Napoleon Faces Ill-will of Events at Waterloo

It was time for this vast man to fall; his excessive weight in human destiny disturbed the balance.

Continuing The Battle of Waterloo,
with a selection from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo published in 1862. This selection is presented in 6 easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The Battle of Waterloo.

Time: 1815
Place: Waterloo Crossroads, 9 miles south of Brussels

Then a formidable spectacle was seen: the whole of this cavalry, with raised sabers, with standards flying and formed in columns of division, descended, with one movement and as one man, with the precision of a bronze battering-ram opening a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance. They entered the formidable valley in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared in the smoke and then, emerging from the gloom, reappeared on the other side of the valley, still in a close compact column, mounting at a trot, under a tremendous canister fire, the frightful muddy incline of the plateau of Mont St. Jean. They ascended it, stern, threatening and imperturbable; between the breaks in the artillery and musketry fire the colossal tramp could be heard. As they formed two divisions, they were in two columns; Wathier’s division was on the right, Delord’s on the left. At a distance it appeared as if two immense steel lizards were crawling toward the crest of the plateau; they traversed the battlefield like a flash.

Nothing like it had been seen since the capture of the great redoubt of the Moskova by the heavy cavalry: Murat was missing, but Ney was there. It seemed as if this mass had become a monster and had but one soul; each squadron undulated and swelled like the rings of a polyp. This could be seen through a vast smoke which was rent asunder at intervals; it was a pell-mell of helmets, shouts and sabers, a stormy bounding of horses among cannon and a disciplined and terrible array; while above it all flashed the cuirasses like the scales of the dragon.

It was a curious numerical coincidence that twenty-six battalions were preparing to receive the charge of these twenty-six squadrons. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of the masked battery, thirteen English squares, each of two battalions and formed two deep, with seven men in the first lines and six in the second, were waiting, calm, dumb and motion less, with their muskets, for what was coming. They did not see the cuirassiers and the cuirassiers did not see them: they merely heard this tide of men ascending. They heard the swelling sound of three thousand horses, the alternating and symmetrical sound of the hoof, the clang of the cuirasses, the clash of the sabers and a species of great and formidable breathing. There was a long and terrible silence and then a long file of raised arms, brandishing sabers and helmets and bugles and standards and three thousand heads with great mustaches, shouting “Long live the Emperor!” appeared above the crest. The whole of this cavalry debouched on the plateau and it was like the beginning of an earthquake.

All at once, terrible to relate, the head of the column of cuirassiers facing the English left reared with a fearful clamor. On reaching the culminating point of the crest, furious and eager to make their exterminating dash on the English squares and guns, the cuirassiers noticed between them and the English a trench, a grave. It was the sunken road of Ohain.

It was a frightful moment: the ravine was there, unexpected, yawning almost precipitous, beneath the horses’ feet and with a depth of twelve feet between its two sides. The second rank thrust the first into the abyss; the horses reared, fell back, slipped with all four feet in the air, crushing and throwing their riders. There was no means of escaping; the entire column was one huge projectile. The force acquired to crush the English crushed the French and the inexorable ravine would not yield till it was filled up. Men and horses rolled into it pell-mell, crushing each other and making one large charnel-house of the gulf and when this grave was full of living men the rest passed over them. Nearly one third of Dubois’s brigade rolled into this abyss.

A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates, says that two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the sunken road of Ohain. These figures probably comprise the other corpses case into the ravine on the day after the battle.

Napoleon, before ordering this charge, had surveyed the ground, but had been unable to see this hollow way, which did not form even a ripple on the crest of the plateau. Warned, however, by the little white chapel that marks its juncture with the Nivelles road, he had asked Lacoste a question, probably as to whether there was any obstacle. The guide answered, “No”; and we might almost say that Napoleon’s catastrophe was brought about by a peasant’s shake of the head.

Other fatalities were yet to arise. Was it possible for Napoleon to win the battle? We answer in the negative. Why? On account of Wellington, on account of Blucher? No; on account of God. Bonaparte, victor at Waterloo, did not harmonize with the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts was preparing, in which Napoleon had no longer a place: the ill-will of events had been displayed long previously.

It was time for this vast man to fall; his excessive weight in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone was of more account than the universal group: such plethoras of human vitality concentrated in a single head — the world, mounting to one man’s brain — would be mortal to civilization if they endured. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible supreme equity to reflect. Streaming blood, overcrowded grave yards, mothers in tears, are formidable pleaders. Napoleon had been denounced in infinitude and his fall was decided. Waterloo is not a battle, but a transformation of the universe.

The battery was unmasked simultaneously with the ravine — sixty guns and thirteen squares thundered at the cuirassiers at point-blank range. The intrepid General Delord gave a military salute to the English battery. The whole of the English field artillery had entered the squares at a gallop; the cuirassier has 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 Delord’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, sabers in their mouths and pistols in their hands.

Wolfgang Menzel begins here. William Siborne begins here. Victor Hugo begins here.

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