Kabanata Kabanata 81 · THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN

The battery was unmasked at the same moment with the ravine.

Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning point-blank on

the cuirassiers. The intrepid General Delort made the military salute

to the English battery.

The whole of the flying artillery of the English had re-entered the

squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not had even the time for a

halt. The disaster of the hollow road had decimated, but not

discouraged them. They belonged to that class of men who, when

diminished in number, increase in courage.

Wathier’s column alone had suffered in the disaster; Delort’s column,

which Ney had deflected to the left, as though he had a presentiment of

an ambush, had arrived whole.

The cuirassiers hurled themselves on the English squares.

At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth, pistols in

fist,—such was the attack.

There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man until

the soldier is changed into a statue, and when all this flesh turns

into granite. The English battalions, desperately assaulted, did not

stir.

Then it was terrible.

All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenzied

whirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained impassive. The first

rank knelt and received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, the second

ranks shot them down; behind the second rank the cannoneers charged

their guns, the front of the square parted, permitted the passage of an

eruption of grape-shot, and closed again. The cuirassiers replied by

crushing them. Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks,

leaped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these four

living wells. The cannon-balls ploughed furrows in these cuirassiers;

the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared,

ground to dust under the horses. The bayonets plunged into the bellies

of these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds which has probably

never been seen anywhere else. The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry,

closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of

grape-shot, they created explosions in their assailants’ midst. The

form of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer

battalions, they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer

cavalry, they were a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a

cloud; lava contended with lightning.

The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in the

air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. lt was formed of

the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The bagpipe-player in the centre

dropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of the forests

and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were being

exterminated around him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch under

his arm, played the Highland airs. These Scotchmen died thinking of Ben

Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argos. The sword of a cuirassier,

which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to

the song by killing the singer.

The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further diminished

by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English army

against them, but they multiplied themselves so that each man of them

was equal to ten. Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded.

Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at

that same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle.

This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake.

All at once, the cuirassiers, who had been the assailants, found

themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their back. Before them

two squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset meant fourteen hundred

dragoons of the guard. On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with the

German light-horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers;

the cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in the

rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What mattered it

to them? They were a whirlwind. Their valor was something

indescribable.

In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was still

thundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could never

have been wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced on the

shoulder by a ball from a biscayan,9 is in the collection of the

Waterloo Museum.

For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen was needed. It was

no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was a shadow, a fury, a dizzy

transport of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In an

instant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight

hundred. Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up

with the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes’s light-horse. The plateau of

Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. The

cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to put

it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other

without releasing the other. The squares still held firm.

There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half

the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This conflict lasted two

hours.

The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, had

they not been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the

hollow road the cuirassiers would have overwhelmed the centre and

decided the victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who

had seen Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished,

admired heroically. He said in an undertone, “Sublime!”

The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or

spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English

regiments six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the

Guard bore to the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.

Wellington’s situation had grown worse. This strange battle was like a

duel between two raging, wounded men, each of whom, still fighting and

still resisting, is expending all his blood.

Which of the two will be the first to fall?

The conflict on the plateau continued.

What had become of the cuirassiers? No one could have told. One thing

is certain, that on the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his

horse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles at

Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles,

Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. This

horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up

the body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was

eighteen years old at that time.

Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at hand.

The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was not broken

through. As every one was in possession of the plateau, no one held it,

and in fact it remained, to a great extent, with the English.

Wellington held the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the

crest and the slope. They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both

sides.

But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleeding of

that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, demanded

reinforcements. “There are none,” replied Wellington; “he must let

himself be killed!” Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidence

which paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney demanded infantry

from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, “Infantry! Where does he expect

me to get it? Does he think I can make it?”

Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the two. The

furious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses of iron and

breasts of steel had ground the infantry to nothing. A few men

clustered round a flag marked the post of a regiment; such and such a

battalion was commanded only by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten’s

division, already so roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was almost

destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze’s brigade strewed the

rye-fields all along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of

those Dutch grenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks

in 1811, fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to the

English standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers was

considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on the following

day, had his knee shattered. If, on the French side, in that tussle of

the cuirassiers, Delort, l’Héritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, and

Blancard were disabled, on the side of the English there was Alten

wounded, Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda

killed, the whole of Wellington’s staff decimated, and England had the

worse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment of foot-guards

had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and three ensigns;

the first battalion of the 30th infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200

soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18

officers killed, 450 soldiers killed. The Hanoverian hussars of

Cumberland, a whole regiment, with Colonel Hacke at its head, who was

destined to be tried later on and cashiered, had turned bridle in the

presence of the fray, and had fled to the forest of Soignes, sowing

defeat all the way to Brussels. The transports, ammunition-wagons, the

baggage-wagons, the wagons filled with wounded, on perceiving that the

French were gaining ground and approaching the forest, rushed headlong

thither. The Dutch, mowed down by the French cavalry, cried, “Alarm!”

From Vert-Coucou to Groenendael, for a distance of nearly two leagues

in the direction of Brussels, according to the testimony of

eye-witnesses who are still alive, the roads were encumbered with

fugitives. This panic was such that it attacked the Prince de Condé at

Mechlin, and Louis XVIII. at Ghent. With the exception of the feeble

reserve echelonned behind the ambulance established at the farm of

Mont-Saint-Jean, and of Vivian’s and Vandeleur’s brigades, which

flanked the left wing, Wellington had no cavalry left. A number of

batteries lay unhorsed. These facts are attested by Siborne; and

Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far as to say that the

Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousand men. The Iron Duke

remained calm, but his lips blanched. Vincent, the Austrian

commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner, who were present at the

battle in the English staff, thought the Duke lost. At five o’clock

Wellington drew out his watch, and he was heard to murmur these

sinister words, “Blücher, or night!”

It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets gleamed on

the heights in the direction of Frischemont.

Here comes the change of face in this giant drama.