THE EMPEROR ASKS THE GUIDE A QUESTION.
On the morning of Waterloo, then, Napoleon was cheerful, and had reason
to be so,--for the plan he had drawn up was admirable. Once the battle
had begun, its various incidents,--the resistance of Hougomont; the
tenacity of La Haye Sainte; Bauduin killed, and Foy placed _hors de
combat_; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was broken;
the fatal rashness of Guilleminot, who had no petards or powder-bags
to destroy the farm gates; the sticking of the artillery in the mud;
the fifteen guns without escort captured by Uxbridge in a hollow
way; the slight effect of the shells falling in the English lines,
which buried themselves in the moistened ground, and only produced a
volcano of mud, so that the troops were merely plastered with mud; the
inutility of Piret's demonstration on Braine l'Alleud, and the whole of
his cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost annihilated; the English right
but slightly disquieted and the left poorly attacked; Ney's strange
mistake in massing instead of échelonning the four divisions of the
first corps; a depth of twenty-seven ranks and a line of two hundred
men given up in this way to the canister; the frightful gaps made by
the cannon-balls in these masses; the attacking columns disunited; the
oblique battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot,
and Durutte in danger; Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Viot, that Hercules
who came from the Polytechnic school, wounded at the moment when he
was beating in with an axe the gates of La Haye Sainte, under the
plunging fire of the English barricade on the Genappe road; Marcognet's
division caught between infantry and cavalry, shot down from the wheat
by Best and Pack, and sabred by Ponsonby; its battery of seven guns
spiked; the Prince of Saxe Weimar holding and keeping in defiance of
Count d'Erlon, Frischemont and Smohain; the flags of the 105th and 45th
regiments which he had captured; the Prussian black Hussar stopped by
the scouts of the flying column of three hundred chasseurs, who were
beating the country between Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming things
which this man said; Grouchy's delay; the fifteen hundred men killed
in less than an hour in the orchard of Hougomont; the eighteen hundred
laid low even in a shorter space of time round La Haye Sainte,--all
these stormy incidents, passing like battle-clouds before Napoleon, had
scarce disturbed his glance or cast a gloom over this imperial face.
Napoleon was accustomed to look steadily at war; he never reckoned up
the poignant details; he cared little for figures, provided that they
gave the total--victory. If the commencement went wrong, he did not
alarm himself, as he believed himself master and owner of the end; he
knew how to wait, and treated Destiny as an equal. He seemed to say to
fate, "You would not dare!"
One half light, one half shade, Napoleon felt himself protected in
good, and tolerated in evil. There was, or he fancied there was, for
him a connivance, we might say almost a complicity, on the part of
events, equivalent to the ancient invulnerability; and yet, when a man
has behind him the Beresina, Leipsic, and Fontainebleau, it seems as
if he might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes visible on
the face of heaven. At the moment when Wellington retrograded, Napoleon
quivered. He suddenly saw the plateau of Mont St. Jean deserted, and
the front of the English army disappear. It was rallying, but was
screened from sight. The Emperor half raised himself in his stirrups,
and the flash of victory passed into his eyes. If Wellington were
driven back into the forest of Soignies, and destroyed, it would be
the definitive overthrow of England by France: it would be Cressy,
Poictiers, Malplaquet, and Ramilies avenged; the man of Marengo would
erase Agincourt. The Emperor, while meditating on this tremendous
stroke, turned his telescope to all parts of the battle-field. His
Guards, standing at ease behind him, gazed at him with a sort of
religious awe. He was reflecting, he examined the slopes, noted the
inclines, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the patches of barley, and
the paths; he seemed to be counting every tuft of gorse. He looked with
some fixity at the English barricades,--two large masses of felled
trees, the one on the Genappe road defended by two guns, the only ones
of all the English artillery which commanded the battlefield, and the
one on the Nivelles road, behind which flashed the Dutch bayonets of
Chassé's brigade. He remarked near this barricade the old chapel of St.
Nicholas, which is at the corner of the cross-road leading to Braine
l'Alleud. He bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste.
The guide shook his head with a probably perfidious negative.
The Emperor drew himself up and reflected; Wellington was retiring, and
all that was needed now was to complete this retreat by an overthrow.
Napoleon hurriedly turned and sent off a messenger at full speed to
Paris to announce that the battle was gained. Napoleon was one of
those geniuses from whom thunder issues, and he had just found his
thunder-stroke; he gave Milhaud's cuirassiers orders to carry the
plateau of Mont St. Jean.