regimental cohesion in 1st Division was mixed. The records show that some regiments had a large nucleus of men who had been together several years, while others had a far higher proportion of recent draftees. While most men of the 105th had been in the regiment at least two years (and many for much longer), over half of the 54th were recently returned prisoners of war or drafted from other units. Indeed, while the 54th had by far the largest number of veterans from before 1803, many had only recently joined the regiment. In total 139 former units were represented in the 54th, including pioneers, wagon train, artillery, cavalry, navy, Imperial Guard, light infantry and line infantry.

Cohesion was perhaps helped by the fact that the men of 1st Division were almost all native Frenchmen. Yet even here there was diversity, as every department in France was represented in the division’s ranks, albeit unevenly (with, for example, 250 men from Oise but only two from the then-department of Corsica). Most foreigners had been discharged en masse the previous year, even those from former French departments. But there were still a handful of men from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Italy, Holland, Belgium, the Rhineland – and even a couple of Prussians. Musicians especially were prone to be hired from abroad, mostly recruited during the peace of 1814. (Elsewhere in I Corps there were men born far beyond Europe or the French colonies, such as Indian-born Jacques de Saint Alban in the 85th Line or Egyptian Solimand Moustapha in the 17th – both of whom would become casualties in the battle).

If the soldiers were a fair cross-section of France, they also reflected the health and height of the wider population. Minimum height requirements for recruits meant that the troops would have been taller than the national average, but the mean height of troops across the eight fighting battalions was still only 163.58 cm (with a median of 164 cm) or roughly 5’ 4”. The shortest man was listed as 130 cm or 4’ 3”, although this is quite likely an error. More probably the shortest man was Corporal Auguste Avard at 140 cm tall, or a little over 4’ 7”. A handful of men stood over 182 cm (6’) tall, but the tallest man in the division was Charles Braun, Drum Major of the 55th, who is recorded at 199 cm (just over 6’ 6”). Both Avard and Braun were wounded at Waterloo. 

Height also, to an extent, informed where a man served, with taller men often assigned to the grenadier companies and shorter men becoming light troops (called voltigeurs in French line regiments). Average heights for line companies across all regiments in the division tended to be somewhere in the 162 to 164 cm range, while on average grenadiers in every regiment were around 5 to 8 cm or 2 to 3 inches taller, in both mean and median heights. Voltigeurs tended to average 1 to 2 cm or less than an inch shorter than their line comrades.

Looking beyond the averages, however, it is evident that by no means all grenadiers were tall, nor all voltigeurs short. The shortest grenadiers were usually in the 153 to 157 cm or 5’ to 5’ 2” range, well below the average for a voltigeur, while the tallest voltigeurs were over 170 cm or 5’ 7”, towering over most of their comrades in both line and grenadier companies. In the second battalion of the 54th, the voltigeur company was not even the shortest on average, albeit by a whisker. 

Height was also a key factor in where men stood in the line of battle. Going into action, French companies were formed in height order, with the tallest third of men in the first rank, the shortest third in the second rank, and the middle third in the rear rank. This clearly impacted how much a man was likely to see of the action. On average in the 1st Division, men in the front rank were 10 to 12 cm  or 4 to 5 inches taller than those immediately behind them, while men in the rear rank were 5 to 7 cm or 2 to 3 inches taller than the soldiers to their immediate front. With a shako adding another 8 to 9 cm or 3 to 4 inches above a man’s head, shorter men in the central rank especially would have had a severely impeded view of anything going on ahead of them on the battlefield.

The regimental registers also indicate that the division was in reasonable health when it marched off on campaign. Some 25 men died and another 115 were hospitalized in the first six months of 1815 across the units that would make up the division — that’s 1.9 per cent of the men who passed through the four regiments. The reasons were mixed or simply went unrecorded, but there is no indication of major outbreaks of disease or mass hospitalizations. There is also no indication of major disillusionment with the cause. Only a dozen men deserted from the division in the week before Waterloo (one from 105th, four from 54th, and seven from 55th), despite the confusion of troop movements and being on home turf providing perfect opportunities to abscond.

The four regiments of 1st Division were ultimately heavily engaged at Waterloo, mostly in attacking La Haye Sainte and the ridge beyond. They suffered somewhat from the charge of the British heavy cavalry in the early afternoon, and more from allied musketry, rifle and cannon fire throughout the day. Casualties were heavy, although their recording in the regimental registers is somewhat patchy and inconsistent. The 28th, for example, does not record men killed in action, while the 54th omits any record of wounds. The 105th also does not record wounds, except in the case of a few men taken prisoner. Across all regiments, however, most men left behind on the field, including dead and wounded, are recorded with a catch-all phrase “presumed prisoner of war.”

In total, the regimental registers of 1st Division list 49 men killed, 288 wounded, 37 temporarily missing (who later rejoined) and 1763 “presumed prisoner.” A few of the presumed prisoner entries were updated later to record men returned or found in enemy hospitals (included as missing or wounded above), but most are left with their ultimate fate unrecorded. The figure therefore includes dozens, if not hundreds, of men killed and wounded, as well as those genuinely taken prisoner.

Some companies and battalions lost more men than others, but in general the casualties were fairly evenly spread across the division. There is little correlation in the recorded losses between height, and therefore place in line of battle, and likelihood of injury, although the imprecision of the records means that it is almost impossible to draw firm conclusions on this score. There is no evidence in this division’s records to support the story of whole companies having surrendered when charged and overrun by British cavalry, although some companies lost well over three-quarters of their strength. The 1st battalion, 28th Line lost most heavily, with some 350 men lost out of 496 listed in the ranks; its 2nd and 3rd companies both recorded 63 casualties, out of 84 and 85 men respectively. In all, over half of the men who began the campaign in 1st Division became casualties or prisoners on June 18, 1815.

The story of Napoleon’s 1st Division can be told in many different ways – from the general orders dictating its movements, to the few memoirs of its soldiers and officers – and of course there is more research that can be done. However, the records of the individuals who made up the regiments add rich context to our understanding of the men who marched to war, and of their experience of Battle at Waterloo.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Graeme Callister Graeme Callister is co-author of the recently published Battle: Understanding Conflict from Hastings to Helmand from www.penandswordbooks.com. He is a senior lecturer in history and war studies at York St John University, with extensive experience of researching and teaching the history of warfare. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.