Waterloo Read online

  But was there no cause for this total collapse of an army whose gallantry had astonished the world? Yes. The shadow of a momentous justice lay over Waterloo. It was the day of destiny, when a force greater than mankind prevailed. Hence the terrified bowing of heads, the surrender of so many noble spirits. The conquerors of Europe were stricken with helplessness, unable to say or do anything as they felt the weight of that terrible Presence. Hoc erat in fatis - so was it written! On that day the course of mankind was altered. Waterloo was the hinge of the nineteenth century. A great man had to disappear in order that a great century might be born. One who is Unanswerable had taken the matter in hand, and thus the panic of so many heroes is explained. It was not merely a shadow that fell upon Waterloo but a thunderbolt; it was God himself.

  At nightfall, in a field near Genappe, two officers, Bernard and Bertrand, came up with a haggard-eyed man who, having been borne thus far by the tide of defeat, had dismounted and, holding his horse by the bridle, was walking back alone in the direction of Waterloo. It was Napoleon, still trying to go forward, the giant somnambulist of a shattered dream.

  The last square

  A few squares of the French guards, as immobile in the rout as rocks in a torrent of water held out until nightfall. The coming of night meant the coming of death, and they waited unshakably for that double darkness to engulf them. Each individual regiment, sundered from the others and having no link with the army as a whole, died in its own way. They had taken up their last positions, some on the uplands of Rossomme, others on the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean; here, abandoned but still formidable, they suffered their final agony, and Ulm, Wagram, Jena, and Friedland died with them.

  By nine o'clock that evening only one square, at the foot of the plateau of the Mont-Saint-Jean, the slope scored by the hooves of the cuirassiers, was holding out against the concentrated artillery-fire of the victorious enemy. It was commanded by a little-known officer named Cambronne. With every burst of fire the square diminished but still it fought back, answering salvoes with rifle-fire, tightening its shrunken walls, while the fleeing men from other units, pausing to take breath, listened to the dwindling thunders of the battle amid the gathering night.

  When finally only a handful of men was left, the heaped dead more numerous than the living, the flag in tatters, the ammunition-less muskets become no more than cudgels, a kind of superstitious awe assailed the victors and the English guns held their fire. There was a momentary pause. Those last defenders saw as though it were a gathering of spectres the dark figures of their enemy closing in on them, men on horseback and guns outlined against the fading pallor of the sky, and over all the giant death's-head which is the ghost that haunts all battlefields. They could hear the sound of the guns being reloaded and see the lighted fuses gleaming like the eyes of tigers in the dusk. In this final moment, when all was in suspense, one of the English generals, Colville or Maitland, called out to them, 'Brave Frenchmen, will you not surrender?' Cambronne answered, 'Merde!'

  Cambronne

  From respect for the decencies of language this word, perhaps the greatest ever uttered by a Frenchman, is not repeated in the history books; the sublime is banned from the record. At our risk and peril we have defied the ban. Amid the giants of that day there was one greater than all others, and it was Cambronne.

  To speak the word and die, what can be greater than this? To accept death is to die, and it was not the fault of the man if, wounded, he nevertheless survived. The real victor of Waterloo was not the defeated Napoleon, or Wellington, who was so nearly defeated, or Blucher, who scarcely fought; it was Cambronne. Thus to defy the lightnings is to be victorious.

  To meet disaster in this fashion, challenging Fate itself, setting a springboard for the lion resurgent, hurling into the rainswept darkness that obscene retort that mocked the traitorous wall of Hougomont, the sunken lane of Ohain, the failure of Grouchy, the coming of Blucher; to incarnate irony at the mouth of the grave, staying erect when prostrate; to demolish the European coalition with a word, fling in the face of kings the cloaca known to the Caesars, make the crudest of words into the greatest by investing it with the splendour of France, insolently conclude Waterloo with mardi-gras, complete Leonidas with Rabelais, compress this victory in a single word that may not be spoken, losing the field but gaining history and at the end of carnage winning to one's side the hosts of laughter - this is sublime.

  There they were, the kings of Europe, the triumphant generals, those thundering Jupiters, with a hundred thousand men and a million more behind them, with the gaping guns and the lighted fuses. They had trampled down the Imperial Guard and the Grande Armee; they had set their foot on Napoleon; and now there was only Cambronne, the earthworm who still outfaced them, searching for a word as one may reach for a sword. The word was spat out of his mouth. He hurled his scorn at that prodigious, mediocre victory, that victory without victors, feeling its impact but knowing its hollowness. He did more than spit: borne down by the weight of numbers and material circumstance, he expressed in a word the spirit that transcends those things, and the word meant excrement. Let us repeat it, to do this was to conquer.

  The spirit of the greatest days visited that unknown man at that fateful moment. He found the word for Waterloo as Rouget de l'Isle had found the 'Marseillaise', in a breath of inspiration. The living breath passed through the ranks and the men shuddered and sang or uttered their death-cry. Cambronne's expression of giant contempt was hurled not merely at Europe in the name of the Empire, which would have been little enough: it was hurled at the past in the name of the Revolution; it was Danton speaking, Kleber bellowing defiance.

  At the word an English voice gave the order to fire and the batteries flamed in a last, terrible belching of grape-shot. The hillside trembled. For a time the scene was obscured by a dense cloud of smoke touched here and there by the rays of the rising moon, and when this drifted away it could be seen that there was nothing left. That formidable remnant had been annihilated. The four walls of the living fortress lay shattered on the ground, with only here and there a movement among the bodies of the dead. Thus did the legions of France, greater than the legions of Rome, expire on the rain-soaked, blood-soaked earth of the Mont-Saint-Jean, amid the darkened corn, at the place where now the post-cart passes at four in the morning on its way to Nivelles, with Joseph the postman blithely whipping up his horse.

  Quot libras in duce*

  The Battle of Waterloo is an enigma as incomprehensible to the winners as to the loser. To Napoleon it was a panic; Blucher saw it simply as a matter of fire-power, and Wellington did not understand it at all. We have only to study the accounts, the confused reports, the contradictory views. The French General, Jomini, distinguishes four crucial moments; the German, Muffling, divides it into three stages. Lieutenant-Colonel Charras, whose views we do not always share, is alone in discerning the true nature of that collapse of the human intelligence at odds with divine hazard. All other historians are in some degree bewildered by it and grope in their bewilderment. It was a momentous day indeed, the collapse of a militarist monarchy which, to the amazement of kings, involved every kingdom in the overthrow of armed force and the defeat of war.

  In an event of this nature, bearing the stamp of more than human necessity, the part played by man is negligible.

  If we deny to Wellington and Blucher all credit for the victory of Waterloo, do we in any way detract from the greatness of England and Germany? No. The greatness of those countries is in no way affected by the happening at Waterloo. Peoples are great, thank Heaven, irrespective of the grim chances of the sword. Neither England nor Germany nor France can be contained in a scabbard. Overshadowing Blucher, in that epoch when Waterloo was no more than a clashing of sabres, was the Germany of Goethe, and overshadowing Wellington was the England of Byron. A huge upsurging of ideas is the keynote of our century, and England and Germany each lends its own splendour to the light of the new dawn. They are illustrious because they think. The ennoble
ment which they bring to civilization is their own quality, born of themselves, not of any accident. Their increased greatness in the nineteenth century is not due to Waterloo. Only barbarian peoples are suddenly enhanced by victory, like streams swollen by a sudden downpour. Civilized peoples, particularly in our present age, neither rise nor sink according to the good or ill-fortune of a military leader. Their specific gravity in the human race is the result of something more than conflict. Their honour, thank God, their dignity, their genius and the light they shed, are not merely numbers drawn in the lottery of battle by those gamblers, the heroes and conquerors. Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voice of reason can be heard. It is a game of 'loser wins'. We must view Waterloo coolly in either aspect, rendering unto Chance what belongs to Chance and to God what belongs to God. It was not in the true sense a victory. It was a lucky throw of the dice.

  A throw of the dice won by Europe and paid for by France - scarcely worth erecting the effigy of a lion to mark the spot.

  It was the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and Wellington were not enemies but opposites. Never has God, who delights in antitheses, contrived a more striking contrast or a more extraordinary confrontation. On the one side precision, foresight, shrewd calculation, cool tenacity, and military correctitude; reserves husbanded, the way of retreat ensured, advantage taken of the terrain; warfare ordered by the book with nothing left to chance. On the other side intuition, divination, military unorthodoxy, more than human instinct, the eye of the eagle that strikes with lightning swiftness, prodigious art mingled with reckless impetuosity; all the mysteries of an unfathomable nature, the sense of kinship with Destiny; river, plain, forest, and hill summoned and in some sort forced into compliance; the despot tyrannizing over the battlefield, faith in a star mingled with military science, enriching but also undermining it. Wellington was the technician of war, Napoleon was its Michelangelo; and this time genius was vanquished by rule-of-thumb.

  Each side was awaiting someone, and it was the technician who calculated rightly. Napoleon awaited Grouchy, who did not come; Wellington awaited Blucher, who came.

  Wellington represented the revenge of classic warfare. Napoleon in his dawn had met it in Italy and superbly beaten it. The old owl had fled the young hawk; the traditional concept had been not merely shattered but outraged. Who was this twenty-six-year-old Corsican, this magnificent ignoramus, who with everything against him and nothing for him, lacking supplies, munitions, guns, boots, almost lacking an army, had with a handful of men assailed the coalition of Europe and absurdly won impossible victories? Where did he spring from, this whirlwind madman who, without pausing for breath, with only the one force at his command, pulverized one after another the five armies of the Austrian Emperor, flinging Beaulieu back on Alvinzi, Wurmser on Beaulieu, Melas on Wurmser, and Mack on Melas. What was he, this upstart of war with the effrontery of a thunderbolt? The academic school of warfare disowned him while falling back before him. Out of this arose an implacable hatred of the old Caesarism for the new, of the orthodox sabre for the flaming sword, and of the conventional strategist for the genius. And on 18 June 1815, this hatred spoke the last word, inscribing above Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Marengo, and Arcola the name of Waterloo. A triumph of mediocrity pleasing to the majority. Destiny permitted the irony. Napoleon in his decline encountered a youthful Wurmser: for to have another Wurmser we need only whiten Wellington's hair.

  Waterloo was a battle of the first importance won by a commander of the second rank. What was most impressive in that battle was England - English steadfastness and resolution, English blood; and what was most superb in England was, with all respect, herself - not her commander but her men. Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declared in a letter to Lord Bathurst that his army - the army that fought on 18 June 1815 - was 'detestable'. What do the bones mouldering in the soil of Waterloo think of that?

  England has been too modest in respect of Wellington; in overloading him with greatness she diminishes herself. He was heroic, but so were the men he commanded. He was tenacious - it was his signal quality, and we do not decry it - but the least of his foot-soldiers and horsemen was as solid as himself. The iron soldier was the equal of the Iron Duke. And for our part our praises go to the army and the people of England. If any trophy is to be awarded it should go to them. The Waterloo Column in London would do greater justice if it raised to the heavens not the figure of a man but the image of a race.

  But these words will not please the English. Despite their revolution of 1688, and our own of 1789, they still cherish their feudal illusions. They believe in heredity and hierarchy. They are a people unsurpassed in power and glory, but they still think of themselves as a nation, not as people. As people they willingly subordinate themselves, accepting a lord as a leader. The workman lets himself be despised, the soldier lets himself be flogged. We may recall that after the Battle of Inkerman a sergeant who had, it seems, saved the army could not be mentioned in dispatches by Lord Raglan because the English military hierarchy does not allow any man of less than commissioned rank to be named in a report.

  What is wonderful in all battles on the scale of Waterloo is the part played in them by chance. The rain-sodden field, the sunken lane, the deafness of Grouchy, the guide who misled Napoleon and the guide who led Blucher aright - chance was marvellously skilful in its ordering of that debacle.

  It may be added that Waterloo was more a massacre than a battle. Of all set battles it was fought on the narrowest front in relation to the numbers of troops engaged. Napoleon's front was about three miles, Wellington's about two, and there were some 72,000 men on either side - hence the carnage. It has been estimated that at Austerlitz the French losses amounted to 14 per cent, the Russian to 30 per cent, and the Austrian to 44 per cent; and that at Wagram the French lost 13 per cent and the Austrians 14 per cent. At Waterloo the French losses were 56 per cent and the Allied losses 31 per cent, making a total for both armies of 41 per cent; 145,000 combatants, 60,000 dead.

  The field of Waterloo today resembles any other stretch of country; it has the stillness of the earth which is the impassive nourisher of man. But at night a sort of visionary mist arises from it, and the traveller who chooses to look and listen, dreaming like Virgil on the field of Philippi, may catch the echoes of catastrophe. That monumental hillock with its nondescript lion vanishes, and the fearful event comes back to life. The battlefield recovers its reality, the lines of infantry wavering across the plain, the furious charges, the gleam of sabres and bayonets, the flame and thunder of cannon-fire. Like a groan emerging from the depths of a tomb the listener may hear the clamour of a ghostly conflict and see the shadowy forms of grenadiers and cuirassiers and the images of men departed - here Napoleon, there Wellington. All gone but still locked in combat, while the ditches run with blood, the trees shudder, the sound of fury rises to the sky and over those windblown heights - Mont-Saint-Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, Planchenoit - the spectral armies whirl in mutual extermination.

  Should we approve of Waterloo?

  There exists a highly respectable school of liberal thought which does not deplore Waterloo. We are not of their number. To us Waterloo is the date of the confounding of liberty. It is strange that such a bird should have been hatched out of such an egg.

  Waterloo, in terms of its ultimate significance, is the considered triumph of counter-revolution. It is Europe versus France, St Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna versus Paris, the status quo versus the new order, the 15th of July 1789 attacked by way of the 20th of March 1815, the move to action-stations of monarchy against the indomitable upheaval of the French people. To subdue that great people which had been in a state of eruption for twenty-six years, such was its aim, an affirmation of solidarity between the Houses of Brunswick, Nassau, Romanoff, Hohenzollern, and Hapsburg, and the House of Bourbon. Waterloo was the assertion of the Divine Right of Kings. It is true
that since the Empire had been a despotism, royalty was forced by a natural reaction to answer it with a degree of liberalism, and that a grudging constitutionalism emerged from Waterloo, to the great displeasure of the victors. The fact is that the Revolution, being wholly inevitable, could not be really destroyed. It re-emerged before Waterloo in the form of Bonaparte overthrowing old thrones, and after Waterloo in the person of Louis XVIII volunteering and submitting to the Charter. Bonaparte set an innkeeper's son on the throne of Naples and an ex-sergeant on the Swedish throne, proclaiming equality by the practice of inequality; Louis XVIII at Saint-Ouen endorsed the Declaration of the Rights of Man. To understand the nature of the Revolution we must call it 'progress'; and we may define progress by the word 'tomorrow'. Tomorrow irresistibly does its work, yesterday as today, and it always achieves its aims, although by strange means. It caused Wellington to make Foy, a plain soldier, into an orator: he fell wounded at Hougomont to re-emerge in parliament. That is the method of Progress, the craftsman to whom all tools are serviceable, the man who bestrode the Alps and the old, sick, well-intentioned monarch Louis XVIII, the conqueror and the gout invalid, one for use outside France, the other within. Waterloo put an end to the overthrow of European thrones by the sword, but the effect of this was to cause the work of revolution to proceed in another form. The day of the swordsmen was ended, the thinkers took their place. The tides of the century which Waterloo sought to stem flowed over the battlefield and still rose; that sinister victory was defeated by liberty.