Les Misérables, page 84
CHAPTER VII--NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR
The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local trouble,had never been in a better humor than on that day. His impenetrabilityhad been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of June, thatprofound soul masked by marble beamed blindly. The man who had beengloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest favorites ofdestiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The supremesmile is God's alone.
_Ridet Cæsar, Pompeius flebit_, said the legionaries of the FulminatrixLegion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it iscertain that Cæsar laughed. While exploring on horseback at one o'clockon the preceding night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand, thecommunes in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of thelong line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon fromFrischemont to Braine-l'Alleud, it had seemed to him that fate, towhom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact tothe appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained for some timemotionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder;and this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterioussaying, "We are in accord." Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longerin accord.
He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night was markedby a joy for him. He traversed the line of the principal outposts,halting here and there to talk to the sentinels. At half-past two, nearthe wood of Hougomont, he heard the tread of a column on the march; hethought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington.He said: "It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way for thepurpose of decamping. I will take prisoners the six thousand English whohave just arrived at Ostend." He conversed expansively; he regained theanimation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March, whenhe pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the GulfJuan, and cried, "Well, Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already!" Onthe night of the 17th to the 18th of June he rallied Wellington. "Thatlittle Englishman needs a lesson," said Napoleon. The rain redoubled inviolence; the thunder rolled while the Emperor was speaking.
At half-past three o'clock in the morning, he lost one illusion;officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him thatthe enemy was not making any movement. Nothing was stirring; not abivouac-fire had been extinguished; the English army was asleep. Thesilence on earth was profound; the only noise was in the heavens.At four o'clock, a peasant was brought in to him by the scouts; thispeasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probablyVivian's brigade, which was on its way to take up a position in thevillage of Ohain, at the extreme left. At five o'clock, two Belgiandeserters reported to him that they had just quitted their regiment,and that the English army was ready for battle. "So much the better!"exclaimed Napoleon. "I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drivethem back."
In the morning he dismounted in the mud on the slope which forms anangle with the Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant'schair brought to him from the farm of Rossomme, seated himself, with atruss of straw for a carpet, and spread out on the table the chartof the battle-field, saying to Soult as he did so, "A prettychecker-board."
In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports ofprovisions, embedded in the soft roads, had not been able to arrive bymorning; the soldiers had had no sleep; they were wet and fasting. Thisdid not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney, "We haveninety chances out of a hundred." At eight o'clock the Emperor'sbreakfast was brought to him. He invited many generals to it. Duringbreakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to a ball two nightsbefore, in Brussels, at the Duchess of Richmond's; and Soult, a roughman of war, with a face of an archbishop, said, "The ball takes placeto-day." The Emperor jested with Ney, who said, "Wellington will not beso simple as to wait for Your Majesty." That was his way, however. "Hewas fond of jesting," says Fleury de Chaboulon. "A merry humor wasat the foundation of his character," says Gourgaud. "He abounded inpleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty," says BenjaminConstant. These gayeties of a giant are worthy of insistence. It washe who called his grenadiers "his grumblers"; he pinched their ears; hepulled their mustaches. "The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on us,"is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from the islandof Elba to France, on the 27th of February, on the open sea, the Frenchbrig of war, _Le Zéphyr_, having encountered the brig _L'Inconstant_, onwhich Napoleon was concealed, and having asked the news of Napoleon from_L'Inconstant_, the Emperor, who still wore in his hat the white andamaranthine cockade sown with bees, which he had adopted at the isle ofElba, laughingly seized the speaking-trumpet, and answered for himself,"The Emperor is well." A man who laughs like that is on familiar termswith events. Napoleon indulged in many fits of this laughter during thebreakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast he meditated for a quarter of anhour; then two generals seated themselves on the truss of straw, pen inhand and their paper on their knees, and the Emperor dictated to themthe order of battle.
At nine o'clock, at the instant when the French army, ranged in echelonsand set in motion in five columns, had deployed--the divisions in twolines, the artillery between the brigades, the music at their head; asthey beat the march, with rolls on the drums and the blasts of trumpets,mighty, vast, joyous, a sea of casques, of sabres, and of bayonets onthe horizon, the Emperor was touched, and twice exclaimed, "Magnificent!Magnificent!"
Between nine o'clock and half-past ten the whole army, incredible as itmay appear, had taken up its position and ranged itself in six lines,forming, to repeat the Emperor's expression, "the figure of six V's."A few moments after the formation of the battle-array, in the midst ofthat profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a storm,which precedes engagements, the Emperor tapped Haxo on the shoulder, ashe beheld the three batteries of twelve-pounders, detached by his ordersfrom the corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and destined to begin theaction by taking Mont-Saint-Jean, which was situated at the intersectionof the Nivelles and the Genappe roads, and said to him, "There are fourand twenty handsome maids, General."
Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed beforehim, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had appointedto barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried.All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughtypity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a largetomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massingthemselves, he said, "It is a pity."
Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected forhis post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right ofthe road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station duringthe battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o'clock in theevening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable;it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which theguard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this knoll the ballsrebounded from the pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As atBrienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of theheavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapelessprojectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up at the spot where hishorse' feet stood. _Scabra rubigine_. A few years ago, a shell of sixtypounds, still charged, and with its fuse broken off level with the bomb,was unearthed. It was at this last post that the Emperor said to hisguide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached to thesaddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every discharge of canisterand tried to hide behind Napoleon: "Fool, it is shameful! You'll getyourself killed with a ball in the back." He who writes these lines hashimself found, in the friable soil of this knoll, on turning overthe sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb, disintegrated, by theoxidization of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron whichparted like elder-twigs between the fingers.
Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of theplains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took place,are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from thismournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real reliefhas been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds herbearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifyingit. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two years later,exclaimed, "They have altered my field of battle!" Where the greatpyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was ahillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, butwhich was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe.The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height ofthe two knolls of the two great sepulchres which enclose the road fromGenappe to Brussels: one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other,the German tomb, is on the right. There is no French tomb. The wholeof that plain is a sepulchre for France. Thanks to the thousands uponthousands of cartloads of earth employed in the hillock one hundred andfifty feet in height and half a mile in circumference, the plateauof Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by an easy slope. On the day ofbattle, particularly on the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt anddifficult of approach. The slope there is so steep that the Englishcannon could not see the farm, situated in the bottom of the valley,which was the centre of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the rainshad still farther increased this acclivity, the mud complicated theproblem of the ascent, and the men not only slipped back, but stuck fastin the mire. Along the crest of the plateau ran a sort of trench whosepresence it was impossible for the distant observer to divine.
What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine-l'Alleud is a Belgianvillage; Ohain is another. These villages, both of them concealed incurves of the landscape, are connected by a road about a league and ahalf in length, which traverses the plain along its undulating level,and often enters and buries itself in the hills like a furrow, whichmakes a ravine of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the presentday, this road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean betweenthe two highways from Genappe and Nivelles; only, it is now on a levelwith the plain; it was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have beenappropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and still is,a trench throughout the greater portion of its course; a hollow trench,sometimes a dozen feet in depth, and whose banks, being too steep,crumbled away here and there, particularly in winter, under drivingrains. Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at theBraine-l'Alleud entrance that a passer-by was crushed by a cart, as isproved by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery, and which givesthe name of the dead, _Monsieur Bernard Debrye, Merchant of Brussels_,and the date of the accident, _February, 1637_.8 It was so deep onthe table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise,was crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated onanother stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process ofclearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible onthe grassy slope to the left of the highway between La Haie-Sainte andthe farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.
On the day of battle, this hollow road whose existence was in no wayindicated, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a trench at thesummit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible;that is to say, terrible.
