第 七十八 章 · NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR
The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local
trouble, had never been in a better humor than on that day. His
impenetrability had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of
June, that profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly. The man who
had been gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest
favorites of destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow.
The supreme smile is God’s alone.
_Ridet Cæsar, Pompeius flebit_, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix
Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is
certain that Cæsar laughed. While exploring on horseback at one o’clock
on the preceding night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand,
the communes in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of
the long line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon
from Frischemont to Braine-l’Alleud, it had seemed to him that fate, to
whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact to the
appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained for some time
motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder; and
this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterious
saying, “We are in accord.” Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer
in accord.
He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night was marked
by a joy for him. He traversed the line of the principal outposts,
halting here and there to talk to the sentinels. At half-past two, near
the wood of Hougomont, he heard the tread of a column on the march; he
thought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington.
He said: “It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way for the
purpose of decamping. I will take prisoners the six thousand English
who have just arrived at Ostend.” He conversed expansively; he regained
the animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March,
when he pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of
the Gulf Juan, and cried, “Well, Bertrand, here is a reinforcement
already!” On the night of the 17th to the 18th of June he rallied
Wellington. “That little Englishman needs a lesson,” said Napoleon. The
rain redoubled in violence; the thunder rolled while the Emperor was
speaking.
At half-past three o’clock in the morning, he lost one illusion;
officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him that
the enemy was not making any movement. Nothing was stirring; not a
bivouac-fire had been extinguished; the English army was asleep. The
silence on earth was profound; the only noise was in the heavens. At
four o’clock, a peasant was brought in to him by the scouts; this
peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably
Vivian’s brigade, which was on its way to take up a position in the
village of Ohain, at the extreme left. At five o’clock, two Belgian
deserters reported to him that they had just quitted their regiment,
and that the English army was ready for battle. “So much the better!”
exclaimed Napoleon. “I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive
them back.”
In the morning he dismounted in the mud on the slope which forms an
angle with the Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant’s
chair brought to him from the farm of Rossomme, seated himself, with a
truss of straw for a carpet, and spread out on the table the chart of
the battle-field, saying to Soult as he did so, “A pretty
checker-board.”
In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports of
provisions, embedded in the soft roads, had not been able to arrive by
morning; the soldiers had had no sleep; they were wet and fasting. This
did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney, “We have
ninety chances out of a hundred.” At eight o’clock the Emperor’s
breakfast was brought to him. He invited many generals to it. During
breakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to a ball two nights
before, in Brussels, at the Duchess of Richmond’s; and Soult, a rough
man of war, with a face of an archbishop, said, “The ball takes place
to-day.” The Emperor jested with Ney, who said, “Wellington will not be
so simple as to wait for Your Majesty.” That was his way, however. “He
was fond of jesting,” says Fleury de Chaboulon. “A merry humor was at
the foundation of his character,” says Gourgaud. “He abounded in
pleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty,” says Benjamin
Constant. These gayeties of a giant are worthy of insistence. It was he
who called his grenadiers “his grumblers”; he pinched their ears; he
pulled their moustaches. “The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on
us,” is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from the
island of Elba to France, on the 27th of February, on the open sea, the
French brig of war, _Le Zéphyr_, having encountered the brig
_L’Inconstant_, on which Napoleon was concealed, and having asked the
news of Napoleon from _L’Inconstant_, the Emperor, who still wore in
his hat the white and amaranthine cockade sown with bees, which he had
adopted at the isle of Elba, laughingly seized the speaking-trumpet,
and answered for himself, “The Emperor is well.” A man who laughs like
that is on familiar terms with events. Napoleon indulged in many fits
of this laughter during the breakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast he
meditated for a quarter of an hour; then two generals seated themselves
on the truss of straw, pen in hand and their paper on their knees, and
the Emperor dictated to them the order of battle.
At nine o’clock, at the instant when the French army, ranged in
echelons and set in motion in five columns, had deployed—the divisions
in two lines, the artillery between the brigades, the music at their
head; as they beat the march, with rolls on the drums and the blasts of
trumpets, mighty, vast, joyous, a sea of casques, of sabres, and of
bayonets on the horizon, the Emperor was touched, and twice exclaimed,
“Magnificent! Magnificent!”
Between nine o’clock and half-past ten the whole army, incredible as it
may appear, had taken up its position and ranged itself in six lines,
forming, to repeat the Emperor’s expression, “the figure of six V’s.” A
few moments after the formation of the battle-array, in the midst of
that profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a
storm, which precedes engagements, the Emperor tapped Haxo on the
shoulder, as he beheld the three batteries of twelve-pounders, detached
by his orders from the corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and destined
to begin the action by taking Mont-Saint-Jean, which was situated at
the intersection of the Nivelles and the Genappe roads, and said to
him, “There are four and twenty handsome maids, General.”
Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed before
him, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had appointed
to barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried.
All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughty
pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large
tomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massing
themselves, he said, “It is a pity.”
Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected for
his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right of
the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during
the battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o’clock in the
evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable;
it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which the
guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this knoll the balls
rebounded from the pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As at
Brienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of the
heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapeless
projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up at the spot where his
horse’s feet stood. _Scabra rubigine_. A few years ago, a shell of
sixty pounds, still charged, and with its fuse broken off level with
the bomb, was unearthed. It was at this last post that the Emperor said
to his guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was
attached to the saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every
discharge of canister and tried to hide behind Napoleon: “Fool, it is
shameful! You’ll get yourself killed with a ball in the back.” He who
writes these lines has himself found, in the friable soil of this
knoll, on turning over the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb,
disintegrated, by the oxidization of six and forty years, and old
fragments of iron which parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.
Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of the
plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took
place, are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from
this mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real
relief has been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds
her bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying
it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two years later,
exclaimed, “They have altered my field of battle!” Where the great
pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a
hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but
which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe.
The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height of
the two knolls of the two great sepulchres which enclose the road from
Genappe to Brussels: one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other,
the German tomb, is on the right. There is no French tomb. The whole of
that plain is a sepulchre for France. Thanks to the thousands upon
thousands of cartloads of earth employed in the hillock one hundred and
fifty feet in height and half a mile in circumference, the plateau of
Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by an easy slope. On the day of
battle, particularly on the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt and
difficult of approach. The slope there is so steep that the English
cannon could not see the farm, situated in the bottom of the valley,
which was the centre of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the
rains had still farther increased this acclivity, the mud complicated
the problem of the ascent, and the men not only slipped back, but stuck
fast in the mire. Along the crest of the plateau ran a sort of trench
whose presence it was impossible for the distant observer to divine.
What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine-l’Alleud is a Belgian
village; Ohain is another. These villages, both of them concealed in
curves of the landscape, are connected by a road about a league and a
half in length, which traverses the plain along its undulating level,
and often enters and buries itself in the hills like a furrow, which
makes a ravine of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the present
day, this road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between
the two highways from Genappe and Nivelles; only, it is now on a level
with the plain; it was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have been
appropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and still is, a
trench throughout the greater portion of its course; a hollow trench,
sometimes a dozen feet in depth, and whose banks, being too steep,
crumbled away here and there, particularly in winter, under driving
rains. Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at the
Braine-l’Alleud entrance that a passer-by was crushed by a cart, as is
proved by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery, and which gives
the name of the dead, _Monsieur Bernard Debrye, Merchant of Brussels_,
and the date of the accident, _February, 1637_.8 It was so deep on the
table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise, was
crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated on
another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process of
clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible on
the grassy slope to the left of the highway between La Haie-Sainte and
the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.
On the day of battle, this hollow road whose existence was in no way
indicated, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a trench at the
summit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible;
that is to say, terrible.