Les Misérables
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.
CHAPTER VIII—THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE
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.
CHAPTER IX—THE UNEXPECTED
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