Les Misérables, page 85
CHAPTER VIII--THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE
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 ofHougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin; thedisabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade wasshattered; Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he had neither petardnor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescortedpieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of thebombs falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves inthe rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud,so that the canister was turned into a splash; the uselessness of Piré'sdemonstration on Braine-l'Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons,almost exterminated; the right wing of the English badly alarmed, theleft wing badly cut into; Ney's strange mistake in massing, instead ofechelonning the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over togrape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontageof two hundred; the frightful holes made in these masses by thecannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenlyunmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised;Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at thePolytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with anaxe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright fire of the Englishbarricade which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels;Marcognet's division caught between the infantry and the cavalry, shotdown at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, putto the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of seven pieces spiked; the Princeof Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding, in spite of the Comte d'Erlon, bothFrischemont and Smohain; the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the45th captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped by runners of theflying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavreand Plancenoit; the alarming things that had been said by prisoners;Grouchy's delay; fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougomontin less than an hour; eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shortertime about La Haie-Sainte,--all these stormy incidents passing like theclouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze andhad not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon wasaccustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rendingdetails, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided thatthey furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginningsdid go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessorat the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of thequestion, 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 himselfprotected 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 Bérésina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behindone, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frownbecomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens.
At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered. He suddenlybeheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared, and the van of theEnglish army disappear. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperorhalf rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed from hiseyes.
Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes anddestroyed--that was the definitive conquest of England by France; it wasCrécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengowas wiping out Agincourt.
So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept hisglass for the last time over all the points of the field of battle. Hisguard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from belowwith a sort of religion. He pondered; he examined the slopes, noted thedeclivities, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the square of rye, thepath; he seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentnessat the English barricades of the two highways,--two large abatis oftrees, that on the road to Genappe above La Haie-Sainte, armed with twocannon, the only ones out of all the English artillery which commandedthe extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelleswhere gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chassé's brigade. Near thisbarricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white,which stands at the angle of the cross-road near Braine-l'Alleud; hebent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide madea 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 toParis 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 ofMont-Saint-Jean.
