بخش 1 کتاب 1

PART TWO

COSETTE

BOOK ONE

WATERLOO

WHAT YOU MEET WITH WHEN YOU COME FROM NIVELLES

LAST YEAR, 1861, on a lovely morning in May,1 a wanderer, the man telling this tale, arrived from Nivelles heading for La Hulpe. He was on foot. He was following a broad paved roadway between two rows of trees, which undulated over hills that rolled along, one after the other, lifting the road up and letting it fall, like enormous waves. He had gone past Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. In the west he could see the slate church tower of Braine-l’Alleud, which is in the shape of an upended vase. He had just left a wood behind him on a rise, and at a crossroad, next to a worm-eaten signpost bearing the inscription Former tollgate no. 4, he came to a tavern with this sign hanging on the outside: Aux Quatre Vents. Echabeau, privately owned café.

A bit farther down the road from this tavern, he reached the bottom of a small valley where water flows under an arch built into the embankment of the road. The cluster of trees, sparse but very green, that covers the valley on one side of the roadway, thins out into meadows on the other side before meandering off gracefully and haphazardly toward Braine-l’Alleud.

At that point, by the roadside to the right, was an inn with a four-wheel cart outside the door, along with a great bundle of hop poles, a plow, a pile of dry brushwood near a quickset hedge, some lime smoking in a square hole, and a ladder lying along an old shed with straw walls. A young girl was hoeing and pulling up weeds in a field where a big yellow poster, probably for some fairground show, fluttered and flapped in the wind. At the corner of the inn, next to a pond where a flotilla of ducks was sailing, a roughly cobbled pathway plunged into the scrub. This wanderer followed it in.

After about a hundred paces, having walked alongside a fifteenth-century wall surmounted by a sharp gable of contrasting bricks, he came to a great arched doorway made of stone, with a rectilinear impost in the heavy style of Louis XIV and two flat medallions mounted on either side. A severe façade dominated this doorway; a wall perpendicular to the façade came right up to the door, almost touching it, and flanked it with an abrupt right angle. Over the meadow in front of the door lay three old harrows through which all the flowers of May were growing pell-mell. The door was shut. It was held shut by a pair of decrepit double doors adorned with a rusty old knocker.

The sun was lovely; the branches of the trees were shivering gently in that May way that seems to come from nests more than from the breeze. A brave little bird, probably in love, was singing its heart out in a great big tree.

The wanderer bent down and peered at a rather large circular crater like the impact of a sphere, in the stone to the left of the door near the bottom of the right-hand abutment. At that moment the door panels were folded back and a peasant woman came out.

She saw the wanderer and realized what he was looking at.

“That was a French cannonball that did that,” she said.

And she added: “What you can see there, higher up in the door, next to the nail, is the hole made by a Biscay musket. The ball didn’t go through the wood.”

“What’s this place called?” the wanderer asked.

“Hougoumont,” said the peasant woman.

The wanderer straightened up. He walked over to the hedge for a look at the view. On the horizon, he could see a sort of grassy knoll through the trees and on this grassy knoll something that, at that distance, looked like a lion.2 He was on the battlefield of Waterloo.

HOUGOUMONT

HOUGOUMONT1—THIS WAS the fatal spot, the first hurdle, the first resistance met with by that great lumberjack of Europe known as Napoléon; the first knot to go under the axe.

It was a château, it is now nothing more than a farm. Hougoumont, for the antiquarian, is Hugomons. This manor was built by Hugo, sire of Somerel, the same man who endowed the sixth chaplaincy in the abbey of Villers.

The wanderer pushed the door, elbowed his way past an old calash, and walked into the courtyard.

The first thing that struck him in this yard was a sixteenth-century doorway that looks like an archway, everything having collapsed around it. Ruins often look monumental. In a wall next to the archway, another door with key-stones dating from the days of Henri IV2 opens to allow a glimpse of trees in an orchard. Next to this door a manure pit, some picks and shovels, a few carts, an old well with its flagstone and its iron pulley, a foal leaping about, a turkey fanning its tail, a chapel surmounted by a small bell tower, a pear tree in flower espaliered against the wall of the chapel—that was the yard whose conquest was one of Napoléon’s dreams. This patch of dirt would perhaps have brought him the world, if only he had been able to take it. Hens were scattering dust with their beaks. A growl was heard, the growl of a big dog baring its teeth, standing in for the English.

The English were admirable here. The four companies of Cooke’s Guards held their ground for seven hours against the furious assault of an entire army.

Hougoumont, as seen on the map in geometric plan with its buildings and enclosure included, forms a sort of irregular rectangle with one of its corners cut off. It is at this corner that the southern gate stands, guarded by the wall that commands it at point-blank range. Hougoumont has two gates: the south gate, which is that of the château, and the north gate, that of the farm. Napoléon sent his brother Jérôme3 against Hougoumont; the divisions of Guilleminot, Foy, and Bachelu4 pitted themselves against it, practically the whole of Reille’s corps was deployed there and crumbled, and Kellermann’s cannonballs ran out along this heroic stretch of wall. It was too much for the Bauduin brigade to force Hougoumont to the north, and the Soye brigade could only make a hole in it to the south without taking it.

The farm buildings border the yard to the south. A piece of the north gate, broken by the French, hangs where it has been fixed to the wall. It consists of four planks nailed to two crosspieces where the scars of battle can clearly be seen.

The north gate, smashed by the French, and on which a patch has been stuck to replace the panel hanging from the wall, stands half open at the back of the yard; it is cut squarely into a wall, stone at the bottom, brick at the top, which closes the yard on the north side. It is a simple cart entrance such as are found on all leasehold farms, two big swing doors made of rustic planks; beyond, meadows. The battle over this entrance was furious. For a long time you could see all kinds of bloody handprints on the door pillar. It is here that Bauduin was killed.

The storm of battle still lingers in this courtyard; the horror is visible there, the reversal of the fray has turned to stone; it lives, it dies, it was yesterday. The walls are in agony, stones fall, breaches scream; holes are wounds; the buckled and shuddering trees are trying to get away.

The courtyard in 1815 was more built up than it is today. Structures that have since been pulled down formed redans, corners, and sharp right angles.

The English barricaded themselves in there; the French got in but could not maintain their position. Next to the chapel, a wing of the château, the sole remains of the manor of Hougoumont, stands crumbling, you might say disembowelled. The château served as a dungeon, the chapel served as a blockhaus. They exterminated people there. The French, shot down with harquebuses on all sides, from behind the walls, from on top of the barns, from down in the cellars, through every casement window, through every basement window, through every loophole in the stones, brought kindling and set fire to walls and men; the volleys of shot were answered by conflagration.

In the ruined wall, you can glimpse through windows garnished with iron bars the dismantled rooms of the main brick building. The English Guards lay in ambush in these rooms; the spiral staircase, split from the ground floor right up to the roof, looks like the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two sections; the English, besieged on the stairs and huddled on the steps at the top, cut away the lower steps, and these big slabs of bluestone form a heap in among the nettles. A dozen steps still cling to the wall; on the first of them, the image of a trident is chiselled. These inaccessible steps are still firmly attached to their sockets. All the rest looks like a toothless jawbone. Two old trees stand there; one is dead, the other is wounded in the foot and grows young again every April. Since 1815, it has begun to grow through the staircase.

They massacred one another in the chapel. The interior, calm again, is strange. Mass has not been said here since the carnage. Yet the altar remains, a rough wooden altar backing on a wall of rough-hewn stone. Four walls washed with lime, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows, on the door a great wooden crucifix, above the crucifix a square window stuffed with a bale of hay, in a corner, on the ground, an old glazed windowframe all broken—that is the chapel for you. Near the altar is nailed a wooden statue of Saint Anne dating from the fifteenth century; the head of baby Jesus was taken off by a Biscay musket. The French, managing to gain control of the chapel for a moment before being dislodged, set fire to it. The flames filled the place; it turned into an oven. The door burned, the floor burned. The wooden Christ did not burn. Fire lapped at his feet, which can now only be seen as blackened stumps, then it stopped. A miracle, according to the people of these parts. The decapitated baby Jesus, though, was not as lucky as Christ.

The walls are covered in writing. Near Christ’s feet this name can be read: Henquinez. Then these others: Conde de Rio Maïor. Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana).5 There are French names with exclamation marks, signs of rage. The wall was whitewashed again in 1849. The nations were trading insults on it.

It is at the door of this chapel that a body was picked up holding an axe in its hand. This cadaver was Sous-Lieutenant Legros.

You come out of the chapel and on the left you see a well. There are two in the courtyard. You ask: Why isn’t there a bucket and a pulley at this one? It is because water is no longer drawn from it. Why isn’t water drawn from it anymore? Because it is full of skeletons.

The last one to be pulled out of the water of this well was called Guillaume Van Kylsom. He was a peasant who lived in Hougoumont and was a gardener there. On June 18, 1815, his family took flight and hid in the woods.

For several days and several nights, the forest surrounding the abbey of Villers harboured all the wretched scattered locals. Even today, certain recognizable vestiges, such as the old trunks of charred trees, mark the place where these poor bivouacs trembled in the depths of the scrub.

Guillaume Van Kylsom stayed in Hougoumont “to guard the castle” and hunkered down in a cellar. The English found him there. He was pulled out of his cubbyhole and given a good hiding with the flats of their swords before the enemy combatants forced the frightened man to wait on them. They were thirsty; Guillaume brought them something to drink. It was from this well that he drew the water. For many, it was the last mouthful of water they would ever drink. This well, where so many dead men drank, was also to die.

After the fighting, one thing needed to be done in a hurry and that was to bury the bodies. Death has its own way of harassing victory, sending pestilence hot on the heels of glory. Typhus is a footnote to triumph. The well was deep, it was turned into a tomb. Three hundred dead were thrown into it. Perhaps in too much haste. Were all of them actually dead? Legend says no. It seems that, the night after the burial, feeble voices could be heard calling out from down in the well.

The well stands alone in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, half-stone and half-brick, folded like the leaves of a screen and simulating a square turret, surround it on three sides. The fourth side is open. This is where the water used to be drawn. The back wall has a sort of misshapen bull’s-eye, perhaps a hole made by a shell. The turret had a roof of which all that remains are the beams. The iron supports for the right wall are in the form of a cross. If you bend over, your eye becomes lost in a deep brick cylinder filled with a densely layered darkness. All around the well the bottom of the walls disappear in nettles.

This well is not fronted by the broad blue flagstone that serves as an apron for all the wells of Belgium. The blue flagstone has been replaced here by a crossbar on which rest five or six deformed stumps of gnarled stiffened wood that look like great big bones. There is no longer any bucket, any chain, any pulley; but there is still a stone basin that was used for wastewater. Rainwater collects in it and from time to time a bird from the neighbouring forests comes and drinks out of it and then flies off.

One house among these ruins, the farmhouse, is still inhabited. The door of this house opens onto the courtyard. Next to a pretty Gothic keyhole plate the door has a slanting iron handle in the shape of a clover leaf. The moment the Hanoverian lieutenant Wilda took hold of the handle to seek refuge inside the farmhouse, a French sapper chopped his hand off with an axe.

The grandfather of the family that now occupies the house was the old gardener Van Kylsom, long since dead. A grey-haired woman will tell you: “I was there. I was three years old. They carted us off into the woods. I was in my mother’s arms. You glued your ears to the ground to listen. I used to imitate the cannon, I’d go boom, boom.” A courtyard door, on the left, as we said, opens on to the orchard.

The orchard is shocking.

It is divided into three parts, you might almost say three acts. The first part is a garden, the second is the orchard, and the third is a wood. These three parts are all enclosed, on the entrance side, by the buildings of the castle and the farm, on the left by a hedge, on the right, by a wall, at the back, by a wall. The wall on the right is made of brick, the back wall is made of stone. First you enter the garden. It is below street level, planted with currant bushes, overgrown with wild vegetation, closed off by a monumental terrace in stone slabs with balusters that have double bulbs. It was a seigneurial garden in the first French style that preceded Le Nôtre;6 today, nothing but ruins and brambles. The pilasters are topped with globes that look like stone cannonballs. You can still count forty-three balusters in place on their bases; the rest are lying in the grass. Almost all of them show scuff marks from musketry. One broken baluster stands on its shaft like a broken leg.

It is in this garden, which is lower than the orchard, that six voltigeurs of the 1st Light Company, having broken through and not being able to get out again, were tracked down and taken like bears in a pit, and decided to stand and fight two Hanoverian companies, one of which was armed with rifles. The Hanoverians were ranged along the balustrade and fired from above. The light infantrymen, riposting from below, six against two hundred, intrepid, having only the currant bushes as cover, took fifteen minutes to die.

You mount a few steps and pass from the garden into what is properly called the orchard. Here, in these few square yards, fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall seems ready to recommence the fighting. The thirty-eight loopholes cut by the English at irregular heights are still there. In front of the sixteenth lie two English graves in granite. The loopholes are only in the south wall; the main attack came from there. This wall is hidden outside by a great quickset hedge; the French arrived, thinking they had only the hedge to tackle, leaped over it, and found the wall, an obstructive hurdle and an ambush, the English guards entrenched behind it, thirty-eight loopholes all firing at once, a storm of grapeshot and cannonballs; and Soye’s brigade was smashed against it. That is how Waterloo kicked off.

The orchard was taken, though. Since there were no ladders, the French used their fingernails to climb. They fought hand to hand beneath the trees. All this grass was sopping wet with blood. A battalion from Nassau, seven hundred men, was blasted to smithereens there. On the other side, the wall, against which Kellermann’s two batteries trained their weapons, is bitten into by grapeshot.

This orchard is as responsive as any other to the month of May. It has its buttercups and its daisies, the grass is high there, cart horses graze there, horsehair ropes on which clothes are drying are slung between the trees and make anyone passing by duck their heads, you can walk through this wasteland and your feet sink in mole holes. In the middle of the grass you notice an uprooted tree trunk, recumbent, covered in green shoots. Major Blackman leaned up against it to expire. Beneath a great tree nearby fell the German general Duplat, from a French family who went into exile at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Right next to this a diseased old apple tree leans wrapped in a bandage of straw and clay. Nearly all the apple trees are falling down from old age. There is not one that does not have its cannonball or its Biscay musket ball. The skeletons of dead trees abound in this orchard. Crows fly among the branches and at the back there is a wood full of violets.

With Bauduin killed, Foy wounded, the fire, the massacre, the carnage, a stream made of English blood, German blood, and French blood furiously intermingled, a well crammed with cadavers, the Nassau regiment and the Brunswick regiment annihilated, Duplat killed, Blackman killed, the English Guards mutilated, twenty French battalions out of the forty of Reille’s corps decimated, three thousand men, in this godforsaken hole of Hougoumont alone, run through with swords, torn to pieces, butchered, their throats cut, shot, burned to death; and all that just so some peasant today can say to a traveller: “Monsieur, give me three francs and, if you like, I’ll tell you all about Waterloo!” JUNE 18, 18151

LET’S GO BACK in time—it’s one of the prerogatives of the narrator—and put ourselves back in the year 1815, and even a bit before the period when the action narrated in the first part of the book begins.

If it hadn’t rained during the night of June 17–18, 1815, the future of Europe would have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, brought Napoléon to his knees. So that Waterloo could be the end of Austerlitz, Providence needed only a bit of rain,2 and a cloud crossing the sky out of season was enough for a whole world to disintegrate.

The battle of Waterloo—and this gave Blücher3 time to get there—could not begin until half past eleven. Why? Because the ground was too wet. They had to wait for it to firm up a little before the artillery could manoeuvre.

Napoléon was an officer of the artillery, and he felt it. In his heart of hearts, this prodigious captain was the man who, in his report on Aboukir4 to the Directoire, had said: “This cannonball of ours killed six men.” All his battle plans are for projectiles. To get the artillery to converge on a given point—that was his key to victory. He treated the strategy of the enemy general like a citadel and demolished it. He overwhelmed the weak point with grapeshot; he set battles up and dissolved them with cannons. There was marksmanship in his genius. To hammer square formations, pulverize regiments, smash lines, grind and scatter massed formations—this was what it was all about for him, strike, strike, strike without letup, and he entrusted this task to the cannonball. A fearsome method, and one that, allied with genius, made this sombre athlete of the pugilism of war invincible for fifteen years.

On June 18, 1815, he was counting more than ever on the artillery because he had the numbers in his favour. Wellington5 had only a hundred and fifty-nine pieces of ordnance; Napoléon had two hundred and forty.

Suppose the ground had been dry; the artillery could have rolled, the action would have begun at six in the morning. The battle would have been fought by two o’clock, three hours before the Prussian episode.

How much is Napoléon to blame for the loss of the battle? Is the shipwreck imputable to the pilot?

Was Napoléon’s obvious physical decline coupled with a certain inner diminution by that stage? Had twenty years of war worn out the blade along with the sheath, the soul along with the body? Did the veteran make his inconvenient presence felt in the captain? In a word, was this genius, as many historians of note have thought, on the wane? Did he act so frenetically to disguise his enfeeblement from himself? Was he beginning to waver, in bewilderment, over a touch of adventure? Had he become oblivious to danger, which is a serious thing in a general? Within that class of material men we might call giants of action, is there an age at which genius becomes myopic? Old age has no hold on geniuses of the ideal; for the Dantes and the Michelangelos, to age is, on the contrary, to grow in stature; for the Hannibals and the Bonapartes, is it to shrink? Had Napoléon lost the feeling for victory? Had he got to the point where he could no longer make out the reef, no longer sniff out the trap, no longer see the crumbling edge of the abyss? Had he lost his scent for catastrophe? Was the man who once knew all the roads to triumph and pointed them out with a magisterial finger from the height of his chariot of lightning, now in such a sinister daze that he was leading his tumultuous team of legions to the brink? Had he, at the age of forty-six, been gripped by some supreme madness? Was this titanic driver of destiny now no more than a monster daredevil?

We do not think so.

His battle plan was, in the opinion of all, a masterpiece. To go straight to the centre of the allied line, make a hole in the enemy, cut him in two, push the British half to Hal and the Prussian half to Tongres, turn Wellington and Blücher into two separate segments, take Mont-Saint-Jean, seize Brussels, chuck the Germans into the Rhine and the English into the sea. All that, for Napoléon, was involved in this battle. After that, we would see.

It goes without saying that we are not claiming to do the history of Waterloo here. One of the scenes that gave rise to the drama we are relating is connected to this battle, but this history is not our subject; this history, moreover, has been told and told in masterly fashion, both from Napoléon’s point of view and from the opposite point of view6 by a glittering array of historians. As for us, we’ll leave the historians to it; we are just a distant witness, a traveller wandering through the plain, a seeker crouched over this ground moulded with human flesh, perhaps mistaking appearance for reality; we have no right to tackle head-on, in the name of science, a whole raft of facts in which there is no doubt something of the mirage, we have neither the military experience nor the skills in strategy that would authorize such a scheme; in our view, a chain of accidents governed the two captains at Waterloo, and when it comes to destiny, that mysterious defendant, we judge as do the people, that guileless judge.

A

THOSE WHO WOULD like to get a clearer idea of the battle of Waterloo have only to make the letter A on the ground in their mind. The left downstroke of the letter A is the road from Nivelles, the right downstroke is the road from Genappe, and the horizontal stroke is the sunken road from Ohain to Braine-l’Alleud. The apex of the A is Mont-Saint-Jean and that is where Wellington is; the lower left-hand point is Hougoumont and that is where Reille is with Jérôme Bonaparte; the lower right-hand point is La Belle-Alliance and that is where Napoléon is. A bit below the point where the horizontal stroke of the A meets and divides the right downstroke is La Haie-Sainte. In the middle of this horizontal bar is the exact point where the last word of the battle was said. That is where they put the lion, an involuntary symbol of the supreme heroism of the Imperial Guard.

The triangle consisting of the apex of the A between the two downstrokes and the horizontal stroke is the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau. The struggle for this plateau is what the whole battle revolved around.

The wings of the two armies extended to right and left of the two roads from Genappe and Nivelles, with d’Erlon facing Picton and Reille facing Hill.

Behind the tip of the A, behind the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau, is the forest of Soignes.

As for the plain itself, imagine a vast undulating terrain; each fold dominates the next fold and all the undulations rise toward Mont-Saint-Jean and end in the forest there.

Two enemy troops on a battlefield are like two wrestlers in a headlock. Each tries to make the other slip. They clutch at anything to hand: A bush is a fulcrum; the corner of a wall is a shoulder brace. For want of some shack to lean against, a regiment loses its footing; some shift in the plain, a movement of the terrain, a handy cross-path, a wood, a ravine, can snag the heel of this colossus we call an army and prevent it from retreating. Anyone who quits the field is mown down. Hence, for the commander in chief, the necessity of examining the slightest tuft of vegetation and of digging into the slightest contour.

The two generals had carefully studied the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean, known today as the plain of Waterloo. Since the previous year, Wellington, in his clairvoyant wisdom, had examined it as a possible site for a great battle. On this terrain and for this duel, on June 18, Wellington had the good side, Napoléon, the bad, the English army being on top, the French army below.

To sketch here Napoléon’s appearance on horseback, his glasses in his hand, on the heights of Rossomme, at dawn on June 18, 1815, is almost too much. Before anyone pointed him out, everyone had spotted him. That calm profile beneath the little hat of the College of Brienne,1 the green uniform, the white lapel hiding the insignia, the grey greatcoat hiding the epaulets, the diagonal slash of the red sash underneath the waistcoat, the leather breeches, the white horse with its purple velvet cloth displaying crowned Ns and eagles at the corners, the riding boots over silk stockings, the silver spurs, the Marengo sword2—the whole figure of the last Caesar stands in everyone’s imagination, acclaimed by some, frowned upon by others.

This figure has long been in blazing light—which has to do with a certain legendary fog that most heroes give off and that always veils the truth for a more or less lengthy period of time; but today the real story has dawned with the light of day.

This bright light, history, is pitiless; what is strange and divine about it is that, completely luminous as it is, and precisely because it is light, it often casts shadow where there used to be rays of sunlight; it makes two different phantoms of the same man, and one attacks the other and proves him false, and the darkness of the despot does battle with the dazzling splendour of the captain. This allows a truer measure in the final evaluation of the peoples of the world. Babylon sacked diminishes Alexander; Rome in chains diminishes Caesar; Jerusalem massacred diminishes Titus.3 Tyranny dogs the tyrant. It is a sorry thing for a man to leave behind him a pall that has his shape.

THE QUID OBSCURUM OF BATTLES

EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT happened in the first stage of the battle; a bad start, confusing, tentative, threatening for both armies, but more for the English than the French.

It had rained all night; the ground had been pummelled by the downpour; water had collected here and there in the hollows of the plain as though in basins; at certain points the army service equipage were in it up to the axles; the girths of the harnessed teams of horses were dripping with liquid mud. If the wheat and rye flattened by this throng of advancing carts had not filled the ruts and made a bed under the wheels, all movement, particularly in the little valleys next to Papelotte, would have been impossible.

The business kicked off late; Napoléon, as we explained, was in the habit of holding all the artillery in his hand like a pistol, now aiming at this point, now at some other point of the battle, and he wanted to wait until the batteries could roll and move freely at a gallop; for that, the sun needed to come out and dry the ground. But the sun did not come out. This was no longer the meet at Austerlitz. When the first cannonball was launched, the English general Colville looked at his watch and noted that it was thirty-five minutes past eleven.

The action kicked off with fury, more fury perhaps than the emperor would have liked from the French wing at Hougoumont. At the same time, Napoléon attacked the centre by hurling the Quiot brigade at La Haie-Sainte, and Ney1 drove the right French wing against the left English wing that was bearing down on Papelotte.

The attack on Hougoumont was partly a feint; to lure Wellington there, to get him to draw to the left—that was the plan. And the plan would have succeeded if the four companies of the English Guards and the brave Belgians of Perponcher’s division had not solidly held the position, and if Wellington, instead of massing troops there, had been able to limit himself to sending only four other companies of Guards and one of Brunswick’s battalions as reinforcement.

The attack of the French right wing on Papelotte was a no-holds-barred one; to overwhelm the English left, cut off the Brussels road, bar passage to any Prussians who might turn up, carry Mont-Saint-Jean, push Wellington back on Hougoumont, and from there to Braine-l’Alleud, from there to Hal, nothing could be neater. And apart from a few snags, the attack succeeded. Papelotte was taken; La Haie-Sainte was won.

One noteworthy detail. In the English infantry, especially in Kempt’s brigade, there were lots of new recruits. These young soldiers were valiant when confronted by our fearsome foot soldiers; in their inexperience, they stood up to the business fearlessly. They were especially useful as skirmishers; when a soldier becomes a skirmisher, to some extent left to his own devices, he becomes to all intents and purposes his own general; these recruits showed something of the inventiveness and fury of the French. This novice infantry had nerve. And Wellington did not like it one bit.

After the capture of La Haie-Sainte, the battle wavered.

During the day, there was an obscure interval, from noon to four; the middle of the battle is almost hazy and is part of the sombreness of the mêlée. Twilight gathers there. You can see vast fluctuations in this fog, a dizzying mirage, the military tackle of the day almost unknown today, flaming busbies, floating sabretaches, leather cross-belts, grenade pouches, the dolmans of the hussars, red boots with hundreds of creases, heavy shakos festooned with torsades, the almost black infantry of Brunswick merged with the scarlet infantry of England, the English soldiers with great white circular rolls around the armholes for epaulets, the Hanoverian light horse with their oblong leather helmets with copper bands and plumes of red horsehair, the Scots with their bare knees and tartan plaids, the great white gaiters of our grenadiers—tableaux, not strategic lines, something for Salvator Rosa, not for Gribeauval.

A certain amount of storminess is always mixed up in a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum.3 Every historian sees what he wants to see in this free-for-all. Whatever the combination of generals, the clash of the armed masses has unpredictable surges; in action, the plans of the two chiefs overlap and are distorted by each other. Some point on the battlefield devours more combatants than some other point, the way more or less spongy soils suck up the water you throw on them at different rates. You are forced to pour more soldiers there than you would like. Such expenditures make up the unforeseen. The battle line wiggles and snakes around like a thread, trails of blood stream illogically, the fronts of the armies undulate, regiments coming in or leaving form capes and gulfs. All these reefs are continually shifting in front of each other; where the infantry was, the artillery arrives; where the artillery was, the cavalry comes rushing in; battalions are mere wisps of smoke. There was something there, but go and look and it’s gone; clearings move around; dark folds advance and retreat; a sort of sepulchral wind pushes, sucks back, swells and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a mêlée? An oscillation. The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute, not a day. To paint a battle, we need those powerful painters whose brushes are dipped in chaos; Rembrandt would be better than Van der Meulen.4 Van der Meulen was accurate at midday but lies at three o’clock. Geometry deceives; only the hurricane is true. This is what gives Folard the right to contradict Polybius.5 We might add that there is always a certain moment when the battle degenerates into combat, individualizes itself, and dissolves into innumerable detailed events that, to borrow the phrase from Napoléon himself, “belong to the biography of the regiments rather than to the history of the army.” In which case, the historian obviously has the right to simplify. He can only seize the main outlines of the struggle, and it is not given to any narrator, no matter how conscientious they may be, to absolutely fix the form of this horrible cloud we know as a battle.

This, which is true of all great armed clashes, is particularly applicable to Waterloo.

Yet that afternoon, at a certain moment, the battle took a definite shape.

FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

BY ABOUT FOUR o’clock, the situation for the English army was serious. The prince of Orange commanded the centre, Hill the right wing, Picton the left wing. The prince of Orange, frantic and fearless, yelled out to the Belgian Dutch: “Nassau! Brunswick! Never retreat!” Hill, exhausted, was falling back on Wellington. Picton was dead, for the very same instant that the English had taken the colours of the 105th regiment of the line from the French, the French had killed General Picton on the English side with a bullet through the head. The battle, for Wellington, had two pivotal points, Hougoumont and La Haie-Sainte; Hougoumont was still holding steady, but was in flames; La Haie-Sainte was taken. Of the German battalion defending it, only forty-two men survived; all the officers, minus five, were dead or taken. Three thousand combatants had been massacred in this barn. A sergeant of the English Guards, the foremost boxer of England, reputed by his comrades to be invulnerable, had been killed there by a little French drummer. Baring had been dislodged, Alten put to the sword. Several colours had been lost, one belonging to Alten’s division, and one from the Lunebourg battalion, carried by a prince of the Deux-Ponts family. The Scottish Greys no longer existed; Ponsonby’s heavy dragoons had been cut to pieces. That valiant cavalry had folded under Bro’s lancers and Travers’s cuirassiers; of their twelve hundred horses, six hundred remained; of the three lieutenant colonels, two were on the ground, Hamilton was wounded, Mater killed. Ponsonby had fallen, stabbed seven times with a lance. Gordon was dead, Marsh was dead. Two divisions, the fifth and the sixth, were wiped out.

With Hougoumont shaken, La Haie-Sainte taken, all that remained was one knot, the centre. That particular knot still held. Wellington reinforced it. He called in Hill, who was at Merbe-Braine, he called in Chassé, who was in Braine-l’Alleud.

The centre of the English army, somewhat concave, very dense and very compact, held a strong position. It occupied the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, with the village behind it and the slope in front of it, which at the time was pretty steep. It had its back to a strong stone house, which in those days was a property of the estate of Nivelles and marked the intersection of the roads, a sixteenth-century pile so robust that the cannonballs ricocheted off it without making a dent. All around the plateau the English had cut through the hedges here and there, made gun ports in the hawthorns, stuck the muzzle of a cannon between two branches, crenellated the bushes. Their artillery was waiting in ambush under the shrubbery. This Punic labour, incontestably authorized by war, which allows for traps, was so well performed that Haxo, sent by the emperor at nine o’clock in the morning to reconnoiter the enemy batteries, did not notice a thing and returned to tell Napoléon that there was no obstacle apart from the two barricades barring the roads from Nivelles and Genappe. It was that time of year when the harvest is high; on the clearing of the plateau, a battalion of the Kempt brigade, the 95th, armed with rifles, was lying hidden in the tall wheat.

Thus assured and shored up, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch army was in a good spot.

The danger of the position was the forest of Soignes, then right alongside the battlefield and cut off by the ponds of Groenendael and Boitsfort. The only way an army could retreat into it would be by breaking up; the regiments would have been immediately disbanded. The artillery would have got lost in the swamp. Retreat, in the opinion of several military professionals—an opinion contested by others, it is true—would have meant a stampede.

Wellington added to the centre one of Chassé’s brigades, taken from the right wing, and one of Wincke’s brigades, taken from the left wing, plus the Clinton division. To his English, to Halkett’s regiments, to Mitchell’s brigade, to Maitland’s guards, he gave as supports and buttresses the infantry of Brunswick, the Nassau contingent, Kielmansegge’s Hanoverians and Ompteda’s Germans. That gave him twenty-six battalions at hand. “The right wing,” as Charras says,1 “was pulled back behind the centre.” An enormous battery was hidden by sacks of dirt at the spot that is today known as the Waterloo Museum. On top of this, Wellington had Somerset’s Horse Guards, fourteen hundred horses, in a dip in the terrain. This was the other half of the English cavalry, so justly celebrated. Ponsonby wiped out, Somerset remained.

The battery, which would almost have been a redoubt had it been finished, was ranged behind a very low garden wall, hastily covered in sandbags, and a large bank of earth. The work was not yet completed; there had been no time to stockade it.

Wellington, anxious but impassive, sat on his horse and stayed there the whole day in the same position, a bit farther along from an old Mont-Saint-Jean mill, which still exists, under an elm that an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, has since bought for two hundred francs, sawn up, and carted away. Wellington sat there, icily heroic. Cannon shot rained down. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, had just fallen by his side. Lord Hill, pointing a bursting shell out to him, said: “Milord, what are your instructions and what orders do you leave us if you get yourself killed?” “To do as I do,” replied Wellington. To Clinton, he said laconically: “Hold this spot to the last man.” The day was clearly going badly. Wellington shouted to his old companions of Talavera, Vitoria, and Salamanca:2“Boys! Don’t even think of giving way! Think of old England!” At around four o’clock, the English line moved backward. Suddenly all you could see on the crest of the plateau was the artillery and the skirmishers, the rest had disappeared; the regiments, driven back by the French shells and musket balls, fell back into the valley still crossed today by the access road to the Mont-Saint-Jean farm. A retrograde movement took place, the battlefront of the English slipped away, Wellington backed off. “Beginning of retreat!” shouted Napoléon.

NAPOLÉON IN A GOOD MOOD

THOUGH ILL AND uncomfortable in the saddle due to a painful medical condition, the emperor had never been in such a good mood as he was that day. Since morning, he had smiled in all his impenetrability. On June 18, 1815, that deep soul, masked in marble, shone blindly. The man who had been so forlorn at Austerlitz was as gay as a lark at Waterloo. The greatest of the chosen ones misread things in this way. Our joys are shadows. The ultimate smile is God’s alone.

Ridet Caesar, Pompeius flebit,1 as the legionnaires of the Fulminatrix legion used to say. Pompey this time did not have to weep, but it is certain that Caesar laughed.

Since the previous night, at one in the morning, Napoléon had been galloping around with Bertrand2 on horseback in the storm and the rain, exploring the hills around Rossomme, satisfied to see the long line of English fires lighting up the whole horizon from Frischemont to Braine-l’Alleud. It had seemed to him that destiny, with whom he had made a date on this field of Waterloo, was punctual; he had pulled up his horse and had remained sitting motionless for a few minutes, watching the lightning, listening to the thunder, and this fatalist had been heard to throw these mysterious words into the darkness: “We are agreed.” Napoléon was wrong. They were no longer agreed.

He had not taken a minute’s sleep, every moment of that night had been marked for him by joy. He had passed all along the entire line of the Grand Guards, stopping here and there to talk to the sentinels. At two-thirty, near the Hougoumont wood, he had heard the tread of a column on the move; for a moment he thought Wellington was falling back. He had said to Bertrand: “That’s the English rear guard getting ready to decamp. I’ll make prisoners out of the six thousand Englishmen who have just arrived in Ostend.” He chatted volubly; he had recovered the excitement of the disembarkation of March 1, when he pointed out to the grand maréchal the enthusiastic peasants of the Juan Gulf, shouting: “There you go, Bertrand, here’s some reinforcements, already!” The night of June 17–18, he poked fun at Wellington. “That little British git needs to be taught a lesson,” said Napoléon. The rain fell harder, it bucketed down; thunder rolled as the emperor spoke.

At three-thirty in the morning, he had shed one illusion; the officers sent out as reconnaissance had told him that the enemy was not making a single move. No one was stirring; not one bivouac fire had been put out. The English army was sleeping. The silence was profound on the ground; the only sound was coming from the sky. At four o’clock, a peasant had been brought to him by the scouts; this peasant had served as a guide for an English cavalry brigade, probably Vivian’s brigade, which was about to take up position in the village of Ohain, on the far left. At five o’clock, two Belgian deserters reported to him that they had just left their regiment and that the English army was expecting a battle. “Good for them!” Napoléon had cried. “I’d rather roll over them than drive them back.” In the morning, on the bank that forms a corner with the road at Planchenoit, he had stepped down into the mud; he had a kitchen table and a peasant’s chair brought to him from the Rossomme farm, had sat down, with a bale of straw for a rug, and had spread out on the table the map of the battlefield, saying to Soult: “Not a bad chessboard!” As a result of all the rain in the night, the convoys of supply wagons got bogged down in the churned-up roads and had not been able to make it there by morning; the soldiers had not slept, were soaked to the bone, and had not eaten; this had not stopped Napoléon from shouting gleefully to Ney: “We’ve got ninety chances in a hundred. Nine out of ten.” At eight o’clock, the emperor was brought his breakfast. He had invited several generals. While they were eating, the story was told of how Wellington had been at a ball in Brussels the night before the last, at the home of the duchess of Richmond, and Soult,3 roughneck man of war that he was, with the face of an archbishop, said: “The ball is today.” The emperor had joked with Ney, who said: “Wellington would not be so silly as to wait for Your Majesty.” That was the way he spoke. “He liked to tease,” says Fleury de Chaboulon.4 “His nature was basically cheerful,” says Gourgaud.5 “He was full of jokes, not so much witty as bizarre,” says Benjamin Constant.6 These jests of the giant are worth emphasizing. It was he who called his grenadiers les grognards, the whiners; he would pinch their ears, he would pull their moustaches. “All he ever did was play practical jokes on us”—so said one of them. During the mysterious trip from the isle of Elba to France,7 on February 27, on the open seas, the French warship Zéphir, having encountered the brig Inconstant, on which Napoléon was hidden, and having asked for news of Napoléon from the Inconstant, the emperor, who was at the time still wearing the white cockade8 on his hat and the amaranth strewn with bees9 he had adopted on the isle of Elba, had grabbed the megaphone, chortling, and himself replied: “The emperor is doing well.” Whoever can laugh like that is on good terms with events. Napoléon had several similar jolly outbursts over that Waterloo breakfast. After breakfast he collected his thoughts for a quarter of an hour; then two generals came and sat on the bale of hay, plume in hand, a sheet of paper each on their knees, and the emperor dictated the order of battle to them.

At nine o’clock, at the instant the French army, echeloned and set in motion in five columns, was deployed, the divisions in two lines, the artillery between the brigades, music at the head, belting out marches, with drumrolls and trumpet blasts, powerful, vast, jubilant, a sea of helmets, swords and bayonets all the way to the horizon, the emperor, much moved, cried out twice: “Magnificent! Magnificent!” Between nine o’clock and half past ten, incredible as it seems, the whole army took up position and lined up in six rows, forming, to borrow an expression of the emperor’s, “the figure of six Vs.” A few moments after the formation of the battlefront, amid that profound silence that is the calm before the storm of a fray, seeing the three batteries of twelve-pounders file past, detached by his orders from the three corps of d’Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and intended to begin the action by battering Mont-Saint-Jean at the intersection of the roads from Nivelles and Genappe, the emperor clapped Haxo on the shoulder and said to him: “There’s twenty-four beauties for you, general.” Sure of the outcome, he smiled encouragement as he watched pass in front of him the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had designated to set up barricades at Mont-Saint-Jean once the village was won. All this serenity was marred only by a word of arrogant pity; when he saw, on his left, at a spot that is today the site of a great tomb, the admirable Scottish Greys massing with their superb horses, he said: “What a shame.” Then he hopped on his horse, rode out from Rossomme and chose his observation post, a small grassy knoll on the right of the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during the battle. The third station, the one from seven o’clock in the evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is frightening; still there today, it is a rather high mound behind which the Guards had massed on a reverse slope of the plain. Around this mound, cannonballs ricocheted over the paved roadway right up to Napoléon. As at Brienne, cannonballs and bullets whistled over his head. Almost at the very same spot where his horse’s feet were, scarred balls, old sabre blades, and warped projectiles eaten with rust have been collected. Scabra rubigine.10 A few years back, a sixty-pound shell was disinterred, still loaded; its fuse had broken off flush with the bomb. It was at this last station that the emperor said to his guide, Lacoste, a frightened, hostile peasant tied to a hussar’s saddle, turning round at every volley of shots and trying to hide behind him: “Idiot! This is shameful. You’ll get yourself shot in the back.” He who writes these lines himself found in the friable slope of the mound, by digging in the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb decomposed by the oxide of forty-six years, along with some old bits of iron that snapped like elderberry twigs between his fingers.

As everybody knows, the varying undulations of the plains where the encounter between Napoléon and Wellington took place are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. In taking from that deadly field what was needed to make a monument to it, they took away its contours, and history, aghast, no longer recognizes itself there. In order to glorify it, they disfigured it. When Wellington saw Waterloo again, two years later, he cried: “They’ve changed my battlefield on me.” Where today there is the great pyramid of earth surmounted by a lion, there was a ridge sloping down toward the Nivelles road in a negotiable ramp; but on the Genappe roadway side, this ridge was almost an escarpment. The elevation of the escarpment can still be measured today by the height of the two great burial mounds that hem in the Genappe-to-Brussels road; one of these, the English grave, is on the left; the other, the German grave, is on the right. There is no French grave. For France, the entire plain is a sepulchre. Thanks to the thousands and thousands of cartloads of dirt used in the knoll, which is one hundred and fifty feet high and five hundred feet in circumference, the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean is today accessible by means of a gentle incline; on the day of battle, especially on the La Haie-Sainte side, it was tough going, steep and sheer. The slope there was so steep that the English cannon could not see the farm below them at the bottom of the valley that was the centre of the action. On June 18, 1815, the runoff from the heavy rain accentuated the steepness further, the mire making the climb even harder; they not only struggled up but got stuck in the mud. All the way along the plateau ridge ran a sort of ditch that an observer could not possibly make out at any distance.

What was this ditch? We’ll tell you. Braine-l’Alleud is a village in Belgium, Ohain is another. These villages, both hidden in the curves of the terrain, are joined by a path about one and a half leagues long that cuts across an undulating plain and often dips into and buries itself in among the hills like a furrow, which means that at various points the road becomes a ravine. In 1815, as now, the road cut across the ridge of the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau between the Genappe and Nivelles roads; but while today it is on a level with the plain, it was then a sunken road. They have taken away both its embankments for the knoll monument. This road was and still is a trench for most of its length; a trench sometimes twelve feet deep, whose too steep embankments would collapse here and there, especially in winter, in the rain. Accidents happened there. The road was so narrow at the entrance to Braine-l’Alleud that a traveller was crushed there by a wagon, as attested by a stone cross standing near the cemetery that gives the name of the dead man as Monsieur Bernard Debrye, merchant of Brussels, and the date of the accident as February 1637.fn1 It was so deep along the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise, was flattened there in 1783 by a landslide when the embankment collapsed, as is attested by another stone cross, the crown of which has disappeared in all the clearing, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible today on the grass-covered verge on the left side of the road between La Haie-Sainte and the Mont-Saint-Jean farm.

On the day of battle, this sunken road, which nothing gave away, bordering the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge, a ditch at the top of the escarpment, a rut hidden in the terrain, was invisible, that is, treacherous and terrible.

fn1 Here is the inscription:

DOM

CY. WAS CRUSHED

THROUGH MISADVENTURE

UNDER A CART

MONSIEUR BERNARD

DE BRYE MERCHANT

AT BRUSSELS ON (illegible)

FEBRUARY 1637.

THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO LACOSTE, THE GUIDE

AND SO, ON the morning of Waterloo, Napoléon was happy. He had reason to be; the battle plan he had designed, as we have seen, was, indeed, admirable.

Once the battle was under way, its extremely various episodes, the resistance of Hougoumont, the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; Bauduin killed, Foy put out of action; the unexpected wall against which Soye’s brigade was smashed; Guilleminot’s fatal blunder in having neither explosives nor sacks of powder; the bogging down of the batteries; the fifteen guns without an escort toppled by Uxbridge along a sunken path; the underwhelming effect of the bombs falling on the English lines and burrowing into the rain-soaked ground, succeeding only in creating volcanoes of mud so that the hail of shot turned into spattering; the uselessness of Piré’s performance at Braine-l’Alleud, all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons, virtually annihilated; the right wing of the English hardly turning a hair, the left wing barely grazed; Ney’s strange misunderstanding that saw him massing—instead of echeloning—the four divisions of the first corps, causing men in rows twenty-seven deep and in fronts of two hundred to be delivered up to the hail of shot accordingly, the awful hole cut in these masses by the cannonballs, the attacking columns split up, the supporting battery suddenly uncovered along their flank, Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised, Quiot pushed back; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules who had sprung from the École Polytechnique, wounded at the very moment he was hoeing into the La Haie-Sainte gate with an axe under the plunging fire of the English barricade blocking the bend in the Genappe-Brussels road; Marcognet’s division caught between infantry and cavalry, gunned down at point-blank range in the wheat by Best and Pack, cut down by Ponsonby, his battery of seven pieces pinned; the prince of Saxe-Weimar holding and keeping Frischemont and Smohain, despite the comte d’Erlon; the colours of the 105th taken, the colours of the 45th taken; this Prussian Black Hussar, brought in by the scouts of the flying column of three hundred chasseurs scouring the countryside between Wavre and Planchenoit and the disturbing things the prisoner had said; Grouchy’s delay;1 the fifteen hundred men killed in less than an hour in the orchard of Hougoumont, the eighteen hundred men mown down in even less time around La Haie-Sainte—all these storm-filled incidents, passing like battle clouds before Napoléon, had scarcely troubled his gaze and had not dimmed the certainty in that imperial face. Napoléon was used to staring hard at war; he never did the poignant sums of details, figure by figure; figures mattered little to him, as long as they amounted to this total: victory. If the beginnings went wrong, he did not get alarmed, for he believed himself master and possessor of the ends; he knew how to bide his time, supposing himself outside the equation, and he dealt with destiny as an equal. He seemed to say to fate: You wouldn’t dare.

Half light, half shadow, Napoléon felt himself protected when things were going well and tolerated when they were going badly. He had on his side, or thought he did, a collusion, you might almost say a complicity, on the part of events, equivalent to antique invulnerability.

Yet when you have Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau2 behind you, it seems you might not take Waterloo on trust. A mysterious frown becomes visible high overhead in the sky.

The moment Wellington fell back, Napoléon quivered. He suddenly saw the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean laid bare and the front of the English army disappear. It rallied, but kept out of sight. The emperor half-rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed in his eyes.

Wellington driven back to the forest of Soignes and destroyed, that was the final overthrow of England by France; that was Crécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man from Marengo was cancelling out Agincourt.

Musing on the terrible episode to come, the emperor then ran his field glasses one last time over every point of the battlefield. His guard, their weapons at their feet behind him, observed him from below with a sort of religious fervour, something close to worship. He was thinking: He was studying the hillsides, noting the slopes, scrutinizing the clumps of trees, the square patch of rye, the track; he seemed to be counting every bush. He looked for some time at the English barricades on both roadways, two broad abatis of felled trees, the one on the Genappe road above La Haie-Sainte equipped with two cannons, the only ones in the whole of the English artillery trained on the battlefield, and the one on the Nivelles road where the Dutch bayonets of Chassé’s brigade glinted. He noticed, close by this barricade, the old white chapel of Saint-Nicolas, which stands next to the track to Braine-l’Alleud. He leaned over and spoke in a half whisper to Lacoste, the guide. The guide shook his head to say no, probably treacherously.

The emperor straightened up and gathered himself together.

Wellington had backed off. All that remained was to finish off this retreat with a crushing defeat.

Napoléon suddenly turned round and sent off a courier at full gallop to Paris to announce that the battle was won.

Napoléon was one of those geniuses that release thunder.

He had just found his thunderbolt.

He gave the order to Milhaud’s cuirassiers to take the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean.

THE UNEXPECTED

THEY WERE THREE thousand five hundred strong. They made a front half a mile long. They were giant men on colossal horses. They were twenty-six squadrons; and they had behind them, to lend them support, the division of Lefebvre-Desnouettes, the one hundred and six elite gendarmes, the chasseurs of the Guard, eleven hundred and ninety-seven men, and the lancers of the Guard, eight hundred and eighty lances. They wore plumeless helmets and cuirasses of beaten iron, with cavalry pistols in their holsters and long sabres. In the morning, the whole army had been filled with admiration for them when, at nine o’clock, with bugles blaring, all the bands playing “Veillons au salut de l’empire”—“Let’s see to the salvation of the Empire”—they had come in a dense column, one of their batteries at their flank, the other at their centre, to fan out over two rows between the Genappe road and Frischemont, and take up their battle position in this powerful second line, so wisely drawn up by Napoléon, which, with Kellermann’s cuirassiers at its left end and Milhaud’s cuirassiers at its right, had, so to speak, two wings of iron.

The aide-de-camp, Bernard, delivered the emperor’s order to them. Ney drew his sword and placed himself at the helm. The enormous squadrons began to move.

Then a formidable spectacle was seen.

This whole cavalry, sabres raised, standards and trumpets to the wind, formed into a column by division, descended in unison and as one, with the precision of a bronze battering ram opening a breach, the hill of La Belle-Alliance, sank into the dreadful depths where so many men had already fallen, vanished there in the smoke, then, emerging from the shadows, reappeared on the other side of the valley of shadow, still compact and serried, rising at full trot, through the cloud of gunshot bursting overhead, up the awful mud slope of the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau. They rose, grave, menacing, imperturbable; in the lulls in the shooting and artillery fire, you could hear the colossal sound of shuffling. Being two divisions, they were in two columns; Wathier’s division had the right, Delord’s the left. From a distance they looked like two immense steel snakes stretching out toward the crest of the plateau. They passed through the battle like a miracle.

Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of the Moskowa1 by the heavy cavalry; Murat was missing,2 but Ney had popped up again. It seemed as though the mass had become a monster with only one soul. Each squadron undulated and swelled like the rings of a polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of thick smoke, torn here and there. A jumble of helmets, shouting, sabres, the tumultuous bouncing of horses’ rumps among the cannon and the fanfare, a disciplined and terrible commotion; over all, the cuirasses, like the scales over a hydra.

These tales seem to belong to another age. Something like this vision appeared no doubt in the old Orphic sagas3 telling of centaurs, antique hippanthropes, those titans with human faces and equine chests who scaled Olympus gambolling, horrible creatures, invulnerable, sublime; gods and beasts, both.

In a bizarre coincidence of numbers, twenty-six battalions were to be joined by these twenty-six squadrons. Behind the crest of the plateau, under cover of the masked battery, the English infantry formed into thirteen squares, two battalions to a square, and in two lines, seven in the first, six in the second, rifle butts at the shoulder, taking aim at whatever happened along, waiting, calm, mute, unmoving. They could not see the cuirassiers and the cuirassiers could not see them. They listened to the tide of men rising. They heard the growing noise of three thousand horses, the alternating and symmetrical knocking of their shod hooves at full trot, the rattling of the cuirasses, the clang of sabres, and a sort of great fierce murmur. There was a fearful silence, then suddenly, a long line of raised arms brandishing sabres appeared above the crest, along with helmets and trumpets and standards and three thousand heads with grey moustaches, all crying: “Long live the emperor!” The entire cavalry poured out onto the plateau and it was like the start of an earthquake.

All of a sudden, tragically, to the left of the English, to our right, the head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightening clamour. Having reached the culminating point of the crest, frantic, full of fury and hell-bent on exterminating the squares and cannons, the cuirassiers had just seen a ditch, a pit, between them and the English. It was the sunken road of Ohain.

The moment was horrifying. There was the ravine, unexpected, yawning, right at the horses’ hooves, two fathoms deep between its twin banks. The second row pushed the first in and the third pushed the second; the horses reared, threw themselves backward, fell on their rumps, slid with their four feet in the air, knocking off and crushing their riders, no way of turning back. The entire column was now no more than a projectile, the force gathered to crush the English crushed the French, the inexorable ravine could not surrender until it was filled, riders and horses rolled into it pell-mell, grinding each other, forming one flesh in this gulf, and when the pit was full of men still alive, they marched over them and the remainder followed suit. Almost a third of Dubois’s brigade toppled into this abyss.

This was the beginning of the end of the battle.

A local tradition, obviously exaggerated, has it that two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the sunken road of Ohain. This figure probably includes all the other corpses that were thrown into the ravine the day after the fighting.

We might note in passing that it was the same brigade, Dubois’s brigade, so fatally tested, that had charged separately an hour earlier and taken the colours of the Lunebourg battalion.

Napoléon, before ordering this charge of Milhaud’s cuirassiers, had carefully examined the terrain, but had not been able to see the sunken road, which did not create so much as a wrinkle on the surface of the plateau. Warned, however, and put on his guard by the little white chapel that marks its junction with the Nivelles road, he had put a question to Lacoste, the guide, probably about the possibility of any obstacle. The guide had replied in the negative. You might go so far as to say that catastrophe came to Napoléon from that shake of a peasant’s head.

Further bad luck was to ensue. Could Napoléon possibly have won the battle? We say no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God. Bonaparte as the victor at Waterloo—this was no longer in the law of the nineteenth century. A different series of feats was gearing up, in which there was no more room for Napoléon. The bad grace of events had announced itself long before. It was high time this mighty man fell.

The excessive weight of this man in human destiny upset the balance. This one individual alone weighed more than the population of the world. This plethora of all human vitality concentrated in a single head, the world going to the brain of one man, would be mortal to civilization if it were to go on. The moment had come for the incorruptible supreme equity to sort things out. Most likely the principles and elements, on which the regular movements in both the moral order and the material order depend, were beginning to groan. The fuming blood, the overflowing cemeteries, the mothers in tears—these are powerful pleas for the defence. When the earth is surfeited, there are mysterious wailings from the shadows that the abyss picks up.

Napoléon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall had been decreed. He was embarrassing God.

Waterloo is not a battle; it is a shift in the world’s front.

THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN

AT THE SAME time as the ravine, the artillery showed itself.

Sixty cannon and the thirteen squares blasted the cuirassiers at point-blank range. The intrepid general Delord gave the military salute to the English battery.

The whole of the English mobile artillery slammed into the squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers did not have time to pause for breath. The disaster of the sunken road had decimated, but not discouraged, them. They were the kind of men who, diminished in number, grew in heart.

Wathier’s column alone had been cobbled by the disaster; Delord’s column, which Ney had sent veering off to the left as though he had divined the trap, had arrived intact.

The cuirassiers hurled themselves at the English squares. Galloping furiously, reins let loose and flying, sabres in their teeth, pistols in their fists—such was the assault. There are moments in battle when the soul hardens the man to the point of turning a soldier into a statue and when all that flesh converts to granite. The English battalions, wildly beset, did not budge. So it was truly frightening.

All sides of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenetic swirl enveloped them. That cold-blooded infantry remained impassive. The first row, on their knees, received the cuirassiers on the ends of their bayonets, the second row gunned them down; behind the second row the cannoneers loaded their pieces, the front of the square opened up, made way for an eruption of firepower and then closed again. The cuirassiers responded by crushing them. Their great horses reared up, leaped over the ranks, jumped over the bayonets, and fell, gigantic, in the middle of those four living walls. The cannonballs made holes in the cuirassiers. The cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared, ground to a pulp underneath the horses. The bayonets sank into the guts of those centaurs. Creating, perhaps, the most monstrous wounds perhaps ever seen, anywhere. The squares, eaten into by the frenzied cavalry, dwindled without flinching. Scattering shot without letup, they exploded amid their assailants. The combat was a monstrous sight. The squares were no longer battalions, they were craters; the cuirassiers were no longer a cavalry, they were a shocking storm. Each square was a volcano attacked by a swarming cloud; lava did battle with lightning.

The square on the far right, which was the most exposed of all, being out in the open, was almost annihilated in the first few clashes. It was made up of the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The bagpipe player in the centre, paying absolutely no attention while everyone was busy exterminating each other all around him, cast down his melancholy eyes full of the reflection of forests and lakes and played Highland ditties, sitting on a drum with his bagpipes under his arm. Those Scots died thinking of Ben Lothian as the Greeks died remembering Argos. A cuirassier’s sabre, smiting the bagpipe and the arm that held it, stopped the song by killing the player.

Relatively few in number, reduced by the disaster of the ravine, the cuirassiers had the whole English army arrayed against them there, but they were everywhere at once, each man suddenly finding the strength of ten. Meanwhile, some of the Hanoverian battalions buckled. Wellington noticed and remembered his cavalry. If Napoléon, even at that moment, had thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle. This forgetfulness was his great, his fatal mistake.

All of a sudden the attacking cuirassiers realized they were being attacked in turn. The English cavalry were upon them. In front of them, the squares; behind them, Somerset. Somerset meant the fourteen hundred dragoons. Somerset had Dornberg on his right, with the German light horse and, on his left, Trip, with the Belgian carabiniers; the cuirassiers, attacked head and flank, front and rear, by the infantry and the cavalry, had to square up on all sides. What did they care? They were a whirlwind. Their bravery was beyond words.

They had behind them the relentlessly booming battery, to boot. They had to have, for these men to be wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, with a bullet hole through the left shoulder plate, is in the collection of the so-called Waterloo Museum. For such Frenchmen, nothing less than such Englishmen would do.

It was no longer a mêlée, it was a squall, a rampage, a dizzying fit of courageous hearts and souls, a hurricane of swords flashing. In an instant the fourteen hundred dragoons were down to no more than eight hundred; Fuller, their lieutenant colonel, fell, dead. Ney rushed in with the lancers and chasseurs of Lefebvre-Desnouettes. The plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean was taken, taken back, taken again. The cuirassiers left the cavalry to return to the infantry or, more accurately, all this formidable throng wrestled with each other without letting go their hold. The squares were still holding. There were twelve attacks. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half of the cuirassiers stayed on the plateau. The struggle lasted two hours.

The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, if the cuirassiers hadn’t been crippled in their first clash by the disaster of the sunken road, they would have overwhelmed the centre and carried the victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished, was struck with heroic admiration. He said in a half whisper: “Splendid!” The cuirassiers annihilated seven out of thirteen squares, took or spiked sixty cannon pieces, and captured six colours from the English regiments, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard brought to the emperor out in front of the farm at La Belle-Alliance.

Wellington’s situation had deteriorated. This strange battle was like a duel between two determined wounded men who, both fighting and fending off all the while, lose all their blood. Which of the two would drop first?

The battle of the plateau raged on.

How far did the cuirassiers get? No one can really say. What is certain is that, the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his horse were found dead in the framework of the machine for weighing vehicles at Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles, Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels come together and cut across each other. This cavalier had got through the English lines. One of the men who carted away the body still lives in Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was eighteen years old at the time.

Wellington felt himself buckling. The end was near.

The cuirassiers had not succeeded in the sense that the centre was not overrun. Since everyone had the plateau, no one had it and, in a word, it remained for the greater part to the English. Wellington had the village and the crowning plain; Ney only had the ridge and the slope. On both sides they seemed rooted to this deathly soil.

But the English looked irremediably weakened. The haemorrhage of that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, called for reinforcements. “There aren’t any,” Wellington replied. “Let him get himself killed!” Almost at the same instant, in an odd coincidence that shows how exhausted both armies were, Ney asked Napoléon for infantry and Napoléon shouted: “Infantry! Where does he want me to get them from? Would he like me to pull them out of a hat?” Yet the English army was the sicker. The furious onslaughts of these great squadrons with their iron cuirasses and chests of steel had ground up the infantry. A few men around a flag marked the place of one regiment, another battalion was now commanded only by some lieutenant’s captain; Alten’s division, already so badly battered at La Haie-Sainte, was almost destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze’s brigade were strewn over the fields of rye all along the Nivelles road; there were almost none left of the Dutch grenadiers who joined our ranks in Spain in 1811 to fight against Wellington and who rallied to the English in 1815 in their fight against Napoléon. The loss among officers was considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who the next day buried his leg, had a fractured knee. On the side of the French, in this battle of the cuirassiers, Delord, L’Héritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, and Blancard were out of action, but on the side of the English, Alten was wounded, Barne was wounded, Delancey was killed, Van Meeren was killed, Ompteda was killed, Wellington’s entire staff was decimated, and England came off worse in this bloody juggling act. The 2nd regiment of foot guards had lost five lieutenant colonels, four captains, and three ensigns; the 1st battalion of the 30th infantry had lost twenty-four officers and one hundred and twelve soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had twenty-four officers wounded, eighteen officers dead, and four hundred and fifty soldiers killed. Cumberland’s Hanoverian Hussars, an entire regiment, led by Colonel Hacke, who would later be court-martialled and cashiered, had turned tail at the sight of the mêlée and were fleeing through the forest of Soignes, sowing panic all the way to Brussels. Carts, gun carriages, supply and baggage wagons, wagons full of the wounded, seeing the French gaining ground and closing in on the forest, rushed there; the Dutch, cut down by the French cavalry, gave the alarm: Get out now! From Vert-Coucou right up to Groenendael, over a length of nearly six miles in the direction of Brussels, the road was jammed with people running for their lives, according to witnesses still alive today. The panic was so great that it reached the prince de Condé at Malines and Louis XVIII at Ghent.1 With the exception of the paltry reserve echeloned behind the ambulance station set up in the Mont-Saint-Jean farm and the brigades of Vivian and Vandeleur that flanked the left wing, Wellington had run out of cavalry. A number of batteries were scattered around unhorsed. These facts have been admitted by Siborne; and Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, even 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 were white. The Austrian commissary, Vincent, the Spanish commissary, Alava, who watched the battle with the English staff, thought the duke was finished. At five o’clock, Wellington pulled out his watch and was heard to murmur these sombre words: “Blücher, or night!” It was at about that point that a distant line of bayonets flashed on the heights around Frischemont.

This was the turning point in this colossal tragedy.

BAD GUIDE FOR NAPOLÉON, GOOD GUIDE FOR BÜLOW

WE ALL KNOW about Napoléon’s heartbreaking mistake; how Grouchy was expected, while Blücher turned up—death instead of life.

Destiny makes such about-faces. You were hoping to sit on the world’s throne and instead you spy Saint Helena looming.

If the little shepherd who served as a guide to Bülow, Blücher’s lieutenant, had advised him to come out of the forest above Frischemont rather than below Planchenoit, the shape of the nineteenth century would perhaps have been different. Napoléon would have won the battle of Waterloo. By any other road than below Planchenoit, the Prussian army would have ended up at a ravine the artillery could not have crossed and Bülow would not have got there.

Just an hour’s delay, as the Prussian general Müffling said, and Blücher would not have found Wellington standing; “the battle would have been lost.”

It was high time, as we have seen, that Blücher turned up. He had been delayed for a considerable while. He had bivouacked at Dion-le-Mont and set out at dawn. But the roads were inaccessible and his divisions got stuck in the mud. The cannons were bogged right up to their hubs. On top of this, they had to cross the Dyle over the narrow bridge at Wavre; the road leading to the bridge had been set on fire by the French, and the ammunition caissons and artillery wagons, not being able to pass between two rows of burning houses, had had to wait for the fire to be put out. It was midday before Bülow’s advance guard could get even as far as Chapelle-Saint-Lambert.

Had the action begun two hours earlier, it would have been over by four, and Blücher would have fallen in the battle won by Napoléon. Such are the immense strokes of luck, good or bad, that are calibrated by an infinity that escapes us.

As early as midday, the emperor was the first, with his telescope, to notice something on the horizon that caught his attention. He had said: “I see a cloud over there that looks to me like troops.” Then he had asked the duc de Dalmatia:1 “Soult, what do you see over toward Chapelle-Saint-Lambert?” The maréchal, training his field glasses that way, had answered: “Four or five thousand men, sire. Obviously it’s Grouchy.” Yet they remained motionless in the mist. The glasses of the whole staff studied the “cloud” signalled by the emperor. Some said: “They’re columns taking a break.” Most said: “Those are trees.” The truth is that the cloud did not stir. The emperor sent Domon’s division of light horse off to reconnoiter that dark spot.

Bülow had not, in fact, moved. His vanguard was very weak and could do nothing. He had to wait for the bulk of his army corps and he had been given the order to mass his forces before entering into battle; but at five o’clock, seeing the peril Wellington was in, Blücher ordered Bülow to attack and said this remarkable thing: “We must give the English army time to come up for air.” A little later, the divisions of Losthin, Hiller, Hacke, and Ryssel fanned out in front of Lobau’s corps, the cavalry of Prince William of Prussia came out of the Paris wood, Planchenoit was in flames, and the Prussian cannonballs began to rain down as far as the rows of the reserve guard behind Napoléon.

THE GUARD

WE KNOW THE rest: the irruption of a third army, the disintegration of the battle, eighty-six fire-breathing maws suddenly thundering; Pirch the First surging forward with Bülow, Zieten’s cavalry led by Blücher in person, the French driven back, Marcognet swept off the Ohain plateau, Durutte dislodged from Papelotte, Donzelot and Quiot beating a retreat, Lobau sideswiped; a new battle gearing up as night fell over the dismantled regiments, the whole English line taking the offensive once again and driven forward, the gigantic hole made in the French army, the hail of English bullets and the hail of Prussian bullets lending each other support; the extermination, disaster along the front, disaster along the flank, the Guard falling into line under this horrifying collapse.

As though they sensed they were about to die, the Guards cried out: “Long live the emperor!” History has nothing more moving than this death rattle bursting out into acclamation.

The sky had been covered the whole day. Suddenly, at that very moment—it was eight o’clock at night—the clouds on the horizon parted and through the elms on the Nivelles road the great sinister redness of the setting sun streamed in. At Austerlitz, the sun had been rising.

Each battalion of the Guard, for this final scene, was commanded by a general. Friant, Michel, Roguet, Harlet, Mallet, Poret de Morvan, were there. When the high black bearskin hats of the grenadiers, decorated with the wide eagle plate, emerged from the fog of war, symmetrical, aligned, tranquil, superb, the enemy felt respect for France; it felt as if they were watching twenty Victories entering the battlefield, wings spread, and those who were victors, considering themselves vanquished, shrank back; but Wellington shouted: “On your feet, Guards, and aim straight!” The red regiment of the English Guards, lying behind the hedges, rose, a cloud of canister shot riddled the tricolour flag fluttering around our eagles, everyone lunged forward, and the final carnage began. The Imperial Guard could feel the army slipping away around them in the gloom and the vast shock of the rout; they heard the “Every man for himself!” that had replaced the “Long live the emperor!” and, despite all the men fleeing behind them, they continued to advance, more and more of them mauled and dying at every step they took. Not one of them hesitated or weakened. Every soldier in the troop was as much a hero as the general. Not one man baulked at the suicide.

Ney, in despair, grand with all the arrogance of acceptance of death, offered himself up to any and all blows in this torment. His fifth horse was killed under him there. Streaming with sweat, eyes aflame, foaming at the mouth, uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulets half ripped off by the sabre slash of a horse guardsman, his great eagle plate dented by a bullet, bleeding, covered in mud, magnificent, a broken sword in hand, he said: “Come and see how a maréchal of France dies on the field of battle!” In vain, for he did not die. He was crazed and filled with outrage. He hurled this question at Drouet d’Erlon: “Aren’t you going to get yourself killed, then, eh?” He shouted in the middle of all this artillery fire that was mashing a cluster of men: “Isn’t there anything for me, then? Oh, I’d love all those English bullets straight in the guts!” You were reserved for French bullets, poor man!

THE CATASTROPHE

THE ROUT BEHIND the Guard was awful.

The army suddenly caved in on all sides at once—Hougoumont, La Haie-Sainte, Papelotte, Planchenoit. The cry “Treason!” was followed by the cry “Every man for himself!” A disintegrating army is a thaw. Everything buckles, splinters, cracks, floats, rolls, tumbles down, crashes around, darts, rushes headlong. The disarray is unbelievable. Ney borrows a horse, hops up, and, without a hat, without a cravat, without a sword, plants himself sideways across the Brussels road, stopping both the English and the French at once. He tries to retain the army, he calls them back, he insults them, he dogs the rout. He is overwhelmed. The soldiers flee from him crying: “Long live Maréchal Ney!” Two of Durutte’s regiments come and go, bewildered and as though tossed between the sabres of the Uhlans1 and the fusillade of the brigades of Kempt, Best, Pack, and Rylandt. A rout is the worst kind of mêlée; friends kill each other in their bid to get away, squadrons and battalions smash and send each other flying, sending up a sea foam of battle. Lobau at one end and Reille at the other are rolled in the torrent. In vain Napoléon builds ramparts with what remains of the Guard; in vain he expends his reserve squadron in a last-ditch effort. Quiot shrinks back before Vivian, Kellermann before Vandeleur, Lobau before Bülow, Morand before Pirch, Domon and Subervic before Prince William of Prussia. Guyot, who led the charge of the emperor’s squadrons, falls under the feet of the English dragoons. Napoléon gallops all the way along the rows of fugitives, haranguing them, pressuring them, threatening them, imploring. All those mouths that only that morning were shouting “Long live the emperor” are hanging open now; he is barely acknowledged. The Prussian cavalry, freshly arrived, darts in, flies, hacks, lops, kills, exterminates. Yoked teams hurtle off, the cannoneers take to their heels; the soldiers belonging to the train unhitch the ammunition caissons and take their horses to escape; overturned wagons, their four wheels in the air, block the way and are accessories to massacre. People are crushed to death, trampled, others walk over the dead and over the living. Arms are lost. A dizzying flood of men pours onto the roads, paths, bridges, plains, hills, valleys, woods, which are choked with this deluge of forty thousand men fleeing for their lives. Shrieks, despair, sacks and fusils thrown into the rye, paths hacked out with swords, no more comrades in arms, no more officers, no more generals, just unspeakable horror. Zieten comfortably hacking through France. Lions turned to deer. That is what the flight was like.

At Genappe, people tried to turn back, to form a united front, to create a roadblock. Lobau rallied three hundred men. They barricaded the entry to the village; but at the first volley of grapeshot from the Prussians, everyone took to their heels again and Lobau was taken. You can still see the mark left by the volley of shot today on the old gable of a brick hovel on the right-hand side of the road, a few minutes before you enter Genappe. The Prussians charged into Genappe, furious no doubt at having so little opportunity to play the conquerors. The pursuit was monstrous. Blücher gave the order for extermination. Roguet had set a grim example in threatening to kill any French grenadier who brought him a Prussian prisoner. Blücher outdid Roguet. The general of the Young Guard, Duhesme, nabbed at the door of an inn in Genappe, handed over his sword to a hussar of Death, who took the sword and killed the prisoner. Victory was completed by the assassination of the vanquished. Let us punish, since we are history: Old Blücher disgraced himself. The ferocity took the disaster to dizzying limits. The desperate rout passed through Genappe, passed through Quatre-Bras, passed through Gosselies, passed through Frasnes, passed through Charleroi, passed through Thuin, and stopped only at the border. Alas! Who was it that was fleeing so desperately? The Grande Armée.2 Was this craziness, this terror, this collapse in a heap, of the greatest bravery that has ever confounded history, without cause? No. The shadow of an enormous right hand looms over Waterloo. It is the day of destiny. The might beyond man made that day. Hence the heads bowed in horror; hence all those great souls yielding up their swords. Those who had conquered Europe fell to the ground, mown down, with nothing more to say or do, sensing a terrible presence in the shadows. Hoc erat in fatis.3 That day, the perspective of the human race shifted. Waterloo is the event the nineteenth century hinges on. The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the coming of the great century. Someone whom you do not answer back saw to it. The panic of those heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo, there was more than a cloud, there was a meteor. God passed.

As night fell, in a field near Genappe, Bernard and Bertrand seized by the lapels of his redingote and stopped a haggard, pensive, sinister man who, dragged that far by the current of the rout, had just dismounted, slipped his horse’s reins under his arm, and, wild-eyed, turned back alone to Waterloo. It was Napoléon still trying to make headway, immense somnambulist of this shattered dream.

THE LAST SQUARE

A FEW SQUARES of the Guard, immobile in the streaming of the rout like rocks in running water, held till nightfall. When night came on, and death with it, they waited for that double darkness and let themselves be enveloped by it, unshakable. Each regiment, cut off from the others and with no further communication with the army that had entirely disintegrated, died in its own manner. They had taken up position to fight the final fight, some on the heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean. There, abandoned, vanquished, terrible, the solemn squares stood dying tremendously. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland,1 died with them.

At dusk, around nine in the evening, at the bottom of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, one square remained. In this deathly valley, at the foot of the slope the cuirassiers had scaled, now flooded by the masses of the English, under the converging fire of the artillery of the victorious enemy, under a frightening rain of projectiles, this square fought on. It was commanded by a little-known officer named Cambronne.2 At each discharge, the square diminished but riposted. It met grapeshot with gunfire, constantly contracting its four walls. In the distance the fugitives, stopping now and then, out of breath, listened in the darkness as the mournful thunder grew fainter.

When this legion was no more than a handful, when their flag was no more than a rag, when their fusils had run out of bullets and were no more than batons, when the heap of corpses was bigger than the group left alive, there was among the victors a sort of holy terror over these sublime dying men, and the English artillery, pausing for breath, fell silent. It was respite of a kind. The combatants were surrounded by what seemed like teeming ghosts, the silhouettes of men on horseback, the black outlines of their cannons, the white sky seen through wheels and gun carriages; the colossal death’s head that heroes always see in the depths of the fog of war was closing in on them and looked at them. They could hear in the crepuscular gloom that cannons were being loaded, wicks were being lit and gleamed like the eyes of tigers in the night, making a circle around their heads; all the shot-firers of the English batteries approached the cannons, and then, deeply moved, holding the moment of reckoning hanging over these men, an English general—Colville according to some, Maitland according to others—cried out to them: “Brave Frenchmen, give yourselves up!” Cambronne replied: “Shit!”3 CAMBRONNE

OUT OF RESPECT for the French reader, the most beautiful word perhaps that a Frenchman has ever uttered cannot be repeated to them. There is a ban on dropping the sublime into history.

At our own risk, we are violating that ban.

So, we say, among all these giants, there was a Titan,1 Cambronne.

To say that word and then die. What could be more grand!? For to want death is to die and it is not this man’s fault if, though shot, he survived.

The man who won the battle of Waterloo is not Napoléon routed, it is not Wellington buckling at four o’clock, desperate at five, it is not Blücher who did not fight; the man who won the battle of Waterloo is Cambronne.

To strike down the thunderbolt that kills you with such a word—that is to conquer.

To answer catastrophe back with that, to say that to fate, to give the lion of the future such a firm footing, to slam down that reply at the night’s rain, at the treacherous wall of Hougoumont, at the sunken path of Ohain, at Grouchy’s delay, at Blücher’s arrival, to come up with irony with one foot in the grave, to manage to stay on your feet after you’ve fallen, to drown the European coalition in one syllable, to offer kings the lavatories already familiar to the Caesars, to make the last of words the first by fusing it with the lightning of France, to insolently bring Waterloo to a close with a Mardi Gras, round off Leonidas with Rabelais,2 sum up the victory in one supreme word that cannot be uttered, to lose ground but keep history, after all the carnage to have the last laugh—this is huge.

It is an insult to the thunderbolt. It is to attain the greatness of Aeschylus.3

Cambronne’s word has the effect of a fracture. It means fracturing a breast with scorn; it is overflowing agony exploding. Who won? Wellington? No. Without Blücher he was sunk. Blücher? No. If Wellington hadn’t begun, Blücher could not have finished. This Cambronne, this man who pops up at the final hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitely small cog of war, feels that there is a lie in there, a lie in a catastrophe, a poignant doubling up, and at the instant he is about to burst with rage over this, he is offered this paltry joke—life! How can he not hit the roof?

There they are, all the kings of Europe, the happy generals, the thundering Jupiters, there are one hundred thousand victorious soldiers and behind the hundred thousand, a million; their cannons, wicks lit, are gaping; they have the Imperial Guard and the Grande Armée under their heels; they have just crushed Napoléon and there is only Cambronne left; there is no one left to protest except this earthworm. Protest he will. So he gropes for a word the way you grope for a sword. He foams at the mouth and this foam is the word. Faced with this miraculous and mediocre victory, faced with this victory without victors, the desperado holds his head high; he takes the whole enormous calamity on the chin but he sees its meaninglessness, and he goes one better than spitting on it; and under the overwhelming pressure of numbers, strength, and material circumstances, he finds in his soul an expression: excrement. We repeat it. To say that, to do that, to come up with that—this is to be the victor.

The spirit of past glory entered into this unknown man at that fatal moment. Cambronne comes up with the word for Waterloo the way Rouget de l’Isle comes up with the “Marseillaise,”4 being visited with inspiration from on high. A whiff of the divine whirlwind breaks loose and wafts through such men, and they shudder, and one of them sings the ultimate song, and the other lets out this terrible cry. Cambronne not only slams down this word of titanic scorn at Europe in the name of the Empire—that would be a small thing; he slams it down at the past in the name of the Revolution. You hear it and you recognize in Cambronne the old soul of the giants. It sounds like Danton talking or Kléber roaring.5 To this word of Cambronne’s, the English voice replied: “Fire!” The batteries blazed, the hill shook, from all those mouths of bronze one last vomit of shot spewed forth, appalling; one vast plume of smoke, vaguely whitened by the rising moon, rolled in, and when the smoke cleared, there was nothing left. This formidable remnant was annihilated; the Guards were dead. The four living walls of the redoubt were lying prone, you could barely make out a tremor here and there among the corpses. And this is how the French legions, greater than the Roman legions, expired at Mont-Saint-Jean on ground soaked with rain and blood, in the gloomy wheatfields, at the place where, these days, at four in the morning, whistling and cheerily whipping his horse, Joseph trots past on his rounds for the Nivelles mail coach service.

QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE?1

THE BATTLE OF Waterloo is an enigma. It is as mysterious for those who won it as for the man who lost it. For Napoléon, it was pure panic.fn2 Blücher sees nothing in it but excitement; Wellington can’t make head or tail of it. Look at the reports. The bulletins are confused, the commentaries muddled. Some stammer, others stutter. Jomini divides the battle of Waterloo into four moments; Müffling carves it into three episodes; Charras2 alone, although on some points our appreciation differs from his, grasped with his proud glance the characteristic features of this catastrophe of human genius grappling with divine chance. All other historians are dazzled and in their dazzled state they are left groping. A blinding day, indeed, the downfall of the military monarchy which, to the great stupor of the kings, dragged every kingdom down with it, the fall of might, the routing of war.

In this event, bearing the marks of superhuman necessity, the role men played is nothing.

Does taking Waterloo away from Wellington and Blücher mean taking something away from England and Germany? No. Neither this illustrious England nor that august Germany is in question in the problem of Waterloo. Thank heavens, peoples are great beyond the sorrowful adventures of the sword. Neither Germany nor England nor France fit into a scabbard. In these times when Waterloo is a mere clinking of sabres, above Blücher Germany has Goethe and above Wellington England has Byron.3 A vast dawning of ideas marks our century and in this dawn England and Germany have their magnificent glow. They are majestic in what they think. The raising of the bar they have brought to civilization is intrinsic to them; it comes from themselves and not from some accident. The way they opened up the nineteenth century does not begin with Waterloo. Only barbarians experience sudden spurts of growth after a victory. That is nothing more than the passing vanity of torrents swollen by a storm. Civilized peoples, especially in our day, are not raised up or brought down by the good or bad luck of a captain. Their specific weight in the human race comes from something more than a fight. Their honour, thank God, their dignity, their radiance, their genius, are not numbers that those gamblers known as heroes and conquerors throw into the lottery of battle. Battle lost, progress is often won. Less glory, more liberty. When the drum shuts up, reason has its say. This is the game of loser wins. So let us keep our calm, on both sides, when we speak of Waterloo. Let us give to chance what is chance’s and to God what is God’s. What is Waterloo? A victory? No. A game of poker. A game of poker won by Europe, paid out by France. It really wasn’t worth the trouble of sticking a lion there.

Besides, Waterloo is the strangest encounter in history. Napoléon and Wellington—they aren’t enemies, they are opposites. Never has God, who likes an antithesis,4 produced a more striking contrast or a more extraordinary confrontation. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, an exit plan assured, supplies well managed, a stubborn sangfroid, an imperturbable approach, strategy that makes the most of the terrain, tactics that counterbalance battalions, carnage laid out like a map, war regulated by the clock, nothing deliberately left to chance, good old traditional courage, absolute correctness; on the other side, intuition, divination, military idiosyncracy, a superhuman instinct, the flamboyant eye of a hawk, which watches and strikes like lightning, prodigious skill wedded to a contemptuous impetuosity, all the mysteries of a deep soul, a close connection to destiny, the river, the plain, the forest, the hill, marshalled and in some amazing way forced to obey, with the despot going as far as to tyrannize the battlefield. Faith in the stars melded to the science of strategy, expanding it but also muddying it. Wellington was the Barrême of the war, Napoléon was its Michelangelo;5 and this time genius was beaten by arithmetic.

On both sides, they were waiting for someone. It was the one who was best at sums who succeeded. Napoléon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not turn up. Wellington was waiting for Blücher; he did.

Wellington is classic warfare getting its revenge. In his heyday, Bonaparte had come across this in Italy and defeated it superbly. The old owl had fled before the young vulture. Age-old tactics had not only been roundly trounced but outraged. Who was this twenty-six-year-old Corsican? What did this splendid ignoramus mean when, with everyone against him, no one for him, without provisions, without munitions, without cannons, without shoes, almost without an army, with a handful of men against masses, he ran at allied Europe and carried absurd—impossible—victories against all the odds? Where did he come from, this thundering maniac who, almost without stopping for breath, and with the same pack of combatants as the only hand he could play had pulverized one after another the five armies of the emperor of Germany, hurling Beaulieu back at Alvinzi, Wurmser at Beaulieu, Mélas at Wurmser, Mack at Mélas?6 Who was this newcomer to war, this little upstart with the effrontery of a star? The military academe excommunicated him as it went under. Hence the implacable rancour of the old Caesarism against the new, of the ordinary sabre against the flamboyant sword, and of the chessboard against sheer genius. On June 18, 1815, this rancour had the last word, and below Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Marengo, Arcola,7 it wrote: Waterloo. The triumph of mediocrity that the majority loves. Destiny let the irony pass. At his decline, Napoléon found himself facing another young Wurmser.8 For to get Wurmser all you have to do, in fact, is to whiten Wellington’s hair.

Waterloo is a battle of the first order won by a captain of the second.

What has to be admired in the battle of Waterloo is England—English steadfastness, English resolution, English blood. The superb thing that England had going for it there, whether it likes it or not, was itself—not its captain, its army.

Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst9 that his army, the army that did battle on June 18, 1815, was a “despicable army.” What does that grisly pile of mixed bones buried beneath the furrows of Waterloo make of that, I wonder?

England has been too modest in relation to Wellington. To make so much of Wellington is to make too little of England. Wellington is just a hero like any other. The Scottish Greys, the Horse Guards, the regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, the infantry of Pack and of Kempt, the cavalry of Ponsonby and of Somerset, the Highlanders playing bagpipes under fire, the battalions of Rylandt, the fresh-faced recruits who barely knew how to handle a musket holding out against the old hands of Essling and Rivoli10—that is what is great. Wellington was tenacious, that was his merit, and we don’t want to take that away from him, but the least of his foot soldiers or horsemen was every bit as rock-solid as he was. The iron soldier is worth every bit as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, we attribute all glory to the English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If there is to be a trophy, it is to the English people that it should go. The Waterloo Column would be more just if, instead of the figure of a man, it raised to the skies the statue of a people.

But this mighty England would be offended by what we are saying here. Even after its 1688 and our 1789,11 it still has feudal illusions. It believes in heredity and in hierarchy. This people, whom no one else surpasses in power and glory, esteems itself a nation, not a people. As a people, it willingly knuckles under and accepts a lord as its leader. A workingman lets himself be treated with contempt; a soldier lets himself be bludgeoned. We recall that at the battle of Inkermann a sergeant who, apparently, had saved the army could not be mentioned by Lord Raglan, the English military hierarchy not allowing any hero below the grade of officer to be cited in a report.

What we admire above all in an encounter of the kind that took place at Waterloo is the tremendous cunning of chance. Overnight rain, the wall of Hougoumont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to cannonfire, Napoléon’s guide deceiving him, Bülow’s guide enlightening him; the whole cataclysm was conducted with consummate skill.

On the whole, we have to say, Waterloo was more of a massacre than a battle.

Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one with the smallest front in relation to the number of combatants. Napoléon, two miles, Wellington, a mile and a half; seventy-two thousand combatants on each side. The carnage stems from such density.

The sums have been done and this ratio established; loss of men, at Austerlitz: French, 14 percent; Russians, 30 percent; Austrians, 44 percent. At Wagram: French, 13 percent; Austrians, 14. At Moscow: French, 37 percent; Russians, 44. At Bautzen:12 French, 13 percent; Russians and Prussians, 14. At Waterloo: French, 56 percent; allies, 31. Average for Waterloo, 41 percent. One hundred and forty-four thousand men; sixty thousand dead.

The field of Waterloo today looks like any other plain; it has that calm that belongs to the earth as mankind’s impassive support.

At night, though, a sort of visionary mist emanates from it and if a traveller should stroll around there, and look, and listen, and dream like Virgil before the fatal plain of Philippi,13 he is seized by a hallucination of the disaster. That terrible June 18 lives on; the artificial hill monument fades from view, the nondescript lion evaporates, the battlefield resumes its reality; lines of infantry snake across the plain, furious galloping stirs up the horizon; the startled dreamer sees the lightning flash of sabres, the glint of bayonets, the blazing of bursting shells, the monstrous crossfire of thunderbolts; he hears the dim clamour of the phantom battle, like a death rattle from the depths of the grave; these shades are the grenadiers; these gleams are cuirassiers; this skeleton is Napoléon; that skeleton is Wellington; all this is no more and yet the slaughter continues; and the ravines run red with blood and the trees shiver and the fury rises up to the skies, and in the darkness, all these wild and wind-blasted heights, Mont-Saint-Jean, Hougoumont, Frischemont, Papelotte, Planchenoit, appear crowned by blurry whirlpools of spectres exterminating each other.

fn2 “A battle over, a day over, wrong steps corrected, greater successes assured for the next day, all was lost by a moment of panic-stricken terror.” Napoléon, Dictées de Sainte-Hélène.

DO WE HAVE TO THINK WATERLOO WAS A GOOD THING?

THERE EXISTS A very respectable liberal school that does not abhor Waterloo. We do not subscribe to it. For us, Waterloo is merely the amazing birth of liberty. That such an eagle should emerge from such an egg is surely unexpected.

Waterloo, if you look at it in terms of its ultimate outcome, is a deliberate counterrevolutionary victory. It is Europe versus France, it is Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna versus Paris, it is the status quo versus initiative, it is July 14, 1789, attacked via March 20, 1815,1 it is the pandemonium of the monarchies versus the indomitable French riot. To finally extinguish this vast people that had been in eruption for twenty-six years—that was the dream. Solidarity of the Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanoffs, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, with the Bourbons.2 Waterloo carries divine right in the passenger seat. It is true that, the Empire having been despotic, royalty, as a natural reaction, had no choice but to be liberal, and that a reluctant constitutional order has sprung from Waterloo, to the great regret of the victors. The fact is that revolution cannot really be defeated and that, being providential and absolutely inevitable, it always reappears—before Waterloo, in Bonaparte’s tearing down the old thrones; after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII’s granting the Charter3 and abiding by it. Bonaparte places a coachman on the throne of Naples and a sergeant on the throne of Sweden,4 using inequality to demonstrate equality; Louis XVIII at Saint-Ouen5 countersigns the Declaration of the Rights of Man. If you want to understand what revolution is, call it Progress; and if you want to understand what progress is, call it Tomorrow. Tomorrow does its work irresistibly and it does it starting today. It always achieves its aim, strangely. It puts Wellington to work to turn Foy, who was a mere soldier, into an orator.6 Foy falls wounded at Hougoumont and gets back on his feet at the rostrum. That is how progress works. No tool is wrong for this particular labourer. It adapts to its divine labour, without being put off, both the man who bounded over the Alps and the poor doddering old invalid of father Élysée.7 It makes use of the gout sufferer as it does of the conqueror; the conqueror outside France, the gout sufferer inside. In cutting short the demolition of the European thrones by the sword, Waterloo had no other effect than to keep up the work of revolution by other means. The swordsmen have finished, it is the thinkers’ turn. The century that Waterloo tried to put an end to walked all over it and went on its way. This sinister victory has been defeated by liberty.

Briefly, and incontestably, what triumphed at Waterloo, what smiled behind Wellington, what brought him all the batons of the marshals of Europe, including, they say, the baton of the maréchal de France,8 what gleefully wheeled in barrows of dirt and bones to build the lion’s knoll, what triumphantly wrote on the pedestal the date June 18, 1815, what encouraged Blücher as he hacked into the rout, what from the height of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean looked down over France as though looking down over some prey, was the counterrevolution. It was the counterrevolution that mumbled that infamous word: dismemberment. Reaching Paris, it saw the crater from close up, it felt the ashes burning its feet and had second thoughts. It reverted to stammering about a charter.

Let us see Waterloo for what it is and nothing more. A deliberate bid for liberty—not at all. The counterrevolution was unintentionally liberal the same way that, through a corresponding phenomenon, Napoléon was unintentionally revolutionary. On June 18, 1815, Robespierre on horseback was thrown from the saddle.

A FRESH BOUT OF DIVINE RIGHT

IT WAS THE end of the dictatorship. And with it, a whole European system fell apart.

The Empire faded to a shadow that resembled that of the dying Roman world. An abyss opened up again as in the days of the barbarians. Only the barbarism of 1815, which should be called by its pet name, the counterrevolution, lacked stamina, soon ran out of puff and pulled up short. The Empire, we must admit, was cried over, and cried over by heroic eyes. If there is glory in the sword turned sceptre, the Empire had been glory itself. It had spread over the earth all the light that tyranny can provide. A sombre light. We might even go so far as to say, a dark light. Compared to the light of day, it is night. The disappearance of the night had the effect of an eclipse.

Louis XVIII returned to Paris. The going round in circles of July 8 obliterated the zeal of March 20. The Corsican became the antithesis of the man from the Béarn.1 The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was white.2 Exile sat in state on the throne. Hartwell’s3 pinewood card table took up position in front of Louis XIV’s fleur-de-lis-patterned armchair. People talked about Bouvines and Fontenoy4 as yesterday’s news, Austerlitz being entirely out of date. The altar and the throne fraternized majestically. One of the most uncontested forms of salvation of nineteenth-century society set itself up in France and on the Continent. Europe wore the white cockade.5 Trestaillon6 became a celebrity. The saying non pluribus impar7 cropped up again in the stone rays representing a sunburst on the façade of the quai d’Orsay barracks. Where there had been the Imperial Guard, there was now a Maison Rouge.8 The arc du Carrousel, completely loaded with ill-gotten victories, feeling out of place among all these novelties and a bit ashamed, perhaps, of Marengo and Arcola, saved face with a statue of the duc d’Angoulême.9 The cemetery of the Madeleine, that terrible potter’s field of ‘93,10 was covered over with marble and jasper, since the bones of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were in that dust. In the moat of Vincennes, a monumental pillar rose out of the ground recalling the fact that the duc d’Enghien11 had died in the very same month Napoléon had been crowned. Pope Pius VII,12 who performed this coronation hot on the heels of that death, calmly blessed the fall as he had blessed the rise. There was in Schönbrunn Castle a little shadow four years old whom it was seditious to call the king of Rome.13 And these things were done and those kings took their thrones back and the master of Europe was thrown in a cage and the old regime became the new regime and all the light and all the shadow of the earth swapped places all because, one summer afternoon, a shepherd boy had said to a Prussian in a wood: “Go this way, not that!” This 1815 was a gloomy sort of spring. The old unhealthy and poisonous realities decked themselves out in new appearances. Dishonesty espoused 1789, divine right hid itself behind a charter, fictions made themselves constitutional, prejudices, superstitions, and ulterior motives, taking Article 1414 to heart, cloaked themselves in liberalism. The snakes shed their skins.

Man had been both aggrandized and belittled at once by Napoléon. The ideal, under this reign of material splendour, went by the strange name of ideology that was bestowed upon it. It was serious recklessness on the part of a great man to scoff at the future. Yet the people, that cannon fodder so in love with the cannoneer, looked around for him. Where is he? What is he doing? Napoléon is dead, said a passerby to one of the war wounded from Marengo and Waterloo. “Him, dead!” cried the soldier. “That’s how well you know him!” People’s imaginations15 defied this man struck down. The heart of Europe, after Waterloo, was black. Something enormous remained empty for a long time when Napoléon vanished.

The kings threw themselves into the vacuum. Old Europe took advantage of it to reform itself. There was a Holy Alliance16—the Belle-Alliance that the fatal field of Waterloo foretold.

In the face of this antique Europe reformed, the outlines of a new France took shape. The future, scorned by the emperor, made its entrance. It had plastered on its forehead that star, Liberty. The ardent eyes of the younger generations turned toward it. What was strange was that they fell in love with both the future, Liberty, and the past, Napoléon, at the same time. The defeat had magnified the defeated out of all proportion. Bonaparte fallen seemed taller than Napoléon on his feet. Those who had triumphed took fright. England had him guarded by Hudson Lowe and France had him spied on by Montchenu.17 His folded arms became the terror of thrones. Alexander18 called him “my insomnia.” This fear stemmed from the whiff of revolution he had about him. Which explains and excuses Bonapartist liberalism.19 This phantom made the Old World quake in its boots. The kings reigned uncomfortably, with the rock of Saint Helena on the horizon.

While Napoléon lay dying at Longwood, the sixty thousand men fallen in the field of Waterloo quietly rotted away and something of their peacefulness spread over the world. The Congress of Vienna20 made the treaties of 1815 out of it and Europe called this the Restoration.

So that is what Waterloo is.

But what does that matter to eternity? That whole tempest, that whole cloud, the war and after it the peace, the whole shadow-play, did not darken for a moment the gleam of the immense eye before which an aphid hopping from one blade of grass to another is equal to the eagle flying from spire to spire among the towers of Notre-Dame.

THE BATTLEFIELD BY NIGHT

LET’S GO BACK—it is a requirement of this book—to that fatal field of battle.

On June 18, 1815, there was a full moon. The brightness favoured Blücher’s ferocious pursuit, gave away the traces of those fleeing, delivered that hopeless mass to the bloodthirsty Prussian cavalry, and aided and abetted the massacre. Night sometimes enters into such tragic collaboration with disasters.

When the last cannonball had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean remained deserted.

The English occupied the French camp, it being the usual observance of victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished. They set up their bivouac on the other side of Rossomme. The Prussians, let loose on the fugitives, drove on. Wellington went into the village of Waterloo to draft his report to Lord Bathurst.

If ever the sic vos non vobis1 was applicable, it surely is to the village of Waterloo. Waterloo did not do a thing and it was two miles from the action. Mont-Saint-Jean was shelled, Hougoumont was set on fire, Papelotte was set on fire, Planchenoit was set on fire, La Haie-Sainte was stormed, La Belle-Alliance saw the two victors embrace; yet these names are scarcely known and Waterloo, which played no role in the battle, takes all the credit for it.

We are not among those who flatter war; when the occasion arises, we say what we think of it to its face. War can be appallingly beautiful and we have not tried to hide this; it can also be, I think we all agree, somewhat ugly. One of its surprisingly ugly aspects is the prompt stripping of the dead after victory. The dawn that follows a battle always rises over bare corpses.

Who does this? Who so tarnishes triumph? Whose is the vile hand that furtively slips into victory’s pocket? Who are these crooks on the job behind glory’s back? Some philosophers, Voltaire among them, assert that it is precisely these people who make glory what it is. They are the same people, they say, there are no extras, those still standing loot those lying on the ground. The hero by day is the vampire by night. After all, a person has the right to rob a corpse he has made. As for us, we do not think so. For the same hand to gather laurels and steal a dead man’s shoes seems inconceivable to us.

What is certain is that, normally, after the victors come the thieves. But let’s exonerate the soldier, particularly the contemporary soldier, from such a charge.

Every army has a rear end and that is where the accusation should lie. Beings like bats, part brigand, part valet, every species of rodent engendered by this twilight we call war: wearers of uniforms who do not fight, would-be malingerers, dreadful walking wounded; shady canteen attendants, trotting along on little carts, sometimes with their wives, stealing things they later sell on; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers; scum, marauders … Once upon a time—we are not speaking of the present day—armies on the march dragged all that straggling along, so much so that these camp followers were known in the trade as “stragglers.” No army or nation was responsible for these creatures; they spoke Italian and followed the Germans; they spoke French and followed the English. It was by one of these miserable wretches, a Spanish camp follower who spoke French, that the marquis de Fervacques,2 hoodwinked by the man’s Picard gobbledygook and so taking him for one of ours, was treacherously killed and robbed on the battlefield itself, on the night that followed the victory of Cerisoles. From looting the looter was born. The hateful maxim “Live off your enemy” produced that leper that only strong discipline could cure. There are reputations that deceive; we don’t always know why certain generals, and great ones at that, have been so popular. Turenne was adored by his soldiers because he tolerated pillaging; allowing wrongdoing is part of being good-hearted; Turenne was so good-hearted he let the Palatinate3 be put to the fire and to the sword. You used to see more or fewer marauders tagging along behind armies depending on whether the chief was more or less strict. Hoche and Marceau4 had no camp followers; Wellington, we gladly do him this justice, had few.

But on the night of June 18–19, they stripped the dead clean. Wellington was firm, and the order was to put to death anyone caught in the act; but plunder is tenacious. The marauders flew off to one corner of the battlefield while they were being shot in another.

The moonlight was sinister on that particular plain.

Around midnight, a man was prowling or, rather, creeping along the sunken Ohain road. To all appearances, he was one of those people we have just described, neither English nor French, neither peasant nor soldier, less man than ghoul, attracted by a nose for the dead, having theft for victory and coming to raid Waterloo. He was dressed in a smock that looked a bit like a greatcoat, he was both anxious and audacious, he crept forward but kept looking around behind him as he went. What was this man? The night probably knew more about him than the day. He didn’t have any kind of bag, but obviously had big pockets under his greatcoat. Now and again, he stopped, studied the plain around him as though to see if he were being observed, suddenly crouched down, poked around something quiet and motionless on the ground, then stood up again and scuttled away. His slithering, his bearing, his mysterious darting movements caused him to resemble those crepuscular spectres that haunt ruins and that old Norman legends call Alleurs—goers.

Certain nocturnal wading birds make similar silhouettes in the wetlands.

A gaze attentively probing all the mist might have noticed at a distance, standing still and as though hidden behind a shack alongside the Nivelles road where it meets the road from Mont-Saint-Jean to Braine-l’Alleud, a sort of small sutler’s wagon with a tarred wickerwork cover, hitched to a starving nag grazing on nettles through her bit, and in this wagon a woman of some kind sitting on top of trunks and parcels. Maybe there was some connection between the wagon and the prowler.

The darkness was serene. Not a cloud in the sky. Too bad if the earth was red, the moon remained white regardless. Such is the indifference of the heavens. In the meadows, branches of trees broken by gunfire but not broken off, were hanging on by their bark and swaying gently in the night breeze. A breath, almost like sighing, stirred the undergrowth. There were ripples in the grass like souls departing.

You could dimly hear in the distance the coming and going of patrols and the circling watchmen of the English camp.

Hougoumont and La Haie-Sainte continued to burn, sending up two great flames, one in the west, one in the east, to which the ring of fires of the English bivouac, laid out in an immense semicircle over the hills along the horizon, had just linked up like a loosened ruby necklace with two red garnets at each end.

We’ve talked about the disaster of the Ohain path. What that death was like for so many brave men, the heart is too appalled to dwell on.

If anything is terrifying, if there is a reality that surpasses dream, it is this: to live, to see the sun, to be in full possession of manly vigour, to be full of health and joy, to laugh valiantly, to run toward the glory in front of you, dazzling, to feel in your chest lungs that breathe, a heart that beats, a will that reasons, to speak, to think, to love, to have a mother, to have a wife, to have children, to have the light, and all of a sudden, in the time it takes to let out a cry, in less than one minute flat, to tumble into an abyss, to fall, to roll, to crush, to be crushed, to see the blades of wheat, flowers, leaves, branches, and yet not to be able to stop yourself by grabbing any of them, to feel your sabre useless, men underneath you, horses on top of you, to flail about in vain, your bones broken by some kick in the dark, to feel a heel making your eyes pop out of your head, to bite into horseshoes with rage, to suffocate, to howl, to twist yourself in knots, to be at the bottom of all this and tell yourself: Just now I was one of the living!

Where this lamentable disaster had resounded with its death rattle, everything was now silent. The cutting made by the sunken road was filled up with horses and riders all inextricably jumbled. Horrific entanglement. The embankment was no more; dead bodies made the road level with the plain right to the very edge, like a perfectly measured bushel of barley. A pile of dead men on the top, a river of blood on the bottom; that is what the road was like on the night of June 18, 1815. The blood ran right up to the Nivelles road and welled up there in a huge pool in front of the felled trees that blocked the road at a spot still marked today. It is, as you will recall, at the opposite spot, going toward the Genappe road, that the cuirassiers collapsed. The density of corpses was in proportion to the depth of the sunken road. Round about the halfway mark, at the spot where it became a plain, where Delord’s division had passed, the layer of dead men thinned out a bit.

The night prowler the reader has just caught a glimpse of was headed that way. He was ferreting through that vast grave. He looked around. We don’t know what hideous review of the dead he passed. He was walking with his feet in the blood.

All of a sudden, he stopped in his tracks.

A few feet in front of him, in the sunken road, at the spot where the mound of the dead ended, from underneath this heap of men and horses, an open hand emerged, lit up by the moon.

The hand had something on its finger that shone; it was a gold ring.

The man bent down, stayed crouching a moment, and when he stood up again, there was no more ring on the hand.

He didn’t exactly stand up again; he stayed in a half-crouching position like that of a scared wildcat, turning his back on the heap of dead, scrutinizing the skyline, on his knees, the whole top part of his body being supported by his two index fingers on the ground, his head peering over the rim of the sunken road. The four paws of the jackal are just right for certain purposes.

When he had set his course, he stood up.

At that instant he nearly jumped out of his skin. He could feel someone grab him from behind.

He wheeled round; the open hand had closed again, seizing the lapel of his greatcoat.

An honest man would have taken fright. This man burst out laughing.

“I’ll be buggered,” he said, “it’s only the dead man. I’d prefer a ghost to a gendarme any day.”

But the hand relaxed and released him. Effort is quickly exhausted in the grave.

“God!” the prowler went on. “Can this dead man be alive? Let’s have a closer look.”

He bent down again, fumbled in the heap, removed whatever was in the way, took the hand, grabbed the arm, freed the head, pulled out the body, and a few seconds later dragged into the darkness of the sunken road a man who was inanimate—or at least senseless. It was a cuirassier, an officer, even an officer of some rank; a big gold epaulet poked out from beneath his cuirass; this officer no longer had a helmet. A furious cut of the sword had slashed his face and you could not see it for blood. Yet it didn’t look like he had any broken limbs, and by a stroke of luck, if we may use such a term here, the bodies had arched above him in such a way as to prevent him from being crushed. His eyes were closed.

He had on his cuirass the silver cross of the Légion d’Honneur.

The prowler ripped the cross off and it disappeared into one of the gaping holes of his greatcoat.

After that, he felt around in the officer’s fob pocket, felt a watch in it and took it. Then he fumbled in the waistcoat, found a purse there and pocketed it.

As he reached this phase in the assistance he was offering the dying man, the officer opened his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said feebly.

The roughness of the man handling him, the freshness of the night, the fact of being able to breathe freely, had brought him to his senses.

The prowler did not answer. He raised his head. The sound of footfalls could be heard on the plain, probably some patrol approaching.

The officer murmured, for there was still agony in his voice: “Who won the battle?”

“The English,” replied the prowler.

The officer went on: “Look in my pockets. You’ll find a purse and a watch. Take them.”

This had already been done.

The prowler pretended to do what he was told and said: “There’s nothing there.”

“I’ve been robbed,” the officer went on. “I’m so sorry. You could have had them.”

The tread of the patrol was becoming more and more distinct.

“Someone’s coming,” said the prowler, making a move as though to go.

The officer, painfully raising his arm, held him back.

“You saved my life. Who are you?”

The prowler replied fast and low: “I was, like you, in the French army. I must leave you. If they catch me, they’ll shoot me. I’ve saved your life. Now you’re on your own.”

“What’s your rank?”

“Sergeant.”

“What’s your name?”

“Thénardier.”

“I won’t forget that name,” said the officer. “And you, you remember mine. My name is Pontmercy.”