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THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE
So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content.
He was right; the plan of battle conceived by him was, as
we have seen, really admirable.
The battle once begun, its very various changes,--the resistance
of Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin;
the disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's
brigade was shattered; Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he
had neither petard nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries;
the fifteen unescorted pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge;
the small effect of the bombs falling in the English lines, and
there embedding themselves in the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding
in producing volcanoes of mud, so that the canister was turned
into a splash; the uselessness of Pire's demonstration on Braine-l'Alleud;
all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost exterminated; the
right wing of the English badly alarmed, the left wing badly cut
into; Ney's strange mistake in massing, instead of echelonning
the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to grape-shot,
arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage of two
hundred; the frightful holes made in these masses by the cannon-balls;
attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenly unmasked
on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised;
Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the
Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating
in with an axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright
fire of the English barricade which barred the angle of the road
from Genappe to Brussels; Marcognet's division caught between
the infantry and the cavalry, shot down at the very muzzle of
the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, put to the sword by
Ponsonby; his battery of seven pieces spiked; the Prince of Saxe-Weimar
holding and guarding, in spite of the Comte d'Erlon, both Frischemont
and Smohain; the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the 45th
captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped by runners of the
flying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between
Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming things that had been said by
prisoners; Grouchy's delay; fifteen hundred men killed in the
orchard of Hougomont in less than an hour; eighteen hundred men
overthrown in a still shorter time about La Haie-Sainte,--all
these stormy incidents passing like the clouds of battle before
Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and had not overshadowed
that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon was accustomed to gaze
steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending details,
cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that
they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings
did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor
at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of
the question, and he treated destiny as his equal:
he seemed to say to fate, Thou wilt not dare.
Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought
himself protected in good and tolerated in evil.
He had, or thought that he had, a connivance, one might almost
say a complicity, of events in his favor, which was equivalent
to the invulnerability of antiquity.
Nevertheless, when one has Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau
behind one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A
mysterious frown becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens.
At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered.
He suddenly beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared,
and the van of the English army disappear.
It was rallying, but hiding itself.
The Emperor half rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory
flashed from his eyes.
Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes
and destroyed--that was the definitive conquest of England by
France; it was Crecy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged.
The man of Marengo was wiping out Agincourt.
So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune,
swept his glass for the last time over all the points of the field
of battle.
His guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched
him from below with a sort of religion.
He pondered; he examined the slopes, noted the declivities,
scrutinized the clumps of trees, the square of rye, the path;
he seemed to be counting each bush.
He gazed with some intentness at the English barricades of
the two highways,--two large abatis of trees, that on the road
to Genappe above La Haie-Sainte, armed with two cannon, the only
ones out of all the English artillery which commanded the extremity
of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelles where
gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chasse's brigade.
Near this barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas,
painted white, which stands at the angle of the cross-road near
Braine-l'Alleud; he bent down and spoke in a low voice to the
guide Lacoste.
The guide made a negative sign with his head, which was probably
perfidious.
The Emperor straightened himself up and fell to thinking.
Wellington had drawn back.
All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing
him.
Napoleon turning round abruptly, despatched an express at
full speed to Paris to announce that the battle was won.
Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts.
He had just found his clap of thunder.
He gave orders to Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the table-land
of Mont-Saint-Jean.
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