One battle in this century rises in fame above all other conflicts of
the ages. It is Waterloo.
It was on the night of the seventeenth of June, 1815, that the British
and French armies, drawing near each other on the borders of Belgium,
encamped, the one near the little village of Waterloo and the other at
La Belle Alliance. They were close together. A modern fieldpiece could
easily throw a shell from Napoleon's headquarters over La Haie Sainte
to Mont St. Jean, and far beyond into the forest. During the afternoon
of the seventeenth, and the greater part of the night, there was a
heavy fall of rain. On the following morning the ground was muddy.
The Emperor, viewing the situation, was unwilling to precipitate the
battle until his artillery might deploy over a dry field.
As to the temper of the Emperor, that was good. Hugo says of him:
"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.
"'Cæsar laughs, Pompey will weep,' 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 no longer agreed."
The arena of Waterloo is an undulating plain. Strategically it has the
shape of an immense harrow. The clevis is on the height called Mont
St. Jean, where Wellington was posted with the British army. Behind
that is the village of Waterloo. The right leg of the harrow
terminates at the hamlet of La Belle Alliance. The left leg is the
road from Brussels to Nivelles. The cross-bar intersects the right leg
at La Haie Sainte. The right leg is the highway from Brussels to
Charleroi. The intersection of the bar with the left leg is near the
old stone chateau of Hougomont. The battle was fought on the line of
the cross-bar and in the triangle between it and the clevis.
The conflict began just before noon. The armies engaged were of equal
strength, numbering about 80,000 men on each side. Napoleon was
superior in artillery, but Wellington's soldiers had seen longer
service in the field. They were his veterans from the Peninsular War,
perhaps the stubbornest fighters in Europe. Napoleon's first plan was
to double back the allied left on the centre. This involved the
capture of La Haie Sainte, and, as a strategic corollary, the taking
of Hougomont. The latter place was first attacked. The field and wood
were carried, but the chateau was held in the midst of horrid carnage
by the British.
Early in the afternoon a Prussian division under Billow, about 10,000
strong, came on the field, and Napoleon had to withdraw a division
from his centre to repel the oncoming Germans. For two or three hours,
in the area between La Haie Sainte and Hougomont, the battle raged,
the lines swaying with uncertain fortune back and forth. La Haie
Sainte was taken and held by Ney. On the whole, the British lines
receded. Wellington's attempt to retake La Haie Sainte ended in a
repulse. Ney, on the counter charge, called on Napoleon for
reinforcements, and the latter at that moment, changing his plan of
battle, determined to make the principal charge on the British centre,
saying, however, "It is an hour too soon." The support which he sent
to Ney was not as heavy as it should have been, but the Marshal
concluded that the crisis was at hand, and Napoleon sought to support
him with Milhaud's cuirassiers and a division of the Middle Guard.
Under this counter charge the British lines reeled and staggered, but
still clung desperately to their position. They gave a little, and
then hung fast and could be moved no farther. In another part of the
field Durutte carried the allied position of Papelotte, and Lobau
routed Bülow from Planchenois. At half-past four everything seemed to
portend disaster to the allies and victory to the French.
If the tragedy of Waterloo had been left at that hour to work out its
own results as between France and England it would appear that the
latter must have gone to the wall; but destiny had prepared another
end for the conflict. Waterloo was a point of concentration. Several
tides had set thither, and some of them had already arrived and broken
on the rocks. Other tides were rolling in. The British wave had been
first, and this had now been rolled back by the tide of France. A
German wave was coming, however, and another French billow, either or
both of which might break at any moment.
On the morning of June 18, at the little town of Wavre, fifteen miles
southeast of Brussels and about eight or ten miles from Waterloo, a
battle had been fought between the French contingent under Marshal
Grouchy and the Prussian division under Thielmann, who commanded the
left wing of Marshal Blücher's army. That commander had a force of
fully forty thousand men under him, and was on his way to join his
forces with those of Wellington on the plateau of Mont St. Jean.
Grouchy had at this time between thirty and forty thousand men, and
was under orders from Napoleon to keep in touch with his right wing,
watching the Prussians and joining himself to the main army according
to the emergency.
These two divisions--Blücher's and Grouchy's--were _sliding along_
toward Waterloo, and on the afternoon of the eighteenth it became one
of the great questions in the history of this century which would
first arrive on the field. Napoleon believed that Grouchy was at hand.
Wellington in his desperation breathed out the wish that either night
or Blücher would come. The ambiguous result of the principal conflict
made it more than ever desirable to both of the commanders to gain
their reinforcements, each before the other. The event showed that the
arrival of Bülow's contingent was really the signal for the oncoming
of the whole Prussian army. The French Emperor, however, remained
confident, and at half-after four he felt warranted in sending a
preliminary despatch of victory to Paris.
Just at this juncture, however, an uproar was witnessed far to the
right. The woods seemed to open, and the banners of Blücher shot up in
the horizon. Grouchy was _not_ on his rear or flank! Napoleon saw at a
glance that it was then or never. His sun of Austerlitz hung low in
the west. The British centre must be broken, or the empire which he
had builded with his genius must pass away like a phantom. He called
out four battalions of the Middle and six of the Old Guard. In the
last fifteen years that Guard had been thrown a hundred times on the
enemies of France, and never yet repulsed. It deemed itself
invincible.
At seven o'clock, just as the June sun was sinking to the horizon, the
bugles sounded and the finest body of horsemen in Europe started to
its doom on the squares of Wellington. The grim horsemen rode to their
fate like heroes. The charge rolled on like an avalanche. It plunged
into the sunken road of O'Hain. It seemed to roll over. It rose from
the low grounds and broke on the British squares. They reeled under
the shock, then reformed and stood fast. Around and around those
immovable lines the soldiers of the Empire beat and beat in vain. It
was the war of races at its climax. It was the final death-grip of the
Gaul and the Teuton. The Old Guard recoiled. The wild cry of "_La
Garde recule_" was heard above the roar of battle. The crisis of the
Modern Era broke in blood and smoke, and the past was suddenly
victorious. The Guard was broken into flying squadrons. Ruin came with
the counter charge of the British. Ney, glorious in his despair,
sought to stay the tide. For an hour longer he was a spectacle to gods
and men. Five horses had been killed under him. He was on foot. He was
hatless. He clutched the hilt of a broken sword. He was covered with
dust and blood. But his grim face was set against the victorious
enemy in the hopeless and heroic struggle to rally his shattered
columns.
Meanwhile the Prussians rushed in from the right. Wellington's Guards
rose and charged. Havoc came down with the darkness. A single regiment
of the Old Guard was formed by Napoleon into a last square around
which to rally the fugitives. The Emperor stood in the midst and
declared his purpose to die with them. Marshal Soult forced him out of
the melee, and the famous square, commanded by Cambronne--flinging his
profane objurgation into the teeth of the English--perished with the
wild cry of "_Vive l'Empereur!_"
Hugo says that the panic of the French admits of an explanation; that
the disappearance of the great man was necessary for the advent of a
great age; that in the battle of Waterloo there was more than a storm,
that is, the bursting of a meteor. "At nightfall," he continues,
"Bernard and Bertrand seized by the skirt of his coat in a field near
Genappe a haggard, thoughtful, gloomy man, who, carried so far by the
current of the rout, had just dismounted, passed the bridle over his
arm, and was now with wandering eye returning alone to Waterloo. It
was Napoleon, the immense somnambulist of a shattered dream!"
On the spot where French patriotism afterward planted the bronze lion
to commemorate forever the extinction of the Old Guard of the French
Empire, and of Napoleon the Great, the traveler from strange lands
pauses, at the distance of eighty years from the horrible cataclysm,
and reflects with wonder how within the memory of living men human
nature could have been raised by the passion of battle to such sublime
heroism as that displayed in these wheatfields and orchards where the
Old Guard of France sank into oblivion, but rose to immortal fame.