IF JAMES MACDONNEL HAD NOT CLOSED THE GATES OF HUGOMONT CASTLE
According to the Duke of Wellington himself, the success of the allies
at the Battle of Waterloo turned on an amazingly slight contingency,
namely, the closing of a gate or door of wood in the wall of a building.
This fact was conclusively brought out when, years after the battle, an
English clergyman, Rev. Mr. Narcross of Framlingham, died and left in
his will the sum of five hundred pounds simply "to the bravest man in
England." The executors of the estate were completely nonplussed. Who
was the bravest man in England? Doubtless many would have come forward
gladly to claim the distinction and the legacy, but who was worthy of
them? In their trouble, the executors applied to the Duke of Wellington
for an answer to the question.
The Iron Duke was not a man to be beaten by any question whatsoever,
least of all by a military one. He went back a little in his
recollections--until he came to the battle of Waterloo. Then he wrote to
the executors of the Framlingham parson that that battle was the
greatest that had been fought in recent times. "The success of it," he
went on to say, "turned upon the closing of the gates of Hugomont; these
gates were closed in the most courageous manner, at the very nick of
time, by Sir James Macdonnel; and he is the man to whom you should pay
the five hundred pounds."
Thereupon the executors went to Sir James with the money; but he said
to them: "I cannot claim all the credit of closing the gates of
Hugomont. My sergeant, John Graham, seeing with me the importance of the
step, rushed forward to help me; and by your leave I will share the
legacy with him." The request was granted, and the fact was to this
extent judicially established that Sir James Macdonnel and John Graham
had closed the gates of Hugomont Castle, thereby settling the issue of
the battle and the fate of Europe.
Let us see what events hinged upon this act, and how they depended on
it. The army with which the great Napoleon faced the miscellaneous
assortment of British, Prussians, Hanoverians, Dutch and Belgians at
Waterloo was smaller than that of the Allies, but vastly more efficient
as a whole. Most of the troops of the Allies were raw, and some of them
were poor stuff indeed. Napoleon's soldiers were hardened, practiced,
brave and splendidly commanded.
Napoleon had forced the Allies back at Quatre Bras. He captured their
position at La Haye Sainte. He perceived that the strategic key to the
whole field of battle was the hill crowned by the old stone _chateau_ of
Hugomont. If that could be taken, Napoleon would be able to attack and
turn Wellington's right flank. That accomplished, a junction of Bluecher
and his Prussians with the English would be prevented; the forces of the
Allies would be split in two, and Napoleon would in all probability
defeat them in detail, according to his time-honored method. The emperor
could easily have finished off the Austrians in their turn, as he
planned to do; and the combined European attempt to oust him would have
been frustrated. Thus the Corsican would have been, probably for so long
as he lived, the master of France at the least, even if the checks he
had already received had restricted his mastery of the rest of the
continent.
Knowing well that upon this cast his fate was staked, Napoleon hurled
his best troops, under Prince Jerome, against the little old _chateau_
on the hill. Again and again they assaulted it. Twelve thousand men were
launched against the half-dilapidated castle, which had been pierced
with loopholes for the British riflemen. And now and here came the
crucial incident whose importance was rated so high by Wellington. At a
moment when the chief defence of the _chateau_ was entrusted to the
Coldstream Guards, under Colonel James Macdonnel, the French were within
a hair's breadth of taking it. They pushed against the gate of the
castle, and had actually forced it open, when the Coldstream Guards
charged out with their bayonets, forcing the advance rank of the French
back a little.
But the French were pouring up, and could no longer be held back at the
point of the bayonet. It was at this instant, when a slight leeway had
been gained, that Colonel Macdonnel and Sergeant Graham, under a galling
fire from the French, stepped forward and with their own hands closed
the _chateau_ gates, barricaded them, and thus enabled the troops to
resume their fierce rifle fire from within.
After this the French made many more assaults on the heavy gates, but
could not force them open again. Wellington meanwhile commanded a
general advance, following a fresh repulse of the French onset; and the
French line was thrown into confusion. He knew that Bluecher was now at
hand--it was by this time half-past seven in the evening--to support
him. Bluecher, indeed, arrived, and attacked and crushed the broken
French right, forcing Napoleon to retreat in disorder. Thus was
completed the victory which the heroic defence of Hugomont had made
possible.
The crushing of the British right wing on this occasion, had Napoleon
been able thus to effect it, would have reversed a vast deal of history.
It is not necessary to take an extreme view of the situation to realize
this. On the immediate field, the British, Dutch and Hanoverians must
have been forced back upon Brussels, and Bluecher would have been unable
to maintain a front against the French. Even if the remnants of the
allied armies had escaped, and made another stand, Napoleon must
instantly have regained a degree of prestige and position that would
have enabled him to consolidate his power at home and make excellent
terms abroad. Even after Leipsic, when he had seemed to be utterly
beaten, the powers had been willing to give him France's "natural
frontiers"--namely, the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees.
It is likely that Leipsic and Elba had already taught the emperor wisdom
which would have deterred him from attempting to carry the boundaries of
his domain once more to the Baltic, or to parcel out the rest of Europe
among his relatives and dependents. But within the frontiers I have
named, and west of the Rhine, he must have remained impregnable; and all
the momentous consequences which resulted from his defeat must have been
thwarted and turned aside.
Out of the victory of the Allies at Waterloo came, first, the banishment
and early death of Napoleon Bonaparte; the placing of Louis XVIII on the
throne of France; the complete subduing of the Revolution; the creation
of the joint kingdom of Holland and Belgium (which meant the modern
intensely industrialized Belgian state, and Leopold, and the Congo); the
aggrandizement and lasting leadership of Prussia in Germany; the
foundation of the modern Italy through the annexation of the Genoese
republic to the Piedmont kingdom; the enlargement of Switzerland by
three cantons taken from France; the taking of Norway from Denmark and
its bestowal upon Sweden; the absorption of what was left of Poland by
Russia--and some other reparceling of territory in an arbitrary sense
which has nevertheless for the most part endured. There is scarcely a
political articulation in Europe to-day which does not date from
Waterloo; new tendencies still operate which had their inception then!
Indirectly the consequences were momentous. The aggrandizement of
Prussia prepared the way for the unification of Germany and the gradual
atrophy of Austria as a German state. As I have said, the enlargement of
Piedmont foretokened a united Italy, and built up another power which
has contributed to the enforced shrinkage of Austria. The two great
constructive European statesmen of the nineteenth century, Bismarck and
Cavour, were both the children of Waterloo.
All these tendencies might have been working just the other way if
Colonel Macdonnel had not succeeded in closing the _chateau_ gates! Yet
more still was in store. Moral and intellectual consequences of greater
moment, perhaps, than the political results, impended. The victory of
the Allies was followed by a period of severe repression of popular
tendencies in Europe. The Holy Alliance, which became a league of
Continental monarchs against liberal ideas, was a direct consequence. It
inaugurated reaction everywhere. And reaction bred in its turn new and
insidious radicalisms. Lassalle, Marx, St. Simon, and Fourier,
Socialists, and Bakunin and Proudhon, first of the Anarchists, were the
offspring of the Holy Alliance, nurtured in the dark corners of
Repression's jail.
The course of events in Europe would have been far otherwise indeed if
Napoleon's veterans, forcing their way into Hugomont and splitting the
British strength in two, had prepared the way for a long lease of the
power of that adroit and calculating master, who knew so well how to
meet popular demands and still hold his personal sway. In its practical
expression, his system was liberal. Every peasant proprietor in France
to-day holds his acres by virtue of Napoleonic legislation.
That does not mean that all would have been good in France; far from
that. A strange falsity, a theatric insincerity, lay beneath all the
Napoleonic sentiments and ideals. These qualities color the thought of
France still. Will she ever be able to escape them? These tendencies
would have been many times more powerful if Napoleon had entrenched
himself upon the throne. More than that, they must have passed to other
countries. The shadow of his eagles might lie athwart even our America,
his insidious ideas expressing themselves in our politics and our
intellectual and moral life, if that moment's vast contingency had gone
Napoleon's way at Waterloo.