Les Misérables
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!_
CHAPTER III—THE EIGHTEENTH OF JUNE, 1815
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.
CHAPTER IV—A
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