Les Misérables
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.
CHAPTER X—THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN
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.