1.C.1.14. THE LAST SQUARE
SEVERAL squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream
of the defeat, as rocks in running water, held their own until
night. Night came, death also; they awaited that double
shadow, and, invincible, allowed themselves to be enveloped
therein. Each regiment, isolated from the rest, and having no
bond with the army, now shattered in every part, died alone.
They had taken up position for this final action, some on the
heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean.
There, abandoned, vanquished, terrible, those gloomy squares
endured their death-throes in formidable fashion. Ulm,
Wagram, Jena, Friedland, died with them.
At twilight, towards nine o'clock in the evening, one of
them was left at the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean.
In that fatal valley, at the foot of that declivity which the
cuirassiers had ascended, now inundated by the masses of the
English, under the converging fires of the victorious hostile
cavalry, under a frightful density of projectiles, this square
fought on. It was commanded by an obscure officer named
Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished and
replied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade, continually
contracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing
breathless for a moment in the distance, listened in the darkness
to that gloomy and ever-decreasing thunder.
When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when
nothing was left of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the
bullets all gone, were no longer anything but clubs, when the
heap of corpses was larger than the group of survivors, there
reigned among the conquerors, around those men dying so
sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English artillery,
taking breath, became silent. This furnished a sort of respite.
These combatants had around them something in the nature
of a swarm of spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the
black profiles of cannon, the white sky viewed through wheels
and gun-carriages, the colossal death's-head, which the
heroes saw constantly through the smoke, in the depths of the
battle, advanced upon them and gazed at them. Through the
shades of twilight they could hear the pieces being loaded;
the matches all lighted, like the eyes of tigers at night, formed
a circle round their heads; all the lintstocks of the English
batteries approached the cannons, and then, with emotion,
holding the supreme moment suspended above these men, an
English general, Colville according to some, Maitland according
to others, shouted to them, "Surrender, brave Frenchmen!"
Cambronne replied, " —."