As Ney fell back, a body of French cuirassiers advanced upon the English batteries. Their success was partial, and behind them a second column of the guard was formed. Again the assault was renewed; but the second attempt fared worse than the first. To the right of Maitland, Adam's brigade, with the Fifty-second regiment, had taken stand; wheeling now, these drove a deadly flank fire into the advancing French, while the others poured in a devastating hail of bullets from the front. The front ranks of the French replied with spirit, but when the British had completed their manœuver, Colborne gave the order, his men cheered in response, and the countercharge began. "Vive l'Empereur!" came the responsive cheer from the thinning ranks of the assailants, and still they came on. But in the awful crash they reeled, confusion followed, and almost in the twinkling of an eye the rout began. A division of the old guard, the two battalions under Cambronne, retreated in fair order to the center of the valley, where they made their last gallant stand against the overwhelming numbers of Hugh Halkett's German brigade. They fought until but a hundred and fifty survived. From far away the despairing cry of "Sauve qui peut!" seemed to ring on their ears. To the first summons of surrender the leader had replied with dogged defiance; the second was made soon after, about three in the afternoon, and to this he yielded. He and his men filed to the English rear without a murmur, but in deep dejection. This occurrence has passed into tradition as an epic event; what Cambronne might well have said, "The guard dies, but never surrenders," was not uttered by him, but it epitomizes their character, and in the phrase which seems to have been shouted by the men themselves in their last desperate struggle, they and their leader have found immortality.
The last charge of what remained of the guard took place almost at the moment when Durutte was finally routed. Wellington then sent in the fresh cavalry brigades of Vivian and Vandeleur against the column of Donzelot and the remnants of the French cavalry. These swept all before them, and then the duke gave the order for a general advance. The French left fell into panic, and fled toward Belle Alliance. Before La Haye Sainte stood two squares of French soldiers, the favored legion chosen to protect the imperial headquarters. In the fatal hour it splendidly vindicated the choice, and amid the chaos stood in perfect order. Throughout the famous charge of his devoted men Napoleon rode hither and thither, from Rossomme to Belle Alliance. His looks grew dark, but at the very last he called hoarsely to the masses of disorganized troops that came whirling by, bidding them to stand fast. All in vain; and as the last square came on he pressed inside its serried wall. It was not too soon, for the Prussians had now joined the forward movement, and in the supreme disorder consequent the other square dissolved. Napoleon's convoy withstood the shock of a charge from the Twelfth British light dragoons, and again of a Prussian charge at Rossomme, where Gneisenau took up the fierce pursuit. Though assaulted, and hard beset by musketry, the square moved silently on. There were no words except an occasional remark addressed by Napoleon to his brother Jerome, or to one of the officers. At eleven Genappe was reached; there, such was the activity of the pursuers, all hope of an orderly retreat vanished, and the square melted away. Napoleon had become an object of pity—his eyes set, his frame collapsed, his great head rolling in a drowsy stupor. Monthyon and Bertrand set him as best they could upon a horse, and, one on each side, supported him as they rode. They had an escort of forty men. At Quatre Bras they despatched a messenger to summon Grouchy, bidding him to retire on Namur. The Prussians were only one hour behind. At daybreak the hunted Emperor reached Charleroi, but his attendants dared not delay; two rickety carriages were secured, and it was not until the wretched caravan reached Philippeville that the fugitives obtained a few hours' repose.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Surrender[26]
Nature of Napoleon's Defeat — Its Political Consequences — Napoleon's Fatal Resolution — The State of Paris — Napoleon at the Élysée — His Departure for Rochefort — Thoughts of Return — Procrastination — Wild Schemes of Flight — A Refuge in England — His Only Resource — The White Terror and the Allies.
The battle of Waterloo is so called because Wellington's despatch to England was dated from his headquarters at that place. The world-wide celebrity of the fight was due to the failure of a tremendous cause and the extinction of a tremendous genius. That genius had been so colossal as to confuse human judgment. Even yet mankind forgets that its possessor was a finite being and attributes his fall to any cause except the true one. Western Europe had paid dearly for the education, but it had been educated, learning his novel and original methods in both war and diplomacy. We have followed the gradual decline of the master's ability, physical, mental, and moral; we have noted the rise of the forces opposed to him, military, diplomatic, and national. Waterloo is a name of the highest import because it marks the final collapse of personal genius, the beginning of reaction toward an order old in name but new in spirit. Waterloo was not great by reason of the numbers engaged, for on the side of the allies were about a hundred and thirty thousand men, on the other seventy-two thousand approximately; nor was there any special brilliancy in its conduct. Wellington defended a strong position well and carefully selected. But he wilfully left himself with inferior numbers; he did not heartily coöperate with Blücher; both were unready; Gneisenau was suspicious; and the battle of Ligny was a Prussian blunder. Napoleon committed, between dawn and dusk of June eighteenth, a series of petty mistakes, each of which can be explained, but not excused. He began too late; he did not follow up his assaults; he did not retreat when beaten; he could attend to only one thing at a time; he failed in control of his subordinates; he was neither calm nor alert. His return from Elba had made him the idol of the majority in France, but his conduct throughout the Hundred Days was that of a broken man. His genius seemed bright at the opening of his last campaign, but every day saw the day's task delayed. His great lieutenants grew uneasy and untrustworthy, though, like his patient, enduring, and gallant men, they displayed prodigies of personal valor. Ney and Grouchy used their discretion, but it was the discretion of caution most unlike that of Desaix at Marengo, or of Ney himself at Eylau. Their ignorance cannot be condoned; Grouchy's decision at Walhain, though justified in a measure by Soult's later order, was possibly the immediate cause of final disaster. But such considerations do not excuse Napoleon's failure to give explicit orders, nor his nervous interference with Ney's formation before Quatre Bras, nor his deliberate iterations during his captivity that he had expected Grouchy throughout the battle. Moreover, the interest of Waterloo is connected with its immediate and dramatic consequences rather than with its decisive character. If Napoleon had won on that day, the allies would have been far from annihilation; both Wellington and Blücher had kept open their respective lines of retreat. The national uprising of Europe would have been more determined than ever; 1815 would have been but a repetition of 1814. Finally, the losses, though terrible, were not unparalleled. Grouchy won at Wavre, and, hearing of the disaster at Mont St. Jean, first contemplated falling on the Prussian rear as they swept onward in pursuit. But he quickly abandoned this chimerical idea, and on receipt of Napoleon's order from Quatre Bras, withdrew to Namur, and thence, by a masterly retreat, conducted his army back into France. Including those who fell at Wavre, the allies lost about twenty-two thousand five hundred men, of whom seven thousand were British and a like number Prussians. The records at Paris are very imperfect, but they indicate that the French losses were about thirty-one thousand.
The booty captured after Waterloo was unimportant; but the political spoils were immense, and they belonged to the Prussians. Their high expectation of seizing Napoleon's person was disappointed; but the one great result—the realization, namely, of all the tyrannical plans formed at Vienna for the humiliation of liberal France—that they secured by their instant, hot pursuit. It is hard to discern the facts in the dust of controversy. Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Great Britain have each the national conviction of having laid the Corsican specter; France has long been busy explaining the facts of her defeat, but seems to have at last completed the task; the most conspicuous monument on the battle-field is that to the Dutch-Belgians!
Napoleon was fully aware that at Waterloo he had made the last cast of the dice and that he had lost. It cannot be proven, but the charge is made, that far earlier he had ceased to reckon with facts and had begun to juggle with unrealities. The return from Elba has all the elements of romance, but events proved that it was based on a sound judgment. Had the allied powers been willing to give France the privilege of choosing her own government, which in spite of all that had occurred was hers by every principle known to international law, Europe would have enjoyed some years of repose, at any rate; considering Napoleon's shattered health and premature old age, France might for a long period have ceased to be a disturber of the public peace, working out then as now, perhaps in equal tribulation, the enduring principles of the Revolution; forty years of turmoil might have been spared to the Continent and the gory floods poured on the ground at Quatre Bras, Ligny, and Waterloo might have coursed unmolested in the veins of the innocent men from which they welled out. The responsibility for all the blood which was shed after the first treaty of Paris must be shared with Napoleon by dynastic Europe, in particular by the diplomatists who represented the hate of Russia, Austria, and Prussia and suffered it to find an outlet in a war of revenge; a portion too belongs to the factious bitterness which reigned supreme in the various French parties, awakening civil strife and endangering French nationality. From first to last there had been little consistency or continuity in Napoleon's character—it is by no means certain that he might not well have played, and perhaps magisterially, the rôle of a national ruler; it is of course also possible that he might have remained the same untamed, cosmopolitan adventurer to the end. In view of the political history of France during the Hundred Days, the former is more probable. But after Waterloo he was clearly aware that he could no longer be either the one or the other. It was not to be expected that every instinct would disappear at once, that he would resign himself to obscurity without an effort.
After a short rest at Philippeville, Napoleon composed the customary bulletins concerning his campaign, and despatched them to the capital, together with a letter counseling Joseph to stand firm and keep the legislature in hand. If Grouchy had escaped, he wrote, he could already array fifty thousand men on the spot; with the means at hand, he could soon organize a hundred and fifty thousand; the troops in regimental depots, together with the national guard, would raise the number to three hundred thousand. These representations were based on a habit of mind, and not on genuine conviction. He believed Grouchy's force to have been annihilated, and though he paused at Laon as if to reorganize an army, he went through the form of consulting such officers as he could collect, and then, under their advice, pressed on to Paris. The officers urged that the army and the majority of the people were loyal, but that the aristocracy, the royalists, and the liberal deputies were utterly untrustworthy. "My real place is here," was the response. "I shall go to Paris, but you drive me to a foolish course." This was the voice of reason, but he obeyed the behest of inclination. Yet he halted at the threshold, and, entering the city on the night of June twenty-first, made no public announcement of his presence. On the contrary, he almost slunk into the silent halls of the Élysée, where a sleepy attendant or two received the unexpected guest without realizing what had happened. He must have felt that the moral effect of Waterloo had been his undoing; unlike any other of his defeats, it had not ruined him as general alone, nor as ruler alone: his prestige as both monarch and soldier was gone.
The news of Ligny had been received in the city with jubilations; at the instant of Napoleon's arrival the truth about Mont St. Jean was passing all too swiftly on the thousand tongues of rumor from quarter to quarter throughout the town, creating consternation everywhere. Early in the morning, Davout, fully aware of public sentiment, and true to his instincts, advised the shrinking Emperor to prorogue the chambers, and throw himself on the army; Carnot believed the public safety required a dictatorship, and urged it; Lucien was strongly of the same opinion. But the old Napoleon was no more; vacillating almost as if in partial catalepsy, murmuring empty phrases in quick, indistinct utterance, he refused to decide. Members of the council began to gain admittance, and, waxing bolder as Napoleon grew more silent, the word "abdication" was soon on every tongue. At last a decision was taken, and such a one! Lucien was sent to parley with the chambers, and Fouché was summoned. The latter, with insidious eloquence, argued that in the legislature alone could Napoleon find a support to his throne. The talk was reported, as if by magic, in the assembly halls, and Lafayette, supported by Constant, put through a motion that any attempt to dissolve the chambers would be considered treason. Lucien pleaded in vain for a commission to treat with the invaders in his brother's name; the deputies appointed a committee of public safety, and adjourned.