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_ The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure to those who
won it as to those who lost it. For Napoleon it was a panic;[10]
Blucher sees nothing in it but fire; Wellington understands
nothing in regard to it. Look at the reports. The bulletins
are confused, the commentaries involved. Some stammer, others lisp.
Jomini divides the battle of Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts
it up into three changes; Charras alone, though we hold another
judgment than his on some points, seized with his haughty glance
the characteristic outlines of that catastrophe of human genius
in conflict with divine chance. All the other historians suffer from
being somewhat dazzled, and in this dazzled state they fumble about.
It was a day of lightning brilliancy; in fact, a crumbling of
the military monarchy which, to the vast stupefaction of kings,
drew all the kingdoms after it--the fall of force, the defeat of war.
[10] "A battle terminated, a day finished, false measures repaired,
greater successes assured for the morrow,--all was lost by a moment
of panic, terror."--Napoleon, Dictees de Sainte Helene.
In this event, stamped with superhuman necessity, the part played
by men amounts to nothing.
If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blucher, do we thereby deprive
England and Germany of anything? No. Neither that illustrious
England nor that august Germany enter into the problem of Waterloo.
Thank Heaven, nations are great, independently of the lugubrious
feats of the sword. Neither England, nor Germany, nor France
is contained in a scabbard. At this epoch when Waterloo is
only a clashing of swords, above Blucher, Germany has Schiller;
above Wellington, England has Byron. A vast dawn of ideas is the
peculiarity of our century, and in that aurora England and Germany
have a magnificent radiance. They are majestic because they think.
The elevation of level which they contribute to civilization is intrinsic
with them; it proceeds from themselves and not from an accident.
The aggrandizement which they have brought to the nineteenth
century has not Waterloo as its source. It is only barbarous
peoples who undergo rapid growth after a victory. That is the
temporary vanity of torrents swelled by a storm. Civilized people,
especially in our day, are neither elevated nor abased by the good
or bad fortune of a captain. Their specific gravity in the human
species results from something more than a combat. Their honor,
thank God! their dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not
numbers which those gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the
lottery of battles. Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered.
There is less glory and more liberty. The drum holds its peace;
reason takes the word. It is a game in which he who loses wins.
Let us, therefore, speak of Waterloo coldly from both sides.
Let us render to chance that which is due to chance, and to God
that which is due to God. What is Waterloo? A victory? No. The
winning number in the lottery.
The quine[11] won by Europe, paid by France.
[11] Five winning numbers in a lottery.
It was not worth while to place a lion there.
Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history.
Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites.
Never did God, who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking
contrast, a more extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision,
foresight, geometry, prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared,
with an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy,
which takes advantage of the ground, tactics, which preserve the
equilibrium of battalions, carnage, executed according to rule,
war regulated, watch in hand, nothing voluntarily left to chance,
the ancient classic courage, absolute regularity; on the other,
intuition, divination, military oddity, superhuman instinct,
a flaming glance, an indescribable something which gazes like
an eagle, and which strikes like the lightning, a prodigious art
in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries of a profound soul,
associated with destiny; the stream, the plain, the forest,
the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot going
even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in a
star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it.
Wellington was the Bareme of war; Napoleon was its Michael Angelo;
and on this occasion, genius was vanquished by calculation.
On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact calculator
who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come.
Wellington expected Blucher; he came.
Wellington is classic war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at his
dawning, had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him superbly.
The old owl had fled before the young vulture. The old tactics
had been not only struck as by lightning, but disgraced. Who was
that Corsican of six and twenty? What signified that splendid
ignoramus, who, with everything against him, nothing in his favor,
without provisions, without ammunition, without cannon, without shoes,
almost without an army, with a mere handful of men against masses,
hurled himself on Europe combined, and absurdly won victories
in the impossible? Whence had issued that fulminating convict,
who almost without taking breath, and with the same set of combatants
in hand, pulverized, one after the other, the five armies of the emperor
of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on Alvinzi, Wurmser on Beaulieu,
Melas on Wurmser, Mack on Melas? Who was this novice in war
with the effrontery of a luminary? The academical military school
excommunicated him, and as it lost its footing; hence, the implacable
rancor of the old Caesarism against the new; of the regular sword
against the flaming sword; and of the exchequer against genius.
On the 18th of June, 1815, that rancor had the last word.
and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Arcola,
it wrote: Waterloo. A triumph of the mediocres which is sweet
to the majority. Destiny consented to this irony. In his decline,
Napoleon found Wurmser, the younger, again in front of him.
In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of Wellington.
Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the second.
That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is England;
the English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood;
the superb thing about England there, no offence to her, was herself.
It was not her captain; it was her army.
Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst,
that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815,
was a "detestable army." What does that sombre intermingling
of bones buried beneath the furrows of Waterloo think of that?
England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington. To make
Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington is nothing
but a hero like many another. Those Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards,
those regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack
and Kempt, that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders
playing the pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions
of Rylandt, those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to
handle a musket holding their own against Essling's and Rivoli's
old troops,--that is what was grand. Wellington was tenacious;
in that lay his merit, and we are not seeking to lessen it:
but the least of his foot-soldiers and of his cavalry would have been
as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth as much as the Iron Duke.
As for us, all our glorification goes to the English soldier,
to the English army, to the English people. If trophy there be,
it is to England that the trophy is due. The column of Waterloo would
be more just, if, instead of the figure of a man, it bore on high
the statue of a people.
But this great England will be angry at what we are saying here.
She still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789,
the feudal illusion. She believes in heredity and hierarchy.
This people, surpassed by none in power and glory, regards itself
as a nation, and not as a people. And as a people, it willingly
subordinates itself and takes a lord for its head. As a workman,
it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier, it allows itself
to be flogged.
It will be remembered, that at the battle of Inkermann a sergeant
who had, it appears, saved the army, could not be mentioned
by Lord Paglan, as the English military hierarchy does not permit
any hero below the grade of an officer to be mentioned in the reports.
That which we admire above all, in an encounter of the nature of Waterloo,
is the marvellous cleverness of chance. A nocturnal rain, the wall
of Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon,
Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bulow's guide enlightening him,--
the whole of this cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.
On the whole, let us say it plainly, it was more of a massacre
than of a battle at Waterloo.
Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one which has the smallest
front for such a number of combatants. Napoleon three-quarters
of a league; Wellington, half a league; seventy-two thousand
combatants on each side. From this denseness the carnage arose.
The following calculation has been made, and the following
proportion established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French,
fourteen per cent; Russians, thirty per cent; Austrians,
forty-four per cent. At Wagram, French, thirteen per cent;
Austrians, fourteen. At the Moskowa, French, thirty-seven per cent;
Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French, thirteen per cent;
Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo, French, fifty-six
per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo, forty-one per
cent; one hundred and forty-four thousand combatants; sixty thousand dead.
To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs to the earth,
the impassive support of man, and it resembles all plains.
At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from it;
and if a traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches, if he
dreams like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination
of the catastrophe takes possession of him. The frightful 18th
of June lives again; the false monumental hillock disappears,
the lion vanishes in air, the battle-field resumes its reality,
lines of infantry undulate over the plain, furious gallops traverse
the horizon; the frightened dreamer beholds the flash of sabres,
the gleam of bayonets, the flare of bombs, the tremendous interchange
of thunders; he hears, as it were, the death rattle in the depths
of a tomb, the vague clamor of the battle phantom; those shadows
are grenadiers, those lights are cuirassiers; that skeleton Napoleon,
that other skeleton is Wellington; all this no longer exists,
and yet it clashes together and combats still; and the ravines
are empurpled, and the trees quiver, and there is fury even in the
clouds and in the shadows; all those terrible heights, Hougomont,
Mont-Saint-Jean, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plancenoit, appear confusedly
crowned with whirlwinds of spectres engaged in exterminating each other. _
Read next: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK FIRST - WATERLOO: CHAPTER XVII. Is Waterloo to be considered Good?
Read previous: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK FIRST - WATERLOO: CHAPTER XV. Cambronne
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