Les Misérables
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.
CHAPTER XI—A BAD GUIDE TO NAPOLEON; A GOOD GUIDE TO BÜLOW
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.
CHAPTER XII—THE GUARD
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!
CHAPTER XIII—THE CATASTROPHE
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