Waterloo Read online

  But at about four o'clock the English line wavered. There was suddenly nothing to be seen on the high ground of the plateau but the guns and gun-crews. The infantry regiments, unable to withstand the hail of French cannon and musketry fire, had taken refuge in the depression which the farm lane of Mont-Saint-Jean still crosses. There was a general movement of withdrawal. Wellington's battle-line was crumbling. 'It's the beginning of the retreat!' Napoleon cried.

  Napoleon is well-pleased

  Although he was a sick man and troubled by a local ailment which made riding uncomfortable, the Emperor had never been in higher spirits than on that day. Since the morning his inscrutable countenance had worn a smile. The man of marble, the profound visionary, was blindly radiant on that day of 18 June 1815; the frowning commander of Austerlitz was happy at Waterloo. Thus does Destiny deceive us; our joys are shadows, the last laugh is God's.

  'Ridet Caesar, Pompieus flebit - if Caesar laughs Pompey will weep,' said the men of the Fulminatrix legion. Pompey did not weep on this occasion, but it is certain that Caesar laughed.

  It had seemed to Napoleon, since he and Bertrand had ridden after midnight through thunder and rain to the heights near Rossomme, thence to survey the line of English camp-fires lighting the horizon from Frischemont to Braine-l'Alleud, that the appointment with destiny fixed by him for the coming day on the field of Waterloo had been rightly determined. He had reined in his horse and sat for some time motionless gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder; and, fatalist that he was, he had been heard to mutter the cryptic words, 'We are of one mind.' But Napoleon was mistaken. Destiny and he were no longer of one mind.

  He had spent no time at all in sleep, every minute of that night bringing a new cause for satisfaction. He had made the round of the picket-lines, pausing here and there to talk to the men. At half past two, near the wood of Hougomont, he heard the sound of a marching column and for a moment had thought that Wellington was already withdrawing. 'It's the English rear-guard getting ready to clear out,' he said to Bertrand. 'I shall capture the six thousand English who have just landed at Ostend.' He was talking expansively, with the ardour he had shown when they disembarked in the Golfe Juan on 1 March, and pointing to a cheering peasant he exclaimed, 'There you are, Bertrand - a reinforcement already!' On this night of 17 June he mocked Wellington, saying, 'That Englishman needs a lesson.' The rain fell more heavily and there was a crash of thunder as he spoke.

  At three-thirty that morning he lost one of his illusions. The officers sent out to reconnoitre reported that there was no movement in the enemy lines. Nothing was stirring, no camp-fires had been extinguished. Wellington's army was asleep; a profound silence reigned on earth while the skies resounded. At four o'clock a peasant was brought in who had acted as guide to an English cavalry column, probably Vivian's brigade, on its way to take up its position in the village of Ohain, on the extreme left. At five o'clock two Belgian deserters were brought in who said that the English army was awaiting battle. 'So much the better!' cried Napoleon. 'I'd sooner bowl them over than drive them back.'

  At daybreak he dismounted on to the mud of the grass verge at the turn of the road from Plancenoit. He sent to Rossomme farm for a kitchen table and chair, and there seated himself, with a truss of straw for a footstool and a map of the battlefield spread out in front of him, saying to Soult, 'Joli echiquier' - 'a nice chess-board!'

  Owing to the rain and the state of the roads the commissariat convoys had not arrived; the soldiers had had little sleep and were wet and hungry; but this did not deter Napoleon from exclaiming blithely to Ney, 'Our chances are ninety in a hundred.' Breakfast was served to the Emperor at eight o'clock and he invited a number of his generals to join him. Over breakfast they discussed the fact that two nights previously Wellington had attended the Duchess of Richmond's ball in Brussels, and Soult, that rough warrior with the face of an archbishop, said, 'The real ball will be held today.' Napoleon laughed at Ney, who said, 'Wellington won't be such a fool as to wait for your majesty.' This was the kind of talk he enjoyed. 'He loved to tease,' said Fleury de Chaboulon. 'A lively humour was at the root of his nature,' said Gourgand; and Benjamin Constant said, 'He was full of jokes, more crude than witty.' This aspect of the great man deserves to be stressed. It was he who called his grenadiers 'grognards' and pinched their ears or tweaked their moustaches - 'He was always up to some game with us,' one of them said. During the mysterious return from Elba to France, when the French brig-of-war Zephir closed with the brig Inconstant, in which Napoleon was concealed, and asked for news of him, Napoleon himself, wearing the bee-embroidered hat with a white-and-purple cockade which he had devised in Elba, snatched up the speaking-trumpet and shouted, laughing: 'The Emperor is in excellent health.' The man who can laugh in this fashion feels himself to be in harmony with events. Napoleon had several bursts of laughter during that Waterloo breakfast. When the meal was over he was silent for a quarter of an hour; then two generals seated themselves on a truss of straw with writing-pads on their knee and he dictated the order of battle.

  At nine o'clock, when the French army moved off in five columns, divisions in double lines, artillery between the brigades, bands at the head filling the air with the roll of drums and the clamour of trumpets, a powerful, vast, and joyous sea of helmets, sabres, and bayonets extended to the horizon, the Emperor was so moved that he twice cried: 'Magnificent! Magnificent!'

  Incredible as it may seem, in the period between nine and ten-thirty the whole army took up its positions, being arrayed in six lines forming, in the Emperor's phrase, 'a pattern of six Vs'. In the profound lull preceding the storm, while he watched the deployment of the three batteries of twelve-centimetre guns detached from the three corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau with orders to open the attack by bombarding Mont-Saint-Jean at the intersection of the Nivelles and Genappe roads, the Emperor clapped Haxo on the shoulder, saying, 'Two dozen very pretty girls, General.'

  Confident of the outcome, he had a smile of encouragement for the company of sappers from the First Corps, detailed to dig themselves in on Mont-Saint-Jean directly the village was taken. Only one momentary shadow marred the serenity of his mood. Over to his left, in the place where there is today a vast graveyard, he saw the Scots Greys drawn up on their splendid horses, and the sight drew from him an expression of regret - 'It's a pity,' he said.

  Then he mounted his own horse and rode to a point a little in front of Rossomme. This narrow strip of grass to the right of the road from Genappe to Brussels was his second observation-post during the battle. (The third, which he went to at seven in the evening, was between La-Belle-Alliance and La-Haie-Sainte.) It is a terribly exposed place, a high, flat-topped mound which still exists, behind which the Imperial Guard was massed in a small depression in the plain. Bullets ricocheted up from the road surface, and as at Brienne the air above his head was filled with the whistle of grape-shot and musketry. The twisted remnants of shot and shell, rusted sabre-blades, and the like were later retrieved from almost the spot where his horse stood, and a few years ago a shell was dug up there with a damaged fuse and its explosive charge intact. It was here that the Emperor said to his guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, roped to the saddle of a hussar, who ducked at every salvo and tried to hide behind the horses, 'Idiot! You ought to be ashamed. Do you want to be shot in the back?' The writer of these lines, digging in the dusty earth of that hillock, himself found the neck of an exploded bomb eaten with the rust of forty-six years, and fragments of metal that broke like twigs in his hands.

  The rolling countryside is no longer what it was on that June day when Napoleon and Wellington met. It has been disfigured for its own glorification, robbed of its natural contours to make a funeral monument, so that history, put out of countenance, can no longer recognize herself. Returning to Waterloo two years later, Wellington exclaimed: 'They have changed my battlefield!' Where the great pyramid of earth surmounted by a lion now stands there was a ridge with a negotiable s
lope on the side of the Nivelles road but what was almost an escarpment on the side of the Genappe road. Its height can be measured by the height of the two funeral mounds flanking the road from Genappe to Brussels, the one on the left the English memorial and that on the right the German. There is no French memorial. For France the whole plain is a graveyard. Thanks to the many thousand cartloads of earth which have made it into a pyramid 150 feet high and half a mile in circumference, the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by a gentle incline; but on the day of the battle the approaches were much steeper, particularly on the side of La-Haie-Sainte - so much so that the English guns could not see the farm in the depths of the valley, the centre of the struggle. Moreover the heavy rainfall had ploughed gulleys in the steep slopes, adding mud to the difficulties of the ascent.

  Along the crest of the ridge there ran a sort of trench, invisible to the observer at a distance, and this must be described.

  Braine-l'Alleud and Ohain are Belgian villages about four miles apart, hidden from one another by the contours of the land and linked by a road that runs like a furrow through the rolling countryside, sometimes following the contours and sometimes buried between hills, so that at many points it is a ravine. In 1815, as now, the road crosses the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between the Genappe and Nivelles highways; but whereas it is now level with the surrounding land, it was then a sunken lane. Its two embankments have been removed to make the funeral mound. The greater part of the road was and still is embanked, sometimes to a depth of a dozen feet, with steep, overhanging sides which were liable to crumble under heavy rain. There were accidents. The road was so narrow at the approach to Braine-l'Alleud that in February 1637 a certain Monsieur Bernard Debrye, a Brussels merchant, was run over and killed by a farm-cart - a fact recorded by the stone cross standing near the cemetery. And it was so deep on the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau that a peasant named Mathieu Nicaise was killed by a landslide in 1783; but the cross commemorating this event vanished in the clearance, and nothing of it now remains but its overturned pedestal on the grassy slope to the left of the lane running from La-Haie-Sainte to the Mont-Saint-Jean farm.

  On the day of the battle nothing gave warning of this sunken lane flanking the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean; a deep trench running along the escarpment, a hidden furrow in the earth, invisible and therefore terrible.

  The Emperor questions the guide, Lacoste

  So on that morning of Waterloo Napoleon was well content, and with reason. His plan of battle, as we have said, was admirable.

  Nor did the many vicissitudes of the day dismay him: the holding of Hougomont, the stubborn resistance of La-Haie-Sainte; the death of Bauduin and wounding of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was broken; the fatal negligence of Guilleminot, who had neither grenades nor powder bags; the bogging down of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted guns overturned by Uxbridge in a sunken lane; the relative ineffectiveness of explosives falling in the sodden earth of the English lines, so that grape-shot wasted itself in a shower of mud; Pire's failure at Braine-l'Alleud and the virtual wiping out of fifteen cavalry squadrons; the English right little shaken, and the left weakly assailed; Ney's strange blunder in advancing the four divisions of the First Corps en masse instead of in echelon, twenty-seven lines of two hundred men exposed to cannon-shot and rapid musket-fire, so that their attack was thrown into disorder, the supporting batteries on the flank uncovered, Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte threatened and Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Herculean product of the Ecole Polytechnique, wounded at the moment when he was breaking down the gate of La-Haie-Sainte with an axe under the plunging fire from the English fortifications barring the turn in the road from Genappe to Brussels; Marcoquet's division caught between infantry and cavalry, mown down at point-blank range in a cornfield by Best and Pack, sabred by Ponsonby, and its battery of seven guns spiked; the Prince of Saxe-Weimar standing his ground against the Comte d'Erlon, Frischemont, and Smohain; the colours of the 105th and 45th line regiments captured; the Prussian Black Hussar captured by scouts of the flying column of chasseurs scouring the countryside between Wavre and Planchenoit, and the disturbing things this prisoner told them; Grouchy's late arrival; the fifteen hundred men killed in less than an hour in the orchard of Hougomont, and the eighteen hundred killed at La-Haie-Sainte in an even shorter time - all these stormy events, passing in the fog of battle beneath Napoleon's gaze, seemed scarcely to trouble him or cloud his aspect of imperial certainty. He was accustomed to see war as a whole, never casting up the columns of profit and loss. The figures mattered little to him provided they added up to the right total, which was victory. Early setbacks did not shake him, since he believed himself to be master of the conclusion. He could afford to wait; he was beyond question the equal of Destiny, to whom he seemed to say, 'You would not dare.'

  A creature of light and dark, Napoleon believed himself to be protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought he had, a connivance on his side, one may almost say a complicity in the ordering of events akin to the invulnerability of the antique gods. Yet, with Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind him, he might well have had his doubts about Waterloo - as though a mysterious frown had appeared in the depths of the sky.

  But when Wellington recoiled, Napoleon was thrilled. He watched the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean being rapidly evacuated and the English battle-front disappear. It rallied but kept under cover. The Emperor rose in his stirrups with the light of victory in his eyes. He saw Wellington driven into the forest of Soignes and there destroyed, the final crushing of England by France; Crecy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies revenged. The man of Marengo would exact payment for Agincourt.

  Contemplating this fateful prospect, he swept the field of battle for the last time with his glass. His Guard, drawn up with grounded arms on the lower slope behind him, watched him with an almost religious awe. He was intently studying the details of the terrain: slopes and ridges, the odd clump of trees, the barley-field, the footpath, down to the last blade of grass. In particular he examined the barriers of tree-trunks erected by the English across the two highways - the one on the Genappe road overlooking La-Haie-Sainte and armed with two guns which were the only pieces of English artillery bearing on the deepest sector of the battlefield, and the one on the road to Nivelles, behind which gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chasse's brigade. Close by the latter stood the old, white-washed Chapel of St Nicholas, on a bend in the lane running to Braine-l'Alleud. Napoleon bent down and put a question to the guide, Lacoste, who answered with a shake of his head - probably an act of deliberate treachery.

  Then the Emperor straightened up in the saddle and for a moment sat pondering. Wellington had begun to withdraw: all that remained was to turn withdrawal into rout.

  He turned abruptly and ordered a dispatch-rider to ride post-haste to Paris with the news that the battle was won.*

  He was the genius who commands thunder, and he had his thunderbolt. He ordered the cuirassiers under Milhaud to take the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean.

  The unexpected

  There were three thousand five hundred of them, extending over a front of about a mile; twenty-six squadrons of big men on enormous horses. Behind them, in support, were Lefebvre-Desnouettes's division, a picked company of gendarmes, and the contingents of the chasseurs and lancers of the Guard. They wore plumeless helmets and metal breastplates and carried cavalry muskets and long sabres. The whole army had watched in admiration when they moved into position at nine o'clock that morning, the dense column with one artillery battery on its flank and another at its centre, deploying in two ranks between the Genappe road and Frischemont to constitute the powerful and shrewdly placed second line which, with Kellermann's cuirassiers on its left wing and Milhaud's on its right, had so to speak two wings of iron.

  The Emperor's aide-de-camp, Bertrand, brought them the order. Ney drew his sword and placed himself at the head of the squadrons as they went into action.

  It was an
awe-inspiring sight.

  The great force of cavalry, sabres raised and standards fluttering, formed up in columns by divisions, moved as one man down the slope of the Belle-Alliance hill, vanished into the smoke of that fearsome valley where so many men had already fallen, emerged on the other side still in compact, orderly ranks and rode at a canter through a hail of fire up the muddy slope of the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau. They rode steadily, menacingly, imperturbably, the thunder of their horses resounding in the intervals of musket and cannon-fire. Being two divisions they were in two columns, Wathier's division on the right, Delord's on the left.

  At a distance they resembled prodigious snakes of steel writhing across the battlefield and up towards the plateau. Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great Moskowa redoubt by the heavy cavalry. Murat was absent, but Ney was there. The great mass seemed to have become a monster with a single soul. The separate squadrons rose and fell like the rings of a serpent, disclosing gaps as now and then they became visible through the smoke in a confusion of helmets, cries, sabres, the heaving rumps of horses, amid the cannon and the trumpet-blast, a disciplined and dreadful tumult with breastplates gleaming like a serpent's scales.

  These are tales that seem to belong to another age, legends of centaurs, titans with the heads of men and the bodies of horses galloping to the assault of Olympus, terrible, invulnerable, and sublime, both gods and beasts.

  By a strange coincidence the attack of twenty-six squadrons was to be met by the same number of enemy battalions. Behind the ridge of the plateau and in the shadow of the masked battery, Wellington's infantry was formed up in thirteen squares, two battalions in each, the squares being arrayed in two lines of seven and six. Thirteen squares of motionless, resolute men waiting with levelled muskets for what was to come. They could not see their attackers, nor could the attackers see them. They could only hear the rising tide of men, the growing thunder of hooves, the jingle and the clatter of harness, the growl of a savage breath. There was a dreadful silence, and suddenly there appeared on the crest of the ridge a long line of uplifted arms brandishing sabres, helmets, trumpets, grey-moustached faces. With a cry of 'Vive l'empereur!' the cavalry, like the coming of an earthquake, swept on to the plateau.