I gained access to this account my grandfather wrote about a war his great-grandfather fought in. I can't tell when or where this was fought, so I'm wondering if it rings any bells from any of you:
"While he was in the British army, he fought in the Crimean War. He was wounded in the foot while he was a soldier. I especially remember one part that he told to me. Now the Crimean War was when they were fighting Russia. I also remember another part while he was a soldier that Grandpa told us about. He told us about the war about Napoleon. When Napoleon was crossing Europe, conquering the countries and the places, he told how Napoleon's army was invincible. There were no armies that could stand up against it. The reason they were so invincible was that his army was mounted on horses; they called them lancers. They had a twenty-foot lance that they would hold out in front of them. When they would charge, they would just charge through force, and these lances would kill the enemy soldiers or whomever they were charging. Sometimes the enemy didn't have any way of getting to them before this twenty-foot lance would kill them. But Napoleon was taking these different countries, one after another. They came up against this army. They were traveling towards each other. And this army lined up their defenses. They were traveling west, and they lined up their defenses right on the edge of a big wash. The ground was fairly level on both sides of that wash. They lined right up on the east side of that wash. They dug in trenches where they could get down for protection in these trenches. One of Napoleon's main tactics was that he would locate the enemy, and then he would come up within a certain distance of the enemy. Then just at sunrise, his lancers would charge into the enemy camps. They would charge into the enemy camps and destroy them a lot of times before they knew what had happened. This army was prepared for that. They were prepared right on the east side of this big wash. Now the night before it rained, and the water ran down through that wash, made it all muddy. There was water in the bottom. When the sun came up, Napoleon's Lancers were charging straight into the sun. In fact, as the sun came up over the horizon, Napoleon's soldiers had begun their charge. They would have the first wave, and the second wave right behind them, and the third, and the forth in that manner. When they got to that wash, before they got to the wash, they could see these soldiers all lined up in front of them. They were looking right straight across the wash; they didn't know it was there. They could see these soldiers all lined up in a big wide line waiting for them. They figured they were going to do the same thing they had done so many times before. They would charge through those soldiers and kill them with these lances. Just as the sun started up, they made that charge. They came on with the horses running full speed. The lances projected out in front of them ready for the kill. They got to this wash, this ravine. The first soldiers on their horses, that was the first time they saw that ravine, and they couldn't stop because there were horses behind them and there were horses behind those horses. The horses behind them pushed them over that ravine. At first they weren't too worried because they thought, "Well, we'll drive down through this ravine and come up the other side, and we'll be into our enemy." But when the horses went down through that ravine, it was muddy. There was water there, and they got stuck in the mud, in the water. Not only couldn't they run, but they couldn't even walk. They were stuck. So the horses behind them came in, and they marred them right into the mud. They piled up there, and the horses behind came on top of those horses. The ones behind them came on top of those. They couldn't stop; they couldn't get through. The horses couldn't climb over the other horses. They were piled up there. Napoleon's army was destroyed in that wash. They just filled that whole wash up with horses and soldiers. They killed their own soldiers."
At the beginning he says Crimean War, but the implication is that he fought against the French in this battle. He had another great grandfather who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, so I'm wondering if this account is getting confused between the two. According to the book Les Miserables, this is what happened at Waterloo, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. Does this story match anything any of you have heard at all?
Do you have some more basic information about the man, such as when he was born? It's unlikely that he was in both a battle with Napoleon's forces and the Crimean war, as these were separated by a minimum of 48 years. The British were involved in a relatively small percentage of the battles against Napoleon's forces, so a Brit would have most likely fought in the Peninsular War (Spain/Portugal) starting in 1807, the Walcheren Campaign in which there was almost no conflict but British soldiers contracted a horrible illness, or Quatre Bras and Waterloo at the tail end of the war. If this man were born in the 1780s or possibly the 1790s, then it's most likely that he would have fought at Vimeiro, Talavera, Corunna. However there were plenty of battles in the Peninsular War where lancers would charge into a line or skirmishers and whatnot. It's hard to rely on a first person account of a battle where someone may think tens of thousands of lancers are charging at him when in reality it might have been a few hundred. If there's any identifying information about the French cavalry and if it was in the Peninsular War then the book "Charging Against Wellington" could probably be a good resource.
I should add that this description doesn't sound like Waterloo, unless I'm mistaken about some of the details of the battle. It would also probably help to know if your ancestor were English, Scottish, etc.
Ok, so I've gone through every battle I can imagine from the Peninsular War, and brushed up on Waterloo, and I can't find many good matches. The description sounds like an after the fact recollection of a campaign, romanticized a bit.
The engagement at Waterloo did not begin with a dawn lancer charge through a muddy field. Napoleon delayed the start of the battle because they were aware the field was muddy. Wellington's forces began the battle positioned on the reverse slope of hills, not exactly dug in on flat ground. It was also standard practice to form square in the face of a cavalry charge and not remain in line. The description you've posted almost sounds like someone read about Waterloo and spun a tale, rather than someone who was actually there. Waterloo is essentially where Napoleon lost his last army, although the campaign extended a while longer as the French pulled back towards Paris. However the army Napoleon deployed in this final campaign was a shell of what had marched through Europe in the previous part of the century. The memorable moment of this battle was Napoleon sending his old guard to a full frontal assault when the battle was more or less no longer in doubt, and having them be cut down. This wouldn't be remembered as a dawn lancer charge.
The problem with isolating a battle in the peninsular war was that essentially every engagement between the French and primarily Anglo forces saw the French approaching from the East. In 1808/1809, the British were retreating to the sea (to the west) and fought a series of rearguard actions against the French who would find themselves always assaulting from the East. This retreat ended with the Battle of Corunna, but the details do not line up with the description. Someone in this campaign would have been more likely to comment on the Hellish retreat in winter through the mountains with almost no supplies rather than the destruction of a French lancer force.
The next series of engagements saw Marshal Massena striking into Portugal against Wellesley who was again almost always defending positions from the West, from French Eastern assaults. In virtually any skirmish you could find French cavalry riding out in front of their main forces. Any one of these engagements could fit the description, but Wellesley's defensive lines precluded any sort of French cavalry charge into their camps. Wellesley ultimately turned Massena's attack away. Upon pursuit, Wellesley was again almost exclusively attacking from the West, so French rearguard forces would be defending from the East.
The only battle between Wellesley and Soult at the end of this war where I feel the conditions might fit was the Battle of the Nive, where Wellesley took predominantly British forces towards Bayonne, France. Although he was on the offensive, Soult counter-attacked at some point in the engagement. This battle took place after months of terrible weather, with rivers swollen and a lot of flooded, marshy ground around the battlefield. However, at this point in the war Soult did not have much cavalry left, and Wellesley couldn't advance very far into France because he couldn't bring his Spanish forces with him for fear of marauding. The other possible engagement would be when Soult marched through the Pyrenees in 1813 (before the Battle of the Nive) to relieve pressure on besieged forces at Pamplona. Maya and Roncesvalles saw French assaulting British static forces in rough terrain, from the East, but these engagements were stalemates.
I looked at over a hundred engagements in Spain and Portugal and didn't find anything that would meet all of the conditions of the story. I'd say it's more than likely that the ancestor could have been in the British Army, but basically smashed together a bunch of details, or over time grew his stories into legends. It's like how 80,000 people were in a stadium to see a famous catch or home run or whatever, but a decade later 800,000 people are telling the story of how they saw it. My $0.02