1.C.1.9. THE UNEXPECTED
THERE were three thousand five hundred of them. They
formed a front a quarter of a league in extent. They were
giant men, 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
horse-tails, 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
braying 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.
Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the Emperor's orders.
Ney drew his sword and placed himself at their head. The
enormous squadrons were set in motion.
Then a formidable spectacle was seen.
All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and
trumpets flung to the breeze, formed in columns by divisions,
descended, by a simultaneous movement and like one man,
with the precision of a brazen battering-ram which is effecting
a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance, plunged into the
terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared
there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow,
reappeared on the other side of the valley, still compact and
in close ranks, mounting at a full trot, through a storm of
grape-shot which burst upon them, the terrible muddy slope
of the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean. They ascended, grave,
threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between the
musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was
audible. Being two divisions, there were two columns of
them; Wathier's division held the right, Delort's division was
on the left. It seemed as though two immense adders of steel
were to be seen crawling towards the crest of the table-land.
It traversed the battle like a prodigy.
Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great
redoubt of the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was
lacking here, but Ney was again present. It seemed as though
that mass had become a monster and had but one soul. Each
column undulated and swelled like the ring of a polyp. They
could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent
here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a
stormy heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons
and the flourish of trumpets, a terrible and disciplined
tumult; over all, the cuirasses like the scales on the
hydra.
These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something
parallel to this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient
Orphic epics, which told of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes,
those Titans with human heads and equestrian chests
who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible, invulnerable, sublime
— gods and beasts.
Odd numerical coincidence,— twenty-six battalions rode to
meet twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau,
in the shadow of the masked battery, the English infantry,
formed into thirteen squares, two battalions to the square, in
two lines, with seven in the first line, six in the second, the
stocks of their guns to their shoulders, taking aim at that
which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm, mute,
motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers
did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood
of men. They heard the swelling noise of three thousand
horse, the alternate and symmetrical tramp of their hoofs
at full trot, the jingling of the cuirasses, the clang of the
sabres and a sort of grand and savage breathing. There
ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once, a long file
of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the crest,
and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand
heads with gray mustaches, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!"
All this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the
appearance of an earthquake.
All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our
right, the head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a
frightful clamor. On arriving at the culminating point of the
crest, ungovernable, utterly given over to fury and their
course of extermination of the squares and cannon, the
cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,— a trench
between them and the English. It was the hollow road of
Ohain.
It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected,
yawning, directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms
deep between its double slopes; the second file pushed the
first into it, and the third pushed on the second; the horses
reared and fell backward, landed on their haunches, slid down,
all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming the riders;
and there being no means of retreat,— the whole column being
no longer anything more than a projectile,— the force which
had been acquired to crush the English crushed the French;
the inexorable ravine could only yield when filled; horses and
riders rolled there pell-mell, grinding each other, forming but
one mass of flesh in this gulf: when this trench was full of
living men, the rest marched over them and passed on.
Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss.
This began the loss of the battle.
A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says
that two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried
in the hollow road of Ohain. This figure probably comprises
all the other corpses which were flung into this ravine the day
after the combat.
Let us note in passing that it was Dubois's sorely
tried brigade which, an hour previously, making a charge
to one side, had captured the flag of the Lunenburg
battalion.
Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milhaud's
cuirassiers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not
been able to see that hollow road, which did not even form a
wrinkle on the surface of the plateau. Warned, nevertheless,
and put on the alert by the little white chapel which marks
its angle of junction with the Nivelles highway, he had probably
put a question as to the possibility of an obstacle, to the
guide Lacoste. The guide had answered No. We might
almost affirm that Napoleon's catastrophe originated in that
sign of a peasant's head.
Other fatalities were destined to arise.
Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle?
We answer No. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of
Blucher? No. Because of God.
Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within
the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts
was in preparation, in which there was no longer any room
for Napoleon. The ill will of events had declared itself long
before.
It was time that this vast man should fall.
The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed
the balance. This individual alone counted for more
than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality
concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the
brain of one man,— this would be mortal to civilization were
it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and
supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and
the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral,
as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking
blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,— these are
formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too
heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades,
to which the abyss lends an ear.
Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall
had been decided on.
He embarrassed God.
Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part
of the Universe.