War Stories

by Lamar Underwood

  Wellington, restless but impassive, was on horseback, and there remained the whole day in the same attitude, a little in front of the old mill of Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence, beneath an elm, which an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, purchased later on for two hundred francs, cut down, and carried off. Wellington was coldly heroic. The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell at his side. Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him: “My lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?” “Do as I am doing,” replied Wellington. To Clinton he said laconically, “To hold this spot to the last man.” The day was evidently turning out ill. Wellington shouted to his old companions of Talavera, of Vittoria, of Salamanca: “Boys, can retreat be thought of? Think of old England!”

  About four o’clock, the English line drew back. Suddenly nothing was visible on the crest of the plateau except the artillery and the sharp-shooters; the rest had disappeared; the regiments, dislodged by the shells and the French bullets, retreated into the hollow, now intersected by the back road of the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean; a retrograde movement took place, the English front hid itself, Wellington recoiled. “The beginning of the retreat!” cried Napoleon.

  The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local trouble, had never been so good tempered as on that day. His impenetrability had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of June, that profound soul masked by marble was radiant. The man who had been gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest favourites of destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The supreme smile is God’s alone.

  Ridet Cæsar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaires 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 hills in the neighbourhood 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 had not slept a moment; every instant of that night was marked by a joy for him. He rode through 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 landed at Ostend.” He talked expansively; he regained the animation which he had shown at his landing on the 1st 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 made fun of Wellington. “That little Englishman needs a lesson,” said Napoleon. The rain redoubled in violence; it thundered 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 meant to fight. “All the better!” exclaimed Napoleon. “I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive them back.”

  At daybreak 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 chess-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 famished. 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 several 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 the face of an archbishop said, “The ball will be to-day.” The Emperor jested with Ney, who had said, “Wellington will not be so simple as to wait for Your Majesty.” That was his way, however. “He was fond of a joke,” says Fleury de Chaboulon. “A merry humour was at the foundation of his character,” says Gourgaud. “He abounded in pleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty,” says Benjamin Constant. These gaieties of a giant are worthy of comment. It was he who called his grenadiers “his growlers”; 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 violet 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 quite 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 moving 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 was drawn up in six lines, forming, to repeat the Emperor’s expression, “the figure of six V’s.” A few moments after the formation of the line, in the midst of that profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a storm, which precedes battle, 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 pretty girls, General.”

  Sure of the result, 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 human pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large tomb, those admirable Scots Greys, with their superb horses, massing themselves, he said, “It is a pity.”

  Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected for his coign of vantage a contracted elevation of turf to the right of the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second s
tation 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 lofty mound, which still exists, and behind which the guard was massed in a hollow. 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 whistle of the bullets and canister. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword blades, and shapeless projectiles, eaten up with rust, have been 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 station that the Emperor said to his guide, Lacoste, a hostile and timid 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: “You ass, 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, rotted by the oxide of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron which parted like sticks of barley sugar between the fingers.

  Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of the plains, where the encounter between Napoleon and Wellington took place, are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. On 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 huge pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a crest 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 imagined 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 of cartloads of earth employed in erecting the mound 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 incline 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 further 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 guess.

  What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine l’Alleud is a Belgian village; Ohain is another. These villages, both of them hidden in hollows 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 certain parts. In 1815, as to-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 mound. This road was, and still is, a trench for 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. It was so deep on the plateau 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 excavations, 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 top of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible; that is to say, terrible.

  On the morning of Waterloo, then, Napoleon was content.

  He was right; the plan of battle drawn up by him was, as we have seen, really admirable.

  The battle once begun, its various incidents,—the resistance of Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie Sainte; the killing of Dauduin; the disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye’s brigade was broken; Guilleminot’s fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard nor powder sacks; the sticking of the batteries in the mud; the fifteen unescorted pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of the shells falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves in the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud, so that the canister was turned into a splash; the inutility of Piré’s demonstration on Braine-l’Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons almost annihilated; the right wing of the English badly alarmed, the left wing poorly attacked; Ney’s strange mistake in massing, instead of echelonning the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage of two hundred; the terrible gaps made in these masses by the cannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised; Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an axe the door of La Haie Sainte under the downright fire of the English barricade which barred the angle on the Genappe road; Marcognet’s division caught between the infantry and the cavalry, shot down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, put to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of seven pieces spiked; the Prince of Saxe Weimar holding and guarding, in spite of the Comte d’Erlon, both Frischemont and Smohain; the flags of the 105th taken, the flags of the 45th captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped by the flying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming things that had been said by prisoners; Grouchy’s delay; fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougomont in less than an hour; eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter time about La Haie Sainte,—all these stormy incidents passing like the clouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and had not overshadowed his imperial face. Napoleon was accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the poignant details. He cared little for figures, provided that they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question, and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate, You would not dare.

  Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon felt himself protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought that he had, a connivance, one might almost say a complicity, of events in his favour, which was equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity.

  Nevertheless, when one has Bérésina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind one, it seems as though one might defy Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes perceptible on the face of the heavens.

  At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon quivered. He suddenly beheld the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean deserted, and the van of the English army disappear. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperor half rose in his stirrups. Victory flashed from his eyes.

  Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes and destroyed—that was the definite conquest of England by France
; it would be Crécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengo was wiping out Agincourt.

  So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept his glass for the last time over all the points of the field of battle. His guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from below with a sort of religious awe. He pondered; he examined the slopes, noted the declivities, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the patches of rye, the path; he seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness at the English barricades of the two highways,—two large masses of felled trees, the one on the road to Genappe above La Haie Sainte, defended with two cannon, the only ones out of all the English artillery which commanded the extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelles where gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chassé’s brigade. Near this barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, which stands at the angle of the cross-road near Braine-l’Alleud; he bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide made a negative sign with his head, which was probably perfidious.

  The Emperor straightened himself up and reflected.

  Wellington had withdrawn.

  All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing him.

  Napoleon turning round abruptly, despatched an express at full speed to Paris to announce that the battle was won.

  Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder issues.

  He had just found his thunder-stroke.

  He gave orders to Milhaud’s cuirassiers to carry the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean.

  There were three thousand five hundred of them. They formed a front a quarter of a league in length. They were giants, on colossal horses. There were six and twenty squadrons of them; and they had behind them to support them Lefebvre Desnouettes’s division,—the one hundred and six picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the Guard, eleven hundred and ninety-seven men, and the lancers of the guard of eight hundred and eighty lances. They wore casques without plumes, and cuirasses of beaten iron, with horse pistols in their holsters, and long sabre swords. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at nine o’clock, with blare of trumpets and all the music playing “Let us watch o’er the Safety of the Empire,” they had come in a solid column, with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their centre, and deployed in two ranks between the roads to Genappe and Frischemont, and taken up their position for battle in that powerful second line, so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its extreme left Kellermann’s cuirassiers and on its extreme right Milhaud’s cuirassiers, had, so to speak, two wings of iron.