At these bulletins, the stampede became general: the possessors of some resources left; I, who am accustomed never to have anything, was always ready and prepared. I wanted to let Madame de Chateaubriand move out before me; she was a great Bonapartist, but did not like cannon-shots: she refused to leave me.
In the evening, council at His Majesty's: we heard Monsieur's reports over again, as well as the on dits picked up at the military commandant's or at the Baron d'Eckstein's[322]. The waggon to contain the Crown diamonds was put to: I had no need of a waggon to remove my treasure. I put the black-silk handkerchief in which I wrap my head at night into my flaccid minister-of-the-interior's portfolio, and placed myself at the Sovereign's disposal, with that important document of the affairs of the Legitimacy. I was richer in my first emigration, when my knapsack did duty as my pillow and served as a swaddling-band for Atala: but, in 1815, Atala was a big gawky little girl of thirteen or fourteen, who was going about alone in the world and who, to her father's honour, had got herself too much talked about.
On the 19th of June, at one o'clock in the morning, a letter from M. Pozzo, brought to the King by express, reestablished the truth of the facts. Bonaparte had never entered Brussels; he had decidedly lost the Battle of Waterloo. Leaving Paris on the 12th of June, he joined his army on the 14th. On the 15th, he forced the enemy's lines on the Sambre. On the 16th, he beat the Prussians in those plains of Fleurus[323] where victory seems to be always faithful to the French. The villages of Ligny and Saint-Amand were carried. At Quatre-Bras, a further success: the Duke of Brunswick[324] remained among the dead. Blücher[325], in full retreat, fell back upon a reserve of thirty thousand men under the orders of General Bülow[326]; the Duke of Wellington, with the English and Dutch, set his back against Brussels.
On the morning of the 18th, before the first gun had been fired, the Duke of Wellington declared that he would be able to hold out until three o'clock; but that, at that time, if the Prussians did not come into sight, he would necessarily be destroyed: driven back upon Planchenois and Brussels, he was shut out from all retreat. He had been surprised by Napoleon, his strategic position was detestable; he had accepted it and had not chosen it.
The French, at first, on the left wing of the enemy, took the heights commanding the Château d'Hougoumont as far as the farms of the Haye-Sainte and Papelotte; on the right wing, they attacked the village of Mont Saint-Jean; the farm of the Haye-Sainte was carried in the centre by Prince Jerome. But the Prussian reserves appeared in the direction of Saint-Lambert at six o'clock in the evening: a new and furious attack was delivered upon the village of the Haye-Sainte; Blücher arrived with fresh troops and cut off the squares of the Imperial Guard from the rest of our forces. Around this immortal phalanx, the torrent of fugitives carried all with it among waves of dust, fiery smoke and grape-shot, in darkness ploughed with congreve-rockets, amid the roar of three hundred pieces of artillery and the headlong gallop of five-and-twenty thousand horses: it was as it were the summary of all the battles of the Empire. Twice the French shouted, "Victory!" and twice their shouts were stifled under the pressure of the enemy's columns. The fire from our lines died out; the cartridges were exhausted; some wounded grenadiers, amid thirty thousand slain and a hundred thousand blood-stained cannon-balls, cooled and conglomerated at their feet, remained erect, leaning on their muskets, with broken bayonets and empty barrels. Not far from them, the man of battles listened, with a fixed stare, to the last cannon-shot he was to hear in his life. In that field of carnage, his brother Jerome was still fighting with his expiring battalions overwhelmed by numbers; but his courage was unable to retrieve the victory.
The battle of Waterloo.
The number of killed on the side of the Allies was estimated at eighteen thousand men, on the side of the French at twenty-five thousand; twelve hundred British officers had perished; almost all the Duke of Wellington's aides-de-camp were killed or wounded; there was not a family in England but went into mourning. The Prince of Orange[327] was hit by a bullet in the shoulder; the Baron de Vincent, the Austrian Ambassador, was shot through the hand. The English were beholden for the success to the Irish and to the Highland Brigade, whom our cavalry charges were unable to break. General Grouchy's[328] corps, not having advanced, was not present in the action. The two armies crossed steel and fire with a valour and desperation inspired by a national enmity of ten centuries. Lord Castlereagh, giving an account of the battle in the House of Lords[329], said:
"The British and French soldiers, after the action, washed their blood-stained hands in the same stream, and from opposite banks congratulated each other on their courage."
Wellington had always been baleful to Bonaparte, or rather the rival genius to France, the English genius, barred the road to victory. To-day, the Prussians lay claim to the honour of this decisive battle, as against the English; but in war it is not the action accomplished but the name that makes the triumpher: it was not Bonaparte who won the real Battle of Jena[330].
The blunders of the French were important: they made mistakes as to friendly or hostile bodies; they occupied the position of Quatre-Bras too late; Marshal Grouchy, whose instructions were to hold the Prussians in check with his thirty-six thousand men, allowed them to pass without seeing them: hence the reproaches which our generals cast at one another. Bonaparte attacked in front, according to his custom, instead of turning the English, and, with a master's presumption, occupied himself in cutting off the retreat of an enemy who was not beaten.