Les Misérables
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.
CHAPTER XIV—THE LAST SQUARE
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.}
CHAPTER XV—CAMBRONNE
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