Napoleon's strategy throughout the brief campaign was magnificent; his tactics—the detailed handling of his troops on the actual battlefield—were wretched. "We were manoeuvred," says the disgusted Marbot, "like so many pumpkins." Napoleon was only forty-seven years old, but, as Wolseley says, "he was no longer the thin, sleek, active little man he had been at Rivoli. His now bloated face, large stomach, and fat and rounded legs bespoke a man unfitted for hard work on horseback." His fatal delay in pursuing Blücher on the 17th, and his equally fatal waste of time in attacking Wellington on the 18th, proved how his quality as a general had decayed. It is a curious fact that, during the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon remained for hours motionless at a table placed for him in the open air, often asleep, with his head resting on his arms. One reads with an odd sense of humour the answer which a dandy officer of the British Life Guards gave to the inquiry, "How he felt during the battle of Waterloo?" He replied that he had felt "awfully bored"! That anybody should feel "bored" in the vortex of such a drama is wonderful; but scarcely so wonderful as the fact that the general of one of the two contending hosts found it possible to go to sleep during the crisis of the gigantic battle, on which hung his crown and fate. Napoleon had lived too long for the world's happiness or for his own fame.
The story here told is that of Waterloo on its British side. No attempt is made to describe Blücher's magnificent loyalty in pushing, fresh from the defeat of Ligny, through the muddy cross-roads from Wavre, to join Wellington on the blood-stained field of Waterloo. No account, again, is attempted of Grouchy's wanderings into space, with 33,000 men and 96 guns, lazily attacking Thielmann's single corps at Wavre, while Blücher, with three divisions, was marching at speed to fling himself on Napoleon's right flank at Waterloo. It is idle to speculate on what would have happened to the British if the Prussians had not made their movement on Napoleon's right flank. The assured help of Blücher was the condition upon which Wellington made his stand at Waterloo; it was as much part of his calculations as the fighting quality of his own infantry. A plain tale of British endurance and valour is all that is offered here; and what a head of wood and heart of stone any man of Anglo-Saxon race must have who can read such a tale without a thrill of generous emotion!
Waterloo was for the French not so much a defeat as a rout. Napoleon's army simply ceased to exist. The number of its slain is unknown, for its records were destroyed. The killed and wounded in the British army reached the tragical number of nearly 15,000. Probably not less than between 30,000 and 40,000 slain or wounded human beings were scattered, the night following the battle, over the two or three square miles where the great fight had raged; and some of the wounded were lying there still, uncared for, four days afterwards. It is said that for years afterwards, as one looked over the waving wheat-fields in the valley betwixt Mont St. Jean and La Belle Alliance, huge irregular patches, where the corn grew rankest and was of deepest tint, marked the gigantic graves where, in the silence and reconciliation of death, slept Wellington's ruddy-faced infantry lads and the grizzled veterans of the Old Guard. The deep cross-country road which covered Wellington's front has practically disappeared; the Belgians have cut away the banks to build up a huge pyramid, on the summit of which is perched a Belgian lion, with tail erect, grinning defiance towards the French frontier. A lion is not exactly the animal which best represents the contribution the Belgian troops made to Waterloo.
But still the field keeps its main outlines. To the left lies Planchenoit, where Wellington watched to see the white smoke of the Prussian guns; opposite is the gentle slope down which D'Erlon's troops marched to fling themselves on La Haye Sainte; and under the spectator's feet, a little to his left as he stands on the summit of the monument, is the ground over which Life Guards and Inniskillings and Scots Greys galloped in the fury of their great charge. Right in front is the path along which came Milhaud's Cuirassiers and Kellerman's Lancers, and Friant's Old Guard, in turn, to fling themselves in vain on the obstinate squares and thin red line of the British. To the right is Hougoumont, the orchard walls still pierced with loopholes made by the Guards. A fragment of brick, blackened with the smoke of the great fight, is one of the treasures of the present writer. Victors and vanquished alike have passed away, and, since the Old Guard broke on the slopes of Mont St. Jean, British and French have never met in the wrestle of battle. May they never meet again in that fashion! But as long as nations preserve the memory of the great deeds of their history, as long as human courage and endurance can send a thrill of admiration through generous hearts, as long as British blood beats in British veins, the story of the brave men who fought and died at their country's bidding at Waterloo will be one of the great traditions of the English-speaking race.
Of Wellington's part in the great fight it is difficult to speak in terms which do not sound exaggerated. He showed all the highest qualities of generalship, swift vision, cool judgment, the sure insight that forecasts each move on the part of his mighty antagonist, the unfailing resource that instantly devises the plan for meeting it. There is no need to dwell on Wellington's courage; the rawest British militia lad on the field shared that quality with him. But in the temper of Wellington's courage there was a sort of ice-clear quality that was simply marvellous. He visited every square and battery in turn, and was at every point where the fight was most bloody. Every member of his staff, without exception, was killed or wounded, while it is curious to reflect that not a member of Napoleon's staff was so much as touched. But the roar of the battle, with its swift chances of life and death, left Wellington's intellect as cool, and his nerve as steady, as though he were watching a scene in a theatre. One of his generals said to him when the fight seemed most desperate, "If you should be struck, tell us what is your plan?" "My plan," said the Duke, "consists in dying here to the last man." He told at a dinner-table, long after the battle, how, as he stood under the historic tree in the centre of his line, a Scotch sergeant came up, told him he had observed the tree was a mark for the French gunners, and begged him to move from it. Somebody at the table said, "I hope you did, sir?" "I really forget," said the Duke, "but I know I thought it very good advice at the time."
Only twice during the day did Wellington show any trace of remembering what may be called his personal interest in the fight. Napoleon had called him "a Sepoy general." "I will show him to-day," he said, just before the battle began, "how a Sepoy general can defend himself." At night, again, as he sat with a few of his surviving officers about him at supper, his face yet black with the smoke of the fight, he repeatedly leaned back in his chair, rubbing his hands convulsively, and exclaiming aloud, "Thank God! I have met him. Thank God! I have met him." But Wellington's mood throughout the whole of the battle was that which befitted one of the greatest soldiers war has ever produced in the supreme hour of his country's fate. The Duke was amongst the leading files of the British line as they pushed the broken French Guard down the slope, and some one begged him to remember what his life was worth, and go back. "The battle is won," said Wellington; "my life doesn't matter now." Dr. Hulme, too, has told how he woke the Duke early in the morning after the fight, his face grim, unwashed, and smoke-blackened, and read the list of his principal officers—name after name—dead or dying, until the hot tears ran, like those of a woman, down the iron visage of the great soldier.
As Napoleon in the gathering darkness galloped off the field, with the wreck and tumult of his shattered army about him, there remained to his life only those six ignoble years at St. Helena. But Wellington was still in his very prime. He was only forty-six years old, and there awaited him thirty-seven years of honoured life, till, "to the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation," he was laid beside Nelson in the crypt of St. Paul's, and Tennyson sang his requiem:—
"O good grey head, which all men knew,
O voice from which their omens all men drew,
O iron nerve, to true occasion true;
O fall'n at length that tower of strength
Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew."