





Last year (1861), on a beautiful May morning, a traveller, the person
who is telling this story, was coming from Nivelles, and directing his
course towards La Hulpe. He was on foot. He was pursuing a broad paved
road, which undulated between two rows of trees, over the hills which
succeed each other, raise the road and let it fall again, and produce
something in the nature of enormous waves.

He had passed Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. In the west he perceived
the slate-roofed tower of Braine-l’Alleud, which has the form of a
reversed vase. He had just left behind a wood upon an eminence; and at
the angle of the crossroad, by the side of a sort of mouldy gibbet
bearing the inscription _Ancient Barrier No. 4_, a public house,
bearing on its front this sign: _At the Four Winds_ (Aux Quatre Vents).
_Échabeau, Private Café_.

A quarter of a league further on, he arrived at the bottom of a little
valley, where there is water which passes beneath an arch made through
the embankment of the road. The clump of sparsely planted but very
green trees, which fills the valley on one side of the road, is
dispersed over the meadows on the other, and disappears gracefully and
as in order in the direction of Braine-l’Alleud.

On the right, close to the road, was an inn, with a four-wheeled cart
at the door, a large bundle of hop-poles, a plough, a heap of dried
brushwood near a flourishing hedge, lime smoking in a square hole, and
a ladder suspended along an old penthouse with straw partitions. A
young girl was weeding in a field, where a huge yellow poster, probably
of some outside spectacle, such as a parish festival, was fluttering in
the wind. At one corner of the inn, beside a pool in which a flotilla
of ducks was navigating, a badly paved path plunged into the bushes.
The wayfarer struck into this.

After traversing a hundred paces, skirting a wall of the fifteenth
century, surmounted by a pointed gable, with bricks set in contrast, he
found himself before a large door of arched stone, with a rectilinear
impost, in the sombre style of Louis XIV., flanked by two flat
medallions. A severe façade rose above this door; a wall, perpendicular
to the façade, almost touched the door, and flanked it with an abrupt
right angle. In the meadow before the door lay three harrows, through
which, in disorder, grew all the flowers of May. The door was closed.
The two decrepit leaves which barred it were ornamented with an old
rusty knocker.

The sun was charming; the branches had that soft shivering of May,
which seems to proceed rather from the nests than from the wind. A
brave little bird, probably a lover, was carolling in a distracted
manner in a large tree.

The wayfarer bent over and examined a rather large circular excavation,
resembling the hollow of a sphere, in the stone on the left, at the
foot of the pier of the door.

At this moment the leaves of the door parted, and a peasant woman
emerged.

She saw the wayfarer, and perceived what he was looking at.

“It was a French cannon-ball which made that,” she said to him. And she
added:—

“That which you see there, higher up in the door, near a nail, is the
hole of a big iron bullet as large as an egg. The bullet did not pierce
the wood.”


“What is the name of this place?” inquired the wayfarer.

“Hougomont,” said the peasant woman.

The traveller straightened himself up. He walked on a few paces, and
went off to look over the tops of the hedges. On the horizon through
the trees, he perceived a sort of little elevation, and on this
elevation something which at that distance resembled a lion.

He was on the battle-field of Waterloo.






Hougomont,—this was a funereal spot, the beginning of the obstacle, the
first resistance, which that great wood-cutter of Europe, called
Napoleon, encountered at Waterloo, the first knot under the blows of
his axe.

It was a château; it is no longer anything but a farm. For the
antiquary, Hougomont is _Hugomons_. This manor was built by Hugo, Sire
of Somerel, the same who endowed the sixth chaplaincy of the Abbey of
Villiers.

The traveller pushed open the door, elbowed an ancient calash under the
porch, and entered the courtyard.

The first thing which struck him in this paddock was a door of the
sixteenth century, which here simulates an arcade, everything else
having fallen prostrate around it. A monumental aspect often has its
birth in ruin. In a wall near the arcade opens another arched door, of
the time of Henry IV., permitting a glimpse of the trees of an orchard;
beside this door, a manure-hole, some pickaxes, some shovels, some
carts, an old well, with its flagstone and its iron reel, a chicken
jumping, and a turkey spreading its tail, a chapel surmounted by a
small bell-tower, a blossoming pear-tree trained in espalier against
the wall of the chapel—behold the court, the conquest of which was one
of Napoleon’s dreams. This corner of earth, could he but have seized
it, would, perhaps, have given him the world likewise. Chickens are
scattering its dust abroad with their beaks. A growl is audible; it is
a huge dog, who shows his teeth and replaces the English.

The English behaved admirably there. Cooke’s four companies of guards
there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army.

Hougomont viewed on the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising
buildings and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one
angle of which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the
southern door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only a gun’s
length away. Hougomont has two doors,—the southern door, that of the
château; and the northern door, belonging to the farm. Napoleon sent
his brother Jérôme against Hougomont; the divisions of Foy,
Guilleminot, and Bachelu hurled themselves against it; nearly the
entire corps of Reille was employed against it, and miscarried;
Kellermann’s balls were exhausted on this heroic section of wall.
Bauduin’s brigade was not strong enough to force Hougomont on the
north, and the brigade of Soye could not do more than effect the
beginning of a breach on the south, but without taking it.

The farm buildings border the courtyard on the south. A bit of the
north door, broken by the French, hangs suspended to the wall. It
consists of four planks nailed to two cross-beams, on which the scars
of the attack are visible.

The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had
a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall,
stands half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely in
the wall, built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the
courtyard on the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in
all farms, with the two large leaves made of rustic planks: beyond lie
the meadows. The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long
time, all sorts of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the
door-posts. It was there that Bauduin was killed.

The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is
visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives
and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls are in the death
agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds;
the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee.

This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings
which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.

The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in,
but could not stand their ground. Beside the chapel, one wing of the
château, the only ruin now remaining of the manor of Hougomont, rises
in a crumbling state,—disembowelled, one might say. The château served
for a dungeon, the chapel for a block-house. There men exterminated
each other. The French, fired on from every point,—from behind the
walls, from the summits of the garrets, from the depths of the cellars,
through all the casements, through all the air-holes, through every
crack in the stones,—fetched fagots and set fire to walls and men; the
reply to the grape-shot was a conflagration.

In the ruined wing, through windows garnished with bars of iron, the
dismantled chambers of the main building of brick are visible; the
English guards were in ambush in these rooms; the spiral of the
staircase, cracked from the ground floor to the very roof, appears like
the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two stories; the
English, besieged on the staircase, and massed on its upper steps, had
cut off the lower steps. These consisted of large slabs of blue stone,
which form a heap among the nettles. Half a score of steps still cling
to the wall; on the first is cut the figure of a trident. These
inaccessible steps are solid in their niches. All the rest resembles a
jaw which has been denuded of its teeth. There are two old trees there:
one is dead; the other is wounded at its base, and is clothed with
verdure in April. Since 1815 it has taken to growing through the
staircase.

A massacre took place in the chapel. The interior, which has recovered
its calm, is singular. The mass has not been said there since the
carnage. Nevertheless, the altar has been left there—an altar of
unpolished wood, placed against a background of roughhewn stone. Four
whitewashed walls, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows;
over the door a large wooden crucifix, below the crucifix a square
air-hole stopped up with a bundle of hay; on the ground, in one corner,
an old window-frame with the glass all broken to pieces—such is the
chapel. Near the altar there is nailed up a wooden statue of Saint
Anne, of the fifteenth century; the head of the infant Jesus has been
carried off by a large ball. The French, who were masters of the chapel
for a moment, and were then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames
filled this building; it was a perfect furnace; the door was burned,
the floor was burned, the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed
upon his feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen;
then it stopped,—a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of
the neighborhood. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was less fortunate
than the Christ.

The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ this
name is to be read: _Henquinez_. Then these others: _Conde de Rio Maior
Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana)_. There are French names with
exclamation points,—a sign of wrath. The wall was freshly whitewashed
in 1849. The nations insulted each other there.

It was at the door of this chapel that the corpse was picked up which
held an axe in its hand; this corpse was Sub-Lieutenant Legros.

On emerging from the chapel, a well is visible on the left. There are
two in this courtyard. One inquires, Why is there no bucket and pulley
to this? It is because water is no longer drawn there. Why is water not
drawn there? Because it is full of skeletons.

The last person who drew water from the well was named Guillaume van
Kylsom. He was a peasant who lived at Hougomont, and was gardener
there. On the 18th of June, 1815, his family fled and concealed
themselves in the woods.

The forest surrounding the Abbey of Villiers sheltered these
unfortunate people who had been scattered abroad, for many days and
nights. There are at this day certain traces recognizable, such as old
boles of burned trees, which mark the site of these poor bivouacs
trembling in the depths of the thickets.

Guillaume van Kylsom remained at Hougomont, “to guard the château,” and
concealed himself in the cellar. The English discovered him there. They
tore him from his hiding-place, and the combatants forced this
frightened man to serve them, by administering blows with the flats of
their swords. They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It
was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last
draught. This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die
itself.

After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death
has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow
glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and
it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast
into it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says
they were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment,
feeble voices were heard calling from the well.

This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, part
stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower, and folded
like the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides. The fourth side
is open. It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom
has a sort of shapeless loophole, possibly the hole made by a shell.
This little tower had a platform, of which only the beams remain. The
iron supports of the well on the right form a cross. On leaning over,
the eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a
heaped-up mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is
concealed in a growth of nettles.

This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms the
table for all wells in Belgium. The slab has here been replaced by a
cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of
knotty and petrified wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer
either pail, chain, or pulley; but there is still the stone basin which
served the overflow. The rain-water collects there, and from time to
time a bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink, and then
flies away. One house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited.
The door of this house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door, beside a
pretty Gothic lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed
slanting. At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped
this handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed
off his hand with an axe.

The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume van
Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since. A woman with gray hair said
to us: “I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older,
was terrified and wept. They carried us off to the woods. I went there
in my mother’s arms. We glued our ears to the earth to hear. I imitated
the cannon, and went _boum! boum!_”


A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard, so
we were told. The orchard is terrible.

It is in three parts; one might almost say, in three acts. The first
part is a garden, the second is an orchard, the third is a wood. These
three parts have a common enclosure: on the side of the entrance, the
buildings of the château and the farm; on the left, a hedge; on the
right, a wall; and at the end, a wall. The wall on the right is of
brick, the wall at the bottom is of stone. One enters the garden first.
It slopes downwards, is planted with gooseberry bushes, choked with a
wild growth of vegetation, and terminated by a monumental terrace of
cut stone, with balustrade with a double curve.

It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which preceded Le
Nôtre; to-day it is ruins and briars. The pilasters are surmounted by
globes which resemble cannon-balls of stone. Forty-three balusters can
still be counted on their sockets; the rest lie prostrate in the grass.
Almost all bear scratches of bullets. One broken baluster is placed on
the pediment like a fractured leg.

It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six
light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither, and being
unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears in their dens,
accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was
armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined this balustrade and fired
from above. The infantry men, replying from below, six against two
hundred, intrepid and with no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a
quarter of an hour to die.

One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden into the orchard,
properly speaking. There, within the limits of those few square
fathoms, fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall seems
ready to renew the combat. Thirty-eight loopholes, pierced by the
English at irregular heights, are there still. In front of the sixth
are placed two English tombs of granite. There are loopholes only in
the south wall, as the principal attack came from that quarter. The
wall is hidden on the outside by a tall hedge; the French came up,
thinking that they had to deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found
the wall both an obstacle and an ambuscade, with the English guards
behind it, the thirty-eight loopholes firing at once a shower of
grape-shot and balls, and Soye’s brigade was broken against it. Thus
Waterloo began.

Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders, the French
scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand amid the trees.
All this grass has been soaked in blood. A battalion of Nassau, seven
hundred strong, was overwhelmed there. The outside of the wall, against
which Kellermann’s two batteries were trained, is gnawed by grape-shot.

This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May. It has its
buttercups and its daisies; the grass is tall there; the cart-horses
browse there; cords of hair, on which linen is drying, traverse the
spaces between the trees and force the passer-by to bend his head; one
walks over this uncultivated land, and one’s foot dives into
mole-holes. In the middle of the grass one observes an uprooted
tree-bole which lies there all verdant. Major Blackmann leaned against
it to die. Beneath a great tree in the neighborhood fell the German
general, Duplat, descended from a French family which fled on the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes. An aged and falling apple-tree leans
far over to one side, its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and of
clayey loam. Nearly all the apple-trees are falling with age. There is
not one which has not had its bullet or its biscayan.6 The skeletons of
dead trees abound in this orchard. Crows fly through their branches,
and at the end of it is a wood full of violets.

Bauduin killed, Foy wounded, conflagration, massacre, carnage, a
rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled in
fury, a well crammed with corpses, the regiment of Nassau and the
regiment of Brunswick destroyed, Duplat killed, Blackmann killed, the
English Guards mutilated, twenty French battalions, besides the forty
from Reille’s corps, decimated, three thousand men in that hovel of
Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned, with their
throats cut,—and all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the
traveller: _Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will
explain to you the affair of Waterloo!_






Let us turn back,—that is one of the story-teller’s rights,—and put
ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than
the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took
place.

If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and the 18th of
June, 1815, the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops
of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon. All that
Providence required in order to make Waterloo the end of Austerlitz was
a little more rain, and a cloud traversing the sky out of season
sufficed to make a world crumble.

The battle of Waterloo could not be begun until half-past eleven
o’clock, and that gave Blücher time to come up. Why? Because the ground
was wet. The artillery had to wait until it became a little firmer
before they could manœuvre.

Napoleon was an artillery officer, and felt the effects of this. The
foundation of this wonderful captain was the man who, in the report to
the Directory on Aboukir, said: _Such a one of our balls killed six
men_. All his plans of battle were arranged for projectiles. The key to
his victory was to make the artillery converge on one point. He treated
the strategy of the hostile general like a citadel, and made a breach
in it. He overwhelmed the weak point with grape-shot; he joined and
dissolved battles with cannon. There was something of the sharpshooter
in his genius. To beat in squares, to pulverize regiments, to break
lines, to crush and disperse masses,—for him everything lay in this, to
strike, strike, strike incessantly,—and he intrusted this task to the
cannon-ball. A redoubtable method, and one which, united with genius,
rendered this gloomy athlete of the pugilism of war invincible for the
space of fifteen years.

On the 18th of June, 1815, he relied all the more on his artillery,
because he had numbers on his side. Wellington had only one hundred and
fifty-nine mouths of fire; Napoleon had two hundred and forty.

Suppose the soil dry, and the artillery capable of moving, the action
would have begun at six o’clock in the morning. The battle would have
been won and ended at two o’clock, three hours before the change of
fortune in favor of the Prussians. What amount of blame attaches to
Napoleon for the loss of this battle? Is the shipwreck due to the
pilot?

Was it the evident physical decline of Napoleon that complicated this
epoch by an inward diminution of force? Had the twenty years of war
worn out the blade as it had worn the scabbard, the soul as well as the
body? Did the veteran make himself disastrously felt in the leader? In
a word, was this genius, as many historians of note have thought,
suffering from an eclipse? Did he go into a frenzy in order to disguise
his weakened powers from himself? Did he begin to waver under the
delusion of a breath of adventure? Had he become—a grave matter in a
general—unconscious of peril? Is there an age, in this class of
material great men, who may be called the giants of action, when genius
grows short-sighted? Old age has no hold on the geniuses of the ideal;
for the Dantes and Michael Angelos to grow old is to grow in greatness;
is it to grow less for the Hannibals and the Bonapartes? Had Napoleon
lost the direct sense of victory? Had he reached the point where he
could no longer recognize the reef, could no longer divine the snare,
no longer discern the crumbling brink of abysses? Had he lost his power
of scenting out catastrophes? He who had in former days known all the
roads to triumph, and who, from the summit of his chariot of lightning,
pointed them out with a sovereign finger, had he now reached that state
of sinister amazement when he could lead his tumultuous legions
harnessed to it, to the precipice? Was he seized at the age of
forty-six with a supreme madness? Was that titanic charioteer of
destiny no longer anything more than an immense dare-devil?

We do not think so.

His plan of battle was, by the confession of all, a masterpiece. To go
straight to the centre of the Allies’ line, to make a breach in the
enemy, to cut them in two, to drive the British half back on Hal, and
the Prussian half on Tongres, to make two shattered fragments of
Wellington and Blücher, to carry Mont-Saint-Jean, to seize Brussels, to
hurl the German into the Rhine, and the Englishman into the sea. All
this was contained in that battle, according to Napoleon. Afterwards
people would see.

Of course, we do not here pretend to furnish a history of the battle of
Waterloo; one of the scenes of the foundation of the story which we are
relating is connected with this battle, but this history is not our
subject; this history, moreover, has been finished, and finished in a
masterly manner, from one point of view by Napoleon, and from another
point of view by a whole pleiad of historians.7

As for us, we leave the historians at loggerheads; we are but a distant
witness, a passer-by on the plain, a seeker bending over that soil all
made of human flesh, taking appearances for realities, perchance; we
have no right to oppose, in the name of science, a collection of facts
which contain illusions, no doubt; we possess neither military practice
nor strategic ability which authorize a system; in our opinion, a chain
of accidents dominated the two leaders at Waterloo; and when it becomes
a question of destiny, that mysterious culprit, we judge like that
ingenious judge, the populace.






Those persons who wish to gain a clear idea of the battle of Waterloo
have only to place, mentally, on the ground, a capital A. The left limb
of the A is the road to Nivelles, the right limb is the road to
Genappe, the tie of the A is the hollow road to Ohain from
Braine-l’Alleud. The top of the A is Mont-Saint-Jean, where Wellington
is; the lower left tip is Hougomont, where Reille is stationed with
Jérôme Bonaparte; the right tip is the Belle-Alliance, where Napoleon
was. At the centre of this chord is the precise point where the final
word of the battle was pronounced. It was there that the lion has been
placed, the involuntary symbol of the supreme heroism of the Imperial
Guard.

The triangle included in the top of the A, between the two limbs and
the tie, is the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. The dispute over this
plateau constituted the whole battle. The wings of the two armies
extended to the right and left of the two roads to Genappe and
Nivelles; d’Erlon facing Picton, Reille facing Hill.

Behind the tip of the A, behind the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, is the
forest of Soignes.

As for the plain itself, let the reader picture to himself a vast
undulating sweep of ground; each rise commands the next rise, and all
the undulations mount towards Mont-Saint-Jean, and there end in the
forest.

Two hostile troops on a field of battle are two wrestlers. It is a
question of seizing the opponent round the waist. The one seeks to trip
up the other. They clutch at everything: a bush is a point of support;
an angle of the wall offers them a rest to the shoulder; for the lack
of a hovel under whose cover they can draw up, a regiment yields its
ground; an unevenness in the ground, a chance turn in the landscape, a
cross-path encountered at the right moment, a grove, a ravine, can stay
the heel of that colossus which is called an army, and prevent its
retreat. He who quits the field is beaten; hence the necessity
devolving on the responsible leader, of examining the most
insignificant clump of trees, and of studying deeply the slightest
relief in the ground.

The two generals had attentively studied the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean,
now called the plain of Waterloo. In the preceding year, Wellington,
with the sagacity of foresight, had examined it as the possible seat of
a great battle. Upon this spot, and for this duel, on the 18th of June,
Wellington had the good post, Napoleon the bad post. The English army
was stationed above, the French army below.

It is almost superfluous here to sketch the appearance of Napoleon on
horseback, glass in hand, upon the heights of Rossomme, at daybreak, on
June 18, 1815. All the world has seen him before we can show him. That
calm profile under the little three-cornered hat of the school of
Brienne, that green uniform, the white revers concealing the star of
the Legion of Honor, his great coat hiding his epaulets, the corner of
red ribbon peeping from beneath his vest, his leather trousers, the
white horse with the saddle-cloth of purple velvet bearing on the
corners crowned N’s and eagles, Hessian boots over silk stockings,
silver spurs, the sword of Marengo,—that whole figure of the last of
the Cæsars is present to all imaginations, saluted with acclamations by
some, severely regarded by others.

That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light; this arose from
a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and
which always veils the truth for a longer or shorter time; but to-day
history and daylight have arrived.

That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and
divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it is
wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had
hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different
phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and
the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader.
Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations.
Babylon violated lessens Alexander, Rome enchained lessens Cæsar,
Jerusalem murdered lessens Titus, tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a
misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his
form.






Every one is acquainted with the first phase of this battle; a
beginning which was troubled, uncertain, hesitating, menacing to both
armies, but still more so for the English than for the French.

It had rained all night, the earth had been cut up by the downpour, the
water had accumulated here and there in the hollows of the plain as if
in casks; at some points the gear of the artillery carriages was buried
up to the axles, the circingles of the horses were dripping with liquid
mud. If the wheat and rye trampled down by this cohort of transports on
the march had not filled in the ruts and strewn a litter beneath the
wheels, all movement, particularly in the valleys, in the direction of
Papelotte would have been impossible.

The affair began late. Napoleon, as we have already explained, was in
the habit of keeping all his artillery well in hand, like a pistol,
aiming it now at one point, now at another, of the battle; and it had
been his wish to wait until the horse batteries could move and gallop
freely. In order to do that it was necessary that the sun should come
out and dry the soil. But the sun did not make its appearance. It was
no longer the rendezvous of Austerlitz. When the first cannon was
fired, the English general, Colville, looked at his watch, and noted
that it was thirty-five minutes past eleven.

The action was begun furiously, with more fury, perhaps, than the
Emperor would have wished, by the left wing of the French resting on
Hougomont. At the same time Napoleon attacked the centre by hurling
Quiot’s brigade on La Haie-Sainte, and Ney pushed forward the right
wing of the French against the left wing of the English, which rested
on Papelotte.

The attack on Hougomont was something of a feint; the plan was to draw
Wellington thither, and to make him swerve to the left. This plan would
have succeeded if the four companies of the English guards and the
brave Belgians of Perponcher’s division had not held the position
solidly, and Wellington, instead of massing his troops there, could
confine himself to despatching thither, as reinforcements, only four
more companies of guards and one battalion from Brunswick.

The attack of the right wing of the French on Papelotte was calculated,
in fact, to overthrow the English left, to cut off the road to
Brussels, to bar the passage against possible Prussians, to force
Mont-Saint-Jean, to turn Wellington back on Hougomont, thence on
Braine-l’Alleud, thence on Hal; nothing easier. With the exception of a
few incidents this attack succeeded. Papelotte was taken; La
Haie-Sainte was carried.

A detail to be noted. There was in the English infantry, particularly
in Kempt’s brigade, a great many raw recruits. These young soldiers
were valiant in the presence of our redoubtable infantry; their
inexperience extricated them intrepidly from the dilemma; they
performed particularly excellent service as skirmishers: the soldier
skirmisher, left somewhat to himself, becomes, so to speak, his own
general. These recruits displayed some of the French ingenuity and
fury. This novice of an infantry had dash. This displeased Wellington.

After the taking of La Haie-Sainte the battle wavered.

There is in this day an obscure interval, from midday to four o’clock;
the middle portion of this battle is almost indistinct, and
participates in the sombreness of the hand-to-hand conflict. Twilight
reigns over it. We perceive vast fluctuations in that fog, a dizzy
mirage, paraphernalia of war almost unknown to-day, pendant colbacks,
floating sabre-taches, cross-belts, cartridge-boxes for grenades,
hussar dolmans, red boots with a thousand wrinkles, heavy shakos
garlanded with torsades, the almost black infantry of Brunswick mingled
with the scarlet infantry of England, the English soldiers with great,
white circular pads on the slopes of their shoulders for epaulets, the
Hanoverian light-horse with their oblong casques of leather, with brass
hands and red horse-tails, the Scotch with their bare knees and plaids,
the great white gaiters of our grenadiers; pictures, not strategic
lines—what Salvator Rosa requires, not what is suited to the needs of
Gribeauval.

A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. _Quid
obscurum, quid divinum_. Each historian traces, to some extent, the
particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell. Whatever may
be the combinations of the generals, the shock of armed masses has an
incalculable ebb. During the action the plans of the two leaders enter
into each other and become mutually thrown out of shape. Such a point
of the field of battle devours more combatants than such another, just
as more or less spongy soils soak up more or less quickly the water
which is poured on them. It becomes necessary to pour out more soldiers
than one would like; a series of expenditures which are the unforeseen.
The line of battle waves and undulates like a thread, the trails of
blood gush illogically, the fronts of the armies waver, the regiments
form capes and gulfs as they enter and withdraw; all these reefs are
continually moving in front of each other. Where the infantry stood the
artillery arrives, the cavalry rushes in where the artillery was, the
battalions are like smoke. There was something there; seek it. It has
disappeared; the open spots change place, the sombre folds advance and
retreat, a sort of wind from the sepulchre pushes forward, hurls back,
distends, and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a fray? an
oscillation? The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute,
not a day. In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those
powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt is better
than Vandermeulen; Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o’clock.
Geometry is deceptive; the hurricane alone is trustworthy. That is what
confers on Folard the right to contradict Polybius. Let us add, that
there is a certain instant when the battle degenerates into a combat,
becomes specialized, and disperses into innumerable detailed feats,
which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, “belong rather to
the biography of the regiments than to the history of the army.” The
historian has, in this case, the evident right to sum up the whole. He
cannot do more than seize the principal outlines of the struggle, and
it is not given to any one narrator, however conscientious he may be,
to fix, absolutely, the form of that horrible cloud which is called a
battle.

This, which is true of all great armed encounters, is particularly
applicable to Waterloo.

Nevertheless, at a certain moment in the afternoon the battle came to a
point.






Towards four o’clock the condition of the English army was serious. The
Prince of Orange was in command of the centre, Hill of the right wing,
Picton of the left wing. The Prince of Orange, desperate and intrepid,
shouted to the Hollando-Belgians: “Nassau! Brunswick! Never retreat!”
Hill, having been weakened, had come up to the support of Wellington;
Picton was dead. At the very moment when the English had captured from
the French the flag of the 105th of the line, the French had killed the
English general, Picton, with a bullet through the head. The battle
had, for Wellington, two bases of action, Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte;
Hougomont still held out, but was on fire; La Haie-Sainte was taken. Of
the German battalion which defended it, only forty-two men survived;
all the officers, except five, were either dead or captured. Three
thousand combatants had been massacred in that barn. A sergeant of the
English Guards, the foremost boxer in England, reputed invulnerable by
his companions, had been killed there by a little French drummer-boy.
Baring had been dislodged, Alten put to the sword. Many flags had been
lost, one from Alten’s division, and one from the battalion of
Lunenburg, carried by a prince of the house of Deux-Ponts. The Scotch
Grays no longer existed; Ponsonby’s great dragoons had been hacked to
pieces. That valiant cavalry had bent beneath the lancers of Bro and
beneath the cuirassiers of Travers; out of twelve hundred horses, six
hundred remained; out of three lieutenant-colonels, two lay on the
earth,—Hamilton wounded, Mater slain. Ponsonby had fallen, riddled by
seven lance-thrusts. Gordon was dead. Marsh was dead. Two divisions,
the fifth and the sixth, had been annihilated.

Hougomont injured, La Haie-Sainte taken, there now existed but one
rallying-point, the centre. That point still held firm. Wellington
reinforced it. He summoned thither Hill, who was at Merle-Braine; he
summoned Chassé, who was at Braine-l’Alleud.

The centre of the English army, rather concave, very dense, and very
compact, was strongly posted. It occupied the plateau of
Mont-Saint-Jean, having behind it the village, and in front of it the
slope, which was tolerably steep then. It rested on that stout stone
dwelling which at that time belonged to the domain of Nivelles, and
which marks the intersection of the roads—a pile of the sixteenth
century, and so robust that the cannon-balls rebounded from it without
injuring it. All about the plateau the English had cut the hedges here
and there, made embrasures in the hawthorn-trees, thrust the throat of
a cannon between two branches, embattled the shrubs. There artillery
was ambushed in the brushwood. This punic labor, incontestably
authorized by war, which permits traps, was so well done, that Haxo,
who had been despatched by the Emperor at nine o’clock in the morning
to reconnoitre the enemy’s batteries, had discovered nothing of it, and
had returned and reported to Napoleon that there were no obstacles
except the two barricades which barred the road to Nivelles and to
Genappe. It was at the season when the grain is tall; on the edge of
the plateau a battalion of Kempt’s brigade, the 95th, armed with
carabines, was concealed in the tall wheat.

Thus assured and buttressed, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch army was
well posted. The peril of this position lay in the forest of Soignes,
then adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds of
Groenendael and Boitsfort. An army could not retreat thither without
dissolving; the regiments would have broken up immediately there. The
artillery would have been lost among the morasses. The retreat,
according to many a man versed in the art,—though it is disputed by
others,—would have been a disorganized flight.

To this centre, Wellington added one of Chassé’s brigades taken from
the right wing, and one of Wincke’s brigades taken from the left wing,
plus Clinton’s division. To his English, to the regiments of Halkett,
to the brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave as
reinforcements and aids, the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau’s
contingent, Kielmansegg’s Hanoverians, and Ompteda’s Germans. This
placed twenty-six battalions under his hand. _The right wing_, as
Charras says, _was thrown back on the centre_. An enormous battery was
masked by sacks of earth at the spot where there now stands what is
called the “Museum of Waterloo.” Besides this, Wellington had, behind a
rise in the ground, Somerset’s Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse
strong. It was the remaining half of the justly celebrated English
cavalry. Ponsonby destroyed, Somerset remained.

The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a redoubt, was
ranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with a coating of bags
of sand and a large slope of earth. This work was not finished; there
had been no time to make a palisade for it.

Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there remained
the whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance of the old mill
of Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence, beneath an elm, which
an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, purchased later on for two
hundred francs, cut down, and carried off. Wellington was coldly
heroic. The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell at
his side. Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him:
“My lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?” “To do like
me,” replied Wellington. To Clinton he said laconically, “To hold this
spot to the last man.” The day was evidently turning out ill.
Wellington shouted to his old companions of Talavera, of Vittoria, of
Salamanca: “Boys, can retreat be thought of? Think of old England!”


Towards four o’clock, the English line drew back. Suddenly nothing was
visible on the crest of the plateau except the artillery and the
sharpshooters; the rest had disappeared: the regiments, dislodged by
the shells and the French bullets, retreated into the bottom, now
intersected by the back road of the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean; a
retrograde movement took place, the English front hid itself,
Wellington drew back. “The beginning of retreat!” cried Napoleon.






The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local
trouble, had never been in a better humor than on that day. His
impenetrability had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of
June, that profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly. The man who
had been gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest
favorites of destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow.
The supreme smile is God’s alone.

_Ridet Cæsar, Pompeius flebit_, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix
Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is
certain that Cæsar laughed. While exploring on horseback at one o’clock
on the preceding night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand,
the communes in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of
the long line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon
from Frischemont to Braine-l’Alleud, it had seemed to him that fate, to
whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact to the
appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained for some time
motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder; and
this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterious
saying, “We are in accord.” Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer
in accord.

He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night was marked
by a joy for him. He traversed the line of the principal outposts,
halting here and there to talk to the sentinels. At half-past two, near
the wood of Hougomont, he heard the tread of a column on the march; he
thought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington.
He said: “It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way for the
purpose of decamping. I will take prisoners the six thousand English
who have just arrived at Ostend.” He conversed expansively; he regained
the animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March,
when he pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of
the Gulf Juan, and cried, “Well, Bertrand, here is a reinforcement
already!” On the night of the 17th to the 18th of June he rallied
Wellington. “That little Englishman needs a lesson,” said Napoleon. The
rain redoubled in violence; the thunder rolled while the Emperor was
speaking.

At half-past three o’clock in the morning, he lost one illusion;
officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him that
the enemy was not making any movement. Nothing was stirring; not a
bivouac-fire had been extinguished; the English army was asleep. The
silence on earth was profound; the only noise was in the heavens. At
four o’clock, a peasant was brought in to him by the scouts; this
peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably
Vivian’s brigade, which was on its way to take up a position in the
village of Ohain, at the extreme left. At five o’clock, two Belgian
deserters reported to him that they had just quitted their regiment,
and that the English army was ready for battle. “So much the better!”
exclaimed Napoleon. “I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive
them back.”


In the morning he dismounted in the mud on the slope which forms an
angle with the Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant’s
chair brought to him from the farm of Rossomme, seated himself, with a
truss of straw for a carpet, and spread out on the table the chart of
the battle-field, saying to Soult as he did so, “A pretty
checker-board.”


In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports of
provisions, embedded in the soft roads, had not been able to arrive by
morning; the soldiers had had no sleep; they were wet and fasting. This
did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney, “We have
ninety chances out of a hundred.” At eight o’clock the Emperor’s
breakfast was brought to him. He invited many generals to it. During
breakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to a ball two nights
before, in Brussels, at the Duchess of Richmond’s; and Soult, a rough
man of war, with a face of an archbishop, said, “The ball takes place
to-day.” The Emperor jested with Ney, who said, “Wellington will not be
so simple as to wait for Your Majesty.” That was his way, however. “He
was fond of jesting,” says Fleury de Chaboulon. “A merry humor was at
the foundation of his character,” says Gourgaud. “He abounded in
pleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty,” says Benjamin
Constant. These gayeties of a giant are worthy of insistence. It was he
who called his grenadiers “his grumblers”; he pinched their ears; he
pulled their moustaches. “The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on
us,” is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from the
island of Elba to France, on the 27th of February, on the open sea, the
French brig of war, _Le Zéphyr_, having encountered the brig
_L’Inconstant_, on which Napoleon was concealed, and having asked the
news of Napoleon from _L’Inconstant_, the Emperor, who still wore in
his hat the white and amaranthine cockade sown with bees, which he had
adopted at the isle of Elba, laughingly seized the speaking-trumpet,
and answered for himself, “The Emperor is well.” A man who laughs like
that is on familiar terms with events. Napoleon indulged in many fits
of this laughter during the breakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast he
meditated for a quarter of an hour; then two generals seated themselves
on the truss of straw, pen in hand and their paper on their knees, and
the Emperor dictated to them the order of battle.

At nine o’clock, at the instant when the French army, ranged in
echelons and set in motion in five columns, had deployed—the divisions
in two lines, the artillery between the brigades, the music at their
head; as they beat the march, with rolls on the drums and the blasts of
trumpets, mighty, vast, joyous, a sea of casques, of sabres, and of
bayonets on the horizon, the Emperor was touched, and twice exclaimed,
“Magnificent! Magnificent!”


Between nine o’clock and half-past ten the whole army, incredible as it
may appear, had taken up its position and ranged itself in six lines,
forming, to repeat the Emperor’s expression, “the figure of six V’s.” A
few moments after the formation of the battle-array, in the midst of
that profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a
storm, which precedes engagements, the Emperor tapped Haxo on the
shoulder, as he beheld the three batteries of twelve-pounders, detached
by his orders from the corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and destined
to begin the action by taking Mont-Saint-Jean, which was situated at
the intersection of the Nivelles and the Genappe roads, and said to
him, “There are four and twenty handsome maids, General.”


Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed before
him, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had appointed
to barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried.
All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughty
pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large
tomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massing
themselves, he said, “It is a pity.”


Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected for
his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right of
the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during
the battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o’clock in the
evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable;
it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which the
guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this knoll the balls
rebounded from the pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As at
Brienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of the
heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapeless
projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up at the spot where his
horse’s feet stood. _Scabra rubigine_. A few years ago, a shell of
sixty pounds, still charged, and with its fuse broken off level with
the bomb, was unearthed. It was at this last post that the Emperor said
to his guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was
attached to the saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every
discharge of canister and tried to hide behind Napoleon: “Fool, it is
shameful! You’ll get yourself killed with a ball in the back.” He who
writes these lines has himself found, in the friable soil of this
knoll, on turning over the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb,
disintegrated, by the oxidization of six and forty years, and old
fragments of iron which parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.

Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of the
plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took
place, are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from
this mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real
relief has been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds
her bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying
it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two years later,
exclaimed, “They have altered my field of battle!” Where the great
pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a
hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but
which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe.
The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height of
the two knolls of the two great sepulchres which enclose the road from
Genappe to Brussels: one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other,
the German tomb, is on the right. There is no French tomb. The whole of
that plain is a sepulchre for France. Thanks to the thousands upon
thousands of cartloads of earth employed in the hillock one hundred and
fifty feet in height and half a mile in circumference, the plateau of
Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by an easy slope. On the day of
battle, particularly on the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt and
difficult of approach. The slope there is so steep that the English
cannon could not see the farm, situated in the bottom of the valley,
which was the centre of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the
rains had still farther increased this acclivity, the mud complicated
the problem of the ascent, and the men not only slipped back, but stuck
fast in the mire. Along the crest of the plateau ran a sort of trench
whose presence it was impossible for the distant observer to divine.

What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine-l’Alleud is a Belgian
village; Ohain is another. These villages, both of them concealed in
curves of the landscape, are connected by a road about a league and a
half in length, which traverses the plain along its undulating level,
and often enters and buries itself in the hills like a furrow, which
makes a ravine of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the present
day, this road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between
the two highways from Genappe and Nivelles; only, it is now on a level
with the plain; it was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have been
appropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and still is, a
trench throughout the greater portion of its course; a hollow trench,
sometimes a dozen feet in depth, and whose banks, being too steep,
crumbled away here and there, particularly in winter, under driving
rains. Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at the
Braine-l’Alleud entrance that a passer-by was crushed by a cart, as is
proved by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery, and which gives
the name of the dead, _Monsieur Bernard Debrye, Merchant of Brussels_,
and the date of the accident, _February, 1637_.8 It was so deep on the
table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise, was
crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated on
another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process of
clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible on
the grassy slope to the left of the highway between La Haie-Sainte and
the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.

On the day of battle, this hollow road whose existence was in no way
indicated, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a trench at the
summit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible;
that is to say, terrible.






So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content.

He was right; the plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen,
really admirable.

The battle once begun, its very various changes,—the resistance of
Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin; the
disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye’s brigade was
shattered; Guilleminot’s fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard
nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted
pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of the
bombs falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves in
the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of
mud, so that the canister was turned into a splash; the uselessness of
Piré’s demonstration on Braine-l’Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen
squadrons, almost exterminated; the right wing of the English badly
alarmed, the left wing badly cut into; Ney’s strange mistake in
massing, instead of echelonning the four divisions of the first corps;
men delivered over to grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep
and with a frontage of two hundred; the frightful holes made in these
masses by the cannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the
side-battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and
Durutte compromised; Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules
graduated at the Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was
beating in with an axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright
fire of the English barricade which barred the angle of the road from
Genappe to Brussels; Marcognet’s division caught between the infantry
and the cavalry, shot down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the
grain by Best and Pack, put to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of
seven pieces spiked; the Prince of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding, in
spite of the Comte d’Erlon, both Frischemont and Smohain; the flag of
the 105th taken, the flag of the 45th captured; that black Prussian
hussar stopped by runners of the flying column of three hundred light
cavalry on the scout between Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming things
that had been said by prisoners; Grouchy’s delay; fifteen hundred men
killed in the orchard of Hougomont in less than an hour; eighteen
hundred men overthrown in a still shorter time about La
Haie-Sainte,—all these stormy incidents passing like the clouds of
battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and had not
overshadowed that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon was accustomed
to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending details,
cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that they
furnished the total—victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings did
go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor at the
end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question,
and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate, Thou
wilt not dare.

Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought himself
protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought that he
had, a connivance, one might almost say a complicity, of events in his
favor, which was equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity.

Nevertheless, when one has Bérésina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind
one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown
becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens.

At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered. He
suddenly beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared, and the van
of the English army disappear. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The
Emperor half rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed
from his eyes.

Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes and
destroyed—that was the definitive conquest of England by France; it was
Crécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengo
was wiping out Agincourt.

So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept his
glass for the last time over all the points of the field of battle. His
guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from below
with a sort of religion. He pondered; he examined the slopes, noted the
declivities, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the square of rye, the
path; he seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness
at the English barricades of the two highways,—two large abatis of
trees, that on the road to Genappe above La Haie-Sainte, armed with two
cannon, the only ones out of all the English artillery which commanded
the extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelles
where gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chassé’s brigade. Near this
barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white,
which stands at the angle of the crossroad near Braine-l’Alleud; he
bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide made
a negative sign with his head, which was probably perfidious.

The Emperor straightened himself up and fell to thinking.

Wellington had drawn back.

All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing him.

Napoleon turning round abruptly, despatched an express at full speed to
Paris to announce that the battle was won.

Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts.

He had just found his clap of thunder.

He gave orders to Milhaud’s cuirassiers to carry the table-land of
Mont-Saint-Jean.






There were three thousand five hundred of them. They formed a front a
quarter of a league in extent. They were giant men, on colossal horses.
There were six and twenty squadrons of them; and they had behind them
to support them Lefebvre-Desnouettes’s division,—the one hundred and
six picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the Guard, eleven hundred
and ninety-seven men, and the lancers of the guard of eight hundred and
eighty lances. They wore casques without horse-tails, and cuirasses of
beaten iron, with horse-pistols in their holsters, and long
sabre-swords. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at
nine o’clock, with braying of trumpets and all the music playing “Let
us watch o’er the Safety of the Empire,” they had come in a solid
column, with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their
centre, and deployed in two ranks between the roads to Genappe and
Frischemont, and taken up their position for battle in that powerful
second line, so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its
extreme left Kellermann’s cuirassiers and on its extreme right
Milhaud’s cuirassiers, had, so to speak, two wings of iron.

Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the Emperor’s orders. Ney drew his
sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set
in motion.

Then a formidable spectacle was seen.

All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung
to the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a
simultaneous movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen
battering-ram which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle
Alliance, plunged into the terrible depths in which so many men had
already fallen, disappeared there in the smoke, then emerging from that
shadow, reappeared on the other side of the valley, still compact and
in close ranks, mounting at a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot
which burst upon them, the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of
Mont-Saint-Jean. They ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in
the intervals between the musketry and the artillery, their colossal
trampling was audible. Being two divisions, there were two columns of
them; Wathier’s division held the right, Delort’s division was on the
left. It seemed as though two immense adders of steel were to be seen
crawling towards the crest of the table-land. It traversed the battle
like a prodigy.

Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of
the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was lacking here, but Ney was
again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and
had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a
polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent
here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy
heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of
trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses
like the scales on the hydra.

These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to
this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told
of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human heads
and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible,
invulnerable, sublime—gods and beasts.

Odd numerical coincidence,—twenty-six battalions rode to meet
twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow
of the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen
squares, two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the
first line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their
shoulders, taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing,
waited, calm, mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and
the cuirassiers did not see them. They listened to the rise of this
flood of men. They heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse,
the alternate and symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the
jingling of the cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand
and savage breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all
at once, a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared
above the crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three
thousand heads with gray moustaches, shouting, “Vive l’Empereur!” All
this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance
of an earthquake.

All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the
head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On
arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly
given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and
cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,—a trench
between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.

It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning,
directly under the horses’ feet, two fathoms deep between its double
slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed
on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their
haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and
overwhelming the riders; and there being no means of retreat,—the whole
column being no longer anything more than a projectile,—the force which
had been acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the
inexorable ravine could only yield when filled; horses and riders
rolled there pell-mell, grinding each other, forming but one mass of
flesh in this gulf: when this trench was full of living men, the rest
marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois’s brigade
fell into that abyss.

This began the loss of the battle.

A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says that two
thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow road
of Ohain. This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which
were flung into this ravine the day after the combat.

Let us note in passing that it was Dubois’s sorely tried brigade which,
an hour previously, making a charge to one side, had captured the flag
of the Lunenburg battalion.

Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milhaud’s
cuirassiers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not been able to see
that hollow road, which did not even form a wrinkle on the surface of
the plateau. Warned, nevertheless, and put on the alert by the little
white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelles
highway, he had probably put a question as to the possibility of an
obstacle, to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered No. We might
almost affirm that Napoleon’s catastrophe originated in that sign of a
peasant’s head.

Other fatalities were destined to arise.

Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer
No. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God.

Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the
nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in
which there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events
had declared itself long before.

It was time that this vast man should fall.

The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the
balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group.
These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head;
the world mounting to the brain of one man,—this would be mortal to
civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the
incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the
principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the
moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood,
over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,—these are formidable
pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there
are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an
ear.

Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been
decided on.

He embarrassed God.

Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the
Universe.






The battery was unmasked at the same moment with the ravine.

Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning point-blank on
the cuirassiers. The intrepid General Delort made the military salute
to the English battery.

The whole of the flying artillery of the English had re-entered the
squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not had even the time for a
halt. The disaster of the hollow road had decimated, but not
discouraged them. They belonged to that class of men who, when
diminished in number, increase in courage.

Wathier’s column alone had suffered in the disaster; Delort’s column,
which Ney had deflected to the left, as though he had a presentiment of
an ambush, had arrived whole.

The cuirassiers hurled themselves on the English squares.

At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth, pistols in
fist,—such was the attack.

There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man until
the soldier is changed into a statue, and when all this flesh turns
into granite. The English battalions, desperately assaulted, did not
stir.

Then it was terrible.

All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenzied
whirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained impassive. The first
rank knelt and received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, the second
ranks shot them down; behind the second rank the cannoneers charged
their guns, the front of the square parted, permitted the passage of an
eruption of grape-shot, and closed again. The cuirassiers replied by
crushing them. Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks,
leaped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these four
living wells. The cannon-balls ploughed furrows in these cuirassiers;
the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared,
ground to dust under the horses. The bayonets plunged into the bellies
of these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds which has probably
never been seen anywhere else. The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry,
closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of
grape-shot, they created explosions in their assailants’ midst. The
form of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer
battalions, they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer
cavalry, they were a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a
cloud; lava contended with lightning.

The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in the
air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. lt was formed of
the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The bagpipe-player in the centre
dropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of the forests
and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were being
exterminated around him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch under
his arm, played the Highland airs. These Scotchmen died thinking of Ben
Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argos. The sword of a cuirassier,
which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to
the song by killing the singer.

The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further diminished
by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English army
against them, but they multiplied themselves so that each man of them
was equal to ten. Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded.
Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at
that same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle.
This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake.

All at once, the cuirassiers, who had been the assailants, found
themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their back. Before them
two squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset meant fourteen hundred
dragoons of the guard. On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with the
German light-horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers;
the cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in the
rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What mattered it
to them? They were a whirlwind. Their valor was something
indescribable.

In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was still
thundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could never
have been wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced on the
shoulder by a ball from a biscayan,9 is in the collection of the
Waterloo Museum.

For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen was needed. It was
no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was a shadow, a fury, a dizzy
transport of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In an
instant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight
hundred. Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up
with the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes’s light-horse. The plateau of
Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. The
cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to put
it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other
without releasing the other. The squares still held firm.

There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half
the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This conflict lasted two
hours.

The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, had
they not been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the
hollow road the cuirassiers would have overwhelmed the centre and
decided the victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who
had seen Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished,
admired heroically. He said in an undertone, “Sublime!”


The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or
spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English
regiments six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the
Guard bore to the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.

Wellington’s situation had grown worse. This strange battle was like a
duel between two raging, wounded men, each of whom, still fighting and
still resisting, is expending all his blood.

Which of the two will be the first to fall?

The conflict on the plateau continued.

What had become of the cuirassiers? No one could have told. One thing
is certain, that on the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his
horse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles at
Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles,
Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. This
horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up
the body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was
eighteen years old at that time.

Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at hand.

The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was not broken
through. As every one was in possession of the plateau, no one held it,
and in fact it remained, to a great extent, with the English.
Wellington held the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the
crest and the slope. They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both
sides.

But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleeding of
that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, demanded
reinforcements. “There are none,” replied Wellington; “he must let
himself be killed!” Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidence
which paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney demanded infantry
from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, “Infantry! Where does he expect
me to get it? Does he think I can make it?”


Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the two. The
furious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses of iron and
breasts of steel had ground the infantry to nothing. A few men
clustered round a flag marked the post of a regiment; such and such a
battalion was commanded only by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten’s
division, already so roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was almost
destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze’s brigade strewed the
rye-fields all along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of
those Dutch grenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks
in 1811, fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to the
English standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers was
considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on the following
day, had his knee shattered. If, on the French side, in that tussle of
the cuirassiers, Delort, l’Héritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, and
Blancard were disabled, on the side of the English there was Alten
wounded, Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda
killed, the whole of Wellington’s staff decimated, and England had the
worse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment of foot-guards
had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and three ensigns;
the first battalion of the 30th infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200
soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18
officers killed, 450 soldiers killed. The Hanoverian hussars of
Cumberland, a whole regiment, with Colonel Hacke at its head, who was
destined to be tried later on and cashiered, had turned bridle in the
presence of the fray, and had fled to the forest of Soignes, sowing
defeat all the way to Brussels. The transports, ammunition-wagons, the
baggage-wagons, the wagons filled with wounded, on perceiving that the
French were gaining ground and approaching the forest, rushed headlong
thither. The Dutch, mowed down by the French cavalry, cried, “Alarm!”
From Vert-Coucou to Groenendael, for a distance of nearly two leagues
in the direction of Brussels, according to the testimony of
eye-witnesses who are still alive, the roads were encumbered with
fugitives. This panic was such that it attacked the Prince de Condé at
Mechlin, and Louis XVIII. at Ghent. With the exception of the feeble
reserve echelonned behind the ambulance established at the farm of
Mont-Saint-Jean, and of Vivian’s and Vandeleur’s brigades, which
flanked the left wing, Wellington had no cavalry left. A number of
batteries lay unhorsed. These facts are attested by Siborne; and
Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far as to say that the
Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousand men. The Iron Duke
remained calm, but his lips blanched. Vincent, the Austrian
commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner, who were present at the
battle in the English staff, thought the Duke lost. At five o’clock
Wellington drew out his watch, and he was heard to murmur these
sinister words, “Blücher, or night!”


It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets gleamed on
the heights in the direction of Frischemont.

Here comes the change of face in this giant drama.






The painful surprise of Napoleon is well known. Grouchy hoped for,
Blücher arriving. Death instead of life.

Fate has these turns; the throne of the world was expected; it was
Saint Helena that was seen.

If the little shepherd who served as guide to Bülow, Blücher’s
lieutenant, had advised him to debouch from the forest above
Frischemont, instead of below Plancenoit, the form of the nineteenth
century might, perhaps, have been different. Napoleon would have won
the battle of Waterloo. By any other route than that below Plancenoit,
the Prussian army would have come out upon a ravine impassable for
artillery, and Bülow would not have arrived.

Now the Prussian general, Muffling, declares that one hour’s delay, and
Blücher would not have found Wellington on his feet. “The battle was
lost.”


It was time that Bülow should arrive, as will be seen. He had,
moreover, been very much delayed. He had bivouacked at Dion-le-Mont,
and had set out at daybreak; but the roads were impassable, and his
divisions stuck fast in the mire. The ruts were up to the hubs of the
cannons. Moreover, he had been obliged to pass the Dyle on the narrow
bridge of Wavre; the street leading to the bridge had been fired by the
French, so the caissons and ammunition-wagons could not pass between
two rows of burning houses, and had been obliged to wait until the
conflagration was extinguished. It was midday before Bülow’s vanguard
had been able to reach Chapelle-Saint-Lambert.

Had the action been begun two hours earlier, it would have been over at
four o’clock, and Blücher would have fallen on the battle won by
Napoleon. Such are these immense risks proportioned to an infinite
which we cannot comprehend.

The Emperor had been the first, as early as midday, to descry with his
field-glass, on the extreme horizon, something which had attracted his
attention. He had said, “I see yonder a cloud, which seems to me to be
troops.” Then he asked the Duc de Dalmatie, “Soult, what do you see in
the direction of Chapelle-Saint-Lambert?” The marshal, levelling his
glass, answered, “Four or five thousand men, Sire; evidently Grouchy.”
But it remained motionless in the mist. All the glasses of the staff
had studied “the cloud” pointed out by the Emperor. Some said: “It is
trees.” The truth is, that the cloud did not move. The Emperor detached
Domon’s division of light cavalry to reconnoitre in that quarter.

Bülow had not moved, in fact. His vanguard was very feeble, and could
accomplish nothing. He was obliged to wait for the body of the army
corps, and he had received orders to concentrate his forces before
entering into line; but at five o’clock, perceiving Wellington’s peril,
Blücher ordered Bülow to attack, and uttered these remarkable words:
“We must give air to the English army.”


A little later, the divisions of Losthin, Hiller, Hacke, and Ryssel
deployed before Lobau’s corps, the cavalry of Prince William of Prussia
debouched from the forest of Paris, Plancenoit was in flames, and the
Prussian cannon-balls began to rain even upon the ranks of the guard in
reserve behind Napoleon.






Every one knows the rest,—the irruption of a third army; the battle
broken to pieces; eighty-six mouths of fire thundering simultaneously;
Pirch the first coming up with Bülow; Zieten’s cavalry led by Blücher
in person, the French driven back; Marcognet swept from the plateau of
Ohain; Durutte dislodged from Papelotte; Donzelot and Quiot retreating;
Lobau caught on the flank; a fresh battle precipitating itself on our
dismantled regiments at nightfall; the whole English line resuming the
offensive and thrust forward; the gigantic breach made in the French
army; the English grape-shot and the Prussian grape-shot aiding each
other; the extermination; disaster in front; disaster on the flank; the
Guard entering the line in the midst of this terrible crumbling of all
things.

Conscious that they were about to die, they shouted, “Vive l’Empereur!”
History records nothing more touching than that agony bursting forth in
acclamations.

The sky had been overcast all day long. All of a sudden, at that very
moment,—it was eight o’clock in the evening—the clouds on the horizon
parted, and allowed the grand and sinister glow of the setting sun to
pass through, athwart the elms on the Nivelles road. They had seen it
rise at Austerlitz.

Each battalion of the Guard was commanded by a general for this final
catastrophe. Friant, Michel, Roguet, Harlet, Mallet, Poret de Morvan,
were there. When the tall caps of the grenadiers of the Guard, with
their large plaques bearing the eagle appeared, symmetrical, in line,
tranquil, in the midst of that combat, the enemy felt a respect for
France; they thought they beheld twenty victories entering the field of
battle, with wings outspread, and those who were the conquerors,
believing themselves to be vanquished, retreated; but Wellington
shouted, “Up, Guards, and aim straight!” The red regiment of English
guards, lying flat behind the hedges, sprang up, a cloud of grape-shot
riddled the tricolored flag and whistled round our eagles; all hurled
themselves forwards, and the final carnage began. In the darkness, the
Imperial Guard felt the army losing ground around it, and in the vast
shock of the rout it heard the desperate flight which had taken the
place of the “Vive l’Empereur!” and, with flight behind it, it
continued to advance, more crushed, losing more men at every step that
it took. There were none who hesitated, no timid men in its ranks. The
soldier in that troop was as much of a hero as the general. Not a man
was missing in that suicide.

Ney, bewildered, great with all the grandeur of accepted death, offered
himself to all blows in that tempest. He had his fifth horse killed
under him there. Perspiring, his eyes aflame, foaming at the mouth,
with uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulets half cut off by a
sword-stroke from a horseguard, his plaque with the great eagle dented
by a bullet; bleeding, bemired, magnificent, a broken sword in his
hand, he said, “Come and see how a Marshal of France dies on the field
of battle!” But in vain; he did not die. He was haggard and angry. At
Drouet d’Erlon he hurled this question, “Are you not going to get
yourself killed?” In the midst of all that artillery engaged in
crushing a handful of men, he shouted: “So there is nothing for me! Oh!
I should like to have all these English bullets enter my bowels!”
Unhappy man, thou wert reserved for French bullets!






The rout behind the Guard was melancholy.

The army yielded suddenly on all sides at once,—Hougomont, La
Haie-Sainte, Papelotte, Plancenoit. The cry “Treachery!” was followed
by a cry of “Save yourselves who can!” An army which is disbanding is
like a thaw. All yields, splits, cracks, floats, rolls, falls, jostles,
hastens, is precipitated. The disintegration is unprecedented. Ney
borrows a horse, leaps upon it, and without hat, cravat, or sword,
places himself across the Brussels road, stopping both English and
French. He strives to detain the army, he recalls it to its duty, he
insults it, he clings to the rout. He is overwhelmed. The soldiers fly
from him, shouting, “Long live Marshal Ney!” Two of Durutte’s regiments
go and come in affright as though tossed back and forth between the
swords of the Uhlans and the fusillade of the brigades of Kempt, Best,
Pack, and Rylandt; the worst of hand-to-hand conflicts is the defeat;
friends kill each other in order to escape; squadrons and battalions
break and disperse against each other, like the tremendous foam of
battle. Lobau at one extremity, and Reille at the other, are drawn into
the tide. In vain does Napoleon erect walls from what is left to him of
his Guard; in vain does he expend in a last effort his last serviceable
squadrons. Quiot retreats before Vivian, Kellermann before Vandeleur,
Lobau before Bülow, Morand before Pirch, Domon and Subervic before
Prince William of Prussia; Guyot, who led the Emperor’s squadrons to
the charge, falls beneath the feet of the English dragoons. Napoleon
gallops past the line of fugitives, harangues, urges, threatens,
entreats them. All the mouths which in the morning had shouted, “Long
live the Emperor!” remain gaping; they hardly recognize him. The
Prussian cavalry, newly arrived, dashes forwards, flies, hews, slashes,
kills, exterminates. Horses lash out, the cannons flee; the soldiers of
the artillery-train unharness the caissons and use the horses to make
their escape; transports overturned, with all four wheels in the air,
clog the road and occasion massacres. Men are crushed, trampled down,
others walk over the dead and the living. Arms are lost. A dizzy
multitude fills the roads, the paths, the bridges, the plains, the
hills, the valleys, the woods, encumbered by this invasion of forty
thousand men. Shouts despair, knapsacks and guns flung among the rye,
passages forced at the point of the sword, no more comrades, no more
officers, no more generals, an inexpressible terror. Zieten putting
France to the sword at its leisure. Lions converted into goats. Such
was the flight.

At Genappe, an effort was made to wheel about, to present a battle
front, to draw up in line. Lobau rallied three hundred men. The
entrance to the village was barricaded, but at the first volley of
Prussian canister, all took to flight again, and Lobau was taken. That
volley of grape-shot can be seen to-day imprinted on the ancient gable
of a brick building on the right of the road at a few minutes’ distance
before you enter Genappe. The Prussians threw themselves into Genappe,
furious, no doubt, that they were not more entirely the conquerors. The
pursuit was stupendous. Blücher ordered extermination. Roguet had set
the lugubrious example of threatening with death any French grenadier
who should bring him a Prussian prisoner. Blücher outdid Roguet.
Duhesme, the general of the Young Guard, hemmed in at the doorway of an
inn at Genappe, surrendered his sword to a huzzar of death, who took
the sword and slew the prisoner. The victory was completed by the
assassination of the vanquished. Let us inflict punishment, since we
are history: old Blücher disgraced himself. This ferocity put the
finishing touch to the disaster. The desperate route traversed Genappe,
traversed Quatre-Bras, traversed Gosselies, traversed Frasnes,
traversed Charleroi, traversed Thuin, and only halted at the frontier.
Alas! and who, then, was fleeing in that manner? The Grand Army.

This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest
bravery which ever astounded history,—is that causeless? No. The shadow
of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of
destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence
the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls
surrendering their swords. Those who had conquered Europe have fallen
prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the
present shadow of a terrible presence. _Hoc erat in fatis_. That day
the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the
hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was
necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to
whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of
heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something
more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by.

At nightfall, in a meadow near Genappe, Bernard and Bertrand seized by
the skirt of his coat and detained a man, haggard, pensive, sinister,
gloomy, who, dragged to that point by the current of the rout, had just
dismounted, had passed the bridle of his horse over his arm, and with
wild eye was returning alone to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, the immense
somnambulist of this dream which had crumbled, essaying once more to
advance.






Several squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream of the
defeat, as rocks in running water, held their own until night. Night
came, death also; they awaited that double shadow, and, invincible,
allowed themselves to be enveloped therein. Each regiment, isolated
from the rest, and having no bond with the army, now shattered in every
part, died alone. They had taken up position for this final action,
some on the heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of
Mont-Saint-Jean. There, abandoned, vanquished, terrible, those gloomy
squares endured their death-throes in formidable fashion. Ulm, Wagram,
Jena, Friedland, died with them.

At twilight, towards nine o’clock in the evening, one of them was left
at the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. In that fatal valley, at
the foot of that declivity which the cuirassiers had ascended, now
inundated by the masses of the English, under the converging fires of
the victorious hostile cavalry, under a frightful density of
projectiles, this square fought on. It was commanded by an obscure
officer named Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished and
replied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade, continually
contracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing breathless for a
moment in the distance, listened in the darkness to that gloomy and
ever-decreasing thunder.

When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left
of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone, were no
longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger than the
group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors, around those
men dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English
artillery, taking breath, became silent. This furnished a sort of
respite. These combatants had around them something in the nature of a
swarm of spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profiles
of cannon, the white sky viewed through wheels and gun-carriages, the
colossal death’s-head, which the heroes saw constantly through the
smoke, in the depths of the battle, advanced upon them and gazed at
them. Through the shades of twilight they could hear the pieces being
loaded; the matches all lighted, like the eyes of tigers at night,
formed a circle round their heads; all the lintstocks of the English
batteries approached the cannons, and then, with emotion, holding the
supreme moment suspended above these men, an English general, Colville
according to some, Maitland according to others, shouted to them,
“Surrender, brave Frenchmen!” Cambronne replied, “——.”


{EDITOR’S COMMENTARY: Another edition of this book has the word
“Merde!” in lieu of the —— above.}






If any French reader object to having his susceptibilities offended,
one would have to refrain from repeating in his presence what is
perhaps the finest reply that a Frenchman ever made. This would enjoin
us from consigning something sublime to History.

At our own risk and peril, let us violate this injunction.

Now, then, among those giants there was one Titan,—Cambronne.

To make that reply and then perish, what could be grander? For being
willing to die is the same as to die; and it was not this man’s fault
if he survived after he was shot.

The winner of the battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon, who was put to
flight; nor Wellington, giving way at four o’clock, in despair at five;
nor Blücher, who took no part in the engagement. The winner of Waterloo
was Cambronne.

To thunder forth such a reply at the lightning-flash that kills you is
to conquer!

Thus to answer the Catastrophe, thus to speak to Fate, to give this
pedestal to the future lion, to hurl such a challenge to the midnight
rainstorm, to the treacherous wall of Hougomont, to the sunken road of
Ohain, to Grouchy’s delay, to Blücher’s arrival, to be Irony itself in
the tomb, to act so as to stand upright though fallen, to drown in two
syllables the European coalition, to offer kings privies which the
Cæsars once knew, to make the lowest of words the most lofty by
entwining with it the glory of France, insolently to end Waterloo with
Mardigras, to finish Leonidas with Rabellais, to set the crown on this
victory by a word impossible to speak, to lose the field and preserve
history, to have the laugh on your side after such a carnage,—this is
immense!

It was an insult such as a thunder-cloud might hurl! It reaches the
grandeur of Æschylus!

Cambronne’s reply produces the effect of a violent break. ’Tis like the
breaking of a heart under a weight of scorn. ’Tis the overflow of agony
bursting forth. Who conquered? Wellington? No! Had it not been for
Blücher, he was lost. Was it Blücher? No! If Wellington had not begun,
Blücher could not have finished. This Cambronne, this man spending his
last hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal of war, realizes
that here is a falsehood, a falsehood in a catastrophe, and so doubly
agonizing; and at the moment when his rage is bursting forth because of
it, he is offered this mockery,—life! How could he restrain himself?
Yonder are all the kings of Europe, the general’s flushed with victory,
the Jupiter’s darting thunderbolts; they have a hundred thousand
victorious soldiers, and back of the hundred thousand a million; their
cannon stand with yawning mouths, the match is lighted; they grind down
under their heels the Imperial guards, and the grand army; they have
just crushed Napoleon, and only Cambronne remains,—only this earthworm
is left to protest. He will protest. Then he seeks for the appropriate
word as one seeks for a sword. His mouth froths, and the froth is the
word. In face of this mean and mighty victory, in face of this victory
which counts none victorious, this desperate soldier stands erect. He
grants its overwhelming immensity, but he establishes its triviality;
and he does more than spit upon it. Borne down by numbers, by superior
force, by brute matter, he finds in his soul an expression:
_“Excrément!”_ We repeat it,—to use that word, to do thus, to invent
such an expression, is to be the conqueror!

The spirit of mighty days at that portentous moment made its descent on
that unknown man. Cambronne invents the word for Waterloo as Rouget
invents the “Marseillaise,” under the visitation of a breath from on
high. An emanation from the divine whirlwind leaps forth and comes
sweeping over these men, and they shake, and one of them sings the song
supreme, and the other utters the frightful cry.

This challenge of titanic scorn Cambronne hurls not only at Europe in
the name of the Empire,—that would be a trifle: he hurls it at the past
in the name of the Revolution. It is heard, and Cambronne is recognized
as possessed by the ancient spirit of the Titans. Danton seems to be
speaking! Kléber seems to be bellowing!

At that word from Cambronne, the English voice responded, “Fire!” The
batteries flamed, the hill trembled, from all those brazen mouths
belched a last terrible gush of grape-shot; a vast volume of smoke,
vaguely white in the light of the rising moon, rolled out, and when the
smoke dispersed, there was no longer anything there. That formidable
remnant had been annihilated; the Guard was dead. The four walls of the
living redoubt lay prone, and hardly was there discernible, here and
there, even a quiver in the bodies; it was thus that the French
legions, greater than the Roman legions, expired on Mont-Saint-Jean, on
the soil watered with rain and blood, amid the gloomy grain, on the
spot where nowadays Joseph, who drives the post-wagon from Nivelles,
passes whistling, and cheerfully whipping up his horse at four o’clock
in the morning.






The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure to those who won
it as to those who lost it. For Napoleon it was a panic;10 Blücher sees
nothing in it but fire; Wellington understands nothing in regard to it.
Look at the reports. The bulletins are confused, the commentaries
involved. Some stammer, others lisp. Jomini divides the battle of
Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it up into three changes;
Charras alone, though we hold another judgment than his on some points,
seized with his haughty glance the characteristic outlines of that
catastrophe of human genius in conflict with divine chance. All the
other historians suffer from being somewhat dazzled, and in this
dazzled state they fumble about. It was a day of lightning brilliancy;
in fact, a crumbling of the military monarchy which, to the vast
stupefaction of kings, drew all the kingdoms after it—the fall of
force, the defeat of war.

In this event, stamped with superhuman necessity, the part played by
men amounts to nothing.

If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blücher, do we thereby deprive
England and Germany of anything? No. Neither that illustrious England
nor that august Germany enter into the problem of Waterloo. Thank
Heaven, nations are great, independently of the lugubrious feats of the
sword. Neither England, nor Germany, nor France is contained in a
scabbard. At this epoch when Waterloo is only a clashing of swords,
above Blücher, Germany has Schiller; above Wellington, England has
Byron. A vast dawn of ideas is the peculiarity of our century, and in
that aurora England and Germany have a magnificent radiance. They are
majestic because they think. The elevation of level which they
contribute to civilization is intrinsic with them; it proceeds from
themselves and not from an accident. The aggrandizement which they have
brought to the nineteenth century has not Waterloo as its source. It is
only barbarous peoples who undergo rapid growth after a victory. That
is the temporary vanity of torrents swelled by a storm. Civilized
people, especially in our day, are neither elevated nor abased by the
good or bad fortune of a captain. Their specific gravity in the human
species results from something more than a combat. Their honor, thank
God! their dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not numbers
which those gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of
battles. Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is
less glory and more liberty. The drum holds its peace; reason takes the
word. It is a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak
of Waterloo coldly from both sides. Let us render to chance that which
is due to chance, and to God that which is due to God. What is
Waterloo? A victory? No. The winning number in the lottery.

The quine 11 won by Europe, paid by France.

It was not worthwhile to place a lion there.

Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and
Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God,
who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more
extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry,
prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate
coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of
the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions,
carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand,
nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage,
absolute regularity; on the other, intuition, divination, military
oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable
something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the
lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the
mysteries of a profound soul, associated with destiny; the stream, the
plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey,
the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle;
faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but
perturbing it. Wellington was the Barême of war; Napoleon was its
Michael Angelo; and on this occasion, genius was vanquished by
calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact
calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not
come. Wellington expected Blücher; he came.

Wellington is classic war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at his
dawning, had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him superbly. The old
owl had fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not
only struck as by lightning, but disgraced. Who was that Corsican of
six and twenty? What signified that splendid ignoramus, who, with
everything against him, nothing in his favor, without provisions,
without ammunition, without cannon, without shoes, almost without an
army, with a mere handful of men against masses, hurled himself on
Europe combined, and absurdly won victories in the impossible? Whence
had issued that fulminating convict, who almost without taking breath,
and with the same set of combatants in hand, pulverized, one after the
other, the five armies of the emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on
Alvinzi, Wurmser on Beaulieu, Mélas on Wurmser, Mack on Mélas? Who was
this novice in war with the effrontery of a luminary? The academical
military school excommunicated him, and as it lost its footing; hence,
the implacable rancor of the old Cæsarism against the new; of the
regular sword against the flaming sword; and of the exchequer against
genius. On the 18th of June, 1815, that rancor had the last word, and
beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Arcola, it wrote:
Waterloo. A triumph of the mediocres which is sweet to the majority.
Destiny consented to this irony. In his decline, Napoleon found
Wurmser, the younger, again in front of him.

In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of Wellington.

Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the
second.

That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is England; the
English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; the superb
thing about England there, no offence to her, was herself. It was not
her captain; it was her army.

Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst,
that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815, was a
“detestable army.” What does that sombre intermingling of bones buried
beneath the furrows of Waterloo think of that?

England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington. To make
Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington is nothing but a
hero like many another. Those Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards, those
regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt,
that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders playing the
pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions of Rylandt,
those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to handle a musket
holding their own against Essling’s and Rivoli’s old troops,—that is
what was grand. Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we
are not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of
his cavalry would have been as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth
as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our glorification goes to the
English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If trophy
there be, it is to England that the trophy is due. The column of
Waterloo would be more just, if, instead of the figure of a man, it
bore on high the statue of a people.

But this great England will be angry at what we are saying here. She
still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789, the feudal illusion.
She believes in heredity and hierarchy. This people, surpassed by none
in power and glory, regards itself as a nation, and not as a people.
And as a people, it willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for
its head. As a workman, it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier,
it allows itself to be flogged.

It will be remembered, that at the battle of Inkermann a sergeant who
had, it appears, saved the army, could not be mentioned by Lord Paglan,
as the English military hierarchy does not permit any hero below the
grade of an officer to be mentioned in the reports.

That which we admire above all, in an encounter of the nature of
Waterloo, is the marvellous cleverness of chance. A nocturnal rain, the
wall of Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the
cannon, Napoleon’s guide deceiving him, Bülow’s guide enlightening
him,—the whole of this cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.

On the whole, let us say it plainly, it was more of a massacre than of
a battle at Waterloo.

Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one which has the smallest
front for such a number of combatants. Napoleon three-quarters of a
league; Wellington, half a league; seventy-two thousand combatants on
each side. From this denseness the carnage arose.

The following calculation has been made, and the following proportion
established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent;
Russians, thirty per cent; Austrians, forty-four per cent. At Wagram,
French, thirteen per cent; Austrians, fourteen. At the Moskowa, French,
thirty-seven per cent; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French,
thirteen per cent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo,
French, fifty-six per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo,
forty-one per cent; one hundred and forty-four thousand combatants;
sixty thousand dead.

To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs to the earth,
the impassive support of man, and it resembles all plains.

At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from it; and if a
traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches, if he dreams
like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the
catastrophe takes possession of him. The frightful 18th of June lives
again; the false monumental hillock disappears, the lion vanishes in
air, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate
over the plain, furious gallops traverse the horizon; the frightened
dreamer beholds the flash of sabres, the gleam of bayonets, the flare
of bombs, the tremendous interchange of thunders; he hears, as it were,
the death rattle in the depths of a tomb, the vague clamor of the
battle phantom; those shadows are grenadiers, those lights are
cuirassiers; that skeleton Napoleon, that other skeleton is Wellington;
all this no longer exists, and yet it clashes together and combats
still; and the ravines are empurpled, and the trees quiver, and there
is fury even in the clouds and in the shadows; all those terrible
heights, Hougomont, Mont-Saint-Jean, Frischemont, Papelotte,
Plancenoit, appear confusedly crowned with whirlwinds of spectres
engaged in exterminating each other.






There exists a very respectable liberal school which does not hate
Waterloo. We do not belong to it. To us, Waterloo is but the stupefied
date of liberty. That such an eagle should emerge from such an egg is
certainly unexpected.

If one places one’s self at the culminating point of view of the
question, Waterloo is intentionally a counter-revolutionary victory. It
is Europe against France; it is Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna against
Paris; it is the _statu quo_ against the initiative; it is the 14th of
July, 1789, attacked through the 20th of March, 1815; it is the
monarchies clearing the decks in opposition to the indomitable French
rioting. The final extinction of that vast people which had been in
eruption for twenty-six years—such was the dream. The solidarity of the
Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanoffs, the Hohenzollerns, the
Hapsburgs with the Bourbons. Waterloo bears divine right on its
crupper. It is true, that the Empire having been despotic, the kingdom
by the natural reaction of things, was forced to be liberal, and that a
constitutional order was the unwilling result of Waterloo, to the great
regret of the conquerors. It is because revolution cannot be really
conquered, and that being providential and absolutely fatal, it is
always cropping up afresh: before Waterloo, in Bonaparte overthrowing
the old thrones; after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII. granting and
conforming to the charter. Bonaparte places a postilion on the throne
of Naples, and a sergeant on the throne of Sweden, employing inequality
to demonstrate equality; Louis XVIII. at Saint-Ouen countersigns the
declaration of the rights of man. If you wish to gain an idea of what
revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of
the nature of progress, call it To-morrow. To-morrow fulfils its work
irresistibly, and it is already fulfilling it to-day. It always reaches
its goal strangely. It employs Wellington to make of Foy, who was only
a soldier, an orator. Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again in the
tribune. Thus does progress proceed. There is no such thing as a bad
tool for that workman. It does not become disconcerted, but adjusts to
its divine work the man who has bestridden the Alps, and the good old
tottering invalid of Father Élysée. It makes use of the gouty man as
well as of the conqueror; of the conqueror without, of the gouty man
within. Waterloo, by cutting short the demolition of European thrones
by the sword, had no other effect than to cause the revolutionary work
to be continued in another direction. The slashers have finished; it
was the turn of the thinkers. The century that Waterloo was intended to
arrest has pursued its march. That sinister victory was vanquished by
liberty.

In short, and incontestably, that which triumphed at Waterloo; that
which smiled in Wellington’s rear; that which brought him all the
marshals’ staffs of Europe, including, it is said, the staff of a
marshal of France; that which joyously trundled the barrows full of
bones to erect the knoll of the lion; that which triumphantly inscribed
on that pedestal the date “_June_ 18, 1815”; that which encouraged
Blücher, as he put the flying army to the sword; that which, from the
heights of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, hovered over France as over
its prey, was the counter-revolution. It was the counter-revolution
which murmured that infamous word “dismemberment.” On arriving in
Paris, it beheld the crater close at hand; it felt those ashes which
scorched its feet, and it changed its mind; it returned to the stammer
of a charter.

Let us behold in Waterloo only that which is in Waterloo. Of
intentional liberty there is none. The counter-revolution was
involuntarily liberal, in the same manner as, by a corresponding
phenomenon, Napoleon was involuntarily revolutionary. On the 18th of
June, 1815, the mounted Robespierre was hurled from his saddle.






End of the dictatorship. A whole European system crumbled away.

The Empire sank into a gloom which resembled that of the Roman world as
it expired. Again we behold the abyss, as in the days of the
barbarians; only the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its pet
name of the counter-revolution, was not long breathed, soon fell to
panting, and halted short. The Empire was bewept,—let us acknowledge
the fact,—and bewept by heroic eyes. If glory lies in the sword
converted into a sceptre, the Empire had been glory in person. It had
diffused over the earth all the light which tyranny can give—a sombre
light. We will say more; an obscure light. Compared to the true
daylight, it is night. This disappearance of night produces the effect
of an eclipse.

Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris. The circling dances of the 8th of July
effaced the enthusiasms of the 20th of March. The Corsican became the
antithesis of the Bearnese. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was
white. The exile reigned. Hartwell’s pine table took its place in front
of the fleur-de-lys-strewn throne of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy
were mentioned as though they had taken place on the preceding day,
Austerlitz having become antiquated. The altar and the throne
fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of the
health of society in the nineteenth century was established over
France, and over the continent. Europe adopted the white cockade.
Trestaillon was celebrated. The device _non pluribus impar_ reappeared
on the stone rays representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on
the Quai d’Orsay. Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now
a red house. The Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne
victories, thrown out of its element among these novelties, a little
ashamed, it may be, of Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its
predicament with the statue of the Duc d’Angoulême. The cemetery of the
Madeleine, a terrible pauper’s grave in 1793, was covered with jasper
and marble, since the bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in
that dust.

In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,
recalling the fact that the Duc d’Enghien had perished in the very
month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the
coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on
the fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there
was a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King
of Rome. And these things took place, and the kings resumed their
thrones, and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime
became the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the
earth changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer’s
day, a shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, “Go this way, and not
that!”


This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy and
poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded
1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became
constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with
Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was
the serpent’s change of skin.

Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this
reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of
ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future
into derision. The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so
fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is
he doing? “Napoleon is dead,” said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo
and Waterloo. “He dead!” cried the soldier; “you don’t know him.”
Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown. The depths of
Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous
remained long empty through Napoleon’s disappearance.

The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Europe profited by it
to undertake reforms. There was a Holy Alliance; _Belle-Alliance_,
Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance.

In presence and in face of that antique Europe reconstructed, the
features of a new France were sketched out. The future, which the
Emperor had rallied, made its entry. On its brow it bore the star,
Liberty. The glowing eyes of all young generations were turned on it.
Singular fact! people were, at one and the same time, in love with the
future, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had rendered the
vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more lofty than Napoleon
erect. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him guarded by
Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montchenu. His folded arms
became a source of uneasiness to thrones. Alexander called him “my
sleeplessness.” This terror was the result of the quantity of
revolution which was contained in him. That is what explains and
excuses Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to
tremble. The kings reigned, but ill at their ease, with the rock of
Saint Helena on the horizon.

While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle at Longwood, the
sixty thousand men who had fallen on the field of Waterloo were quietly
rotting, and something of their peace was shed abroad over the world.
The Congress of Vienna made the treaties in 1815, and Europe called
this the Restoration.

This is what Waterloo was.

But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all that cloud,
that war, then that peace? All that darkness did not trouble for a
moment the light of that immense Eye before which a grub skipping from
one blade of grass to another equals the eagle soaring from belfry to
belfry on the towers of Notre Dame.






Let us return—it is a necessity in this book—to that fatal
battle-field.

On the 18th of June the moon was full. Its light favored Blücher’s
ferocious pursuit, betrayed the traces of the fugitives, delivered up
that disastrous mass to the eager Prussian cavalry, and aided the
massacre. Such tragic favors of the night do occur sometimes during
catastrophes.

After the last cannon-shot had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean
remained deserted.

The English occupied the encampment of the French; it is the usual sign
of victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished. They established
their bivouac beyond Rossomme. The Prussians, let loose on the
retreating rout, pushed forward. Wellington went to the village of
Waterloo to draw up his report to Lord Bathurst.

If ever the _sic vos non vobis_ was applicable, it certainly is to that
village of Waterloo. Waterloo took no part, and lay half a league from
the scene of action. Mont-Saint-Jean was cannonaded, Hougomont was
burned, La Haie-Sainte was taken by assault, Papelotte was burned,
Plancenoit was burned, La Belle-Alliance beheld the embrace of the two
conquerors; these names are hardly known, and Waterloo, which worked
not in the battle, bears off all the honor.

We are not of the number of those who flatter war; when the occasion
presents itself, we tell the truth about it. War has frightful beauties
which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous
features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the
bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle
always rises on naked corpses.

Who does this? Who thus soils the triumph? What hideous, furtive hand
is that which is slipped into the pocket of victory? What pickpockets
are they who ply their trade in the rear of glory? Some
philosophers—Voltaire among the number—affirm that it is precisely
those persons who have made the glory. It is the same men, they say;
there is no relief corps; those who are erect pillage those who are
prone on the earth. The hero of the day is the vampire of the night.
One has assuredly the right, after all, to strip a corpse a bit when
one is the author of that corpse. For our own part, we do not think so;
it seems to us impossible that the same hand should pluck laurels and
purloin the shoes from a dead man.

One thing is certain, which is, that generally after conquerors follow
thieves. But let us leave the soldier, especially the contemporary
soldier, out of the question.

Every army has a rear-guard, and it is that which must be blamed.
Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts of
vespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers of
uniforms, who take no part in the fighting; pretended invalids;
formidable limpers; interloping sutlers, trotting along in little
carts, sometimes accompanied by their wives, and stealing things which
they sell again; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers;
soldiers’ servants; marauders; armies on the march in days gone by,—we
are not speaking of the present,—dragged all this behind them, so that
in the special language they are called “stragglers.” No army, no
nation, was responsible for those beings; they spoke Italian and
followed the Germans, then spoke French and followed the English. It
was by one of these wretches, a Spanish straggler who spoke French,
that the Marquis of Fervacques, deceived by his Picard jargon, and
taking him for one of our own men, was traitorously slain and robbed on
the battle-field itself, in the course of the night which followed the
victory of Cerisoles. The rascal sprang from this marauding. The
detestable maxim, _Live on the enemy!_ produced this leprosy, which a
strict discipline alone could heal. There are reputations which are
deceptive; one does not always know why certain generals, great in
other directions, have been so popular. Turenne was adored by his
soldiers because he tolerated pillage; evil permitted constitutes part
of goodness. Turenne was so good that he allowed the Palatinate to be
delivered over to fire and blood. The marauders in the train of an army
were more or less in number, according as the chief was more or less
severe. Hoche and Marceau had no stragglers; Wellington had few, and we
do him the justice to mention it.

Nevertheless, on the night from the 18th to the 19th of June, the dead
were robbed. Wellington was rigid; he gave orders that any one caught
in the act should be shot; but rapine is tenacious. The marauders stole
in one corner of the battlefield while others were being shot in
another.

The moon was sinister over this plain.

Towards midnight, a man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in the
direction of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he was one of
those whom we have just described,—neither English nor French, neither
peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul attracted by the scent of
the dead bodies having theft for his victory, and come to rifle
Waterloo. He was clad in a blouse that was something like a great coat;
he was uneasy and audacious; he walked forwards and gazed behind him.
Who was this man? The night probably knew more of him than the day. He
had no sack, but evidently he had large pockets under his coat. From
time to time he halted, scrutinized the plain around him as though to
see whether he were observed, bent over abruptly, disturbed something
silent and motionless on the ground, then rose and fled. His sliding
motion, his attitudes, his mysterious and rapid gestures, caused him to
resemble those twilight larvæ which haunt ruins, and which ancient
Norman legends call the Alleurs.

Certain nocturnal wading birds produce these silhouettes among the
marshes.

A glance capable of piercing all that mist deeply would have perceived
at some distance a sort of little sutler’s wagon with a fluted wicker
hood, harnessed to a famished nag which was cropping the grass across
its bit as it halted, hidden, as it were, behind the hovel which
adjoins the highway to Nivelles, at the angle of the road from
Mont-Saint-Jean to Braine l’Alleud; and in the wagon, a sort of woman
seated on coffers and packages. Perhaps there was some connection
between that wagon and that prowler.

The darkness was serene. Not a cloud in the zenith. What matters it if
the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences
of the sky. In the fields, branches of trees broken by grape-shot, but
not fallen, upheld by their bark, swayed gently in the breeze of night.
A breath, almost a respiration, moved the shrubbery. Quivers which
resembled the departure of souls ran through the grass.

In the distance the coming and going of patrols and the general rounds
of the English camp were audible.

Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte continued to burn, forming, one in the
west, the other in the east, two great flames which were joined by the
cordon of bivouac fires of the English, like a necklace of rubies with
two carbuncles at the extremities, as they extended in an immense
semicircle over the hills along the horizon.

We have described the catastrophe of the road of Ohain. The heart is
terrified at the thought of what that death must have been to so many
brave men.

If there is anything terrible, if there exists a reality which
surpasses dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun; to be in full
possession of virile force; to possess health and joy; to laugh
valiantly; to rush towards a glory which one sees dazzling in front of
one; to feel in one’s breast lungs which breathe, a heart which beats,
a will which reasons; to speak, think, hope, love; to have a mother, to
have a wife, to have children; to have the light—and all at once, in
the space of a shout, in less than a minute, to sink into an abyss; to
fall, to roll, to crush, to be crushed; to see ears of wheat, flowers,
leaves, branches; not to be able to catch hold of anything; to feel
one’s sword useless, men beneath one, horses on top of one; to struggle
in vain, since one’s bones have been broken by some kick in the
darkness; to feel a heel which makes one’s eyes start from their
sockets; to bite horses’ shoes in one’s rage; to stifle, to yell, to
writhe; to be beneath, and to say to one’s self, “But just a little
while ago I was a living man!”


There, where that lamentable disaster had uttered its death-rattle, all
was silence now. The edges of the hollow road were encumbered with
horses and riders, inextricably heaped up. Terrible entanglement! There
was no longer any slope, for the corpses had levelled the road with the
plain, and reached the brim like a well-filled bushel of barley. A heap
of dead bodies in the upper part, a river of blood in the lower
part—such was that road on the evening of the 18th of June, 1815. The
blood ran even to the Nivelles highway, and there overflowed in a large
pool in front of the abatis of trees which barred the way, at a spot
which is still pointed out.

It will be remembered that it was at the opposite point, in the
direction of the Genappe road, that the destruction of the cuirassiers
had taken place. The thickness of the layer of bodies was proportioned
to the depth of the hollow road. Towards the middle, at the point where
it became level, where Delort’s division had passed, the layer of
corpses was thinner.

The nocturnal prowler whom we have just shown to the reader was going
in that direction. He was searching that vast tomb. He gazed about. He
passed the dead in some sort of hideous review. He walked with his feet
in the blood.

All at once he paused.

A few paces in front of him, in the hollow road, at the point where the
pile of dead came to an end, an open hand, illumined by the moon,
projected from beneath that heap of men. That hand had on its finger
something sparkling, which was a ring of gold.

The man bent over, remained in a crouching attitude for a moment, and
when he rose there was no longer a ring on the hand.

He did not precisely rise; he remained in a stooping and frightened
attitude, with his back turned to the heap of dead, scanning the
horizon on his knees, with the whole upper portion of his body
supported on his two forefingers, which rested on the earth, and his
head peering above the edge of the hollow road. The jackal’s four paws
suit some actions.

Then coming to a decision, he rose to his feet.

At that moment, he gave a terrible start. He felt some one clutch him
from behind.

He wheeled round; it was the open hand, which had closed, and had
seized the skirt of his coat.

An honest man would have been terrified; this man burst into a laugh.

“Come,” said he, “it’s only a dead body. I prefer a spook to a
gendarme.”


But the hand weakened and released him. Effort is quickly exhausted in
the grave.

“Well now,” said the prowler, “is that dead fellow alive? Let’s see.”


He bent down again, fumbled among the heap, pushed aside everything
that was in his way, seized the hand, grasped the arm, freed the head,
pulled out the body, and a few moments later he was dragging the
lifeless, or at least the unconscious, man, through the shadows of
hollow road. He was a cuirassier, an officer, and even an officer of
considerable rank; a large gold epaulette peeped from beneath the
cuirass; this officer no longer possessed a helmet. A furious sword-cut
had scarred his face, where nothing was discernible but blood.

However, he did not appear to have any broken limbs, and, by some happy
chance, if that word is permissible here, the dead had been vaulted
above him in such a manner as to preserve him from being crushed. His
eyes were still closed.

On his cuirass he wore the silver cross of the Legion of Honor.

The prowler tore off this cross, which disappeared into one of the
gulfs which he had beneath his great coat.

Then he felt of the officer’s fob, discovered a watch there, and took
possession of it. Next he searched his waistcoat, found a purse and
pocketed it.

When he had arrived at this stage of succor which he was administering
to this dying man, the officer opened his eyes.

“Thanks,” he said feebly.

The abruptness of the movements of the man who was manipulating him,
the freshness of the night, the air which he could inhale freely, had
roused him from his lethargy.

The prowler made no reply. He raised his head. A sound of footsteps was
audible in the plain; some patrol was probably approaching.

The officer murmured, for the death agony was still in his voice:—

“Who won the battle?”


“The English,” answered the prowler.

The officer went on:—

“Look in my pockets; you will find a watch and a purse. Take them.”


It was already done.

The prowler executed the required feint, and said:—

“There is nothing there.”


“I have been robbed,” said the officer; “I am sorry for that. You
should have had them.”


The steps of the patrol became more and more distinct.

“Some one is coming,” said the prowler, with the movement of a man who
is taking his departure.

The officer raised his arm feebly, and detained him.

“You have saved my life. Who are you?”


The prowler answered rapidly, and in a low voice:—

“Like yourself, I belonged to the French army. I must leave you. If
they were to catch me, they would shoot me. I have saved your life. Now
get out of the scrape yourself.”


“What is your rank?”


“Sergeant.”


“What is your name?”


“Thénardier.”


“I shall not forget that name,” said the officer; “and do you remember
mine. My name is Pontmercy.”





