QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE.
The Battle of Waterloo is an enigma as obscure for those who gained it
as for him who lost it. To Napoleon it is a panic; Blücher sees nothing
in it but fire; Wellington does not understand it at all. Look at the
reports: the bulletins are confused; the commentaries are entangled;
the latter stammer, the former stutter. Jomini divides the battle of
Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it into three acts; Charras,
although we do not entirely agree with him in all his appreciations,
has alone caught with his haughty eye the characteristic lineaments of
this catastrophe of human genius contending with divine chance. All the
other historians suffer from a certain bedazzlement in which they grope
about. It was a flashing day; in truth, the overthrow of the military
monarchy which, to the great stupor of the kings, has dragged down all
kingdoms,--the downfall of strength and the rout of war.
In this event, which bears the stamp of superhuman necessity, men play
but a small part. If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blücher, does
that deprive England and Germany of anything? No. Neither illustrious
England nor august Germany is in question in the problem of Waterloo;
for, thank Heaven! nations are great without the mournful achievements
of the sword. Neither Germany nor England nor France is held in a
scabbard; at this day, when Waterloo is only a clash of sabres, Germany
has Goethe above Blücher, and England Byron above Wellington. A mighty
dawn of ideas is peculiar to our age; and in this dawn England and
Germany have their own magnificent flash. They are majestic because
they think; the high level they bring to civilization is intrinsic
to them; it comes from themselves and not from an accident. Any
aggrandizement the 19th century may have cannot boast of Waterloo as
its fountain-head; for only barbarous nations grow suddenly after a
victory: it is the transient vanity of torrents swollen by a storm.
Civilized nations, especially at the present day, are not elevated or
debased by the good or evil fortune of a captain, and their specific
weight in the human family results from something more than a battle.
Their honor, dignity, enlightenment, and genius are not numbers which
those gamblers, heroes, and conquerors can stake in the lottery of
battles. Very often a battle lost is progress gained, and less of glory
more of liberty. The drummer is silent and reason speaks; it is the
game of who loses wins. Let us, then, speak of Waterloo coldly from
both sides, and render to chance the things that belong to chance, and
to God what is God's. What is Waterloo,--a victory? No; a great prize
in the lottery. A prize won by Europe and paid by France. It was hardly
worth while erecting a lion for it.
Waterloo, by the way, is the strangest encounter recorded in history;
Napoleon and Wellington are not enemies, but contraries. Never did
God, who delights in antitheses, produce a more striking contrast or
a more extraordinary confrontation. On one side precision, foresight,
geometry, prudence, a retreat assured, reserves prepared, an obstinate
coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy profiting by the ground,
tactics balancing battalions, carnage measured by a plumb-line, war
regulated watch in hand, nothing left voluntarily to accident, old
classic courage and absolute correctness. On the other side we have
intuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, a
flashing glance; something that gazes like the eagle and strikes like
lightning, all the mysteries of a profound mind, association with
destiny; the river, the plain, the forest, and the hill summoned,
and to some extent compelled, to obey, the despot going so far as
even to tyrannize over the battle-field; faith in a star blended with
strategic science, heightening but troubling it. Wellington was the
Barême of war, Napoleon was its Michael Angelo, and this true genius
was conquered by calculation. On both sides somebody was expected; and
it was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon waited for Grouchy,
who did not come; Wellington waited for Blücher, and he came.
Wellington is the classical war taking its revenge; Bonaparte, in his
dawn, had met it in Italy and superbly defeated it,--the old owl fled
before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only overthrown,
but scandalized. Who was this Corsican of six-and-twenty years of
age? What meant this splendid ignoramus who, having everything against
him, nothing for him, without provisions, ammunition, guns, shoes,
almost without an army, with a handful of men against masses, dashed
at allied Europe, and absurdly gained impossible victories? Whence
came this mad thunderer, who, almost without taking breath, pulverized
one after another the five armies of the Emperor of Germany, upsetting
Beaulieu upon Alvinzi, Wurmser upon Beaulieu, Mélas upon Wurmser, Mack
upon Mélas? Who was this new-comer of war who possessed the effrontery
of a planet? The academic military school excommunicated him, while
bolting, and hence arose an implacable rancor of the old Cæsarism
against the new, of the old sabre against the flashing sword, and of
the chess-board against genius. On June 18, 1815, this rancor got the
best; and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Marengo, and
Arcola, it wrote,--Waterloo. It was a triumph of mediocrity, sweet
to majorities, and destiny consented to this irony. In his decline,
Napoleon found a young Wurmser before him,--in fact, it is only
necessary to whiten Wellington's hair in order to have a Wurmser.
Waterloo is a battle of the first class, gained by a captain of the
second.
What must be admired in the battle of Waterloo is England, the English
firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; and what England
had really superb in it is (without offence) herself; it is not her
captain, but her army. Wellington, strangely ungrateful, declares in
his despatch to Lord Bathurst, that his army, the one which fought
on June 18, 1815, was a "detestable army." What does the gloomy pile
of bones buried in the trenches of Waterloo think of this? England
has been too modest to herself in her treatment of Wellington; for
making him so great is making herself small. Wellington is merely a
hero like any other man. The Scotch Grays, the Life Guards, Maitland
and Mitchell's regiments, Pack and Kempt's infantry, Ponsonby and
Somerset's cavalry, the Highlanders playing the bagpipes under the
shower of canister, Ryland's battalions, the fresh recruits who
could hardly manage a musket and yet held their ground against the
old bands of Essling and Rivoli,--all this is grand. Wellington was
tenacious, that was his merit, and we do not deny it to him; but the
lowest of his privates and his troopers was quite as solid as he, and
the iron soldier is as good as the iron duke. For our part, all our
glorification is offered to the English soldier, the English army,
the English nation; and if there must be a trophy, it is to England
that this trophy is owing. The Waterloo column would be more just if,
instead of the figure of a man, it raised to the clouds the statue of a
people.
But this great England will be irritated by what we are writing here;
for she still has feudal illusions, after her 1688, and the French
1789. This people believes in inheritance and hierarchy; and while no
other excels it in power and glory, it esteems itself as a nation and
not as a people. As a people, it readily subordinates itself, and takes
a lord as its head; the workman lets himself be despised; the soldier
puts up with flogging. It will be remembered that, at the battle of
Inkermann, a sergeant who, as it appears, saved the British army,
could not be mentioned by Lord Raglan, because the military hierarchy
does not allow any hero below the rank of officer to be mentioned
in despatches. What we admire before all, in an encounter like
Waterloo, is the prodigious skill of chance. The night rain, the wall
of Hougomont, the sunken road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon,
Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bülow's guide enlightening him,--all
this cataclysm is marvellously managed.
Altogether, we will assert, there is more of a massacre than of a
battle in Waterloo. Waterloo, of all pitched battles, is the one which
had the smallest front for such a number of combatants,--Napoleon's,
three quarters of a league, Wellington's, half a league, and
seventy-two thousand combatants on either side. From this density came
the carnage. The following calculation has been made and proportion
established: loss of men at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent;
Russian, thirty per cent; Austrian, forty-four per cent: at Wagram,
French, thirteen per cent; Austrian, fourteen per cent: at Moskova,
French, thirty-seven per cent; Russian, forty-four per cent: at
Bautzen, French, thirteen per cent; Russian and Prussian, fourteen per
cent: at Waterloo, French, fifty-six per cent; Allies, thirty-one per
cent,--total for Waterloo, forty-one per cent, or out of one hundred
and forty-four thousand fighting men, sixty thousand killed and
wounded. The field of Waterloo has at the present day that calmness
which belongs to the earth, and resembles all plains. At night, a sort
of visionary mist rises from it, and if any traveller walk about it,
and listen and dream like Virgil on the mournful plain of Philippi, the
hallucination of the catastrophe seizes upon him. The frightful June 18
lives again, the false monumental hill is levelled, the wondrous lion
is dissipated, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry
undulate on the plain, furious galloping crosses the horizon; the
startled dreamer sees the flash of sabres, the sparkle of bayonets, the
red light of shells, the monstrous collision of thunderbolts; he hears,
like a death-groan from the tomb, the vague clamor of the phantom
battle. These shadows are grenadiers; these flashes are cuirassiers;
this skeleton is Napoleon; this skeleton is Wellington; all this is
non-existent, and yet still combats, and the ravines are stained
purple, and the trees rustle, and there is fury even in the clouds and
in the darkness, while all the stern heights--Mont St. Jean, Hougomont,
Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--seem confusedly crowned by
hosts of spectres exterminating one another.