1.C.1.7. NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR
THE Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by
a local trouble, had never been in a better humor than on that
day. His impenetrability had been smiling ever since the
morning. On the 18th of June, that profound soul masked by
marble beamed blindly. The man who had been gloomy at
Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest favorites of destiny
make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The
supreme smile is God's alone.
Ridet Caesar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaries of the
Fulminatrix Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on
that occasion, but it is certain that Caesar laughed. While exploring
on horseback at one o'clock on the preceding night,
in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand, the communes
in the neighborhood 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 took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that
night was marked by a joy for him. He traversed 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 arrived at Ostend." He conversed
expansively; he regained the animation which he had
shown at his landing on the first 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
rallied Wellington. "That little Englishman needs a lesson,"
said Napoleon. The rain redoubled in violence; the thunder
rolled 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 was ready for battle. "So much the better!" exclaimed
Napoleon. "I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive
them back."
In the morning 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 checker-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 fasting. 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 many 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 a face of an archbishop, said,
"The ball takes place to-day." The Emperor jested with Ney,
who said, "Wellington will not be so simple as to wait for
Your Majesty." That was his way, however. "He was fond
of jesting," says Fleury de Chaboulon. "A merry humor was
at the foundation of his character," says Gourgaud. "He
abounded in pleasantries, which were more peculiar than
witty," says Benjamin Constant. These gayeties of a giant
are worthy of insistence. It was he who called his grenadiers
"his grumblers"; he pinched their ears; he pulled their
mustaches. "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 Zephyr,
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 amaranthine 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 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 set in motion 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
ranged itself in six lines, forming, to repeat the Emperor's
expression, "the figure of six V's." A few moments after the
formation of the battle-array, in the midst of that profound
silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a storm,
which precedes engagements, 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 handsome maids, General."
Sure of the issue, 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 bad been traversed
by but a single word of haughty pity; perceiving on his left,
at a spot where there now stands a large tomb, those admirable
Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massing themselves,
he said, "It is a pity."
Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme,
and selected for his post of observation a contracted elevation
of turf to the right of the road from Genappe to Brussels,
which was his second station 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 elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind
which the guard was massed on a slope of the plain. 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 shriek of the bullets and of the heavy artillery. Mouldy
cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapeless projectiles, eaten
up with rust, were 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 last post that the
Emperor said to his guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified
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: "Fool, 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, disintegrated,
by the oxidization of six and forty years, and old fragments
of iron which parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.
Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations
of the plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and
Wellington took place, are no longer what they were on June
18, 1815. By 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
great pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day,
there was a hillock 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 measured 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 upon thousands of cartloads
of earth employed in the hillock 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 slope 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
farther 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 divine.
What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine-l'Alleud is
a Belgian village; Ohain is another. These villages, both of
them concealed in curves 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 some places. In 1815, as at the present 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 hillock.
This road was, and still is, a trench throughout 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 passerby 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 table-land 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 process
of clearing the ground, 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 summit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in
the soil, was invisible; that is to say, terrible.