第 八十五 章 · THE LAST SQUARE

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.}