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NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR
The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a
local trouble, had never been in a better humor than on that day.
His impenetrability had been smiling ever since the morning.
On the 18th of June, that profound soul masked by marble beamed
blindly. The man who had been gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at
Waterloo. The greatest favorites of destiny make mistakes.
Our joys are composed of shadow.
The supreme smile is God's alone.
Ridet Caesar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaries of the
Fulminatrix Legion.
Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is
certain that Caesar laughed.
While exploring on horseback at one o'clock on the preceding
night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand, the communes
in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of the
long line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon
from Frischemont to Braine-l'Alleud, it had seemed to him that
fate, to whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo,
was exact to the appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained
for some time motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening
to the thunder; and this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness
this mysterious saying, "We are in accord." Napoleon
was mistaken.
They were no longer in accord.
He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night
was marked by a joy for him.
He traversed the line of the principal outposts, halting here
and there to talk to the sentinels.
At half-past two, near the wood of Hougomont, he heard the
tread of a column on the march; he thought at the moment that
it was a retreat on the part of Wellington.
He said:
"It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way
for the purpose of decamping.
I will take prisoners the six thousand English who have just
arrived at Ostend." He conversed expansively; he regained
the animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of
March, when he pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic
peasant of the Gulf Juan, and cried, "Well, Bertrand, here
is a reinforcement already!" On the night of the 17th to
the 18th of June he rallied Wellington. "That little Englishman
needs a lesson," said Napoleon.
The rain redoubled in violence; the thunder rolled while the
Emperor was speaking.
At half-past three o'clock in the morning, he lost one illusion;
officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him
that the enemy was not making any movement.
Nothing was stirring; not a bivouac-fire had been extinguished;
the English army was asleep. The silence on earth was profound;
the only noise was in the heavens. At four o'clock, a peasant
was brought in to him by the scouts; this peasant had served as
guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably Vivian's brigade,
which was on its way to take up a position in the village of Ohain,
at the extreme left.
At five o'clock, two Belgian deserters reported to him that
they had just quitted their regiment, and that the English army
was ready for battle. "So much the better!" exclaimed
Napoleon.
"I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive them
back."
In the morning he dismounted in the mud on the slope which
forms an angle with the Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and
a peasant's chair brought to him from the farm of Rossomme, seated
himself, with a truss of straw for a carpet, and spread out on
the table the chart of the battle-field, saying to Soult as he
did so, "A pretty checker-board."
In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports
of provisions, embedded in the soft roads, had not been able to
arrive by morning; the soldiers had had no sleep; they were wet
and fasting.
This did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to
Ney, "We have ninety chances out of a hundred." At eight
o'clock the Emperor's breakfast was brought to him. He invited
many generals to it.
During breakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to
a ball two nights before, in Brussels, at the Duchess of Richmond's;
and Soult, a rough man of war, with a face of an archbishop, said,
"The ball takes place to-day." The Emperor jested with
Ney, who said, "Wellington will not be so simple as to wait
for Your Majesty."
That was his way, however. "He was fond of jesting,"
says Fleury de Chaboulon.
"A merry humor was at the foundation of his character,"
says Gourgaud. "He abounded in pleasantries, which were more
peculiar than witty," says Benjamin Constant.
These gayeties of a giant are worthy of insistence.
It was he who called his grenadiers "his grumblers";
he pinched their ears; he pulled their mustaches.
"The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on us,"
is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from
the island of Elba to France, on the 27th of February, on the
open sea, the French brig of war, Le Zephyr, having encountered
the brig L'Inconstant, on which Napoleon was concealed, and having
asked the news of Napoleon from L'Inconstant, the Emperor, who
still wore in his hat the white and amaranthine cockade sown with
bees, which he had adopted at the isle of Elba, laughingly seized
the speaking-trumpet, and answered for himself, "The Emperor
is well."
A man who laughs like that is on familiar terms with events.
Napoleon indulged in many fits of this laughter during the
breakfast at Waterloo.
After breakfast he meditated for a quarter of an hour; then
two generals seated themselves on the truss of straw, pen in hand
and their paper on their knees, and the Emperor dictated to them
the order of battle.
At nine o'clock, at the instant when the French army, ranged
in echelons and set in motion in five columns, had deployed--
the divisions in two lines, the artillery between the brigades,
the music at their head; as they beat the march, with rolls on
the drums and the blasts of trumpets, mighty, vast, joyous, a
sea of casques, of sabres, and of bayonets on the horizon, the
Emperor was touched, and twice exclaimed, "Magnificent!
Magnificent!"
Between nine o'clock and half-past ten the whole army, incredible
as it may appear, had taken up its position and ranged itself
in six lines, forming, to repeat the Emperor's expression, "the
figure of six V's." A few moments after the formation of
the battle-array, in the midst of that profound silence, like
that which heralds the beginning of a storm, which precedes engagements,
the Emperor tapped Haxo on the shoulder, as he beheld the three
batteries of twelve-pounders, detached by his orders from the
corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and destined to begin the action
by taking Mont-Saint-Jean, which was situated at the intersection
of the Nivelles and the Genappe roads, and said to him, "There
are four and twenty handsome maids, General."
Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed
before him, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he
had appointed to barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village
should be carried.
All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word
of haughty pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there
now stands a large tomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their
superb horses, massing themselves, he said, "It is a pity."
Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected
for his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to
the right of the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his
second station during the battle.
The third station, the one adopted at seven o'clock in the
evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable;
it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind
which the guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this
knoll the balls rebounded from the pavements of the road, up to
Napoleon himself.
As at Brienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets
and of the heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades,
and shapeless projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up
at the spot where his horse' feet stood.
Scabra rubigine.
A few years ago, a shell of sixty pounds, still charged, and
with its fuse broken off level with the bomb, was unearthed.
It was at this last post that the Emperor said to his guide,
Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached to
the saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every discharge
of canister and tried to hide behind Napoleon:
"Fool, it is shameful!
You'll get yourself killed with a ball in the back."
He who writes these lines has himself found, in the friable soil
of this knoll, on turning over the sand, the remains of the neck
of a bomb, disintegrated, by the oxidization of six and forty
years, and old fragments of iron which parted like elder-twigs
between the fingers.
Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations
of the plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington
took place, are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815.
By taking from this mournful field the wherewithal to make
a monument to it, its real relief has been taken away, and history,
disconcerted, no longer finds her bearings there.
It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying it.
Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two years later,
exclaimed, "They have altered my field of battle!" Where
the great pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day,
there was a hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the
Nivelles road, but which was almost an escarpment on the side
of the highway to Genappe.
The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by
the height of the two knolls of the two great sepulchres which
enclose the road from Genappe to Brussels:
one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other, the German
tomb, is on the right.
There is no French tomb.
The whole of that plain is a sepulchre for France.
Thanks to the thousands upon thousands of cartloads of earth
employed in the hillock one hundred and fifty feet in height and
half a mile in circumference, the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean is
now accessible by an easy slope. On the day of battle, particularly
on the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt and difficult of
approach.
The slope there is so steep that the English cannon could
not see the farm, situated in the bottom of the valley, which
was the centre of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the rains
had still farther increased this acclivity, the mud complicated
the problem of the ascent, and the men not only slipped back,
but stuck fast in the mire. Along the crest of the plateau ran
a sort of trench whose presence it was impossible for the distant
observer to divine.
What was this trench?
Let us explain.
Braine-l'Alleud is a Belgian village; Ohain is another.
These villages, both of them concealed in curves of the landscape,
are connected by a road about a league and a half in length, which
traverses the plain along its undulating level, and often enters
and buries itself in the hills like a furrow, which makes a ravine
of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the present day, this
road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between the
two highways from Genappe and Nivelles; only, it is now on a level
with the plain; it was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have
been appropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and
still is, a trench throughout the greater portion of its course;
a hollow trench, sometimes a dozen feet in depth, and whose banks,
being too steep, crumbled away here and there, particularly in
winter, under driving rains.
Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at the Braine-l'Alleud
entrance that a passer-by was crushed by a cart, as is proved
by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery, and which gives
the name of the dead, Monsieur Bernard Debrye, Merchant of Brussels,
and the date of the accident, February, 1637.[8] It was so deep
on the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise,
was crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated
on another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the
process of clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal
is still visible on the grassy slope to the left of the highway
between La Haie-Sainte and the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.
[8] This is the inscription:--
D. O. M.
CY A ETE ECRASE
PAR MALHEUR
SOUS UN CHARIOT,
MONSIEUR BERNARD
DE BRYE MARCHAND
A BRUXELLE LE [Illegible]
FEVRIER 1637.
On the day of battle, this hollow road whose existence was
in no way indicated, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a
trench at the summit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the
soil, was invisible; that is to say, terrible.
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