by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EMPEROR ASKS THE GUIDE A QUESTION.
On the morning of Waterloo, then, Napoleon was cheerful, and had reasonto be so,--for the plan he had drawn up was admirable. Once the battlehad begun, its various incidents,--the resistance of Hougomont; thetenacity of La Haye Sainte; Bauduin killed, and Foy placed _hors decombat_; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was broken;the fatal rashness of Guilleminot, who had no petards or powder-bagsto destroy the farm gates; the sticking of the artillery in the mud;the fifteen guns without escort captured by Uxbridge in a hollowway; the slight effect of the shells falling in the English lines,which buried themselves in the moistened ground, and only produced avolcano of mud, so that the troops were merely plastered with mud; theinutility of Piret's demonstration on Braine l'Alleud, and the whole ofhis cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost annihilated; the English rightbut slightly disquieted and the left poorly attacked; Ney's strangemistake in massing instead of échelonning the four divisions of thefirst corps; a depth of twenty-seven ranks and a line of two hundredmen given up in this way to the canister; the frightful gaps made bythe cannon-balls in these masses; the attacking columns disunited; theoblique battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot,and Durutte in danger; Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Viot, that Herculeswho came from the Polytechnic school, wounded at the moment when hewas beating in with an axe the gates of La Haye Sainte, under theplunging fire of the English barricade on the Genappe road; Marcognet'sdivision caught between infantry and cavalry, shot down from the wheatby Best and Pack, and sabred by Ponsonby; its battery of seven gunsspiked; the Prince of Saxe Weimar holding and keeping in defiance ofCount d'Erlon, Frischemont and Smohain; the flags of the 105th and 45thregiments which he had captured; the Prussian black Hussar stopped bythe scouts of the flying column of three hundred chasseurs, who werebeating the country between Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming thingswhich this man said; Grouchy's delay; the fifteen hundred men killedin less than an hour in the orchard of Hougomont; the eighteen hundredlaid low even in a shorter space of time round La Haye Sainte,--allthese stormy incidents, passing like battle-clouds before Napoleon, hadscarce disturbed his glance or cast a gloom over this imperial face.Napoleon was accustomed to look steadily at war; he never reckoned upthe poignant details; he cared little for figures, provided that theygave the total--victory. If the commencement went wrong, he did notalarm himself, as he believed himself master and owner of the end; heknew how to wait, and treated Destiny as an equal. He seemed to say tofate, "You would not dare!"
One half light, one half shade, Napoleon felt himself protected ingood, and tolerated in evil. There was, or he fancied there was, forhim a connivance, we might say almost a complicity, on the part ofevents, equivalent to the ancient invulnerability; and yet, when a manhas behind him the Beresina, Leipsic, and Fontainebleau, it seems asif he might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes visible onthe face of heaven. At the moment when Wellington retrograded, Napoleonquivered. He suddenly saw the plateau of Mont St. Jean deserted, andthe front of the English army disappear. It was rallying, but wasscreened from sight. The Emperor half raised himself in his stirrups,and the flash of victory passed into his eyes. If Wellington weredriven back into the forest of Soignies, and destroyed, it would bethe definitive overthrow of England by France: it would be Cressy,Poictiers, Malplaquet, and Ramilies avenged; the man of Marengo woulderase Agincourt. The Emperor, while meditating on this tremendousstroke, turned his telescope to all parts of the battle-field. HisGuards, standing at ease behind him, gazed at him with a sort ofreligious awe. He was reflecting, he examined the slopes, noted theinclines, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the patches of barley, andthe paths; he seemed to be counting every tuft of gorse. He looked withsome fixity at the English barricades,--two large masses of felledtrees, the one on the Genappe road defended by two guns, the only onesof all the English artillery which commanded the battlefield, and theone on the Nivelles road, behind which flashed the Dutch bayonets ofChassé's brigade. He remarked near this barricade the old chapel of St.Nicholas, which is at the corner of the cross-road leading to Brainel'Alleud. He bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste.The guide shook his head with a probably perfidious negative.
The Emperor drew himself up and reflected; Wellington was retiring, andall that was needed now was to complete this retreat by an overthrow.Napoleon hurriedly turned and sent off a messenger at full speed toParis to announce that the battle was gained. Napoleon was one ofthose geniuses from whom thunder issues, and he had just found histhunder-stroke; he gave Milhaud's cuirassiers orders to carry theplateau of Mont St. Jean.
