For France the whole plain is a graveyard. Thanks to the many thousand cartloads of earth which have made it into a pyramid 150 feet high and half a mile in circumference, the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by a gentle incline; but on the day of the battle the approaches were much steeper, particularly on the side of La-Haie-Sainte – so much so that the English guns could not see the farm in the depths of the valley, the centre of the struggle. Moreover the heavy rainfall had ploughed gulleys in the steep slopes, adding mud to the difficulties of the ascent.

Along the crest of the ridge there ran a sort of trench, invisible to the observer at a distance, and this must be described.

Braine-l’Alleud and Ohain are Belgian villages about four miles apart, hidden from one another by the contours of the land and linked by a road that runs like a furrow through the rolling countryside, sometimes following the contours and sometimes buried between hills, so that at many points it is a ravine. In 1815, as now, the road crosses the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between the Genappe and Nivelles highways; but whereas it is now level with the surrounding land, it was then a sunken lane. Its two embankments have been removed to make the funeral mound. The greater part of the road was and still is embanked, sometimes to a depth of a dozen feet, with steep, overhanging sides which were liable to crumble under heavy rain. There were accidents. The road was so narrow at the approach to Braine-l’Alleud that in February 1637 a certain Monsieur Bernard Debrye, a Brussels merchant, was run over and killed by a farm-cart – a fact recorded by the stone cross standing near the cemetery. And it was so deep on the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau that a peasant named Mathieu Nicaise was killed by a landslide in 1783; but the cross commemorating this event vanished in the clearance, and nothing of it now remains but its overturned pedestal on the grassy slope to the left of the lane running from La-Haie-Sainte to the Mont-Saint-Jean farm.

On the day of the battle nothing gave warning of this sunken lane flanking the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean; a deep trench running along the escarpment, a hidden furrow in the earth, invisible and therefore terrible.

The Emperor questions the guide, Lacoste

So on that morning of Waterloo Napoleon was well content, and with reason. His plan of battle, as we have said, was admirable.

Nor did the many vicissitudes of the day dismay him: the holding of Hougomont, the stubborn resistance of La-Haie-Sainte; the death of Bauduin and wounding of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye’s brigade was broken; the fatal negligence of Guilleminot, who had neither grenades nor powder bags; the bogging down of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted guns overturned by Uxbridge in a sunken lane; the relative ineffectiveness of explosives falling in the sodden earth of the English lines, so that grape-shot wasted itself in a shower of mud; Piré’s failure at Braine-l’Alleud and the virtual wiping out of fifteen cavalry squadrons; the English right little shaken, and the left weakly assailed; Ney’s strange blunder in advancing the four divisions of the First Corps en masse instead of in echelon, twenty-seven lines of two hundred men exposed to cannon-shot and rapid musket-fire, so that their attack was thrown into disorder, the supporting batteries on the flank uncovered, Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte threatened and Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Herculean product of the École Polytechnique, wounded at the moment when he was breaking down the gate of La-Haie-Sainte with an axe under the plunging fire from the English fortifications barring the turn in the road from Genappe to Brussels; Marcoquet’s division caught between infantry and cavalry, mown down at point-blank range in a cornfield by Best and Pack, sabred by Ponsonby, and its battery of seven guns spiked; the Prince of Saxe-Weimar standing his ground against the Comte d’Erlon, Frischemont, and Smohain; the colours of the 105th and 45th line regiments captured; the Prussian Black Hussar captured by scouts of the flying column of chasseurs scouring the countryside between Wavre and Planchenoit, and the disturbing things this prisoner told them; Grouchy’s late arrival; the fifteen hundred men killed in less than an hour in the orchard of Hougomont, and the eighteen hundred killed at La-Haie-Sainte in an even shorter time – all these stormy events, passing in the fog of battle beneath Napoleon’s gaze, seemed scarcely to trouble him or cloud his aspect of imperial certainty. He was accustomed to see war as a whole, never casting up the columns of profit and loss. The figures mattered little to him provided they added up to the right total, which was victory. Early setbacks did not shake him, since he believed himself to be master of the conclusion. He could afford to wait; he was beyond question the equal of Destiny, to whom he seemed to say, ‘You would not dare.’

A creature of light and dark, Napoleon believed himself to be protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought he had, a connivance on his side, one may almost say a complicity in the ordering of events akin to the invulnerability of the antique gods. Yet, with Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind him, he might well have had his doubts about Waterloo – as though a mysterious frown had appeared in the depths of the sky.

But when Wellington recoiled, Napoleon was thrilled. He watched the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean being rapidly evacuated and the English battle-front disappear. It rallied but kept under cover. The Emperor rose in his stirrups with the light of victory in his eyes. He saw Wellington driven into the forest of Soignes and there destroyed, the final crushing of England by France; Crécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies revenged. The man of Marengo would exact payment for Agincourt.

Contemplating this fateful prospect, he swept the field of battle for the last time with his glass. His Guard, drawn up with grounded arms on the lower slope behind him, watched him with an almost religious awe. He was intently studying the details of the terrain: slopes and ridges, the odd clump of trees, the barley-field, the footpath, down to the last blade of grass. In particular he examined the barriers of tree-trunks erected by the English across the two highways – the one on the Genappe road overlooking La-Haie-Sainte and armed with two guns which were the only pieces of English artillery bearing on the deepest sector of the battlefield, and the one on the road to Nivelles, behind which gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chassé’s brigade. Close by the latter stood the old, white-washed Chapel of St Nicholas, on a bend in the lane running to Braine-l’Alleud. Napoleon bent down and put a question to the guide, Lacoste, who answered with a shake of his head – probably an act of deliberate treachery.

Then the Emperor straightened up in the saddle and for a moment sat pondering. Wellington had begun to withdraw: all that remained was to turn withdrawal into rout.

He turned abruptly and ordered a dispatch-rider to ride post-haste to Paris with the news that the battle was won.*

He was the genius who commands thunder, and he had his thunderbolt. He ordered the cuirassiers under Milhaud to take the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean.

The unexpected

There were three thousand five hundred of them, extending over a front of about a mile; twenty-six squadrons of big men on enormous horses. Behind them, in support, were Lefebvre-Desnouettes’s division, a picked company of gendarmes, and the contingents of the chasseurs and lancers of the Guard. They wore plumeless helmets and metal breastplates and carried cavalry muskets and long sabres.