Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER XVI—QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE?
1797 words | Chapter 161
The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure to those who won
it as to those who lost it. For Napoleon it was a panic;10 Blücher sees
nothing in it but fire; Wellington understands nothing in regard to it.
Look at the reports. The bulletins are confused, the commentaries
involved. Some stammer, others lisp. Jomini divides the battle of
Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it up into three changes;
Charras alone, though we hold another judgment than his on some points,
seized with his haughty glance the characteristic outlines of that
catastrophe of human genius in conflict with divine chance. All the
other historians suffer from being somewhat dazzled, and in this
dazzled state they fumble about. It was a day of lightning brilliancy;
in fact, a crumbling of the military monarchy which, to the vast
stupefaction of kings, drew all the kingdoms after it—the fall of
force, the defeat of war.
In this event, stamped with superhuman necessity, the part played by
men amounts to nothing.
If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blücher, do we thereby deprive
England and Germany of anything? No. Neither that illustrious England
nor that august Germany enter into the problem of Waterloo. Thank
Heaven, nations are great, independently of the lugubrious feats of the
sword. Neither England, nor Germany, nor France is contained in a
scabbard. At this epoch when Waterloo is only a clashing of swords,
above Blücher, Germany has Schiller; above Wellington, England has
Byron. A vast dawn of ideas is the peculiarity of our century, and in
that aurora England and Germany have a magnificent radiance. They are
majestic because they think. The elevation of level which they
contribute to civilization is intrinsic with them; it proceeds from
themselves and not from an accident. The aggrandizement which they have
brought to the nineteenth century has not Waterloo as its source. It is
only barbarous peoples who undergo rapid growth after a victory. That
is the temporary vanity of torrents swelled by a storm. Civilized
people, especially in our day, are neither elevated nor abased by the
good or bad fortune of a captain. Their specific gravity in the human
species results from something more than a combat. Their honor, thank
God! their dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not numbers
which those gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of
battles. Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is
less glory and more liberty. The drum holds its peace; reason takes the
word. It is a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak
of Waterloo coldly from both sides. Let us render to chance that which
is due to chance, and to God that which is due to God. What is
Waterloo? A victory? No. The winning number in the lottery.
The quine 11 won by Europe, paid by France.
It was not worthwhile to place a lion there.
Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and
Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God,
who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more
extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry,
prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate
coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of
the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions,
carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand,
nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage,
absolute regularity; on the other, intuition, divination, military
oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable
something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the
lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the
mysteries of a profound soul, associated with destiny; the stream, the
plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey,
the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle;
faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but
perturbing it. Wellington was the Barême of war; Napoleon was its
Michael Angelo; and on this occasion, genius was vanquished by
calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact
calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not
come. Wellington expected Blücher; he came.
Wellington is classic war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at his
dawning, had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him superbly. The old
owl had fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not
only struck as by lightning, but disgraced. Who was that Corsican of
six and twenty? What signified that splendid ignoramus, who, with
everything against him, nothing in his favor, without provisions,
without ammunition, without cannon, without shoes, almost without an
army, with a mere handful of men against masses, hurled himself on
Europe combined, and absurdly won victories in the impossible? Whence
had issued that fulminating convict, who almost without taking breath,
and with the same set of combatants in hand, pulverized, one after the
other, the five armies of the emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on
Alvinzi, Wurmser on Beaulieu, Mélas on Wurmser, Mack on Mélas? Who was
this novice in war with the effrontery of a luminary? The academical
military school excommunicated him, and as it lost its footing; hence,
the implacable rancor of the old Cæsarism against the new; of the
regular sword against the flaming sword; and of the exchequer against
genius. On the 18th of June, 1815, that rancor had the last word, and
beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Arcola, it wrote:
Waterloo. A triumph of the mediocres which is sweet to the majority.
Destiny consented to this irony. In his decline, Napoleon found
Wurmser, the younger, again in front of him.
In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of Wellington.
Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the
second.
That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is England; the
English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; the superb
thing about England there, no offence to her, was herself. It was not
her captain; it was her army.
Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst,
that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815, was a
“detestable army.” What does that sombre intermingling of bones buried
beneath the furrows of Waterloo think of that?
England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington. To make
Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington is nothing but a
hero like many another. Those Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards, those
regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt,
that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders playing the
pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions of Rylandt,
those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to handle a musket
holding their own against Essling’s and Rivoli’s old troops,—that is
what was grand. Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we
are not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of
his cavalry would have been as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth
as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our glorification goes to the
English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If trophy
there be, it is to England that the trophy is due. The column of
Waterloo would be more just, if, instead of the figure of a man, it
bore on high the statue of a people.
But this great England will be angry at what we are saying here. She
still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789, the feudal illusion.
She believes in heredity and hierarchy. This people, surpassed by none
in power and glory, regards itself as a nation, and not as a people.
And as a people, it willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for
its head. As a workman, it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier,
it allows itself to be flogged.
It will be remembered, that at the battle of Inkermann a sergeant who
had, it appears, saved the army, could not be mentioned by Lord Paglan,
as the English military hierarchy does not permit any hero below the
grade of an officer to be mentioned in the reports.
That which we admire above all, in an encounter of the nature of
Waterloo, is the marvellous cleverness of chance. A nocturnal rain, the
wall of Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the
cannon, Napoleon’s guide deceiving him, Bülow’s guide enlightening
him,—the whole of this cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.
On the whole, let us say it plainly, it was more of a massacre than of
a battle at Waterloo.
Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one which has the smallest
front for such a number of combatants. Napoleon three-quarters of a
league; Wellington, half a league; seventy-two thousand combatants on
each side. From this denseness the carnage arose.
The following calculation has been made, and the following proportion
established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent;
Russians, thirty per cent; Austrians, forty-four per cent. At Wagram,
French, thirteen per cent; Austrians, fourteen. At the Moskowa, French,
thirty-seven per cent; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French,
thirteen per cent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo,
French, fifty-six per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo,
forty-one per cent; one hundred and forty-four thousand combatants;
sixty thousand dead.
To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs to the earth,
the impassive support of man, and it resembles all plains.
At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from it; and if a
traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches, if he dreams
like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the
catastrophe takes possession of him. The frightful 18th of June lives
again; the false monumental hillock disappears, the lion vanishes in
air, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate
over the plain, furious gallops traverse the horizon; the frightened
dreamer beholds the flash of sabres, the gleam of bayonets, the flare
of bombs, the tremendous interchange of thunders; he hears, as it were,
the death rattle in the depths of a tomb, the vague clamor of the
battle phantom; those shadows are grenadiers, those lights are
cuirassiers; that skeleton Napoleon, that other skeleton is Wellington;
all this no longer exists, and yet it clashes together and combats
still; and the ravines are empurpled, and the trees quiver, and there
is fury even in the clouds and in the shadows; all those terrible
heights, Hougomont, Mont-Saint-Jean, Frischemont, Papelotte,
Plancenoit, appear confusedly crowned with whirlwinds of spectres
engaged in exterminating each other.
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