In battles like Waterloo where men marched and fired in the open, it seems like being in the very front of the battle during the first volleys was unsurvivable. There was no cover, no trying to “dodge” the enemy’s fire, you were just expected to stand there and take it. If you’re in one of the rows further back in a column you have the protection of the men in front of you to soak up volleys, but if you’re in the front it just seems like you have to pray that the volleys miss you in particular for some reason. Am I wrong? And if being in the front line was especially dangerous, how could officers convince men to stay in formation?
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No.
First of all, the great majority of men engaged in a Napoleonic battle escaped unscathed; at Austerlitz, six out of seven French survived with no wounds to speak of. That said, casualties were pretty uneven across units. Some would not be committed until the battle was already won, while others would be fighting tooth and nail all day. Thus, while the infantry of Napoleon's Guard lost only one officer wounded, the 24th Light regiment in Soult's IV corps lost 490 of its 1291 officers and men.
Individual volleys could be fantastically deadly or pathetically ineffectual; at Fontenoy in 1745, the French delivered the first volley at 30 paces, which produced much confusion but little execution; when the British returned fire, their volley inflicted 619 casualties on the ten battalions of the French and Swiss Guards; at the Battle of Chotusitz, the Prussians required no fewer than 650,000 rounds to inflict a paltry 5,000 casualties on the Austrians. It very much depended on how long your formation was in combat, the skill of the enemy, as well as sheer random chance.
Moreover, I think people tend to have an inaccurate impression of Napoleonic battles. These were generally not linear in the sense of the 18th century; the entire army was not formed up in a series of continuous lines, but rather was divided into numerous independent corps, which arrived on the battlefield at different times and from different directions, resulting in a much more chaotic situation.
Additionally, smaller units like battalions had increasingly augmented their selection of combat formations during the Revolutionary period; instead of lines of two or three ranks, it was now common for whole battalions or brigades to fight in thick skirmish lines to deliver fire, while their division's reserves remained in columns or masses. The men doing the shooting thus had the advantage of spacing and the use of cover, and were not limited to the lines and volleys of 18th century armies. Furthermore, the chief killer on the Napoleonic battlefield was not musketry, whether in linear volleys or skirmishers firing at will, but artillery.
Compared to thin lines, columns, where you might think you were safe in the 9th or 12th rank, were especially vulnerable to fire throughout their whole depth; enemy formations in line could overlap their flanks and enfilade them with fire, while artillery fire could easily plow through several ranks, even if it wasn't already aimed at the center of the column.
Generally speaking then, there were a lot of other important factors besides one's position in the front rank of a formation that influenced your likelihood of becoming a casualty.