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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, "-----."
{EDITOR'S COMMENTARY:Another edition of this book has the
word "Merde!" in lieu of the ----- above.}
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