Chương Chương 87 · QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE?

The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure to those who won

it as to those who lost it. For Napoleon it was a panic;10 Blücher sees

nothing in it but fire; Wellington understands nothing in regard to it.

Look at the reports. The bulletins are confused, the commentaries

involved. Some stammer, others lisp. Jomini divides the battle of

Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it up into three changes;

Charras alone, though we hold another judgment than his on some points,

seized with his haughty glance the characteristic outlines of that

catastrophe of human genius in conflict with divine chance. All the

other historians suffer from being somewhat dazzled, and in this

dazzled state they fumble about. It was a day of lightning brilliancy;

in fact, a crumbling of the military monarchy which, to the vast

stupefaction of kings, drew all the kingdoms after it—the fall of

force, the defeat of war.

In this event, stamped with superhuman necessity, the part played by

men amounts to nothing.

If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blücher, do we thereby deprive

England and Germany of anything? No. Neither that illustrious England

nor that august Germany enter into the problem of Waterloo. Thank

Heaven, nations are great, independently of the lugubrious feats of the

sword. Neither England, nor Germany, nor France is contained in a

scabbard. At this epoch when Waterloo is only a clashing of swords,

above Blücher, Germany has Schiller; above Wellington, England has

Byron. A vast dawn of ideas is the peculiarity of our century, and in

that aurora England and Germany have a magnificent radiance. They are

majestic because they think. The elevation of level which they

contribute to civilization is intrinsic with them; it proceeds from

themselves and not from an accident. The aggrandizement which they have

brought to the nineteenth century has not Waterloo as its source. It is

only barbarous peoples who undergo rapid growth after a victory. That

is the temporary vanity of torrents swelled by a storm. Civilized

people, especially in our day, are neither elevated nor abased by the

good or bad fortune of a captain. Their specific gravity in the human

species results from something more than a combat. Their honor, thank

God! their dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not numbers

which those gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of

battles. Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is

less glory and more liberty. The drum holds its peace; reason takes the

word. It is a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak

of Waterloo coldly from both sides. Let us render to chance that which

is due to chance, and to God that which is due to God. What is

Waterloo? A victory? No. The winning number in the lottery.

The quine 11 won by Europe, paid by France.

It was not worthwhile to place a lion there.

Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and

Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God,

who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more

extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry,

prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate

coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of

the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions,

carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand,

nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage,

absolute regularity; on the other, intuition, divination, military

oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable

something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the

lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the

mysteries of a profound soul, associated with destiny; the stream, the

plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey,

the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle;

faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but

perturbing it. Wellington was the Barême of war; Napoleon was its

Michael Angelo; and on this occasion, genius was vanquished by

calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact

calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not

come. Wellington expected Blücher; he came.

Wellington is classic war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at his

dawning, had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him superbly. The old

owl had fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not

only struck as by lightning, but disgraced. Who was that Corsican of

six and twenty? What signified that splendid ignoramus, who, with

everything against him, nothing in his favor, without provisions,

without ammunition, without cannon, without shoes, almost without an

army, with a mere handful of men against masses, hurled himself on

Europe combined, and absurdly won victories in the impossible? Whence

had issued that fulminating convict, who almost without taking breath,

and with the same set of combatants in hand, pulverized, one after the

other, the five armies of the emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on

Alvinzi, Wurmser on Beaulieu, Mélas on Wurmser, Mack on Mélas? Who was

this novice in war with the effrontery of a luminary? The academical

military school excommunicated him, and as it lost its footing; hence,

the implacable rancor of the old Cæsarism against the new; of the

regular sword against the flaming sword; and of the exchequer against

genius. On the 18th of June, 1815, that rancor had the last word, and

beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Arcola, it wrote:

Waterloo. A triumph of the mediocres which is sweet to the majority.

Destiny consented to this irony. In his decline, Napoleon found

Wurmser, the younger, again in front of him.

In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of Wellington.

Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the

second.

That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is England; the

English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; the superb

thing about England there, no offence to her, was herself. It was not

her captain; it was her army.

Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst,

that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815, was a

“detestable army.” What does that sombre intermingling of bones buried

beneath the furrows of Waterloo think of that?

England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington. To make

Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington is nothing but a

hero like many another. Those Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards, those

regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt,

that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders playing the

pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions of Rylandt,

those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to handle a musket

holding their own against Essling’s and Rivoli’s old troops,—that is

what was grand. Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we

are not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of

his cavalry would have been as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth

as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our glorification goes to the

English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If trophy

there be, it is to England that the trophy is due. The column of

Waterloo would be more just, if, instead of the figure of a man, it

bore on high the statue of a people.

But this great England will be angry at what we are saying here. She

still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789, the feudal illusion.

She believes in heredity and hierarchy. This people, surpassed by none

in power and glory, regards itself as a nation, and not as a people.

And as a people, it willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for

its head. As a workman, it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier,

it allows itself to be flogged.

It will be remembered, that at the battle of Inkermann a sergeant who

had, it appears, saved the army, could not be mentioned by Lord Paglan,

as the English military hierarchy does not permit any hero below the

grade of an officer to be mentioned in the reports.

That which we admire above all, in an encounter of the nature of

Waterloo, is the marvellous cleverness of chance. A nocturnal rain, the

wall of Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the

cannon, Napoleon’s guide deceiving him, Bülow’s guide enlightening

him,—the whole of this cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.

On the whole, let us say it plainly, it was more of a massacre than of

a battle at Waterloo.

Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one which has the smallest

front for such a number of combatants. Napoleon three-quarters of a

league; Wellington, half a league; seventy-two thousand combatants on

each side. From this denseness the carnage arose.

The following calculation has been made, and the following proportion

established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent;

Russians, thirty per cent; Austrians, forty-four per cent. At Wagram,

French, thirteen per cent; Austrians, fourteen. At the Moskowa, French,

thirty-seven per cent; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French,

thirteen per cent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo,

French, fifty-six per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo,

forty-one per cent; one hundred and forty-four thousand combatants;

sixty thousand dead.

To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs to the earth,

the impassive support of man, and it resembles all plains.

At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from it; and if a

traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches, if he dreams

like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the

catastrophe takes possession of him. The frightful 18th of June lives

again; the false monumental hillock disappears, the lion vanishes in

air, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate

over the plain, furious gallops traverse the horizon; the frightened

dreamer beholds the flash of sabres, the gleam of bayonets, the flare

of bombs, the tremendous interchange of thunders; he hears, as it were,

the death rattle in the depths of a tomb, the vague clamor of the

battle phantom; those shadows are grenadiers, those lights are

cuirassiers; that skeleton Napoleon, that other skeleton is Wellington;

all this no longer exists, and yet it clashes together and combats

still; and the ravines are empurpled, and the trees quiver, and there

is fury even in the clouds and in the shadows; all those terrible

heights, Hougomont, Mont-Saint-Jean, Frischemont, Papelotte,

Plancenoit, appear confusedly crowned with whirlwinds of spectres

engaged in exterminating each other.