________________________________________________
_ So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content.
He was right; the plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen,
really admirable.
The battle once begun, its very various changes,--the resistance
of Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin;
the disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's
brigade was shattered; Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he
had neither petard nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries;
the fifteen unescorted pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge;
the small effect of the bombs falling in the English lines, and there
embedding themselves in the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding
in producing volcanoes of mud, so that the canister was turned into
a splash; the uselessness of Pire's demonstration on Braine-l'Alleud;
all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost exterminated; the right
wing of the English badly alarmed, the left wing badly cut into;
Ney's strange mistake in massing, instead of echelonning the four
divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to grape-shot,
arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage of two hundred;
the frightful holes made in these masses by the cannon-balls;
attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenly unmasked on
their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised; Quiot repulsed;
Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the Polytechnic School,
wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an axe the door
of La Haie-Sainte under the downright fire of the English barricade
which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels;
Marcognet's division caught between the infantry and the cavalry,
shot down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best
and Pack, put to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of seven
pieces spiked; the Prince of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding,
in spite of the Comte d'Erlon, both Frischemont and Smohain;
the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the 45th captured; that black
Prussian hussar stopped by runners of the flying column of three
hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavre and Plancenoit;
the alarming things that had been said by prisoners; Grouchy's delay;
fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougomont in less
than an hour; eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter
time about La Haie-Sainte,--all these stormy incidents passing
like the clouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled
his gaze and had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty.
Napoleon was accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added
up the heart-rending details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered
little to him, provided that they furnished the total, victory;
he was not alarmed if the beginnings did go astray, since he
thought himself the master and the possessor at the end; he knew
how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question, and he
treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate, Thou wilt
not dare.
Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought himself
protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought
that he had, a connivance, one might almost say a complicity,
of events in his favor, which was equivalent to the invulnerability
of antiquity.
Nevertheless, when one has Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau
behind one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo.
A mysterious frown becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens.
At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered.
He suddenly beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared,
and the van of the English army disappear. It was rallying,
but hiding itself. The Emperor half rose in his stirrups.
The lightning of victory flashed from his eyes.
Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes
and destroyed--that was the definitive conquest of England by France;
it was Crecy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged.
The man of Marengo was wiping out Agincourt.
So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune,
swept his glass for the last time over all the points of the field
of battle. His guard, standing behind him with grounded arms,
watched him from below with a sort of religion. He pondered;
he examined the slopes, noted the declivities, scrutinized the
clumps of trees, the square of rye, the path; he seemed to be
counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness at the English
barricades of the two highways,--two large abatis of trees, that on
the road to Genappe above La Haie-Sainte, armed with two cannon,
the only ones out of all the English artillery which commanded the
extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelles
where gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chasse's brigade. Near this
barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white,
which stands at the angle of the cross-road near Braine-l'Alleud;
he bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide
made a negative sign with his head, which was probably perfidious.
The Emperor straightened himself up and fell to thinking.
Wellington had drawn back.
All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing him.
Napoleon turning round abruptly, despatched an express at full
speed to Paris to announce that the battle was won.
Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts.
He had just found his clap of thunder.
He gave orders to Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the table-land
of Mont-Saint-Jean. _
Read next: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK FIRST - WATERLOO: CHAPTER IX. The Unexpected
Read previous: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK FIRST - WATERLOO: CHAPTER VII.VNapoleon in a Good Humor
Table of content of Les Miserables
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
