CHAPTER X--THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN

  The battery was unmasked at the same moment with the ravine.

  Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning point-blank onthe cuirassiers. The intrepid General Delort made the military salute tothe English battery.

  The whole of the flying artillery of the English had re-entered thesquares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not had even the time for ahalt. The disaster of the hollow road had decimated, but not discouragedthem. 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 ofan ambush, had arrived whole.

  The cuirassiers hurled themselves on the English squares.

  At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth, pistols infist,--such was the attack.

  There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man untilthe soldier is changed into a statue, and when all this flesh turns intogranite. The English battalions, desperately assaulted, did not stir.

  Then it was terrible.

  All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenziedwhirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained impassive. The firstrank knelt and received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, the secondranks shot them down; behind the second rank the cannoneers chargedtheir guns, the front of the square parted, permitted the passage ofan eruption of grape-shot, and closed again. The cuirassiers repliedby crushing them. Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks,leaped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these fourliving 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 belliesof these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds which has probablynever been seen anywhere else. The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry,closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter ofgrape-shot, they created explosions in their assailants' midst. The formof this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer battalions,they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, they werea tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud; lava contendedwith lightning.

  The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in theair, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. lt was formedof the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The bagpipe-player in the centredropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of theforests and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were beingexterminated around him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch underhis arm, played the Highland airs. These Scotchmen died thinking of BenLothian, 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 tothe song by killing the singer.

  The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further diminishedby the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English armyagainst them, but they multiplied themselves so that each man of themwas equal to ten. Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded.Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon atthat 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, foundthemselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their back. Beforethem two squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset meant fourteen hundreddragoons of the guard. On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with theGerman light-horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers;the cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in therear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What mattered itto them? They were a whirlwind. Their valor was something indescribable.

  In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was stillthundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could neverhave been wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced onthe shoulder by a ball from a biscayan,9 is in the collection of theWaterloo Museum.

  For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen was needed. Itwas no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was a shadow, a fury, a dizzytransport of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In aninstant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight hundred.Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up withthe lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes's light-horse. The plateauof Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. Thecuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to putit more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each otherwithout releasing the other. The squares still held firm.

  There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Halfthe cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This conflict lasted two hours.

  The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, had theynot been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the hollowroad the cuirassiers would have overwhelmed the centre and decided thevictory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seenTalavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished, admiredheroically. He said in an undertone, "Sublime!"

  The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took orspiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English regimentssix flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard boreto the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.

  Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle was like aduel between two raging, wounded men, each of whom, still fighting andstill 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 thingis certain, that on the day after the battle, a cuirassier and hishorse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles atMont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles,Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. Thishorseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up thebody still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was eighteenyears 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 brokenthrough. 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. Wellingtonheld the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the crest andthe slope. They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both sides.

  But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleedingof that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, demandedreinforcements. "There are none," replied Wellington; "he must lethimself be killed!" Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidencewhich paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney demanded infantryfrom Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, "Infantry! Where does he expectme to get it? Does he think I can make it?"

  Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the two. Thefurious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses of iron andbreasts of steel had ground the infantry to nothing. A few men clusteredround a flag marked the post of a regiment; such and such a battalionwas 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-fieldsall along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of those Dutchgrenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks in 1811,fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to theEnglish standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers wasconsiderable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on the followingday, had his knee shattered. If, on the French side, in that tussleof the cuirassiers, Delort, l'Héritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, andBlancard were disabled, on the side of the English there was Altenwounded, Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Omptedakilled, the whole of Wellington's staff decimated, and England had theworse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment of foot-guardshad lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and three ensigns;the first battalion of the 30th infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18 officerskilled, 450 soldiers killed. The Hanoverian hussars of Cumberland, awhole regiment, with Colonel Hacke at its head, who was destined to betried later on and cashiered, had turned bridle in the presence of thefray, and had fled to the forest of Soignes, sowing defeat all the wayto Brussels. The transports, ammunition-wagons, the baggage-wagons, thewagons filled with wounded, on perceiving that the French were gainingground and approaching the forest, rushed headlong thither. The Dutch,mowed down by the French cavalry, cried, "Alarm!" From Vert-Coucou toGroentendael, for a distance of nearly two leagues in the directionof Brussels, according to the testimony of eye-witnesses who are stillalive, the roads were encumbered with fugitives. This panic was suchthat it attacked the Prince de Condé at Mechlin, and Louis XVIII. atGhent. With the exception of the feeble reserve echelonned behind theambulance established at the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean, and of Vivian'sand Vandeleur's brigades, which flanked the left wing, Wellington hadno cavalry left. A number of batteries lay unhorsed. These facts areattested by Siborne; and Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so faras to say that the Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousandmen. The Iron Duke remained calm, but his lips blanched. Vincent, theAustrian commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner, who were presentat the battle in the English staff, thought the Duke lost. At fiveo'clock Wellington drew out his watch, and he was heard to murmur thesesinister words, "Blücher, or night!"

  It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets gleamed onthe heights in the direction of Frischemont.

  Here comes the change of face in this giant drama.