"And while amid their scattered band
Raged the fierce riders' bloody brand,
Recoil'd in common rout and fear,
Lancer and Guard and Cuirassier,
Horsemen and foot--a mingled host,
Their leaders fall'n, their standards lost."
--SCOTT.
Napoleon watched the huge black echelon of battalions mount the slope,
their right section crumbled under the rush of the British Guards.
Colborne and the 52nd tumbled the left flank into ruin; the British
cavalry swept down upon them. Those who stood near Napoleon watched
his face. It became pale as death. "Ils sont mêlés ensemble" ("they
are mingled together"), he muttered to himself. He cast one hurried
glance over the field, to right and left, and saw nothing but broken
squadrons, abandoned batteries, wrecked infantry battalions. "Tout est
perdu," he said, "sauve qui peut," and, wheeling his horse, he turned
his back upon his last battlefield. His star had set!
Napoleon's strategy throughout the brief campaign was magnificent; his
tactics--the detailed handling of his troops on the actual
battlefield--were wretched. "We were manoeuvred," says the disgusted
Marbot, "like so many pumpkins." Napoleon was only forty-seven years
old, but, as Wolseley says, "he was no longer the thin, sleek, active
little man he had been at Rivoli. His now bloated face, large stomach,
and fat and rounded legs bespoke a man unfitted for hard work on
horseback." His fatal delay in pursuing Blücher on the 17th, and his
equally fatal waste of time in attacking Wellington on the 18th, proved
how his quality as a general had decayed. It is a curious fact that,
during the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon remained for hours motionless
at a table placed for him in the open air, often asleep, with his head
resting on his arms. One reads with an odd sense of humour the answer
which a dandy officer of the British Life Guards gave to the inquiry,
"How he felt during the battle of Waterloo?" He replied that he had
felt "awfully bored"! That anybody should feel "bored" in the vortex
of such a drama is wonderful; but scarcely so wonderful as the fact
that the general of one of the two contending hosts found it possible
to go to sleep during the crisis of the gigantic battle, on which hung
his crown and fate. Napoleon had lived too long for the world's
happiness or for his own fame.
The story here told is that of Waterloo on its British side. No
attempt is made to describe Blücher's magnificent loyalty in pushing,
fresh from the defeat of Ligny, through the muddy cross-roads from
Wavre, to join Wellington on the blood-stained field of Waterloo. No
account, again, is attempted of Grouchy's wanderings into space, with
33,000 men and 96 guns, lazily attacking Thielmann's single corps at
Wavre, while Blücher, with three divisions, was marching at speed to
fling himself on Napoleon's right flank at Waterloo. It is idle to
speculate on what would have happened to the British if the Prussians
had not made their movement on Napoleon's right flank. The assured
help of Blücher was the condition upon which Wellington made his stand
at Waterloo; it was as much part of his calculations as the fighting
quality of his own infantry. A plain tale of British endurance and
valour is all that is offered here; and what a head of wood and heart
of stone any man of Anglo-Saxon race must have who can read such a tale
without a thrill of generous emotion!
Waterloo was for the French not so much a defeat as a rout. Napoleon's
army simply ceased to exist. The number of its slain is unknown, for
its records were destroyed. The killed and wounded in the British army
reached the tragical number of nearly 15,000. Probably not less than
between 30,000 and 40,000 slain or wounded human beings were scattered,
the night following the battle, over the two or three square miles
where the great fight had raged; and some of the wounded were lying
there still, uncared for, four days afterwards. It is said that for
years afterwards, as one looked over the waving wheat-fields in the
valley betwixt Mont St. Jean and La Belle Alliance, huge irregular
patches, where the corn grew rankest and was of deepest tint, marked
the gigantic graves where, in the silence and reconciliation of death,
slept Wellington's ruddy-faced infantry lads and the grizzled veterans
of the Old Guard. The deep cross-country road which covered
Wellington's front has practically disappeared; the Belgians have cut
away the banks to build up a huge pyramid, on the summit of which is
perched a Belgian lion, with tail erect, grinning defiance towards the
French frontier. A lion is not exactly the animal which best
represents the contribution the Belgian troops made to Waterloo.
But still the field keeps its main outlines. To the left lies
Planchenoit, where Wellington watched to see the white smoke of the
Prussian guns; opposite is the gentle slope down which D'Erlon's troops
marched to fling themselves on La Haye Sainte; and under the
spectator's feet, a little to his left as he stands on the summit of
the monument, is the ground over which Life Guards and Inniskillings
and Scots Greys galloped in the fury of their great charge. Right in
front is the path along which came Milhaud's Cuirassiers and
Kellerman's Lancers, and Friant's Old Guard, in turn, to fling
themselves in vain on the obstinate squares and thin red line of the
British. To the right is Hougoumont, the orchard walls still pierced
with loopholes made by the Guards. A fragment of brick, blackened with
the smoke of the great fight, is one of the treasures of the present
writer. Victors and vanquished alike have passed away, and, since the
Old Guard broke on the slopes of Mont St. Jean, British and French have
never met in the wrestle of battle. May they never meet again in that
fashion! But as long as nations preserve the memory of the great deeds
of their history, as long as human courage and endurance can send a
thrill of admiration through generous hearts, as long as British blood
beats in British veins, the story of the brave men who fought and died
at their country's bidding at Waterloo will be one of the great
traditions of the English-speaking race.
Of Wellington's part in the great fight it is difficult to speak in
terms which do not sound exaggerated. He showed all the highest
qualities of generalship, swift vision, cool judgment, the sure insight
that forecasts each move on the part of his mighty antagonist, the
unfailing resource that instantly devises the plan for meeting it.
There is no need to dwell on Wellington's courage; the rawest British
militia lad on the field shared that quality with him. But in the
temper of Wellington's courage there was a sort of ice-clear quality
that was simply marvellous. He visited every square and battery in
turn, and was at every point where the fight was most bloody. Every
member of his staff, without exception, was killed or wounded, while it
is curious to reflect that not a member of Napoleon's staff was so much
as touched. But the roar of the battle, with its swift chances of life
and death, left Wellington's intellect as cool, and his nerve as
steady, as though he were watching a scene in a theatre. One of his
generals said to him when the fight seemed most desperate, "If you
should be struck, tell us what is your plan?" "My plan," said the
Duke, "consists in dying here to the last man." He told at a
dinner-table, long after the battle, how, as he stood under the
historic tree in the centre of his line, a Scotch sergeant came up,
told him he had observed the tree was a mark for the French gunners,
and begged him to move from it. Somebody at the table said, "I hope
you did, sir?" "I really forget," said the Duke, "but I know I thought
it very good advice at the time."
Only twice during the day did Wellington show any trace of remembering
what may be called his personal interest in the fight. Napoleon had
called him "a Sepoy general." "I will show him to-day," he said, just
before the battle began, "how a Sepoy general can defend himself." At
night, again, as he sat with a few of his surviving officers about him
at supper, his face yet black with the smoke of the fight, he
repeatedly leaned back in his chair, rubbing his hands convulsively,
and exclaiming aloud, "Thank God! I have met him. Thank God! I have
met him." But Wellington's mood throughout the whole of the battle was
that which befitted one of the greatest soldiers war has ever produced
in the supreme hour of his country's fate. The Duke was amongst the
leading files of the British line as they pushed the broken French
Guard down the slope, and some one begged him to remember what his life
was worth, and go back. "The battle is won," said Wellington; "my life
doesn't matter now." Dr. Hulme, too, has told how he woke the Duke
early in the morning after the fight, his face grim, unwashed, and
smoke-blackened, and read the list of his principal officers--name
after name--dead or dying, until the hot tears ran, like those of a
woman, down the iron visage of the great soldier.
As Napoleon in the gathering darkness galloped off the field, with the
wreck and tumult of his shattered army about him, there remained to his
life only those six ignoble years at St. Helena. But Wellington was
still in his very prime. He was only forty-six years old, and there
awaited him thirty-seven years of honoured life, till, "to the noise of
the mourning of a mighty nation," he was laid beside Nelson in the
crypt of St. Paul's, and Tennyson sang his requiem:--
"O good grey head, which all men knew,
O voice from which their omens all men drew,
O iron nerve, to true occasion true;
O fall'n at length that tower of strength
Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew."