1.C.1.10. THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN
THE battery was unmasked at the same moment with the
ravine.
Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning
point-blank on the cuirassiers. The intrepid General Delort
made the military salute to the English battery.
The whole of the flying artillery of the English had
re-entered the squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not
had even the time for a halt. The disaster of the hollow road
had decimated, but not discouraged them. They belonged to
that class of men who, when diminished in number, increase
in courage.
Wathier's column alone had suffered in the disaster;
Delort's column, which Ney had deflected to the left, as
though he had a presentiment of an ambush, had arrived
whole.
The cuirassiers hurled themselves on the English squares.
At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth
pistols in fist,— such was the attack.
There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the
man until the soldier is changed into a statue, and when all
this flesh turns into granite. The English battalions, desperately
assaulted, did not stir.
Then it was terrible.
All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once.
A frenzied whirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained
impassive. The first rank knelt and received the
cuirassiers on their bayonets, the second ranks shot them
down; behind the second rank the cannoneers charged their
guns, the front of the square parted, permitted the passage
of an eruption of grape-shot, and closed again. The cuirassiers
replied by crushing them. Their great horses reared,
strode across the ranks, leaped over the bayonets and fell,
gigantic, in the midst of these four living wells. The cannonballs
ploughed furrows in these cuirassiers; the cuirassiers
made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared,
ground to dust under the horses. The bayonets plunged into
the bellies of these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds
which has probably never been seen anywhere else. The
squares, wasted by this mad cavalry, closed up their ranks
without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of grape-shot,
they created explosions in their assailants' midst. The
form of this combat was monstrous. These squares were
no longer battalions, they were craters; those cuirassiers were
no longer cavalry, they were a tempest. Each square was a
volcano attacked by a cloud; lava contended with lightning.
The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all,
being in the air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock.
lt was formed of the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The
bagpipe-player in the centre dropped his melancholy eyes,
filled with the reflections of the forests and the lakes, in profound
inattention, while men were being exterminated around
him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch under his arm,
played the Highland airs. These Scotchmen died thinking
of Ben Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argos. The sword
of a cuirassier, which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm
which bore it, put an end to the song by killing the singer.
The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further
diminished by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the
whole English army against them, but they multiplied themselves
so that each man of them was equal to ten. Nevertheless,
some Hanoverian battalions yielded. Wellington perceived
it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at that
same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the
battle. This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake.
All at once, the cuirassiers, who had been the assailants,
found themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their
back. Before them two squares, behind them Somerset;
Somerset meant fourteen hundred dragoons of the guard.
On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with the German light-horse,
and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers; the
cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in
the rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What
mattered it to them? They were a whirlwind. Their valor
was something indescribable.
In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which
was still thundering. It was necessary that it should be
so, or they could never have been wounded in the back.
One of their cuirasses, pierced on the shoulder by a ball
from a biscayan, is in the collection of the Waterloo
Museum.
For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen
was needed. It was no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was
a shadow, a fury, a dizzy transport of souls and courage, a
hurricane of lightning swords. In an instant the fourteen
hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight hundred.
Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up
with the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes's light-horse. The
plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured
again. The cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return
to the infantry; or, to put it more exactly, the whole of that
formidable rout collared each other without releasing the
other. The squares still held firm.
There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed
under him. Half the cuirassiers remained on the plateau.
This conflict lasted two hours.
The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no
doubt that, had they not been enfeebled in their first shock
by the disaster of the hollow road the cuirassiers would have
overwhelmed the centre and decided the victory. This extraordinary
cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen Talavera and
Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished, admired
heroically. He said in an undertone, "Sublime!"
The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen,
took or spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the
English regiments six flags, which three cuirassiers and three
chasseurs of the Guard bore to the Emperor, in front of the
farm of La Belle Alliance.
Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle
was like a duel between two raging, wounded men, each of
whom, still fighting and still resisting, is expending all his
blood.
Which of the two will be the first to fall?
The conflict on the plateau continued.
What had become of the cuirassiers? No one could have
told. One thing is certain, that on the day after the battle, a
cuirassier and his horse were found dead among the woodwork
of the scales for vehicles at Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point
where the four roads from Nivelles, Genappe, La Hulpe, and
Brussels meet and intersect each other. This horseman had
pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up the
body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He
was eighteen years old at that time.
Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at
hand.
The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was not
broken through. As every one was in possession of the plateau,
no one held it, and in fact it remained, to a great extent, with
the English. Wellington held the village and the culminating
plain; Ney had only the crest and the slope. They seemed
rooted in that fatal soil on both sides.
But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable.
The bleeding of that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left
wing, demanded reinforcements. "There are none," replied
Wellington; "he must let himself be killed!" Almost at that
same moment, a singular coincidence which paints the exhaustion
of the two armies, Ney demanded infantry from
Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, "Infantry! Where does
he expect me to get it? Does he think I can make
it?"
Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the
two. The furious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses
of iron and breasts of steel had ground the infantry to
nothing. A few men clustered round a flag marked the post
of a regiment; such and such a battalion was commanded only
by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten's division, already so
roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was almost destroyed; the
intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze's brigade strewed the rye-fields
all along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of those
Dutch grenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our
ranks in 1811, fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815,
rallied to the English standard, fought against Napoleon.
The loss in officers was considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had
his leg buried on the following day, had his knee shattered.
If, on the French side, in that tussle of the cuirassiers, Delort,
l'Heritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, and Blancard were disabled,
on the side of the English there was Alten wounded,
Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda
killed, the whole of Wellington's staff decimated, and England
had the worse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment
of foot-guards had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains,
and three ensigns; the first battalion of the 30th infantry had
lost 24 officers and 1,200 soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had
lost 24 officers wounded, 18 officers killed, 450 soldiers killed.
The Hanoverian hussars of Cumberland, a whole regiment,
with Colonel Hacke at its head, who was destined to be tried
later on and cashiered, had turned bridle in the presence of
the fray, and had fled to the forest of Soignes, sowing defeat
all the way to Brussels. The transports, ammunition-wagons,
the baggage-wagons, the wagons filled with wounded, on perceiving
that the French were gaining ground and approaching
the forest, rushed headlong thither. The Dutch, mowed down
by the French cavalry, cried, "Alarm!" From Vert-Coucou
to Groentendael, for a distance of nearly two leagues in the
direction of Brussels, according to the testimony of eye-witnesses
who are still alive, the roads were encumbered with
fugitives. This panic was such that it attacked the Prince de
Conde at Mechlin, and Louis XVIII. at Ghent. With the
exception of the feeble reserve echelonned behind the ambulance
established at the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean, and of
Vivian's and Vandeleur's brigades, which flanked the left
wing, Wellington had no cavalry left. A number of batteries
lay unhorsed. These facts are attested by Siborne; and
Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far as to say that
the Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousand
men. The Iron Duke remained calm, but his lips blanched.
Vincent, the Austrian commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner,
who were present at the battle in the English staff,
thought the Duke lost. At five o'clock Wellington drew out
his watch, and he was heard to murmur these sinister words,
"Blucher, or night!"
It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets
gleamed on the heights in the direction of Frischemont.
Here comes the change of face in this giant drama.