distance; a hollow trench, in some places | battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; twelve feet deep, whose scarped sides were Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte in danger; washed down here and there by the winter Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Voit, that Herrains. Accidents occurred there: the road cules who came from the Polytechnic school, was no narrow where it entered Braine l'Al-wounded at the moment when he was beating leud that a wayfarer was crushed there by a vagon, as is proved by a stone cross standng near the graveyard, which gives the aame of the dead man as "Monsieur Bernard Debruc, trader of Brussels," and the date "February, 1637." It was so deep on the plateau of Mont St. Jean that a peasant, one Mathieu Nicaise, was crushed there in 1783 by a fall of earth, as is proved by another stone cross, the top of which disappeared in the excavations, but whose overthrown pedestal is still visible on the grass slope to the left of the road between La Haye Sainte and the farm of Mont St. Jean. On the day of the battle, this hollow way, whose existence nothing revealed, a trench on the top of the escarpment, a rut hidden in the earth, was visible, that is to say terrible. CHAPTER VIII. THE EMPEROR ASKS THE GUIDE A QUESTION. in with an axe the gates of La Haye Sainte, under the plunging fire of the English barricade on the Genappe road; Marcognet's division caught between infantry and cavalry, shot down from the wheat, by Best and Pack, and sabred by Ponsonby; its battery of seven guns spiked; the Prince of Saxe Weimar holding and keeping in defiance of Count D'Erlon, Frischemont of Smohain; the flags of the 105th and 45th regiments which he had captured; the Prussian black Hussars stopped by the scouts of the flying column of three hundred chasseurs, who were beating the country between Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming things which this man said; Grouchy's delay; the fifteen hundred men killed in less than an hour in the orchard of Hougomont; the eighteen hundred laid low even in a shorter space of time round La Haye Sainte-all these stormy incidents, passing like battle-clouds before Napoleon, had scarce disturbed his glance or cast a gloom over his imperial face. Napoleon was accustomed to look steadily at war; he never On the morning of Waterloo, then, Napo- reckoned up the poignant details; he cared leon was cheerful, and had reason to be so, little for figures, provided they gave the total for the plan he had drawn up was admirable.-victory. If the commencement was wrong, Once the battle had begun, its various incidents the resistance of Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haye Sainte; Bauduin killed and Foy placed hors de combat; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was broken; the fatal rashness of Guilleminot, who had no petards or powder-bags to destroy the farm-gates; the sticking of the artillery in the mud; the fifteen guns without escort captured by Uxbridge in a hollow way; the slight effect of the shells falling in the English lines, which buried themselves in the moistened ground, and only produced a volcano of mud, so that the troops were merely plastered with mud; the inutility of Piret's demonstration on Braine l'Alleud, and the whole of his cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost annihilated; the English right but slightly disquieted, and the left poorly attacked; Ney's strange mistake in massing instead of echelonning the four divisions of the first corps; a depth of twenty-seven ranks and a line of two hundred men given up in this way to the canister; the frightful gaps made by the cannon-balls in these masses; the attacking columns disunited; the oblique he did not alarm himself, as he believed himself master and owner of the end; he knew how to wait, and treated destiny as an equal. He seemed to say to fate, "You would not dare!" One half light, one half shade, Napoleon felt himself protected in good, and tolerated in evil. There was, or he fancied there was, for him a connivance, we might say, almost a complicity, on the part of events, equivalent to the ancient invulnerability; and yet, when a man has behind him the Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau, it seems as if he could defy Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes visible on the face of heaven. At the moment when Wellington retrograded, Napoleon quivered. He suddenly saw the plateau of Mont St. Jean deserted, and the front of the English army disappear. The Emperor half-raised himself in his stirrups, and the flash of victory passed into his eyes. If Wellington were driven back into the forest of Soignies, and destroyed, it would be the definitive overthrow of England by France; it would be Cressy, Poictiers, Malplaquet, and Ramilies avenged, the man of Marengo would erase Agincourt. The Emperor, while meditating on this tremendous result, turned his telescope to all parts of the battle-field. His Guards, standing at ease behind him, gazed with a sort of religious awe. He was reflecting, he examined the slopes, noted the inclines, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the patches of barley, and the paths; he seemed to be counting every tuft of gorse. He looked with some fixity at the English barricades, two large masses of felled trees, the one on the Genappe road defended by two guns, the only ones of the English artillery which commanded the battle-field, and the one on the Nivelles road, behind which flashed the Dutch bayonets of Chasse's brigade. He remarked near this barricade the old chapel of St. Nicholas, which is at the corner of the cross road leading to Braine l'Alleud. He bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide shook his head with a probably perfidious negative. The Emperor drew himself up and reflected; Wellington was retiring, and all that was needed now, was to complete this retreat by an overthrow. Napoleon hurriedly turned and sent off a messenger at full speed to Paris to announce that the battle was won. Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder issues, and he had just found his thunder-stroke; he gave Milhaud's cuirassiers orders to carry the plateau of Mont St. Jean. CHAPTER IX. A SURPRISE. They were three thousand five hundred in number, and formed a front a quarter of a league in length; they were gigantic men mounted on colossal horses. They formed twenty-six squadrons, and had behind them, as a support, Lefebvre Desnouette's division, composed of the one hundred and six gendarmes, the chasseurs of the guard, eleven hundred and ninety-seven sabres, and the lancers of the Guard, eight hundred and eighty lances. They wore a helmet without a plume, and a cuirasse of wrought steel, and were armed with pistols and a straight sabre. In the morning the whole army had admired them when they came up, at nine o'clock, with bugles sounding, while all the bands played, "Veillons au salut de l'Empire," in close column, with one battery on their flank, the others in their centre, and VOL. II. deployed in two ranks, and took their place in that powerful second line, so skilfully formed by Napoleon, which, having at its extreme left Kellermann's cuirassiers, and on its extreme right Milhaud's cuirassiers, seemed to be endowed with two wings of steel. The aide-de-camp Bernard carried to them the Emperor's order: Ney drew his sabre and placed himself at their head, and the mighty squadron started. Then a formidable spectacle was seen; the whole of this cavalry, with raised sabres and standards flying, and formed in columns of division, descended, with one movement and as one man, with the precision of a bronze battering-ram opening a breach, the hill of the Belle Alliance. They entered the formidable valley in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared in the smoke, and then, emerging from the gloom, reappeared on the other side of the valley, still in a close, compact column, mounting at a trot, under a tremendous canister fire, the frightful muddy incline of the plateau of Mont St. Jean. They ascended it, stern, threatening, and imperturbable; between the breaks in the artillery and musketry fire, the colossal tramp could be heard. As they formed two divisions, they were in two columns. Wathier's division was on the right, Delord's on the left. At a distance it appeared as if two immense steel lizards were crawling toward the crest of the plateau; they traversed the battlefield like a flash. Nothing like it had been seen since the capture of the great redoubt of the Moskova by the heavy cavalry: Murat was missing, but Ney was there. It seemed as if the mass had become a monster, and had but one soul; each squadron undulated and swelled like the rings of a polype. This could be seen through a vast smoke, which was rent asunder at intervals; it was a pell mell of helmets, shouts, and sabres, a stormy bounding of horses among cannon; and a disciplined and terrible array; while above it all flashed the cuirasses like the scales of the dragon. Such narratives seemed to belong to another age; something like this vision was doubtless traceable in the old Orphean epics, describing the men-horses, the ancient hippanthropists, those Titans with human faces and equestrian chest, whose gallop escaladed Olympus-horrible, sublime, invulnerable beings, gods and brutes. It was a curious numeri. 27 cal coincidence that twenty-six battalions | the other corpses cast into the ravine on the were preparing to receive the charge of day after the battle. Napoleon, before these twenty-six squadrons. Behind the ordering this charge, had surveyed the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of the ground, but had been unable to see this masked battery, thirteen English squares, hollow way, which did not form even a each of two battalions and formed two deep, ripple on the crest of the plateau. Warned, with seven men in the first lines and six in however, by the little white chapel which the second, were waiting, calm, dumb, and marks its juncture with the Nivelles road, motionless, with their muskets, for what was he had asked Lacoste a question, probably coming. They did not see the cuirassiers, as to whether there was any obstacle. The and the cuirassiers did not see them; they guide answered no, and we might almost merely heard this tide of men ascending. say that Napoleon's catastrophe was brought They heard the swelling sound of three about by a peasant's shake of the head. thousand horses, the alternating and symmetrical sound of the hoof, the clang of the cuirasses, the crash of the sabres, and a species of great and formidable breathing. There was a long and terrible silence, and then a long file of raised arms, brandishing sabres and helmets, and bugles and standards, and three thousand heads, with great moustaches, shouting, "Long live the Emperor!" appeared above the crest. The whole of this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the commencement of an earthquake. Other fatalities were yet to arise. Was it possible for Napoleon to win the battle? We answer in the negative. Why? On account of Wellington, on account of Blucher? No; on account of GOD. Bonaparte, victor at Waterloo, did not harmonize with the law of the 19th century. Another series of facts was preparing, in which Napoleon had no longer a place; the ill will of events had been displayed long previously. It was time for this vast man to fall; his excessive weight in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone was of more account than the universal group; such ple single head-the world mounting to one man's brain-would be mortal to civilization if they endured. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible supreme equity to reflect, and it is probable that the principles and elements on which the regular gravitations of the moral order as of the material order depend, complained. Streaming blood, over-crowded grave-yards, mothers in tears, are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from an excessive burden, there are mysterious groans from the shadow, which the abyss hears. Napoleon had been denounced in infinitude, and his fall was decided. Waterloo is not a battle, but a transformation of the Universe. All at once, terrible to relate, the head of the column of cuirassiers, facing the Eng-thoras of human vitality concentrated in a lish left, reared with a fearful clamor. On reaching the culminating point of the crest, furious and eager to make their exterminating dash on the English squares and guns, the cuirassiers noticed between them and the English a trench, a grave. It was the hollow road of Ohain. It was a frightful moment the ravine was there, unexpected, yawning, almost precipitous, beneath the horses' feet, and with a depth of twelve feet between its two sides. The second rank thrust the first into the abyss; the horses reared, fell back, slipped with all four feet in the air, crushing and throwing their riders. There was no means of escaping; the entire column was one huge projectile. The force acquired to crush the English, crushed the French, and the inexorable ravine would not yield till it was filled up. Men and horses rolled into it pell-mell, crushing each other, and making one large charnel-house of the gulf, and when this grave was full of living men, the rest passed over them. Nearly one-third of the Dubois brigade rolled into this abyss. This commenced the loss of the battle. A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates, says that two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow way of Ohain. These figures probably comprise CHAPTER X. THE PLATEAU OF MONT ST. JEAN. The battery was unmasked simultaneously with the ravine-sixty guns and thirteen squares thundered at the cuirassiers at point-blank range. The intrepid General Delord gave a military salute to the English battery. The whole of the English field artillery had entered the squares at a gallop; the cuirassiers had not even a moment for reflection. The disaster of the hollow way had decimated but not discouraged them, they were of that nature of men whose hearts grow large when their number is diminished. Wathier's column alone suffered in the disaster; but Delord's column, which he had ordered to wheel to the left, as if he suspected the trap, arrived entire. The cuirassiers rushed at the English squares at full gallop, with hanging bridles, sabres in their mouths, and pistols in their hands. There are moments in a battle when the soul hardens a man, so that it changes the soldier into a statue, and all flesh becomes granite. The English battalions though fiercely assailed, did not move. Then there was a frightful scene, all the faces of the English squares were attacked simultaneously, and a frenzied whirl surrounded them. But the cold infantry remained impassive; the front ranks kneeling received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, while the second fired at them; behind the second rank the artillerymen loaded their guns, the front of the square opened to let an eruption of canister pass and then closed again. The cuirassiers responded by attempts to crush their foe; their great horses reared, leaped over bayonets, and landed in the centre of the four living walls. The cannon-balls made gaps in the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared, trampled down by the horses, and bayonets were buried in the entrails of these centaurs. Hence arose horrible wounds, such as were probably never seen elsewhere. The squares, where broken by the impetuous cavalry, contracted without yielding an inch of ground; inexhaustible in canister, they produced an explosion in the midst of the assailants. The aspect of this combat was monstrous: these squares were no longer battalions but craters; these cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, but a tempest -each square was a volcano attacked by a storm; the lava combated the lightning. The extreme right square, the most exposed of all, as it was in the air, was nearly annihilated in the first attack. It was formed of the 75th Highlanders; the piper in the centre, while his comrades were being exterminated around him, was seated on a drum, with his pibroch under his arm, and playing mountain airs. These Scotchmen died, thinking of Ben Lothian, as the Greeks did, remembering Argos. The cuirassier's sabre, by cutting through the pibroch and the arm that held it, stopped the tune by killing the player. The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and reduced by the catastrophe of the ravine, had against them nearly the whole English army; but they multiplied themselves, and each man was worth ten. Some Hanoverian battalions, however, gave way; Wellington saw it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at this moment thought of his infantry, the battle would have been won, and this forgetfulness was his great and fatal fault. All at once the assailers found themselves assailed; the English cavalry were on their backs, before them the squares, behind them Somerset with the one thousand four hundred Dragoon Guards. Somerset had on his right Dornberg with the German chevaul-egers, and on his left Trip with the Belgian carbineers; the cuirassiers, attacked on the flank and in the front, be fore and behind, by infantry and cavalry, were compelled to make a front on all sides. But what did they care? they were a whirlwind, their bravery became indescribable. In addition, they had behind them the still thundering battery, and it was only in such a way that these men could be wounded in the back. One of these cuirasses with a hole through the left scapula is in the Waterloo Museum. For such Frenchmen, nothing less than such Englishmen were required. It was no longer a melee, it was a headlong fury, a hurricane of flashing swords. In an instant the one thousand four hundred Dragoons were only eight hundred; and Fuller, their Lieutenant-colonel, was dead. Ney dashed up with Lefebvre Desnouette's lancers and chasseurs; the plateau of Mont St. Jean was taken and retaken, and taken again. The cuirassiers left the cavalry to attack the infantry, or, to speak more correctly, all these men collared each other and did not lose their hold. The squares still held out after twelve assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him, and one-half of the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This struggle lasted two hours. The English army was profoundly shaken; and there is no doubt that, had not the cuirassiers been weakened in their attack by the disaster of the hollow way, they would have broken through the centre and decided the victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three parts van quished, admired heroically; he said in a low voice, "Splendid!" The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, captured or spiked sixty guns, and took six English regimental flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard carried to the Emperor before the farm of la Belle Alliance. Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle resembled a fight between two savage wounded men, who constantly lose their blood while continuing the struggle. Which would be the first to fall? The combat for the plateau continued. How far did the cuirassiers get? no one could say; but it is certain that on the day after the battle a cuirassier and his horse were found dead on the weighing-machine of Mont St. Jean, at the very spot where the Nivelles, Genappe, La Hulpe and Brussels roads intersect each other. This horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up this corpse still lives at Mont St. Jean; his name is Dehaye, and he was eighteen years of age at the time. Wellington felt himself giving way and the crisis was close at hand. The cuirassiers had not succeeded, in the sense that the English centre had not been broken. Everybody held the plateau, and nobody held it; but, in the end, the greater portion remained in the hands of the English. Wellington had the village and the plain; Ney, only the crest and the slope. Both sides seemed to have taken root in this mournful soil. But the weakness of the English seemed irremediable, for the hemorrhage of this army was horrible. Kempt on the left wing asked for reinforcements. "There are none," Wellington replied. Almost at the same moment, by a strange coincidence which depicts the exhaustion of both armies, Ney asked Napoleon for infantry, and Napoleon answered, "Infantry; where does he expect me to get them? Does he think I can make them?" Still the English army was the worse of the two; the furious attacks of these great squadrons, with their iron cuirasses and steel chests, had crushed their infantry. A few men round the colors marked the place of a regiment, and some battalions were only commanded by a captain or a lieutenant. Alten's division, already so maltreated at La Haye Sainte, was nearly destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze's brigade lay among the wheat along the Nivelles road: hardly any were left of those Dutch Grenadiers, who, in 1811, fought Wellington in Spain, on the French side, and who, in 1815, joined the English and fought Napo leon. The loss in officers was considerable; Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg interred the next day, had a fractured knee. If on the side of the French in this contest of the cuirassiers, Delord, L'Heretier, Colbert, Duof, Travers, and Blancard were hors de combat; on the side of the English, Alten was wounded, Barnes was wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda killed, Wellington's staff decimated-and England had the heaviest scale in the balance of blood. The 2d regiment of footguards had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains and three ensigns; the first bat talion of the 30th had lost twenty-four officers and one hundred and twelve men; the 79th Highlanders had twenty-four officers wounded, and eighteen officers and four hundred and fifty men killed. Cumberland's Hanoverian Hussars, an entire regiment, having their Colonel Hacke at their head, who at a later date was tried and cashiered, turned bridle during the fight and fled into the forest of Soignies, spreading the rout as far as Brussels. The wagons, ammunition trains, baggage trains, and ambulance carts full of wounded, on seeing the French, gave ground, and approaching the forest, rushed into it; the Dutch, sabred by the French cavalry, broke in confusion. From Vert Coucou to Groenendael, a distance of two leagues on the Brussels road, there was, according to the testimony of living witnesses, a dense crowd of fugitives, and the panic was so great that it assailed the Prince de Conde at Mechlin and Louis XVIII. at Ghent. With the exception of the weak reserve echelonned behind the field hospital established at the farm of Mont St. Jean, and Vivian's and Vandeleur's brigades, which flanked the left wing, Wellington had no cavalry left, and many of the guns lay dismounted. These facts are confessed by Siborne; and Pringle, exaggerating the danger, goes so far as to state that the Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirtyfour thousand men. The Iron Duke remained firm, but his lip blanched. Austrian commissioner Vincent, and the Spanish commissioner Alava, who were present at the battle, thought the Duke lost; at five o'clock Wellington looked at his watch, and could be heard muttering, "Blu. cher or night." The It was this moment that a distant line of bayonets glistened on the heights on the side of Frischemont. This was the climax of the gigantic drama. |