NAPOLEON IN GOOD HUMOR.
The Emperor, although ill, and though a local pain made riding
uncomfortable, had never been so good-tempered as on this day. From
the morning his impenetrability had been smiling, and on June 18,
1815, this profound soul, coated with granite, was radiant. The man
who had been sombre at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest
predestined men offer these contradictions, for our joys are a shadow,
and the supreme smile belongs to God. _Ridet Cæsar, Pompeius flebit_,
the legionaries of the Fulminatrix legion used to say. On this occasion
Pompey was not destined to weep, but it is certain that Cæsar laughed.
At one o'clock in the morning, amid the rain and storm, he had explored
with Bertrand the hills near Rossomme, and was pleased to see the long
lines of English fires illumining the horizon from Frischemont to
Braine l'Alleud. It seemed to him as if destiny had made an appointment
with him on a fixed day and was punctual. He stopped his horse, and
remained for some time motionless, looking at the lightning and
listening to the thunder. The fatalist was heard to cast into the night
the mysterious words,--"We are agreed." Napoleon was mistaken; they
were no longer agreed.
He had not slept for a moment: all the instants of the past night
had been marked with joy for him. He rode through the entire line of
main guards, stopping every now and then to speak to the videttes. At
half-past two he heard the sound of a marching column near Hougomont,
and believed for a moment in a retreat on the side of Wellington. He
said to Bertrand,--"The English rear-guard is preparing to decamp. I
shall take prisoners the six thousand English who have just landed at
Ostend." He talked cheerfully, and had regained the spirits he had
displayed during the landing of March 1st, when he showed the Grand
Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Juan Gulf, and said,--"Well,
Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already." On the night between June
17 and 18 he made fun of Wellington. "This little Englishman requires
a lesson," said Napoleon. The rain became twice as violent, and it
thundered while the Emperor was speaking. At half-past three A.M. he
lost one illusion: officers sent to reconnoitre informed him that
the enemy was making no movement. Nothing was stirring, not a single
bivouac fire was extinguished, and the English army was sleeping. The
silence was profound on earth, and there was only noise in the heavens.
At four o'clock a peasant was brought to him by the scouts: this
peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably
Vivian's, which had taken up a position on the extreme left in the
village of Ohain. At five o'clock two Belgian deserters informed him
that they had just left their regiments, and the English army meant
fighting. "All the better," cried Napoleon; "I would sooner crush them
than drive them back."
At daybreak he dismounted on the slope which forms the angle of the
Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant chair brought from
the farm of Rossomme, sat down with a truss of straw for a carpet, and
laid on the table the map of the battlefield, saying to Soult,--"It
is a pretty chess-board." Owing to the night rain, the commissariat
wagons, which stuck in the muddy roads, did not arrive by daybreak.
The troops had not slept, were wet through and fasting; but this did
not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Soult,--"We have
ninety chances out of a hundred in our favor." At eight o'clock the
Emperor's breakfast was brought, and he invited several generals to
share it with him. While breakfasting, somebody said that Wellington
had been the last evening but one at a ball in Brussels, and Soult,
the rough soldier with his archbishop's face, remarked, "The ball will
be to-day." The Emperor teased Ney for saying,--"Wellington will not
be so simple as to wait for your Majesty." This was his usual manner.
"He was fond of a joke," says Fleury de Chaboulon; "The basis of his
character was a pleasant humor," says Gourgaud; "He abounded with
jests, more peculiar than witty," says Benjamin Constant. This gayety
of the giant is worth dwelling on: it was he who called his Grenadiers
"Growlers;" he pinched their ears and pulled their moustachios. "The
Emperor was always playing tricks with us," was a remark made by one
of them. During the mysterious passage from Elba to France, on February
27, the French brig of war, the _Zephyr_, met the _Inconstant_, on
board which Napoleon was concealed, and inquiring after Napoleon, the
Emperor, who still had in his hat the white and violet cockade studded
with bees which he had adopted at Elba, himself laughingly took up the
speaking-trumpet, and answered,--"The Emperor is quite well." A man
who jests in this way is on familiar terms with events. Napoleon had
several outbursts of this laughter during the breakfast of Waterloo:
after breakfast he reflected for a quarter of an hour; then two
generals sat down on the truss of straw with a pen in their hand and a
sheet of paper on their knee, and the Emperor dictated to them the plan
of the battle.
At nine o'clock, the moment when the French army, échelonned and
moving in five columns, began to deploy, the divisions in two lines,
the artillery between, the bands in front, drums rattling and
bugles braying,--a powerful, mighty, joyous army, a sea of bayonets
and helmets on the horizon, the Emperor, much affected, twice
exclaimed,--"Magnificent! magnificent!"
Between nine and half-past ten, although it seems incredible, the
whole army took up position, and was drawn up in six lines, forming,
to repeat the Emperor's expression, "the figure of six V's." A few
minutes after the formation of the line, and in the midst of that
profound silence which precedes the storm of a battle, the Emperor,
seeing three 12-pounder batteries defile, which had been detached by
his orders from Erlon, Reille, and Lobau's brigades, and which were
intended to begin the action at the spot where the Nivelles and Genappe
roads crossed, tapped Haxo on the shoulder, and said, "There are
twenty-four pretty girls, General." Sure of the result, he encouraged
with a smile the company of sappers of the first corps as it passed
him, which he had selected to barricade itself in Mont St. Jean, so
soon as the village was carried. All this security was only crossed
by one word of human pity: on seeing at his left, at the spot where
there is now a large tomb, the admirable Scotch Grays massed with their
superb horses, he said, "It is a pity." Then he mounted his horse,
rode toward Rossomme, and selected as his observatory a narrow strip
of grass on the right of the road running from Genappe to Brussels,
and this was his second station. The third station, the one he took
at seven in the evening, is formidable,--it is a rather lofty mound
which still exists, and behind which the guard was massed in a hollow.
Around this mound the balls ricochetted on the pavement of the road and
reached Napoleon. As at Brienne, he had round his head the whistle of
bullets and canister. Almost at the spot where his horse's hoofs stood,
cannon-balls, old sabre-blades, and shapeless rust-eaten projectiles,
have been picked up; a few years ago a live shell was dug up, the fusee
of which had broken off. It was at this station that the Emperor said
to his guide, Lacoste, a hostile timid peasant, who was fastened to a
hussar's saddle, and tried at each volley of canister to hide himself
behind Napoleon, "You ass! it is shameful; you will be killed in the
back." The person who is writing these lines himself found, while
digging up the sand in the friable slope of this mound, the remains
of a shell rotted by the oxide of forty-six years, and pieces of iron
which broke like sticks of barley-sugar between his fingers.
Everybody is aware that the undulations of the plains on which the
encounter between Napoleon and Wellington took place, are no longer
as they were on June 18, 1815. On taking from this mournful plain
the material to make a monument, it was deprived of its real relics,
and history, disconcerted, no longer recognizes itself; in order to
glorify, they disfigured. Wellington, on seeing Waterloo two years
after, exclaimed, "My battle-field has been altered." Where the huge
pyramid of earth surmounted by a lion how stands, there was a crest
which on the side of the Nivelles road had a practicable ascent, but
which on the side of the Genappe road was almost an escarpment. The
elevation of this escarpment may still be imagined by the height of
the two great tombs which skirt the road from Genappe to Brussels: the
English tomb on the left, the German tomb on the right. There is no
French tomb,--for France the whole plain is a sepulchre. Through the
thousands of cart-loads of earth employed in erecting the mound, which
is one hundred and fifty feet high and half a mile in circumference,
the plateau of Mont St. Jean is now accessible by a gentle incline;
but on the day of the battle, and especially on the side of La Haye
Sainte, it was steep and abrupt. The incline was so sharp that the
English gunners could not see beneath them the farm situated in the
bottom of the valley, which was the centre of the fight. On June 18,
1815, the rain had rendered the steep road more difficult, and the
troops not only had to climb up but slipped in the mud. Along the
centre of the crest of the plateau ran a species of ditch, which it was
impossible for a distant observer to guess. We will state what this
ditch was. Braine l'Alleud is a Belgian village and Ohain is another;
these villages, both concealed in hollows, are connected by a road
about a league and a half in length, which traverses an undulating
plain, and frequently buries itself between hills, so as to become
at certain spots a ravine. In 1815, as to-day, this road crossed the
crest of the plateau of Mont St. Jean: but at the present day it is
level with the ground, while at that time it was a hollow way. The two
slopes have been carried away to form the monumental mound. This road
was, and still is, a trench for the greater part of the distance,--a
hollow trench, in some places twelve feet deep, whose scarped sides
were washed down here and there by the winter rains. Accidents occurred
there: the road was so narrow where it entered Braine l'Alleud, that
a wayfarer was crushed there by a wagon, as is proved by a stone
cross standing near the grave-yard, which gives the name of the dead
man as "Monsieur Bernard Debrye, trader, of Brussels," and the date,
"February, 1637." It was so deep on the plateau of Mont St. Jean,
that a peasant, one Mathieu Nicaise, was crushed there in 1783 by a
fall of earth, as is proved by another stone cross, the top of which
disappeared in the excavations, but whose overthrown pedestal is still
visible on the grass slope to the left of the road between La Haye
Sainte and the farm of Mont St. Jean. On the day of the battle, this
hollow way, whose existence nothing revealed, a trench on the top of
the escarpment, a rut hidden in the earth, was invisible, that is to
say, terrible.