Les Misérables, v. 2

Ney, wild, and grand in the consciousness of accepted death, offered himself to every blow in this combat. He had his fifth horse killed under him here. Bathed in perspiration, with a flame in his eye and foam on his lips, his uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulettes half-cut through by the sabre-cut of a horse-guard, and his decoration of the great Eagle dinted by a bullet, – bleeding, muddy, magnificent, and holding a broken sword in his hand, he shouted, "Come and see how a marshal of France dies on the battle-field!" But it was in vain; he did not die. He was haggard and indignant, and hurled at Drouet d'Erlon the question, "Are you not going to get yourself killed?" He yelled amid the roar of all this artillery, crushing a handful of men, "Oh, there is nothing for me! I should like all these English cannon-balls to enter my chest!" You were reserved for French bullets, unfortunate man.

CHAPTER XIII

THE CATASTROPHE

The rout in the rear of the guard was mournful; the army suddenly gave way on all sides simultaneously, – at Hougomont, La Haye Sainte, Papelotte, and Plancenoit. The cry of "Treachery!" was followed by that of "Sauve qui peut!" An army which disbands is like a thaw, – all gives way, cracks, floats, rolls, falls, comes into collision, and dashes forward. Ney borrows a horse, leaps on it, and without hat, stock, or sword, dashes across the Brussels road, stopping at once English and French. He tries to hold back the army, he recalls it, he insults it, he clings wildly to the rout to hold it back. The soldiers fly from him, shouting, "Long live Marshal Ney!" Two regiments of Durutte's move backward and forward in terror, and as it were tossed between the sabres of the Hussars and the musketry fire of Kempt's, Best's, and Pack's brigades. A rout is the highest of all confusions, for friends kill one another in order to escape, and squadrons and battalions dash against and destroy one another. Lobau at one extremity and Reille at the other are carried away by the torrent. In vain does Napoleon build a wall of what is left of the Guard; in vain does he expend his own special squadrons in a final effort. Quiot retires before Vivian, Kellermann before Vandeleur, Lobau before Bülow, Moraud before Pirch, and Domor and Subervie before Prince William of Prussia. Guyot, who led the Emperor's squadrons to the charge, falls beneath the horses of English Dragoons. Napoleon gallops along the line of fugitives, harangues, urges, threatens, and implores them; all the mouths that shouted "Long live the Emperor!" in the morning, remained wide open; they hardly knew him. The Prussian cavalry, who had come up fresh, dash forward, cut down, kill, and exterminate. The artillery horses dash forward with the guns; the train soldiers unharness the horses from the caissons and escape on them; wagons overthrown, and with their four wheels in the air, block up the road and supply opportunities for massacre. Men crush one another and trample over the dead and over the living. A multitude wild with terror fill the roads, the paths, the bridges, the plains, the hills, the valleys, and the woods, which are thronged by this flight of forty thousand men. Cries, desperation; knapsacks and muskets cast into the wheat; passages cut with the edge of the sabres; no comrades, no officers, no generals recognized, – an indescribable terror. Ziethen sabring France at his ease. The lions become kids. Such was this fight.

At Genappe an effort was made to turn and rally; Lobau collected three hundred men; the entrance of the village was barricaded, but at the first round of Prussian canister all began flying again, and Lobau was made prisoner. This volley of shot may still be seen, buried in the gable of an old brick house on the right of the road, just before you reach Genappe. The Prussians dashed into Genappe, doubtless furious at being such small victors, and the pursuit was monstrous, for Blücher commanded extermination. Roguet had given the mournful example of threatening with death any French Grenadier who brought in a Prussian prisoner, and Blücher surpassed Roguet Duchesme, general of the young guard, who was pursued into the doorway of an inn in Genappe, surrendered his sword to an Hussar of death, who took the sword and killed the prisoner. The victory was completed by the assassination of the vanquished. Let us punish, as we are writing history, – old Blücher dishonored himself. This ferocity set the seal on the disaster; the desperate rout passed through Genappe, passed through Quatre Bras, passed through Sombreffe, passed through Frasnes, passed through Thuin, passed through Charleroi, and only stopped at the frontier. Alas! and who was it flying in this way? The grand army.

Did this vertigo, this terror, this overthrow of the greatest bravery that ever astonished history, take place without a cause? No. The shadow of a mighty right hand is cast over Waterloo; it is the day of destiny, and the force which is above man produced that day. Hence the terror, hence all those great souls laying down their swords. Those who had conquered Europe, fell crushed, having nothing more to say or do, and feeling a terrible presence in the shadow. Hoc erat in fatis. On that day the perspective of the human race was changed, and Waterloo is the hinge of the 19th century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary for the advent of the great age, and He who cannot be answered undertook the task. The panic of the heroes admits of explanation: in the battle of Waterloo there is more than a storm, – there is a meteor.

At nightfall, Bernard and Bertrand seized by the skirt of his coat, in a field near Genappe, a haggard, thoughtful, gloomy man, who, carried so far by the current of the rout, had just dismounted, passed the bridle over his arm, and was now, with wandering eye, returning alone to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, the immense somnambulist of the shattered dream, still striving to advance.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LAST SQUARE

A few squares of the Guard, standing motionless in the swash of the rout, like rocks in running water, held out till night. They awaited the double shadow of night and death, and let them surround them. Each regiment, isolated from the others, and no longer connected with the army which was broken on all sides, died where it stood. In order to perform this last exploit, they had taken up a position, some on the heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of Mont St. Jean. The gloomy squares, deserted, conquered, and terrible, struggled formidably with death, for Ulm, Wagram, Jena, and Friedland were dying in it. When twilight set in at nine in the evening, one square still remained at the foot of the plateau of Mont St. Jean. In this mournful valley, at the foot of the slope scaled by the cuirassiers, now inundated by the English masses, beneath the converging fire of the hostile and victorious artillery, under a fearful hailstorm of projectiles, this square still resisted. It was commanded by an obscure officer of the name of Cambronne. At each volley the square diminished, but continued to reply to the canister with musketry fire, and each moment contracted its four walls. Fugitives in the distance, stopping at moments to draw breath, listened in the darkness to this gloomy diminishing thunder.

When this legion had become only a handful, when their colors were but a rag, when their ammunition was exhausted, and muskets were clubbed, and when the pile of corpses was greater than the living group, the victors felt a species of sacred awe, and the English artillery ceased firing. It was a sort of respite; these combatants had around them an army of spectres, outlines of mounted men, the black profile of guns, and the white sky visible through the wheels; the colossal death's-head which heroes ever glimpse in the smoke of a battle, advanced and looked at them. They could hear in the twilight gloom that the guns were being loaded; the lighted matches, resembling the eyes of a tiger in the night, formed a circle round their heads. The linstocks of the English batteries approached the guns, and at this moment an English general, – Colville according to some, Maitland according to others, – holding the supreme moment suspended over the heads of these men, shouted to them, "Brave Frenchmen, surrender!"

Cambronne answered, "Merde!"

CHAPTER XV

CAMBRONNE

Out of respect for the French reader, the grandest word that any Frenchman has ever uttered must not be repeated. Dump no sublimity into the stream of history.

At our own risk, we shall disregard this notice.

Among these giants, then, there was one Titan, Cambronne.

To speak out this word and then die, what could be more sublime than this! For to be ready to die is to die, and it was no fault of his if amid a storm of grape-shot he still lived.

The man who won the battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon routed; it was not Wellington giving ground at four o'clock, driven to despair at five; it was not Blücher, who had not fought at all: the man who won the battle of Waterloo was Cambronne.

To overwhelm with such a word the thunder-bolt which kills you, is to win the victory.

To reply thus to disaster, to say this to fate, to lay such a foundation for the lion which was to mark the spot, to hurl this reply to the night's rain, to the masked wall of Hougomont, to the sunken road of Ohain, to the delay of Grouchy, to the arrival of Blücher, to be Irony in the tomb, to struggle to his feet again after having fallen, to drown in two syllables the European coalition, to offer to kings these latrines already used by the Cæsars, to make the last of words the first, lending it the splendor of France, to end Waterloo with the jeers of the Mardi-Gras, to supplement Leonidas with Rabelais, to sum up this victory in one last word impossible to repeat, to lose ground and preserve history, after such carnage to have the laugh on his side, this is grand.

This insult to the lightning reaches the sublimity of Æschylus.

Cambronne's exclamation has the effect of an explosion. It is the bursting of a bosom with disdain; it is the surcharge of agony which breaks out. Who did conquer? Was it Wellington? No. Without Blücher he was lost. Was it Blücher? No. If Wellington had not begun, Blücher could not have finished. This Cambronne, this new-comer upon the scene, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal atom of the war, feels that there is a lie somewhere in the disaster, which doubles its bitterness; and at the moment when he is bursting with rage, they offer him this mockery, life! How could he help bursting out? They are there, – all the kings of Europe, the conquering generals, the thundering Jupiters; they have a hundred thousand victorious soldiers, and behind the hundred thousand, a million; their cannon, the matches lighted, are yawning; they have trampled under foot the Imperial Guard and the Grand Army; they have just crushed Napoleon; only Cambronne is left; only this earthworm remains to protest. He will protest. Then he looks about for a word, as he would for a sword. Froth rises to his lips, and this froth is the word. Before this victory, stupendous but commonplace, before this victory without victors, driven to despair, he stands erect again. He yields to its weight, but he proves its nothingness; and he does more than spit upon it; and weighed down by numbers, by force, by matter, he finds for his soul one expression, "Merde!" We repeat – to say this, to do this, to find this, is to win the victory.

The spirit of the great past entered into this unknown man at this fatal moment. Cambronne finds the word of Waterloo just as Rouget de l'Isle finds the Marseillaise – by an inspiration from above. A magnetic current from the divine whirlwind passes through these men and they vibrate, and one sings the grand song, the other utters the terrible cry. This word of superhuman scorn Cambronne hurls not alone at Europe in the name of the Empire, – that would be little; he hurls it at the past in the name of the Revolution. In Cambronne is heard and is recognized the old soul of the giants. It seems as if it were Danton speaking or Kleber roaring.

To this word of Cambronne's, the English voice replied, "Fire!" The batteries blazed, the hill trembled, from all these brazen mouths leaped a last fearful belching of grape, a dense cloud of smoke rolled forth silvered in waves by the rising moon, and when the smoke cleared away, there was nothing left there. This dreaded remnant was annihilated. The four walls of the living redoubt lay low, there being hardly perceptible here and there a quivering among the corpses; and thus the French legions, greater than those of Rome, died at Mont St. Jean, on the earth drenched with rain and blood, in the gloomy wheat-fields, at the spot where now there passes at four o'clock in the morning, whistling and gayly flicking his horse with the whip, Joseph, who drives the Nivelles mail-cart.

CHAPTER XVI

QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE

The Battle of Waterloo is an enigma as obscure for those who gained it as for him who lost it. To Napoleon it is a panic; Blücher sees nothing in it but fire; Wellington does not understand it at all. Look at the reports: the bulletins are confused; the commentaries are entangled; the latter stammer, the former stutter. Jomini divides the battle of Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it into three acts; Charras, although we do not entirely agree with him in all his appreciations, has alone caught with his haughty eye the characteristic lineaments of this catastrophe of human genius contending with divine chance. All the other historians suffer from a certain bedazzlement in which they grope about. It was a flashing day; in truth, the overthrow of the military monarchy which, to the great stupor of the kings, has dragged down all kingdoms, – the downfall of strength and the rout of war.

In this event, which bears the stamp of superhuman necessity, men play but a small part. If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blücher, does that deprive England and Germany of anything? No. Neither illustrious England nor august Germany is in question in the problem of Waterloo; for, thank Heaven! nations are great without the mournful achievements of the sword. Neither Germany nor England nor France is held in a scabbard; at this day, when Waterloo is only a clash of sabres, Germany has Goethe above Blücher, and England Byron above Wellington. A mighty dawn of ideas is peculiar to our age; and in this dawn England and Germany have their own magnificent flash. They are majestic because they think; the high level they bring to civilization is intrinsic to them; it comes from themselves and not from an accident. Any aggrandizement the 19th century may have cannot boast of Waterloo as its fountain-head; for only barbarous nations grow suddenly after a victory: it is the transient vanity of torrents swollen by a storm. Civilized nations, especially at the present day, are not elevated or debased by the good or evil fortune of a captain, and their specific weight in the human family results from something more than a battle. Their honor, dignity, enlightenment, and genius are not numbers which those gamblers, heroes, and conquerors can stake in the lottery of battles. Very often a battle lost is progress gained, and less of glory more of liberty. The drummer is silent and reason speaks; it is the game of who loses wins. Let us, then, speak of Waterloo coldly from both sides, and render to chance the things that belong to chance, and to God what is God's. What is Waterloo, – a victory? No; a great prize in the lottery. A prize won by Europe and paid by France. It was hardly worth while erecting a lion for it.

Waterloo, by the way, is the strangest encounter recorded in history; Napoleon and Wellington are not enemies, but contraries. Never did God, who delights in antitheses, produce a more striking contrast or a more extraordinary confrontation. On one side precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, a retreat assured, reserves prepared, an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy profiting by the ground, tactics balancing battalions, carnage measured by a plumb-line, war regulated watch in hand, nothing left voluntarily to accident, old classic courage and absolute correctness. On the other side we have intuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, a flashing glance; something that gazes like the eagle and strikes like lightning, all the mysteries of a profound mind, association with destiny; the river, the plain, the forest, and the hill summoned, and to some extent compelled, to obey, the despot going so far as even to tyrannize over the battle-field; faith in a star blended with strategic science, heightening but troubling it. Wellington was the Barême of war, Napoleon was its Michael Angelo, and this true genius was conquered by calculation. On both sides somebody was expected; and it was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon waited for Grouchy, who did not come; Wellington waited for Blücher, and he came.

Wellington is the classical war taking its revenge; Bonaparte, in his dawn, had met it in Italy and superbly defeated it, – the old owl fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only overthrown, but scandalized. Who was this Corsican of six-and-twenty years of age? What meant this splendid ignoramus who, having everything against him, nothing for him, without provisions, ammunition, guns, shoes, almost without an army, with a handful of men against masses, dashed at allied Europe, and absurdly gained impossible victories? Whence came this mad thunderer, who, almost without taking breath, pulverized one after another the five armies of the Emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu upon Alvinzi, Wurmser upon Beaulieu, Mélas upon Wurmser, Mack upon Mélas? Who was this new-comer of war who possessed the effrontery of a planet? The academic military school excommunicated him, while bolting, and hence arose an implacable rancor of the old Cæsarism against the new, of the old sabre against the flashing sword, and of the chess-board against genius. On June 18, 1815, this rancor got the best; and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Marengo, and Arcola, it wrote, – Waterloo. It was a triumph of mediocrity, sweet to majorities, and destiny consented to this irony. In his decline, Napoleon found a young Wurmser before him, – in fact, it is only necessary to whiten Wellington's hair in order to have a Wurmser. Waterloo is a battle of the first class, gained by a captain of the second.

What must be admired in the battle of Waterloo is England, the English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; and what England had really superb in it is (without offence) herself; it is not her captain, but her army. Wellington, strangely ungrateful, declares in his despatch to Lord Bathurst, that his army, the one which fought on June 18, 1815, was a "detestable army." What does the gloomy pile of bones buried in the trenches of Waterloo think of this? England has been too modest to herself in her treatment of Wellington; for making him so great is making herself small. Wellington is merely a hero like any other man. The Scotch Grays, the Life Guards, Maitland and Mitchell's regiments, Pack and Kempt's infantry, Ponsonby and Somerset's cavalry, the Highlanders playing the bagpipes under the shower of canister, Ryland's battalions, the fresh recruits who could hardly manage a musket and yet held their ground against the old bands of Essling and Rivoli, – all this is grand. Wellington was tenacious, that was his merit, and we do not deny it to him; but the lowest of his privates and his troopers was quite as solid as he, and the iron soldier is as good as the iron duke. For our part, all our glorification is offered to the English soldier, the English army, the English nation; and if there must be a trophy, it is to England that this trophy is owing. The Waterloo column would be more just if, instead of the figure of a man, it raised to the clouds the statue of a people.

But this great England will be irritated by what we are writing here; for she still has feudal illusions, after her 1688, and the French 1789. This people believes in inheritance and hierarchy; and while no other excels it in power and glory, it esteems itself as a nation and not as a people. As a people, it readily subordinates itself, and takes a lord as its head; the workman lets himself be despised; the soldier puts up with flogging. It will be remembered that, at the battle of Inkermann, a sergeant who, as it appears, saved the British army, could not be mentioned by Lord Raglan, because the military hierarchy does not allow any hero below the rank of officer to be mentioned in despatches. What we admire before all, in an encounter like Waterloo, is the prodigious skill of chance. The night rain, the wall of Hougomont, the sunken road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon, Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bülow's guide enlightening him, – all this cataclysm is marvellously managed.

Altogether, we will assert, there is more of a massacre than of a battle in Waterloo. Waterloo, of all pitched battles, is the one which had the smallest front for such a number of combatants, – Napoleon's, three quarters of a league, Wellington's, half a league, and seventy-two thousand combatants on either side. From this density came the carnage. The following calculation has been made and proportion established: loss of men at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent; Russian, thirty per cent; Austrian, forty-four per cent: at Wagram, French, thirteen per cent; Austrian, fourteen per cent: at Moskova, French, thirty-seven per cent; Russian, forty-four per cent: at Bautzen, French, thirteen per cent; Russian and Prussian, fourteen per cent: at Waterloo, French, fifty-six per cent; Allies, thirty-one per cent, – total for Waterloo, forty-one per cent, or out of one hundred and forty-four thousand fighting men, sixty thousand killed and wounded. The field of Waterloo has at the present day that calmness which belongs to the earth, and resembles all plains. At night, a sort of visionary mist rises from it, and if any traveller walk about it, and listen and dream like Virgil on the mournful plain of Philippi, the hallucination of the catastrophe seizes upon him. The frightful June 18 lives again, the false monumental hill is levelled, the wondrous lion is dissipated, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate on the plain, furious galloping crosses the horizon; the startled dreamer sees the flash of sabres, the sparkle of bayonets, the red light of shells, the monstrous collision of thunderbolts; he hears, like a death-groan from the tomb, the vague clamor of the phantom battle. These shadows are grenadiers; these flashes are cuirassiers; this skeleton is Napoleon; this skeleton is Wellington; all this is non-existent, and yet still combats, and the ravines are stained purple, and the trees rustle, and there is fury even in the clouds and in the darkness, while all the stern heights – Mont St. Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit – seem confusedly crowned by hosts of spectres exterminating one another.

CHAPTER XVII

OUGHT WATERLOO TO BE APPLAUDED?

There exists a highly respectable liberal school, which does not detest Waterloo, but we do not belong to it. For us Waterloo is only the stupefied date of liberty; for such an eagle to issue from such a shell is assuredly unexpected. Waterloo, if we place ourselves at the culminating point of the question, is intentionally a counter-revolutionary victory, – it is Europe against France; it is Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna against Paris; it is the statu quo opposed to the initiative; it is the 14th July, 1789, attacked through March 20, 1815; it is all the monarchies clearing the decks to conquer the indomitable French spirit of revolt. The dream was to extinguish this vast people which had been in a state of eruption for six-and-twenty years; and for this purpose, Brunswick, Nassau, the Romanoffs, Hohenzollern, and the Hapsburger coalesced with the Bourbons, and Waterloo carries divine right on its pillion. It is true that as the Empire was despotic, Royalty, by the natural reaction of things, was compelled to be liberal, and a constitutional order issued from Waterloo, much to the regret of the conquerors. The fact is, that the Revolution can never be really conquered, and being providential and absolutely fatal, it constantly reappears, – before Waterloo in Napoleon overthrowing the old thrones; after Waterloo in Louis XVIII. granting and enduring the charter. Bonaparte places a postilion on the throne of Naples, and a sergeant on the throne of Sweden, employing inequality to demonstrate equality; Louis XVIII. at St. Ouen countersigns the declaration of the rights of man. If you wish to understand what revolution is, call it progress; and if you wish to understand what progress is, call it to-morrow. To-morrow ever does its work irresistibly and does it to-day, and it ever strangely attains its object. It employs Wellington to make an orator of Foy who was only a soldier. Foy falls at Hougomont and raises himself in the tribune. Such is the process of progress, and that workman has no bad tools: it fits to its divine work the man who bestrode the Alps and the old tottering patient of Père Élysée, and it employs both the gouty man and the conqueror, – the conqueror externally, the gouty man at home. Waterloo, by cutting short the demolition of thrones by the sword, had no other effect than to continue the revolutionary work on another side. The sabres have finished, and the turn of the thinkers arrives; the age which Waterloo wished to arrest marched over it, and continued its route, and this sinister victory was gained by liberty.