THE PLATEAU OF MONT ST. JEAN.
The battery was unmasked simultaneously with the ravine,--sixty guns
and the thirteen squares thundered at the cuirassiers at point-blank
range. The intrepid General Delort gave a military salute to the
English battery. The whole of the English field artillery had entered
the squares at a gallop; the cuirassiers had not even a moment for
reflection. The disaster of the hollow way had decimated but not
discouraged them; they were of that nature of men whose hearts
grow large when their number is diminished. Wathier's column alone
suffered in the disaster: but Delort's column, which he had ordered
to wheel to the left, as if he suspected the trap, arrived entire.
The cuirassiers rushed at the English squares at full gallop, with
hanging bridles, sabres in their mouths, and pistols in their hands.
There are moments in a battle when the soul hardens a man, so that
it changes the soldier into a statue, and all flesh becomes granite.
The English battalions, though fiercely assailed, did not move. Then
there was a frightful scene. All the faces of the English squares were
attacked simultaneously, and a frenzied whirl surrounded them. But
the cold infantry remained impassive; the front rank kneeling received
the cuirassiers on their bayonets, while the second fired at them;
behind the second rank the artillery-men loaded their guns, the front
of the square opened to let an eruption of canister pass, and then
closed again. The cuirassiers responded by attempts to crush their foe;
their great horses reared, leaped over the bayonets, and landed in the
centre of the four living walls. The cannon-balls made gaps in the
cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of
men disappeared, trampled down by the horses, and bayonets were buried
in the entrails of these centaurs. Hence arose horrible wounds, such
as were probably never seen elsewhere. The squares, where broken by
the impetuous cavalry, contracted without yielding an inch of ground;
inexhaustible in canister they produced an explosion in the midst of
the assailants. The aspect of this combat was monstrous: these squares
were no longer battalions, but craters; these cuirassiers were no
longer cavalry, but a tempest,--each square was a volcano attacked by a
storm; the lava combated the lightning.
The extreme right square, the most exposed of all, as it was in the
air, was nearly annihilated in the first attack. It was formed of the
75th Highlanders; the piper in the centre, while his comrades were
being exterminated around him, was seated on a drum, with his bagpipe
under his arm, and playing mountain airs. These Scotchmen died thinking
of Ben Lothian, as the Greeks did remembering Argos. A cuirassier's
sabre, by cutting through the pibroch and the arm that held it, stopped
the tune by killing the player.
The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and reduced by the
catastrophe of the ravine, had against them nearly the whole English
army; but they multiplied themselves, and each man was worth ten. Some
Hanoverian battalions, however, gave way: Wellington saw it and thought
of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at this moment thought of his infantry,
the battle would have been won, and this forgetfulness was his great
and fatal fault. All at once the assailers found themselves assailed;
the English cavalry were on their backs, before them the squares,
behind them Somerset with the one thousand four hundred Dragoon Guards.
Somerset had on his right Dornberg with the German chevau-legers, and
on his left Trip with the Belgian carbineers; the cuirassiers, attacked
on the flank and in front, before and behind, by infantry and cavalry,
were compelled to make a front on all sides. But what did they care?
They were a whirlwind; their bravery became indescribable.
In addition, they had behind them the still thundering battery, and it
was only in such a way that these men could be wounded in the back.
One of these cuirasses with a hole through the left scapula is in
the Waterloo Museum. For such Frenchmen, nothing less was required
than such Englishmen. It was no longer a _mêlée_; it was a headlong
fury, a hurricane of flashing swords. In an instant the one thousand
four hundred Dragoons were only eight hundred; and Fuller, their
lieutenant-colonel, was dead. Ney dashed up with Lefebvre Desnouette's
lancers and chasseurs; the plateau of Mont St. Jean was taken and
retaken, and taken again. The cuirassiers left the cavalry to attack
the infantry, or, to speak more correctly, all these men collared one
another and did not loose their hold. The squares still held out after
twelve assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him, and one half
of the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This struggle lasted two
hours. The English army was profoundly shaken; and there is no doubt
that, had not the cuirassiers been weakened in their attack by the
disaster of the sunken road, they would have broken through the centre
and decided the victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton,
who had seen Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three parts vanquished,
admired heroically; he said in a low voice, "Splendid!" The cuirassiers
annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, captured or spiked sixty
guns, and took six English regimental flags, which three cuirassiers
and three chasseurs of the Guard carried to the Emperor before the farm
of La Belle Alliance.
Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle resembled a
fight between two savage wounded men, who constantly lose their blood
while continuing the struggle. Which would be the first to fall? The
combat for the plateau continued. How far did the cuirassiers get? No
one could say; but it is certain that on the day after the battle, a
cuirassier and his horse were found dead on the weighing machine of
Mont St. Jean, at the very spot where the Nivelles, Genappe, La Hulpe,
and Brussels roads intersect and meet. This horseman had pierced the
English lines. One of the men who picked up this corpse still lives at
Mont St. Jean; his name is Dehaye, and he was eighteen years of age
at the time. Wellington felt himself giving way, and the crisis was
close at hand. The cuirassiers had not succeeded, in the sense that
the English centre had not been broken. Everybody held the plateau,
and nobody held it; but, in the end, the greater portion remained in
the hands of the English. Wellington had the village and the plain;
Ney, only the crest and the slope. Both sides seemed to have taken
root in this mournful soil. But the weakness of the English seemed
irremediable, for the hemorrhage of this army was horrible. Kempt on
the left wing asked for reinforcements. "There are none," Wellington
replied. Almost at the same moment, by a strange coincidence which
depicts the exhaustion of both armies, Ney asked Napoleon for infantry,
and Napoleon answered, "Infantry? where does he expect me to get them?
Does he think I can make them?"
Still the English army was the worse of the two; the furious attacks of
these great squadrons with their iron cuirasses and steel chests had
crushed their infantry. A few men round the colors marked the place of
a regiment, and some battalions were only commanded by a captain or a
lieutenant. Alten's division, already so maltreated at La Haye Sainte,
was nearly destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze's brigade
lay among the wheat along the Nivelles road: hardly any were left of
those Dutch Grenadiers who, in 1811, fought Wellington in Spain,
on the French side, and who, in 1815, joined the English and fought
Napoleon. The loss in officers was considerable; Lord Uxbridge, who had
his leg interred the next day, had a fractured knee. If on the side of
the French, in this contest of the cuirassiers, Delord, l'Heretier,
Colbert, Duof, Travers, and Blancard were _hors de combat_, on the side
of the English, Alten was wounded, Barnes was wounded, Delancey killed,
Van Meeren killed, Ompteda killed, Wellington's staff decimated,--and
England had the heaviest scale in this balance of blood. The 2d
regiment of foot-guards had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four
captains, and three ensigns; the first battalion of the 30th had
lost twenty-four officers, and one hundred and twelve men; the 79th
Highlanders had twenty-four officers wounded, and eighteen officers and
four hundred and fifty men killed. Cumberland's Hanoverian Hussars,
an entire regiment, having their Colonel Hacke at their head, who
at a later date was tried and cashiered, turned bridle during the
flight and fled into the forest of Soignies, spreading the rout as
far as Brussels. The wagons, ammunition trains, baggage trains, and
ambulance carts full of wounded, on seeing the French, gave ground,
and approaching the forest, rushed into it; the Dutch, sabred by the
French cavalry, broke in confusion. From Vert Coucou to Groenendæl, a
distance of two leagues on the Brussels roads, there was, according
to the testimony of living witnesses, a dense crowd of fugitives,
and the panic was so great that it assailed the Prince de Condé at
Mechlin and Louis XVIII. at Ghent. With the exception of the weak
reserve échelonned behind the field hospital established at the farm
of Mont St. Jean, and Vivian's and Vandeleur's brigades, which flanked
the left wing, Wellington had no cavalry left, and many of the guns
lay dismounted. These facts are confessed by Siborne; and Pringle,
exaggerating the danger, goes so far as to state that the Anglo-Dutch
army was reduced to thirty-four thousand men. The Iron Duke remained
firm, but his lips blanched. The Austrian commissioner Vincent, and the
Spanish commissioner Alava, who were present at the battle, thought the
Duke lost; at five o'clock Wellington looked at his watch, and could be
heard muttering, "Blücher or night!"
It was this moment that a distant line of bayonets glistened on the
heights on the side of Frischemont. This was the climax of the gigantic
drama.