1.C.1.8. THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE
So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content.
He was right; the plan of battle conceived by him was, as
we have seen, really admirable.
The battle once begun, its very various changes,— the resistance
of Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing
of Bauduin; the disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall
against which Soye's brigade was shattered; Guilleminot's
fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard nor powder
sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted
pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small
effect of the bombs 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 uselessness of Pire's demonstration
on Braine-l'Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons,
almost exterminated; the right wing of the English badly
alarmed, the left wing badly cut into; 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 frightful holes 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 of the road from Genappe to Brussels;
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 flag of the 105th taken, the
flag of the 45th captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped
by runners of 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 that face
of imperial certainty. Napoleon was accustomed to gaze
steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending details,
cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, 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, Thou wilt
not dare.
Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon
thought 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 favor, which was equivalent
to the invulnerability of antiquity.
Nevertheless, when one has Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau
behind one, it seems as though one might distrust
Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes perceptible in the
depths of the heavens.
At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered.
He suddenly beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean
cleared, and the van of the English army disappear. It was
rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperor half rose in his
stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed from his eyes.
Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes
and destroyed— that was the definitive conquest of England
by France; it was Crecy, 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 religion. He
pondered; he examined the slopes, noted the declivities, scrutinized
the clumps of trees, the square 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 abatis of trees, that on the road to Genappe above La
Haie-Sainte, armed 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 Chasse's brigade. Near this barricade
he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white,
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 fell to thinking.
Wellington had drawn back.
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
darts.
He had just found his clap of thunder.
He gave orders to Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the
table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean.