Napoleon Sends Forward the Cavalry at Waterloo

Wellington, on seeing Waterloo two years afterward, exclaimed, “My battlefield has been altered.”

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

What is a battle? An oscillation. The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute and not a day. To paint a battle, those powerful painters, who have chaos in their pencils, are needed. Rembrandt is worth more than Vandermeulin, for Vandermeulin, exact at midday, is incorrect at three o’clock. Geometry is deceived and the hurricane alone is true and it is this that gives Folard the right to contradict Polybius. Let us add that there is always a certain moment in which the battle degenerates into a combat, is particularized and broken up into countless detail facts which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, “belong rather to the biography of regiments than to the history of the army.” The historian, in such a case, has the evident right to sum up; he can only catch the principal out lines of the struggle and it is not given to any narrator, however conscientious he may be, to absolutely fix the form of that horrible cloud which is called a battle. This, which is true of all great armed collisions, is peculiarly applicable to Waterloo; still, at a certain moment in the afternoon, the battle began to assume a settled shape.

Everybody is aware that the undulations of the plains on which the encounter between Napoleon and Wellington took place are no longer as they were on June 18, 1815. On taking from this mournful plain the material to make a monument, it was deprived of its real relics and history, disconcerted, no longer recognizes itself; in order to glorify, they disfigure. Wellington, on seeing Waterloo two years afterward, exclaimed, “My battlefield has been altered.” Where the huge pyramid of earth surmounted by a lion now stands, there was a crest which on the side of the Nivelles road had a practicable ascent, but which on the side of the Genappe road was almost an escarpment. The elevation of this escarpment may still be imagined by the height of the two great tombs which skirt the road from Genappe to Brussels: the English tomb on the left, the German tomb on the right. There is no French tomb — for France the whole plain is a sepulcher.

Through the thousands of cartloads of earth employed in erecting the mound, which is one hundred fifty feet high and half a mile in circumference, the plateau of Mont St. Jean is now accessible by a gentle incline, but on the day of the battle and especially on the side of La Haye Sainte, it was steep and abrupt. The incline was so sharp that the English gunne1s could not see beneath them the farm situated in the bottom of the valley, which was the center of the fight. On June 18, 1815, the rain had rendered the steep road more difficult and the troops not only had to climb up but slipped in the mud. Along the center of the crest of the plateau ran a ditch, the existence of which it was impossible for a distant observer to guess. On the day of the battle this hollow way, a trench on the top of the escarpment, a rut hidden in the earth, was invisible, that is to say, terrible.

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 beginning went wrong, he did not alarm himself, as he believed himself master and owner of the end.

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. 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 Soigne and destroyed, it would be the definitive over throw of England by France; it would be Crécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet and Ramillies avenged; the man of Marengo would erase Agincourt.

The Emperor, while meditating on this tremendous result, turned his telescope to all parts of the battlefield. 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; at the one of the Nivelles road, behind which flashed the Dutch bayonets of Chassé’s brigade. 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.

They were three thousand five hundred in number and formed a front a quarter of a league in length; they were gigantic men mounted on colossal horses. They formed twenty-six squadrons and had behind them, as a support, Lefebvre Desnouette’s division, composed of one hundred sixty gendarmes; the chasseurs of the guard, eleven hundred ninety-seven sabers and the lancers of the guard, eight hundred eighty lances. They wore a helmet without a plume and a cuirass of wrought steel and were armed with pistols and a straight sabre. In the morning the whole army had admired them when they came up at nine o’clock, with bugles sounding, while all the bands played Veillons nu salut de l’Empire, in close column with one battery on their flank, the others in their center and deployed in two ranks and took their place in that powerful second line, so skillfully formed by Napoleon, which, having at its extreme left Kellermann’s cuirassiers and on its extreme right Milhaud’s cuirassiers, seemed to be endowed with two wings of steel. The aide-de-camp Bernard carried to them the Emperor’s order: Ney drew his sabre and placed himself at their head and the mighty squadrons started.

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

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