Les Misérables, page 96
CHAPTER XIX--THE BATTLE-FIELD AT NIGHT
Let us return--it is a necessity in this book--to that fatalbattle-field.
On the 18th of June the moon was full. Its light favored Blücher'sferocious pursuit, betrayed the traces of the fugitives, deliveredup that disastrous mass to the eager Prussian cavalry, and aided themassacre. Such tragic favors of the night do occur sometimes duringcatastrophes.
After the last cannon-shot had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jeanremained deserted.
The English occupied the encampment of the French; it is the usual signof victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished. They established theirbivouac beyond Rossomme. The Prussians, let loose on the retreatingrout, pushed forward. Wellington went to the village of Waterloo to drawup his report to Lord Bathurst.
If ever the _sic vos non vobis_ was applicable, it certainly is to thatvillage of Waterloo. Waterloo took no part, and lay half a league fromthe scene of action. Mont-Saint-Jean was cannonaded, Hougomont wasburned, La Haie-Sainte was taken by assault, Papelotte was burned,Plancenoit was burned, La Belle-Alliance beheld the embrace of the twoconquerors; these names are hardly known, and Waterloo, which worked notin the battle, bears off all the honor.
We are not of the number of those who flatter war; when the occasionpresents itself, we tell the truth about it. War has frightful beautieswhich we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideousfeatures. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of thebodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battlealways rises on naked corpses.
Who does this? Who thus soils the triumph? What hideous, furtive hand isthat which is slipped into the pocket of victory? What pickpocketsare they who ply their trade in the rear of glory? Somephilosophers--Voltaire among the number--affirm that it is preciselythose persons have made the glory. It is the same men, they say; thereis no relief corps; those who are erect pillage those who are proneon the earth. The hero of the day is the vampire of the night. One hasassuredly the right, after all, to strip a corpse a bit when one is theauthor of that corpse. For our own part, we do not think so; it seemsto us impossible that the same hand should pluck laurels and purloin theshoes from a dead man.
One thing is certain, which is, that generally after conquerors followthieves. But let us leave the soldier, especially the contemporarysoldier, out of the question.
Every army has a rear-guard, and it is that which must be blamed.Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts ofvespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers ofuniforms, who take no part in the fighting; pretended invalids;formidable limpers; interloping sutlers, trotting along in little carts,sometimes accompanied by their wives, and stealing things which theysell again; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers; soldiers'servants; marauders; armies on the march in days gone by,--we are notspeaking of the present,--dragged all this behind them, so that in thespecial language they are called "stragglers." No army, no nation,was responsible for those beings; they spoke Italian and followed theGermans, then spoke French and followed the English. It was by one ofthese wretches, a Spanish straggler who spoke French, that the Marquisof Fervacques, deceived by his Picard jargon, and taking him for oneof our own men, was traitorously slain and robbed on the battle-fielditself, in the course of the night which followed the victory ofCerisoles. The rascal sprang from this marauding. The detestable maxim,_Live on the enemy!_ produced this leprosy, which a strict disciplinealone could heal. There are reputations which are deceptive; one doesnot always know why certain generals, great in other directions, havebeen so popular. Turenne was adored by his soldiers because he toleratedpillage; evil permitted constitutes part of goodness. Turenne was sogood that he allowed the Palatinate to be delivered over to fire andblood. The marauders in the train of an army were more or less innumber, according as the chief was more or less severe. Hoche andMarceau had no stragglers; Wellington had few, and we do him the justiceto mention it.
Nevertheless, on the night from the 18th to the 19th of June, the deadwere robbed. Wellington was rigid; he gave orders that any one caught inthe act should be shot; but rapine is tenacious. The marauders stole inone corner of the battlefield while others were being shot in another.
The moon was sinister over this plain.
Towards midnight, a man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in thedirection of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he was one ofthose whom we have just described,--neither English nor French, neitherpeasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul attracted by the scentof the dead bodies having theft for his victory, and come to rifleWaterloo. He was clad in a blouse that was something like a great coat;he was uneasy and audacious; he walked forwards and gazed behind him.Who was this man? The night probably knew more of him than the day. Hehad no sack, but evidently he had large pockets under his coat. Fromtime to time he halted, scrutinized the plain around him as though tosee whether he were observed, bent over abruptly, disturbed somethingsilent and motionless on the ground, then rose and fled. His slidingmotion, his attitudes, his mysterious and rapid gestures, caused himto resemble those twilight larvæ which haunt ruins, and which ancientNorman legends call the Alleurs.
Certain nocturnal wading birds produce these silhouettes among themarshes.
A glance capable of piercing all that mist deeply would have perceivedat some distance a sort of little sutler's wagon with a fluted wickerhood, harnessed to a famished nag which was cropping the grass acrossits bit as it halted, hidden, as it were, behind the hovel which adjoinsthe highway to Nivelles, at the angle of the road from Mont-Saint-Jeanto Braine l'Alleud; and in the wagon, a sort of woman seated on coffersand packages. Perhaps there was some connection between that wagon andthat prowler.
The darkness was serene. Not a cloud in the zenith. What matters it ifthe earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences ofthe sky. In the fields, branches of trees broken by grape-shot, but notfallen, upheld by their bark, swayed gently in the breeze of night.A breath, almost a respiration, moved the shrubbery. Quivers whichresembled the departure of souls ran through the grass.
In the distance the coming and going of patrols and the general roundsof the English camp were audible.
Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte continued to burn, forming, one in thewest, the other in the east, two great flames which were joined by thecordon of bivouac fires of the English, like a necklace of rubieswith two carbuncles at the extremities, as they extended in an immensesemicircle over the hills along the horizon.
We have described the catastrophe of the road of Ohain. The heart isterrified at the thought of what that death must have been to so manybrave men.
If there is anything terrible, if there exists a reality which surpassesdreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun; to be in full possessionof virile force; to possess health and joy; to laugh valiantly; to rushtowards a glory which one sees dazzling in front of one; to feel inone's breast lungs which breathe, a heart which beats, a will whichreasons; to speak, think, hope, love; to have a mother, to have a wife,to have children; to have the light--and all at once, in the space of ashout, in less than a minute, to sink into an abyss; to fall, toroll, to crush, to be crushed; to see ears of wheat, flowers, leaves,branches; not to be able to catch hold of anything; to feel one's sworduseless, men beneath one, horses on top of one; to struggle in vain,since one's bones have been broken by some kick in the darkness; to feela heel which makes one's eyes start from their sockets; to bite horses'shoes in one's rage; to stifle, to yell, to writhe; to be beneath, andto say to one's self, "But just a little while ago I was a living man!"
There, where that lamentable disaster had uttered its death-rattle,all was silence now. The edges of the hollow road were encumbered withhorses and riders, inextricably heaped up. Terrible entanglement! Therewas no longer any slope, for the corpses had levelled the road with theplain, and reached the brim like a well-filled bushel of barley. Aheap of dead bodies in the upper part, a river of blood in the lowerpart--such was that road on the evening of the 18th of June, 1815. Theblood ran even to the Nivelles highway, and there overflowed in a largepool in front of the abatis of trees which barred the way, at a spotwhich is still pointed out.
It will be remembered that it was at the opposite point, in thedirection of the Genappe road, that the destruction of the cuirassiershad taken place. The thickness of the layer of bodies was proportionedto the depth of the hollow road. Towards the middle, at the pointwhere it became level, where Delort's division had passed, the layer ofcorpses was thinner.
The nocturnal prowler whom we have just shown to the reader was goingin that direction. He was searching that vast tomb. He gazed about. Hepassed the dead in some sort of hideous review. He walked with his feetin the blood.
All at once he paused.
A few paces in front of him, in the hollow road, at the point wherethe pile of dead came to an end, an open hand, illumined by the moon,projected from beneath that heap of men. That hand had on its fingersomething sparkling, which was a ring of gold.
The man bent over, remained in a crouching attitude for a moment, andwhen he rose there was no longer a ring on the hand.
He did not precisely rise; he remained in a stooping and frightenedattitude, with his back turned to the heap of dead, scanning the horizonon his knees, with the whole upper portion of his body supported on histwo forefingers, which rested on the earth, and his head peering abovethe edge of the hollow road. The jackal's four paws suit some actions.
Then coming to a decision, he rose to his feet.
At that moment, he gave a terrible start. He felt some one clutch himfrom behind.
He wheeled round; it was the open hand, which had closed, and had seizedthe skirt of his coat.
An honest man would have been terrified; this man burst into a laugh.
"Come," said he, "it's only a dead body. I prefer a spook to agendarme."
But the hand weakened and released him. Effort is quickly exhausted inthe grave.
"Well now," said the prowler, "is that dead fellow alive? Let's see."
He bent down again, fumbled among the heap, pushed aside everything thatwas in his way, seized the hand, grasped the arm, freed the head, pulledout the body, and a few moments later he was dragging the lifeless, orat least the unconscious, man, through the shadows of hollow road. Hewas a cuirassier, an officer, and even an officer of considerable rank;a large gold epaulette peeped from beneath the cuirass; this officerno longer possessed a helmet. A furious sword-cut had scarred his face,where nothing was discernible but blood.
However, he did not appear to have any broken limbs, and, by some happychance, if that word is permissible here, the dead had been vaultedabove him in such a manner as to preserve him from being crushed. Hiseyes were still closed.
On his cuirass he wore the silver cross of the Legion of Honor.
The prowler tore off this cross, which disappeared into one of the gulfswhich he had beneath his great coat.
Then he felt of the officer's fob, discovered a watch there, and tookpossession of it. Next he searched his waistcoat, found a purse andpocketed it.
When he had arrived at this stage of succor which he was administeringto this dying man, the officer opened his eyes.
"Thanks," he said feebly.
The abruptness of the movements of the man who was manipulating him, thefreshness of the night, the air which he could inhale freely, had rousedhim from his lethargy.
The prowler made no reply. He raised his head. A sound of footsteps wasaudible in the plain; some patrol was probably approaching.
The officer murmured, for the death agony was still in his voice:--
"Who won the battle?"
"The English," answered the prowler.
The officer went on:--
"Look in my pockets; you will find a watch and a purse. Take them."
It was already done.
The prowler executed the required feint, and said:--
"There is nothing there."
"I have been robbed," said the officer; "I am sorry for that. You shouldhave had them."
The steps of the patrol became more and more distinct.
"Some one is coming," said the prowler, with the movement of a man whois taking his departure.
The officer raised his arm feebly, and detained him.
"You have saved my life. Who are you?"
The prowler answered rapidly, and in a low voice:--
"Like yourself, I belonged to the French army. I must leave you. If theywere to catch me, they would shoot me. I have saved your life. Now getout of the scrape yourself."
"What is your rank?"
"Sergeant."
"What is your name?"
"Thénardier."
"I shall not forget that name," said the officer; "and do you remembermine. My name is Pontmercy."
BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION
