Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER X—THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN
1758 words | Chapter 155
The battery was unmasked at the same moment with the ravine.
Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning point-blank on
the cuirassiers. The intrepid General Delort made the military salute
to the English battery.
The whole of the flying artillery of the English had re-entered the
squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not had even the time for a
halt. The disaster of the hollow road had decimated, but not
discouraged them. They belonged to that class of men who, when
diminished in number, increase in courage.
Wathier’s column alone had suffered in the disaster; Delort’s column,
which Ney had deflected to the left, as though he had a presentiment of
an ambush, had arrived whole.
The cuirassiers hurled themselves on the English squares.
At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth, pistols in
fist,—such was the attack.
There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man until
the soldier is changed into a statue, and when all this flesh turns
into granite. The English battalions, desperately assaulted, did not
stir.
Then it was terrible.
All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenzied
whirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained impassive. The first
rank knelt and received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, the second
ranks shot them down; behind the second rank the cannoneers charged
their guns, the front of the square parted, permitted the passage of an
eruption of grape-shot, and closed again. The cuirassiers replied by
crushing them. Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks,
leaped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these four
living wells. The cannon-balls ploughed furrows in these cuirassiers;
the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared,
ground to dust under the horses. The bayonets plunged into the bellies
of these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds which has probably
never been seen anywhere else. The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry,
closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of
grape-shot, they created explosions in their assailants’ midst. The
form of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer
battalions, they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer
cavalry, they were a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a
cloud; lava contended with lightning.
The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in the
air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. lt was formed of
the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The bagpipe-player in the centre
dropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of the forests
and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were being
exterminated around him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch under
his arm, played the Highland airs. These Scotchmen died thinking of Ben
Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argos. The sword of a cuirassier,
which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to
the song by killing the singer.
The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further diminished
by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English army
against them, but they multiplied themselves so that each man of them
was equal to ten. Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded.
Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at
that same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle.
This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake.
All at once, the cuirassiers, who had been the assailants, found
themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their back. Before them
two squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset meant fourteen hundred
dragoons of the guard. On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with the
German light-horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers;
the cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in the
rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What mattered it
to them? They were a whirlwind. Their valor was something
indescribable.
In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was still
thundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could never
have been wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced on the
shoulder by a ball from a biscayan,9 is in the collection of the
Waterloo Museum.
For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen was needed. It was
no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was a shadow, a fury, a dizzy
transport of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In an
instant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight
hundred. Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up
with the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes’s light-horse. The plateau of
Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. The
cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to put
it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other
without releasing the other. The squares still held firm.
There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half
the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This conflict lasted two
hours.
The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, had
they not been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the
hollow road the cuirassiers would have overwhelmed the centre and
decided the victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who
had seen Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished,
admired heroically. He said in an undertone, “Sublime!”
The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or
spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English
regiments six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the
Guard bore to the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.
Wellington’s situation had grown worse. This strange battle was like a
duel between two raging, wounded men, each of whom, still fighting and
still resisting, is expending all his blood.
Which of the two will be the first to fall?
The conflict on the plateau continued.
What had become of the cuirassiers? No one could have told. One thing
is certain, that on the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his
horse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles at
Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles,
Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. This
horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up
the body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was
eighteen years old at that time.
Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at hand.
The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was not broken
through. As every one was in possession of the plateau, no one held it,
and in fact it remained, to a great extent, with the English.
Wellington held the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the
crest and the slope. They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both
sides.
But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleeding of
that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, demanded
reinforcements. “There are none,” replied Wellington; “he must let
himself be killed!” Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidence
which paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney demanded infantry
from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, “Infantry! Where does he expect
me to get it? Does he think I can make it?”
Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the two. The
furious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses of iron and
breasts of steel had ground the infantry to nothing. A few men
clustered round a flag marked the post of a regiment; such and such a
battalion was commanded only by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten’s
division, already so roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was almost
destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze’s brigade strewed the
rye-fields all along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of
those Dutch grenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks
in 1811, fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to the
English standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers was
considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on the following
day, had his knee shattered. If, on the French side, in that tussle of
the cuirassiers, Delort, l’Héritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, and
Blancard were disabled, on the side of the English there was Alten
wounded, Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda
killed, the whole of Wellington’s staff decimated, and England had the
worse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment of foot-guards
had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and three ensigns;
the first battalion of the 30th infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200
soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18
officers killed, 450 soldiers killed. The Hanoverian hussars of
Cumberland, a whole regiment, with Colonel Hacke at its head, who was
destined to be tried later on and cashiered, had turned bridle in the
presence of the fray, and had fled to the forest of Soignes, sowing
defeat all the way to Brussels. The transports, ammunition-wagons, the
baggage-wagons, the wagons filled with wounded, on perceiving that the
French were gaining ground and approaching the forest, rushed headlong
thither. The Dutch, mowed down by the French cavalry, cried, “Alarm!”
From Vert-Coucou to Groenendael, for a distance of nearly two leagues
in the direction of Brussels, according to the testimony of
eye-witnesses who are still alive, the roads were encumbered with
fugitives. This panic was such that it attacked the Prince de Condé at
Mechlin, and Louis XVIII. at Ghent. With the exception of the feeble
reserve echelonned behind the ambulance established at the farm of
Mont-Saint-Jean, and of Vivian’s and Vandeleur’s brigades, which
flanked the left wing, Wellington had no cavalry left. A number of
batteries lay unhorsed. These facts are attested by Siborne; and
Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far as to say that the
Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousand men. The Iron Duke
remained calm, but his lips blanched. Vincent, the Austrian
commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner, who were present at the
battle in the English staff, thought the Duke lost. At five o’clock
Wellington drew out his watch, and he was heard to murmur these
sinister words, “Blücher, or night!”
It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets gleamed on
the heights in the direction of Frischemont.
Here comes the change of face in this giant drama.
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