1.C.1.16. QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE?
THE battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure to
those who won it as to those who lost it. For Napoleon it was
a panic;
Blucher sees nothing in it but fire; Wellington
understands nothing in regard to it. Look at the reports.
The bulletins are confused, the commentaries involved. Some
stammer, others lisp. Jomini divides the battle of Waterloo
into four moments; Muffling cuts it up into three changes;
Charras alone, though we hold another judgment than his on
some points, seized with his haughty glance the characteristic
outlines of that catastrophe of human genius in conflict with
divine chance. All the other historians suffer from being
somewhat dazzled, and in this dazzled state they fumble about.
It was a day of lightning brilliancy; in fact, a crumbling of
the military monarchy which, to the vast stupefaction of
kings, drew all the kingdoms after it— the fall of force, the
defeat of war.
In this event, stamped with superhuman necessity, the part
played by men amounts to nothing.
If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blucher, do we
thereby deprive England and Germany of anything? No.
Neither that illustrious England nor that august Germany
enter into the problem of Waterloo. Thank Heaven, nations
are great, independently of the lugubrious feats of the sword.
Neither England, nor Germany, nor France is contained in a
scabbard. At this epoch when Waterloo is only a clashing of
swords, above Blucher, Germany has Schiller; above Wellington,
England has Byron. A vast dawn of ideas is the
peculiarity of our century, and in that aurora England and
Germany have a magnificent radiance. They are majestic
because they think. The elevation of level which they contribute
to civilization is intrinsic with them; it proceeds from
themselves and not from an accident. The aggrandizement
which they have brought to the nineteenth century has not
Waterloo as its source. It is only barbarous peoples who
undergo rapid growth after a victory. That is the temporary
vanity of torrents swelled by a storm. Civilized people,
especially in our day, are neither elevated nor abased by the
good or bad fortune of a captain. Their specific gravity in
the human species results from something more than a combat.
Their honor, thank God! their dignity, their intelligence,
their genius, are not numbers which those gamblers,
heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of battles. Often
a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is less glory
and more liberty. The drum holds its peace; reason takes the
word. It is a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore,
speak of Waterloo coldly from both sides. Let us render
to chance that which is due to chance, and to God that which
is due to God. What is Waterloo? A victory? No. The
winning number in the lottery.
The quine won by Europe, paid by France.
It was not worth while to place a lion there.
Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history.
Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies; they are
opposites. Never did God, who is fond of antitheses, make a
more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison. On
one side, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, an assured
retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable
method, strategy, which takes advantage of the
ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions,
carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in
hand, nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic
courage, absolute regularity; on the other, intuition, divination,
military oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance,
an indescribable something which gazes like an eagle, and
which strikes like the lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful
impetuosity, all the mysteries of a profound soul, associated
with destiny; the stream, the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned,
and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot going
even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in a
star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing
it. Wellington was the Bareme of war; Napoleon was its
Michael Angelo; and on this occasion, genius was vanquished
by calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was
the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting
for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected Blucher;
he came.
Wellington is classic war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at
his dawning, had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him
superbly. The old owl had fled before the young vulture.
The old tactics had been not only struck as by lightning, but
disgraced. Who was that Corsican of six and twenty? What
signified that splendid ignoramus, who, with everything
against him, nothing in his favor, without provisions, without
ammunition, without cannon, without shoes, almost without
an army, with a mere handful of men against masses, hurled
himself on Europe combined, and absurdly won victories in
the impossible? Whence had issued that fulminating convict,
who almost without taking breath, and with the same set of
combatants in hand, pulverized, one after the other, the five
armies of the emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on
Alvinzi, Wurmser on Beaulieu, Melas on Wurmser, Mack on
Melas? Who was this novice in war with the effrontery of a
luminary? The academical military school excommunicated
him, and as it lost its footing; hence, the implacable rancor
of the old Caesarism against the new; of the regular sword
against the flaming sword; and of the exchequer against
genius. On the 18th of June, 1815, that rancor had the last
word. and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua,
Arcola, it wrote: Waterloo. A triumph of the mediocres
which is sweet to the majority. Destiny consented to this
irony. In his decline, Napoleon found Wurmser, the younger,
again in front of him.
In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of
Wellington.
Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of
the second.
That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is
England; the English firmness, the English resolution, the
English blood; the superb thing about England there, no
offence to her, was herself. It was not her captain; it was
her army.
Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord
Bathurst, that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of
June, 1815, was a "detestable army." What does that sombre
intermingling of bones buried beneath the furrows of Waterloo
think of that?
England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington.
To make Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington
is nothing but a hero like many another. Those Scotch
Grays, those Horse Guards, those regiments of Maitland and
of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt, that cavalry of
Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders playing the pibroch
under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions of
Rylandt, those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to
handle a musket holding their own against Essling's and
Rivoli's old troops,— that is what was grand. Wellington was
tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we are not seeking to
lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of his cavalry
would have been as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth as
much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our glorification goes
to the English soldier, to the English army, to the English
people. If trophy there be, it is to England that the trophy
is due. The column of Waterloo would be more just, if,
instead of the figure of a man, it bore on high the statue of
a people.
But this great England will be angry at what we are saying
here. She still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789,
the feudal illusion. She believes in heredity and hierarchy.
This people, surpassed by none in power and glory, regards
itself as a nation, and not as a people. And as a people, it
willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for its head.
As a workman, it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier,
it allows itself to be flogged.
It will be remembered, that at the battle of Inkermann a
sergeant who had, it appears, saved the army, could not be
mentioned by Lord Paglan, as the English military hierarchy
does not permit any hero below the grade of an officer to be
mentioned in the reports.
That which we admire above all, in an encounter of the
nature of Waterloo, is the marvellous cleverness of chance.
A nocturnal rain, the wall of Hougomont, the hollow road of
Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon, Napoleon's guide deceiving
him, Bulow's guide enlightening him,— the whole of this
cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.
On the whole, let us say it plainly, it was more of a massacre
than of a battle at Waterloo.
Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one which has the
smallest front for such a number of combatants. Napoleon
three-quarters of a league; Wellington, half a league; seventy-two
thousand combatants on each side. From this denseness
the carnage arose.
The following calculation has been made, and the following
proportion established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French,
fourteen per cent; Russians, thirty per cent; Austrians, forty-four
per cent. At Wagram, French, thirteen per cent; Austrians,
fourteen. At the Moskowa, French, thirty-seven per
cent; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French, thirteen per
cent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo, French,
fifty-six per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo,
forty-one per cent; one hundred and forty-four thousand combatants;
sixty thousand dead.
To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs to
the earth, the impassive support of man, and it resembles all
plains.
At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from it;
and if a traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches, if
he dreams like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination
of the catastrophe takes possession of him. The
frightful 18th of June lives again; the false monumental
hillock disappears, the lion vanishes in air, the battle-field resumes
its reality, lines of infantry undulate over the plain,
furious gallops traverse the horizon; the frightened dreamer
beholds the flash of sabres, the gleam of bayonets, the flare of
bombs, the tremendous interchange of thunders; he hears, as
it were, the death rattle in the depths of a tomb, the vague
clamor of the battle phantom; those shadows are grenadiers,
those lights are cuirassiers; that skeleton Napoleon, that other
skeleton is Wellington; all this no longer exists, and yet it
clashes together and combats still; and the ravines are empurpled,
and the trees quiver, and there is fury even in the
clouds and in the shadows; all those terrible heights, Hougomont,
Mont-Saint-Jean, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plancenoit,
appear confusedly crowned with whirlwinds of spectres engaged
in exterminating each other.