Chapter Chapter 79 · THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE

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.