‘It’s the English rear-guard getting ready to clear out,’ he said to Bertrand. ‘I shall capture the six thousand English who have just landed at Ostend.’ He was talking expansively, with the ardour he had shown when they disembarked in the Golfe Juan on 1 March, and pointing to a cheering peasant he exclaimed, ‘There you are, Bertrand – a reinforcement already!’ On this night of 17 June he mocked Wellington, saying, ‘That Englishman needs a lesson.’ The rain fell more heavily and there was a crash of thunder as he spoke.

At three-thirty that morning he lost one of his illusions. The officers sent out to reconnoitre reported that there was no movement in the enemy lines. Nothing was stirring, no camp-fires had been extinguished. Wellington’s army was asleep; a profound silence reigned on earth while the skies resounded. At four o’clock a peasant was brought in who had acted as guide to an English cavalry column, probably Vivian’s brigade, on its way to take up its position in the village of Ohain, on the extreme left. At five o’clock two Belgian deserters were brought in who said that the English army was awaiting battle. ‘So much the better!’ cried Napoleon. ‘I’d sooner bowl them over than drive them back.’

At daybreak he dismounted on to the mud of the grass verge at the turn of the road from Plancenoit. He sent to Rossomme farm for a kitchen table and chair, and there seated himself, with a truss of straw for a footstool and a map of the battlefield spread out in front of him, saying to Soult, ‘Joli échiquier’ – ‘a nice chess-board!’

Owing to the rain and the state of the roads the commissariat convoys had not arrived; the soldiers had had little sleep and were wet and hungry; but this did not deter Napoleon from exclaiming blithely to Ney, ‘Our chances are ninety in a hundred.’ Breakfast was served to the Emperor at eight o’clock and he invited a number of his generals to join him. Over breakfast they discussed the fact that two nights previously Wellington had attended the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels, and Soult, that rough warrior with the face of an archbishop, said, ‘The real ball will be held today.’ Napoleon laughed at Ney, who said, ‘Wellington won’t be such a fool as to wait for your majesty.’ This was the kind of talk he enjoyed. ‘He loved to tease,’ said Fleury de Chaboulon. ‘A lively humour was at the root of his nature,’ said Gourgand; and Benjamin Constant said, ‘He was full of jokes, more crude than witty.’ This aspect of the great man deserves to be stressed. It was he who called his grenadiers ‘grognards’ and pinched their ears or tweaked their moustaches – ‘He was always up to some game with us,’ one of them said. During the mysterious return from Elba to France, when the French brig-of-war Zephir closed with the brig Inconstant, in which Napoleon was concealed, and asked for news of him, Napoleon himself, wearing the bee-embroidered hat with a white-and-purple cockade which he had devised in Elba, snatched up the speaking-trumpet and shouted, laughing: ‘The Emperor is in excellent health.’ The man who can laugh in this fashion feels himself to be in harmony with events. Napoleon had several bursts of laughter during that Waterloo breakfast. When the meal was over he was silent for a quarter of an hour; then two generals seated themselves on a truss of straw with writing-pads on their knee and he dictated the order of battle.

At nine o’clock, when the French army moved off in five columns, divisions in double lines, artillery between the brigades, bands at the head filling the air with the roll of drums and the clamour of trumpets, a powerful, vast, and joyous sea of helmets, sabres, and bayonets extended to the horizon, the Emperor was so moved that he twice cried: ‘Magnificent! Magnificent!’

Incredible as it may seem, in the period between nine and ten-thirty the whole army took up its positions, being arrayed in six lines forming, in the Emperor’s phrase, ‘a pattern of six Vs’. In the profound lull preceding the storm, while he watched the deployment of the three batteries of twelve-centimetre guns detached from the three corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau with orders to open the attack by bombarding Mont-Saint-Jean at the intersection of the Nivelles and Genappe roads, the Emperor clapped Haxo on the shoulder, saying, ‘Two dozen very pretty girls, General.’

Confident of the outcome, he had a smile of encouragement for the company of sappers from the First Corps, detailed to dig themselves in on Mont-Saint-Jean directly the village was taken. Only one momentary shadow marred the serenity of his mood. Over to his left, in the place where there is today a vast graveyard, he saw the Scots Greys drawn up on their splendid horses, and the sight drew from him an expression of regret – ‘It’s a pity,’ he said.

Then he mounted his own horse and rode to a point a little in front of Rossomme. This narrow strip of grass to the right of the road from Genappe to Brussels was his second observation-post during the battle. (The third, which he went to at seven in the evening, was between La-Belle-Alliance and La-Haie-Sainte.) It is a terribly exposed place, a high, flat-topped mound which still exists, behind which the Imperial Guard was massed in a small depression in the plain. Bullets ricocheted up from the road surface, and as at Brienne the air above his head was filled with the whistle of grape-shot and musketry. The twisted remnants of shot and shell, rusted sabre-blades, and the like were later retrieved from almost the spot where his horse stood, and a few years ago a shell was dug up there with a damaged fuse and its explosive charge intact. It was here that the Emperor said to his guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, roped to the saddle of a hussar, who ducked at every salvo and tried to hide behind the horses, ‘Idiot! You ought to be ashamed. Do you want to be shot in the back?’ The writer of these lines, digging in the dusty earth of that hillock, himself found the neck of an exploded bomb eaten with the rust of forty-six years, and fragments of metal that broke like twigs in his hands.

The rolling countryside is no longer what it was on that June day when Napoleon and Wellington met. It has been disfigured for its own glorification, robbed of its natural contours to make a funeral monument, so that history, put out of countenance, can no longer recognize herself. Returning to Waterloo two years later, Wellington exclaimed: ‘They have changed my battlefield!’ Where the great pyramid of earth surmounted by a lion now stands there was a ridge with a negotiable slope on the side of the Nivelles road but what was almost an escarpment on the side of the Genappe road. Its height can be measured by the height of the two funeral mounds flanking the road from Genappe to Brussels, the one on the left the English memorial and that on the right the German. There is no French memorial.