Last noon beheld them full of lusty life; Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay; The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent, heaped and pent, Rider and horse,-friend, foe,-in one red burial blent! BYRON. THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO. HAD it not rained on the night of the 17th of June, 1815, the future of Europe would have been changed. A few drops of water, more or less, prostrated Napoleon. That Waterloo should be the end of Austerlitz, Providence needed only a little rain; and an unseasonable cloud, crossing the sky, sufficed for the overthrow of a world! The battle of Waterloo — and this gave Blücher time to come up could not be commenced before half-past eleven. Why? Because the ground was soft. It was necessary to wait for it to acquire some little firmness, so that the artillery could manœuvre. Had the ground been dry, and the artillery able to move, the action would have been commenced at six o'clock in the morning. The battle would have been won and finished at two o'clock, three hours before the Prussians turned the scale of fortune. How much fault is there on the part of Napoleon in the loss of this battle? His plan of battle was, all confess, a masterpiece. To march straight to the centre of the allied line, pierce the enemy, cut them in two, push the British half upon Hal, and the Prussian half upon Tongres, make of Wellington and Blücher two fragments, carry Mont SaintJean, seize Brussels, throw the German into the Rhine, and the Englishman into the sea-all this, for Napoleon, was in this battle. What would follow, anybody can see. Both generals had carefully studied the plain of Mont Saint-Jean, now called the plain of Waterloo. Already, in the preceding year, Wellington, with the sagacity of prescience, had examined it as a possible site for a great battle. On this ground, and for this contest, Wellington had the favorable side, Napoleon the unfavorable. The English army was above, the French army below. Wellington, anxious but impassible, was on horseback, and remained the whole day in the same attitude, a little in front of the old mill of Mont Saint-Jean, which is still standing, under an elm, which an Englishman, an enthusiastic Vandal, has since bought for two hundred francs, cut down, and carried away. Wellington was frigidly heroic. The balls rained down. His aid-de-camp, Gordon, had just fallen at his side. Lord Hill, showing him a bursting shell, said: "My lord, what are your instructions, and what orders do you leave us, if you allow yourself to be killed?" "To follow my example," answered Wellington. To Clinton he said, laconically, "Hold this spot to the last man!" The day was clearly going badly. Wellington cried to his old companions of Talavera, Vittoria, and Salamanca: "Boys, we must not be beat! What would they say of us in England?" About four o'clock the English line staggered backward. All at once only the artillery and the sharpshooters were seen on the crest of the plateau; the rest disappeared. The regiments, driven by the shells and bullets of the French, fell back into the valley; the battle-front of the English was slipping away. Wellington gave ground. "Beginning retreat!" cried Napoleon. At the moment when Wellington drew back, Napoleon started up. He saw the plateau of Mont Saint-Jean suddenly laid bare, and the front of the English army disappear. It rallied, but kept concealed. The emperor half-rose in his stirrups. The flush of victory passed into his eyes. Wel lington hurled back on the forest of Soignies, and destroyed that was the final overthrow of England by France. The man of Marengo was wiping out Agincourt. The emperor rose and reflected. Wellington had fallen back. It remained only to complete this repulse by a crushing charge. Napoleon, turning abruptly, sent off a courier at full speed to Paris to announce that the battle was won. Napoleon was one of those geniuses who rule the thunder. He had found his thunderbolt. He ordered Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the plateau of Mont Saint-Jean. They were three thousand five hundred. They formed a line of half a mile. They were gigantic men on colossal horses. They were twenty-six squadrons, and they had behind them. a strong support. Aid-de-camp Bernard brought them the emperor's order. Ney drew his sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons began to move. Then was seen a fearful sight. All this cavalry, with sabres drawn, banners waving, and trumpets sounding, formed in column by division, descended with even movement and as one man - with the precision of a bronze battering-ram opening a breach. Behind the crest of the plateau, under cover of the masked battery, the English infantry, formed in thirteen squares, two battalions to the square, and upon two lines seven on the first, and six on the second with musket to the shoulder, and eye upon their sights, waiting, calm, silent, and immovable. They could not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers could not see them. They listened to the rising of this tide of men. They heard the increasing sound of three thousand horses, the alternate and measured striking of their hoofs at full trot, the rattling of the cuirasses, the clinking of the sabres, and a sort of fierce roar of the coming host. There was a moment of fearful silence; then, suddenly, a long line of raised arms brandishing sabres appeared above the crest, with casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand faces, with gray mustaches, crying, " Vive l'Empereur!" * All this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the beginning of an earthquake. VICTOR HUGO. THE DEFEAT AT WATERLOO. ALL at once, tragic to relate, at the left of the English, and on our right, the head of the column of cuirassiers reared with a frightful clamor. Arrived at the culminating point of the crest, unmanageable, full of fury, and bent upon the extermination of the squares and cannons, the cuirassiers saw between themselves and the English a ditch a grave. It was the sunken road of Ohain. It was a frightful moment. There was the ravine, unlooked-for, yawning at the very feet of the horses, two fathoms deep between its double slopes. The second rank pushed in the first, the third pushed in the second; the horses reared, threw themselves over, fell upon their backs, and struggled with their feet in the air, piling up and overturning their riders; no power to retreat. The whole column was nothing but a projectile. The force acquired to crush the English crushed the French. The inexorable ravine could not yield until it was filled; riders and horses rolled in together pell-mell, grinding each other, making common flesh in this dreadful gulf; and when the grave was full of living men, the rest rode over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois's brigade sank into this abyss. Here the loss of the battle began. A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates, says that two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the sunken road of Ohain. This undoubtedly comprised all * Vive l'Empereur (vèv lòng-per-ûr.) the other bodies thrown into this ravine on the morrow after the battle. Napoleon, before ordering this charge of Milhaud's cuirassiers, had examined the ground, but could not see this hollow road, which did not make even a wrinkle on the surface of the plateau. Warned, however, and put on his guard by the little white chapel which marks its junction with the Nivelles road, he had, probably on the contingency of an obstacle, put a question to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered "No." It may almost be said that from this shake of a peasant's head came the catastrophe of Napoleon. At the same time with the ravine, the artillery was unmasked. Sixty cannon and the thirteen squares thundered and flashed into the cuirassiers. The brave General Delord gave the military salute to the English battery. All the English flying artillery took position in the squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not even time to breathe. The disaster of the sunken road had decimated but not discouraged them. They were men who, diminished in numbers, grew greater in heart. Wathier's column alone had suffered from the disaster. Delord's, which Ney had sent obliquely to the left, as if he had a presentiment of the snare, arrived entire. The cuirassiers hurled themselves upon the English squares. At full gallop, with free rein, their sabres in their teeth and their pistols in their hands, the attack began. There are moments in battle when the soul hardens a man, even to changing the soldier into a statue, and all his flesh becomes granite. The English battalions, desperately assailed, did not yield an inch. Then it was frightful. All sides of the English squares were attacked at once. whirlwind of frenzy enveloped them. A This frigid infantry remained impassable. The first rank, with knee on the ground, received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, the second shot them down; behind the second rank, the cannoneers loaded their guns, the front of the |