Hougoumont

The plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen, really admirable.

The battle once begun, its very various changes, the resistance of Hougoumont, the tenacity of La Haie Sainte, the killing of Baudoin, the disabling of Foy, the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was shattered, Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard nor powder-sacks, the miring of the batteries, the fifteen unescorted pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge, the small effect of the bombs falling in the English lines and there embedding themselves in the rain-soaked soil and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud so that the canister was turned into a splash, the uselessness of Pire's demonstration on Braine l'Alleud, all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons almost exterminated, the right wing of the English badly alarmed, the left wing badly cut into, Ney's strange mistake in massing instead of echeloning the four divisions of the First Corps, men delivered over to grapeshot arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage of two hundred, the frightful holes made in these masses by the cannon-balls, attacking columns disorganized, the side battery suddenly unmasked on their flank, Bourgeois, Donzelot and Durutte compromised, Kio repulsed, Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercule graduated at the Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an axe the door of La Haie Sainte under the downright fire of the English barricade which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels, Marconnier's division caught between the infantry and the cavalry shot down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, put to the sword by Ponsonby, his battery of seven pieces spiked, the Prince of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding in spite of the Comte d'Erlon both Frichemont and Smain, the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the 45th captured, that black Prussian hussar stopped by runners of the flying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavre and Plancenoit, the alarming things that had been said by prisoners, Grouchy's delay, fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougoumont in less than an hour, eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter time about La Haie Sainte, all these stormy incidents passing like the clouds of battle before Napoleon had hardly troubled his gaze and had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty.

Napoleon was accustomed to gaze steadily at war.

He never added up the heart-rending details cipher by cipher.

The winner of Waterloo was Cambronne.

To thunder forth such a reply at the lightning flash that kills you is to conquer.

Thus to answer the catastrophe, thus to speak to fate, to give this pedestal to the future lion, to hurl such a challenge to the midnight rainstorm, to the treacherous wall of Hougoumont, to the sunken road of Ohain, to Grouchy's delay, to Blücher's arrival, to be irony itself in the tomb, to act so as to stand upright though fallen, to drown in two syllables the European coalition, to offer kings privies which the Caesars once knew, to make the lowest of words the most lofty by entwining with it the glory of France, insolently to end Waterloo with Mardi Gras, to finish Leonidas with Rabelais, to set the crown on this victory by a word impossible to speak, to lose the field and preserve history, to have the laugh on your side after such a carnage, this is immense.

It was an insult such as a thundercloud might hurl.