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 of
Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin; the
disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye’s brigade was
shattered; Guilleminot’s fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard
nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted
pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of the
bombs falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves in
the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of
mud, so that the canister was turned into a splash; the uselessness of
Piré’s demonstration on Braine-l’Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen
squadrons, almost exterminated; the right wing of the English badly
alarmed, the left wing badly cut into; Ney’s strange mistake in
massing, instead of echelonning the four divisions of the first corps;
men delivered over to grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep
and with a frontage of two hundred; the frightful holes made in these
masses by the cannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the
side-battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and
Durutte compromised; Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules
graduated at the Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was
beating in with an axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright
fire of the English barricade which barred the angle of the road from
Genappe to Brussels; Marcognet’s division caught between the infantry
and the cavalry, shot down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the
grain by Best and Pack, put to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of
seven pieces spiked; the Prince of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding, in
spite of the Comte d’Erlon, both Frischemont and Smohain; the flag of
the 105th taken, the flag of the 45th captured; that black Prussian
hussar stopped by runners of the flying column of three hundred light
cavalry on the scout between Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming things
that had been said by prisoners; Grouchy’s delay; fifteen hundred men
killed in the orchard of Hougomont in less than an hour; eighteen
hundred men overthrown in a still shorter time about La
Haie-Sainte,—all these stormy incidents passing like the clouds of
battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and had not
overshadowed that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon was accustomed
to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending details,
cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that they
furnished the total—victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings did
go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor at the
end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question,
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 himself
protected 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 behind
one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown
becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens.
At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered. He
suddenly beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared, and the van
of the English army disappear. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The
Emperor half rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed
from his eyes.
Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes and
destroyed—that was the definitive conquest of England by France; it was
Crécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengo
was wiping out Agincourt.
So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept his
glass for the last time over all the points of the field of battle. His
guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from below
with a sort of religion. He pondered; he examined the slopes, noted the
declivities, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the square of rye, the
path; he seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness
at the English barricades of the two highways,—two large abatis of
trees, that on the road to Genappe above La Haie-Sainte, armed with two
cannon, the only ones out of all the English artillery which commanded
the extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelles
where gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chassé’s brigade. Near this
barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white,
which stands at the angle of the crossroad near Braine-l’Alleud; he
bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide made
a 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 to
Paris 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 of
Mont-Saint-Jean.