Chapter 42
Section 42 of A Short History of France by Mary Duclos. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Pamela Nagami. Part IV. Chapter VI. Waterloo. Part II. At one o'clock, as the Emperor on his mound swept the horizon with his field-glass in search of Grouchy's missing reserve,
he saw a moving shadow. Not French? Prussians? Yes, Buleaux's corps, who had not served at Lignes. It was, he thought, but a single unsupported body, which, if Grouchy moved rapidly, might be caught between two fires and annihilated. But Grouchy was not in sight, and these ominous Prussians, waiting and watching for the advent of Buccher's more considerable corps,
hovered on the rear of the battle, still waiting, like a flock of vultures. Perhaps at that moment Napoleon ought to have disengaged his armies, retreated as Buccher had done at Lignes, left the ultimate issue for a happier hour. But was it possible? What reinforcements had he to hope for? Delay was all in favor of the Allies. Their reinforcements were the innumerable hosts of Austria and Russia.
Besides, the struggle was already begun. French and English were at each other's throats in an inextricable medley. The crashing charge of Erlon's division at one o'clock left the British infantry unshaken. Then came the turn of Milot and his cuirassiers. Who does not know the story of their splendid onset as they stormed the Mont-Saint-Jean,
riding like centaurs, three thousand centaurs, three thousand grizzled heads shouting, Who has not heard how in the full shock of their furious charge they came on that sunken lane, the ravine of Ouin, and fell one on top of another in the horrible trap. But the middle ranks and the last gained the plateau on the other side, charging like mad, carrying all before them, the tails of their horses swishing through the tall wheat.
Colonel Sour with six saber cuts in his right arm dismounts while the army surgeon amputates it, and then leaps on his horse again and leads his men to the attack. The Duke of Wellington told me himself, Sejomini, in his Campagne de 1915, He told me at Verona that in all his experience of war he never saw anything more magnificent than the charge of the French cuirassier at Waterloo.
At that moment it was to no French confrère that the Duke was imparting his impressions, but to the incomparable British infantry who withstood the wild onslaught. Steady, boys, he says. What will they say of us at home if we are beaten? There was no thought of giving way. The English never knew when they were beaten. The battle was won by men whose motto has ever been, "'Tis dogged as does it."
The French cavalry was as close to us as our own troops, wrote the Iron Duke a little later to Lord Beresford. The moment came when the fifth British division, reduced from four thousand to four hundred men, could no longer hold its position, and Wellington seeing his brave soldiers hacked in pieces all round him, told them to fall where they stood, and never thought of yielding an inch of ground, though as he sighed, "'Night or Blucher alone can save us."
Meanwhile, Napoleon was in no less terrible straits. Nay, mad with battle had led his cavalry charge too soon, at half past three. The exhaustion of the horses made a further attack appear as yet impossible, and the English cannon had found the range. There were now great moth-eaten spaces and holes in the vast furry mass of the French Busby's. But the first British line is pierced, the second broken,
though the third is intact. Oh, for a good solid regiment of infantry! Nay sends to Napoleon in utmost haste. "'De l'infanterie,' the Emperor answers, "'Que voulez-vous que j'en prenne?' "'Voulez-vous que j'en fasse?' And just as Wellington scans the landscape for a sign of Blucher, he looks anxiously round, still no trace of Grouchy and his men. They might have disappeared in an earthquake. But the army does not yet guess at the Emperor's anguish. The French soldiers had
begun to cry, "'Victoire!' A messenger was riding post haste to Ghent to apprise Louis XVIII of the defeat of the Allies, when that cloud on the horizon began to move. The men cried, "'Grouchy!' But the Emperor knew better. It was the Prussian army under Bülow. In order to win the battle, he must at whatever cost crush the British before the arrival of Blucher, who was probably somewhere in Bülow's rear. The mass of the French cavalry, twelve thousand strong, flung itself again in
charge after charge on the English front, carrying at last the English guns, and sweeping with desperate bravery round the unbroken squares whose fire thinned their ranks. Those indomitable squares remained unshaken. Never has greater courage been displayed, neither in attack or in endurance. The rivals were equally matched. For if either was to overcome, some new factor must be added to his strength. At half past six again that moving shadow on the skyline, and again the soldiers of
France shouted, "'Grouchy!' But it was the bulk of the Prussian army under Blucher. Then the Imperial Guard, Napoleon's last reserve, which had taken no part in the battle, was drawn up in two huge columns of attack. Ney himself led the first, and Ney transfigured, drunk with battle and despair, covered with mud he had been thrown from his horse. His coat pierced with bullets, his sleeve torn from the shoulder, and Ney, while gesticulating, shouting, "'Vive l'empereur!' and the column
sweeping all before it, floundering through heavy fields and pools of water, mounted the rise, touched the English front, and fell back, torn, shattered by the terrible charge of the British musketry. Then broke the second wave, advancing with the same fury, rising, engulfing, only to be repulsed and scattered in its turn. By now it was nine in the evening. Night began to fall. All these brave men had been fighting for three days, and at the moment when the Guard fell back
exhausted, the French beheld the whole Prussian army massed on Napoleon's right, their guns sweeping the road to Charleroi. Wellington seized that moment to make a desperate advance. Those imperturbable, shattering squares began to move forwards. All round, the French now saw themselves hemmed in by those rows on rows of little red figures, no taller than low hedges, which were the British regiments and divisions, and the troops of the Emperor saw that they were
turned. From that hour, all was lost. Terror, panic, confusion reigned in the ranks of the French. Whole regiments fled helter-skelter in a wild Sauve-qui-peu. But the Emperor's old guard still stood firm in the midst of the increasing darkness. Surrender, cried the British in a transport of pity and admiration. Damn, screamed the French general, Chambron. For thus I venture to translate the unpronounceable oath which polite historians have paraphrased as, the guard dies but does not
surrender. And with a last cry, Vive l'empereur, the heroic grenadiers rushed headlong on their death. Napoleon was looking on in a sort of stupor. They seemed to have broken the ranks, he muttered, as he saw his squadrons tumbling head over heels in their mad rout. All was lost, he was to write on the morrow, by a moment of panic terror. And he added with the indulgence of a great captain, The very soldiers at his side were caught in the whirlpool and swept away in that hopeless torrent.
Then the Emperor gathered up his reins and turning his horse, made for the sacrificed phalanx of the guard and would have entered their column. But Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, laid his hand on the bridle. Stop, sire, are not our enemies happy enough already. Napoleon resists and is wise to resist, for that would have been his fitting end. But Soult and the generals drag him on the road to Genop. There, for a long moment, he sits his horse, silent, motionless, deeply brooding,
then orders an artilleryman to fire off his guns and listens for the last time to that dull roar, which has been the music of his life. At last he gives his bridle rein a shake and sets off alone at full canter for Charleroi. On the 21st of June he was in Paris. He had been three days without eating. He was worn out. He had no longer the courage to daunt and dominate the chambers. He was no longer the man of Brumaire and when both houses demanded his abdication,
he was too broken to resist. Lavallette, his postmaster general, has left a record of the fearful epileptic laugh with which Napoleon greeted him on the 21st of June. The Emperor saw the game was up. Outside in the streets the people and the soldiers, two regiments and a mob from the Fauxbourg Saint-Antoine, were shrieking, adjuring him not to desert them, beseeching him to lead them against the enemy. Napoleon remained passive, inert. If there was one thing he adored even more
than power, it was order. He was afraid of civil war, of revolution. On the 22nd he signed his abdication in favor of his son, the King of Rome. He offered the provisional government to serve France as a simple general under their command. The government refused. Finally, as Blücher's Prussians were reported in the neighborhood, he left Paris and made his way to the sea. His first idea had been to take refuge in those United States of America, which were a second
fatherland to the children of the revolution. But the British cruisers scoured the Atlantic. So, making a virtue of necessity, the tracked and hounded autocrat of yesterday wrote to the Prince Regent announcing that he came like the mysticlies to seat himself at the hearth of the British people. Ah, why did not the English state, in a mood of generous and judicious irony, offer him that vacant hall of Hartwell where Louis XVIII had passed his term of exile? Instead, as we know,
to our grief and shame, we stranded him on a sun-baked, devil's island in mid-ocean, on desolate, dreary St. Helena. That and the flaming stake at Rouen are our two crimes in history. We have had our own way of dealing with the heroes and heroines of France. And I think it took the blood we shed of late in Flanders to wipe out the memory of that offence. Not like the mysticlies received with magnificence in Persia by the nobler adversaries of the Elder Age, like philoctetes,
rather, left to perish on his lonely rock. In the twenty-year-long contest between the revolution and Europe, the dynasts score the final triumph. In France, in Spain, in Naples, the Bourbons re-ascend their thrones. Louis XVIII comes limping home to France, crouched on the armies of the coalition. Twelve hundred thousand foreign troops again overrun the departments, leaving behind them when they retire, as a flood tide leaves its fringe of mud and weed an army of occupation.
A hundred and fifty thousand foreigners as a sort of royal guard destined to secure the king against a renewal of revolution. The cost of their maintenance was added to the war tax of seven hundred millions of francs contributed by France to the expenses of the campaign. The insolent, irrepressible country appeared ruined, at least if not reconciled. But military force has never yet been able to long prevent the expansion of a great political ideal,
and the task of the nineteenth century in France was to be the gradual and sure development of the notion of democracy. End of section 42.
