There were three thousand five hundred of them. They formed a front a
quarter of a league in extent. They were giant men, on colossal horses.
There were six and twenty squadrons of them; and they had behind them
to support them Lefebvre-Desnouettes’s division,—the one hundred and
six picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the Guard, eleven hundred
and ninety-seven men, and the lancers of the guard of eight hundred and
eighty lances. They wore casques without horse-tails, and cuirasses of
beaten iron, with horse-pistols in their holsters, and long
sabre-swords. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at
nine o’clock, with braying of trumpets and all the music playing “Let
us watch o’er the Safety of the Empire,” they had come in a solid
column, with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their
centre, and deployed in two ranks between the roads to Genappe and
Frischemont, and taken up their position for battle in that powerful
second line, so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its
extreme left Kellermann’s cuirassiers and on its extreme right
Milhaud’s cuirassiers, had, so to speak, two wings of iron.
Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the Emperor’s orders. Ney drew his
sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set
in motion.
Then a formidable spectacle was seen.
All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung
to the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a
simultaneous movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen
battering-ram which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle
Alliance, plunged into the terrible depths in which so many men had
already fallen, disappeared there in the smoke, then emerging from that
shadow, reappeared on the other side of the valley, still compact and
in close ranks, mounting at a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot
which burst upon them, the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of
Mont-Saint-Jean. They ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in
the intervals between the musketry and the artillery, their colossal
trampling was audible. Being two divisions, there were two columns of
them; Wathier’s division held the right, Delort’s division was on the
left. It seemed as though two immense adders of steel were to be seen
crawling towards the crest of the table-land. It traversed the battle
like a prodigy.
Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of
the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was lacking here, but Ney was
again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and
had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a
polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent
here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy
heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of
trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses
like the scales on the hydra.
These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to
this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told
of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human heads
and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible,
invulnerable, sublime—gods and beasts.
Odd numerical coincidence,—twenty-six battalions rode to meet
twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow
of the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen
squares, two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the
first line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their
shoulders, taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing,
waited, calm, mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and
the cuirassiers did not see them. They listened to the rise of this
flood of men. They heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse,
the alternate and symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the
jingling of the cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand
and savage breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all
at once, a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared
above the crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three
thousand heads with gray moustaches, shouting, “Vive l’Empereur!” All
this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance
of an earthquake.
All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the
head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On
arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly
given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and
cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,—a trench
between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.
It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning,
directly under the horses’ feet, two fathoms deep between its double
slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed
on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their
haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and
overwhelming the riders; and there being no means of retreat,—the whole
column being no longer anything more than a projectile,—the force which
had been acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the
inexorable ravine could only yield when filled; horses and riders
rolled there pell-mell, grinding each other, forming but one mass of
flesh in this gulf: when this trench was full of living men, the rest
marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois’s brigade
fell into that abyss.
This began the loss of the battle.
A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says that two
thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow road
of Ohain. This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which
were flung into this ravine the day after the combat.
Let us note in passing that it was Dubois’s sorely tried brigade which,
an hour previously, making a charge to one side, had captured the flag
of the Lunenburg battalion.
Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milhaud’s
cuirassiers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not been able to see
that hollow road, which did not even form a wrinkle on the surface of
the plateau. Warned, nevertheless, and put on the alert by the little
white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelles
highway, he had probably put a question as to the possibility of an
obstacle, to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered No. We might
almost affirm that Napoleon’s catastrophe originated in that sign of a
peasant’s head.
Other fatalities were destined to arise.
Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer
No. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God.
Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the
nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in
which there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events
had declared itself long before.
It was time that this vast man should fall.
The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the
balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group.
These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head;
the world mounting to the brain of one man,—this would be mortal to
civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the
incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the
principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the
moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood,
over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,—these are formidable
pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there
are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an
ear.
Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been
decided on.
He embarrassed God.
Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the
Universe.