Les Misérables, v. 2/5: Cosette

by Victor Hugo

  CHAPTER XVI.

  QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE.

  The Battle of Waterloo is an enigma as obscure for those who gained itas for him who lost it. To Napoleon it is a panic; Blücher sees nothingin it but fire; Wellington does not understand it at all. Look at thereports: the bulletins are confused; the commentaries are entangled;the latter stammer, the former stutter. Jomini divides the battle ofWaterloo 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 ofthis catastrophe of human genius contending with divine chance. All theother historians suffer from a certain bedazzlement in which they gropeabout. It was a flashing day; in truth, the overthrow of the militarymonarchy which, to the great stupor of the kings, has dragged down allkingdoms,--the downfall of strength and the rout of war.

  In this event, which bears the stamp of superhuman necessity, men playbut a small part. If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blücher, doesthat deprive England and Germany of anything? No. Neither illustriousEngland nor august Germany is in question in the problem of Waterloo;for, thank Heaven! nations are great without the mournful achievementsof the sword. Neither Germany nor England nor France is held in ascabbard; at this day, when Waterloo is only a clash of sabres, Germanyhas Goethe above Blücher, and England Byron above Wellington. A mightydawn of ideas is peculiar to our age; and in this dawn England andGermany have their own magnificent flash. They are majestic becausethey think; the high level they bring to civilization is intrinsicto them; it comes from themselves and not from an accident. Anyaggrandizement the 19th century may have cannot boast of Waterloo asits fountain-head; for only barbarous nations grow suddenly after avictory: it is the transient vanity of torrents swollen by a storm.Civilized nations, especially at the present day, are not elevated ordebased by the good or evil fortune of a captain, and their specificweight in the human family results from something more than a battle.Their honor, dignity, enlightenment, and genius are not numbers whichthose gamblers, heroes, and conquerors can stake in the lottery ofbattles. Very often a battle lost is progress gained, and less of glorymore of liberty. The drummer is silent and reason speaks; it is thegame of who loses wins. Let us, then, speak of Waterloo coldly fromboth sides, and render to chance the things that belong to chance, andto God what is God's. What is Waterloo,--a victory? No; a great prizein the lottery. A prize won by Europe and paid by France. It was hardlyworth 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 didGod, who delights in antitheses, produce a more striking contrast ora more extraordinary confrontation. On one side precision, foresight,geometry, prudence, a retreat assured, reserves prepared, an obstinatecoolness, an imperturbable method, strategy profiting by the ground,tactics balancing battalions, carnage measured by a plumb-line, warregulated watch in hand, nothing left voluntarily to accident, oldclassic courage and absolute correctness. On the other side we haveintuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, aflashing glance; something that gazes like the eagle and strikes likelightning, all the mysteries of a profound mind, association withdestiny; the river, the plain, the forest, and the hill summoned,and to some extent compelled, to obey, the despot going so far aseven to tyrannize over the battle-field; faith in a star blended withstrategic science, heightening but troubling it. Wellington was theBarême of war, Napoleon was its Michael Angelo, and this true geniuswas conquered by calculation. On both sides somebody was expected; andit 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 hisdawn, had met it in Italy and superbly defeated it,--the old owl fledbefore the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only overthrown,but scandalized. Who was this Corsican of six-and-twenty years ofage? What meant this splendid ignoramus who, having everything againsthim, nothing for him, without provisions, ammunition, guns, shoes,almost without an army, with a handful of men against masses, dashedat allied Europe, and absurdly gained impossible victories? Whencecame this mad thunderer, who, almost without taking breath, pulverizedone after another the five armies of the Emperor of Germany, upsettingBeaulieu upon Alvinzi, Wurmser upon Beaulieu, Mélas upon Wurmser, Mackupon Mélas? Who was this new-comer of war who possessed the effronteryof a planet? The academic military school excommunicated him, whilebolting, and hence arose an implacable rancor of the old Cæsarismagainst the new, of the old sabre against the flashing sword, and ofthe chess-board against genius. On June 18, 1815, this rancor got thebest; and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Marengo, andArcola, it wrote,--Waterloo. It was a triumph of mediocrity, sweetto majorities, and destiny consented to this irony. In his decline,Napoleon found a young Wurmser before him,--in fact, it is onlynecessary to whiten Wellington's hair in order to have a Wurmser.Waterloo is a battle of the first class, gained by a captain of thesecond.

  What must be admired in the battle of Waterloo is England, the Englishfirmness, the English resolution, the English blood; and what Englandhad really superb in it is (without offence) herself; it is not hercaptain, but her army. Wellington, strangely ungrateful, declares inhis despatch to Lord Bathurst, that his army, the one which foughton June 18, 1815, was a "detestable army." What does the gloomy pileof bones buried in the trenches of Waterloo think of this? Englandhas been too modest to herself in her treatment of Wellington; formaking him so great is making herself small. Wellington is merely ahero like any other man. The Scotch Grays, the Life Guards, Maitlandand Mitchell's regiments, Pack and Kempt's infantry, Ponsonby andSomerset's cavalry, the Highlanders playing the bagpipes under theshower of canister, Ryland's battalions, the fresh recruits whocould hardly manage a musket and yet held their ground against theold bands of Essling and Rivoli,--all this is grand. Wellington wastenacious, that was his merit, and we do not deny it to him; but thelowest of his privates and his troopers was quite as solid as he, andthe iron soldier is as good as the iron duke. For our part, all ourglorification is offered to the English soldier, the English army,the English nation; and if there must be a trophy, it is to Englandthat 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 apeople.

  But this great England will be irritated by what we are writing here;for she still has feudal illusions, after her 1688, and the French1789. This people believes in inheritance and hierarchy; and while noother excels it in power and glory, it esteems itself as a nation andnot as a people. As a people, it readily subordinates itself, and takesa lord as its head; the workman lets himself be despised; the soldierputs up with flogging. It will be remembered that, at the battle ofInkermann, a sergeant who, as it appears, saved the British army,could not be mentioned by Lord Raglan, because the military hierarchydoes not allow any hero below the rank of officer to be mentionedin despatches. What we admire before all, in an encounter likeWaterloo, is the prodigious skill of chance. The night rain, the wallof Hougomont, the sunken road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon,Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bülow's guide enlightening him,--allthis cataclysm is marvellously managed.

  Altogether, we will assert, there is more of a massacre than of abattle in Waterloo. Waterloo, of all pitched battles, is the one whichhad the smallest front for such a number of combatants,--Napoleon's,three quarters of a league, Wellington's, half a league, andseventy-two thousand combatants on either side. From this density camethe carnage. The following calculation has been made and proportionestablished: 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: atBautzen, French, thirteen per cent; Russian and Prussian, fourteen percent: at Waterloo, French, fifty
-six per cent; Allies, thirty-one percent,--total for Waterloo, forty-one per cent, or out of one hundredand forty-four thousand fighting men, sixty thousand killed andwounded. The field of Waterloo has at the present day that calmnesswhich belongs to the earth, and resembles all plains. At night, a sortof visionary mist rises from it, and if any traveller walk about it,and listen and dream like Virgil on the mournful plain of Philippi, thehallucination of the catastrophe seizes upon him. The frightful June 18lives again, the false monumental hill is levelled, the wondrous lionis dissipated, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantryundulate on the plain, furious galloping crosses the horizon; thestartled dreamer sees the flash of sabres, the sparkle of bayonets, thered light of shells, the monstrous collision of thunderbolts; he hears,like a death-groan from the tomb, the vague clamor of the phantombattle. These shadows are grenadiers; these flashes are cuirassiers;this skeleton is Napoleon; this skeleton is Wellington; all this isnon-existent, and yet still combats, and the ravines are stainedpurple, and the trees rustle, and there is fury even in the clouds andin the darkness, while all the stern heights--Mont St. Jean, Hougomont,Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--seem confusedly crowned byhosts of spectres exterminating one another.