Several squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream of the
defeat, as rocks in running water, held their own until night. Night
came, death also; they awaited that double shadow, and, invincible,
allowed themselves to be enveloped therein. Each regiment, isolated
from the rest, and having no bond with the army, now shattered in every
part, died alone. They had taken up position for this final action,
some on the heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of
Mont-Saint-Jean. There, abandoned, vanquished, terrible, those gloomy
squares endured their death-throes in formidable fashion. Ulm, Wagram,
Jena, Friedland, died with them.
At twilight, towards nine o’clock in the evening, one of them was left
at the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. In that fatal valley, at
the foot of that declivity which the cuirassiers had ascended, now
inundated by the masses of the English, under the converging fires of
the victorious hostile cavalry, under a frightful density of
projectiles, this square fought on. It was commanded by an obscure
officer named Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished and
replied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade, continually
contracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing breathless for a
moment in the distance, listened in the darkness to that gloomy and
ever-decreasing thunder.
When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left
of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone, were no
longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger than the
group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors, around those
men dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English
artillery, taking breath, became silent. This furnished a sort of
respite. These combatants had around them something in the nature of a
swarm of spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profiles
of cannon, the white sky viewed through wheels and gun-carriages, the
colossal death’s-head, which the heroes saw constantly through the
smoke, in the depths of the battle, advanced upon them and gazed at
them. Through the shades of twilight they could hear the pieces being
loaded; the matches all lighted, like the eyes of tigers at night,
formed a circle round their heads; all the lintstocks of the English
batteries approached the cannons, and then, with emotion, holding the
supreme moment suspended above these men, an English general, Colville
according to some, Maitland according to others, shouted to them,
“Surrender, brave Frenchmen!” Cambronne replied, “——.”
{EDITOR’S COMMENTARY: Another edition of this book has the word
“Merde!” in lieu of the —— above.}