Chapter 1 of Book 1 of Les Miserables Vol. 2 by Victor Hugo. Book 1. Waterloo. Chapter 1. What is met with on the way from Nivelle. Last year, 1861, on a beautiful May morning, a traveller, the person who is telling this story, was coming from Nivelle and directing his course towards La Houpe. He was on foot. He was pursuing a broad paved road, which undulated between two rows of trees, over the hills which succeed each other, raised the road and let it fall again, and produce something in the nature of enormous waves. He had passed L'Ilois and Bois Seigneur Isaac. In the west he perceived the slate-roofed tower of Brain-Laloud, which has the form of a reversed vase. He had just left behind a wood upon an eminence, and at the angle of the cross-road, by the side of a sort of moldy gibbet bearing the inscription, Ancient Barrier No. 4, a public-house bearing on its front this sign, At the Four Winds Au Quatre-Vent, Achebeau Private Café. A quarter of a league further on he arrived at the bottom of a little valley, where there is water which passes beneath an arch made through the embankment of the road. The clump of sparsely planted but very green trees, which fills the valley on one side of the road, is dispersed over the meadows on the other, and disappears gracefully, and as in order in the direction of Brain-Laloud. On the right, close to the road, was an inn, with a four-wheel cart at the door, a large bundle of hop-poles, a plough, a heap of dried brushwood near a flourishing hedge, lime smoking in a square hole, and a ladder suspended along an old penthouse with straw partitions. A young girl was weeding in a field, where a huge yellow poster, probably of some outside spectacle such as a parish festival, was fluttering in the wind. At one corner of the inn, beside a pool in which a flotilla of ducks was navigating, a badly paved path plunged into the bushes. The wayfarer struck into this. After traversing a hundred paces, skirting a wall of the fifteenth century, surmounted by a pointed gable, with bricks set in contrast, he found himself before a large door of arch stone, where they wrecked a linear impost, in the somber style of Louis XIV, flanked by two flat medallions. A severe façade rose above this door. A wall perpendicular to the façade almost touched the door, and flanked it with an abrupt right angle. In the meadow before the door lay three harrows, through which, in disorder, grew all the flowers of May. The door was closed. The two decrepit leaves which barred it were ornamented with an old rusty knocker. The sun was charming. The branches had that soft shivering of May, which seems to proceed rather from the nest than from the wind.  The wayfarer bent over and examined a rather large circular excavation, resembling the hollow of a sphere in the stone on the left, at the front of the pier of the door. At this moment the leaves of the door parted, and a peasant woman emerged. She saw the wayfarer and perceived what he was looking at. It was a French cannonball which made that, she said to him, and she added, that which you see there, higher up in the door, near a nail, is the hole of a big iron bullet as large as an egg. The bullet did not pierce the wood. What is the name of this place? inquired the wayfarer. Hugamon, said the peasant woman. The traveller straightened himself up. He walked on a few paces, and went off to look over the tops of the hedges. On the horizon through the trees he perceived a sort of little elevation, and on this elevation something which at that distance resembled a lion. He was on the battlefield of Waterloo. Chapter 2 of Book 1 of Les Miserables. Volume 2 by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Les Miserables, Volume 2 by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabelle Florence Hapgood. Book 1, Waterloo. Chapter 2, Hugamon. Hugamon. This was a funerial spot, the beginning of the obstacle, the first resistance, which that great woodcutter of Europe, called Napoleon, encountered at Waterloo, the first knot under the blows of his axe. It was a chateau. It is no longer anything but a farm. For the antiquary, Hugamon, is Hugo Mons. This manor was built by Hugo, sider of Somerel, the same who endowed the sixth chaplaincy of the Abbey of Villiers. The traveler pushed open the door, elbowed an ancient collage under the porch, and entered the courtyard. The first thing which struck him in this paddock was a door of the 16th century, which here simulates an arcade, everything else having fallen prostrate around it. A monumental aspect often has its birth in ruin. In a wall near the arcade opens another arched door of the time of Henry IV, permitting a glimpse of the trees of an orchard. Beside this door, a manure hole, some pickaxes, some shovels, some carts, an old well, with its flagstone and its iron reel, a chicken jumping in a turkey spreading its tail, a chapel surmounted by a small bell tower, a blossoming parotry trained in a spell year against the wall of a chapel, behold the court, the conquest of which was one of Napoleon's dreams. This corner of earth, could he but have seized it, would perhaps have given him the world likewise. Chickens are scattering its dust abroad with their beaks. A growl is audible. It is a huge dog who shows his teeth and replaces the English. The English behaved admirably there, cooks four companies of guards there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army. Hugo Mont, viewed on the map as a geometrical plane, comprising buildings and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one angle of which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the southern door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only a gun's length away. Hugo Mont has two doors, the southern door, that of the chateau, and the northern door, belonging to the farm. Napoleon sent his brother Jérôme against Hugo Mont. The divisions of Foy, Guy Aminot, and Bachelot hurled themselves against it. Nearly the entire core of rail was employed against it, and miscarried.  Balouine's brigade was not strong enough to force Hugo Mont in the north, and the brigade of Soyer could not do more than affect the beginning of a breach on the south, but without taking it. The farm buildings bordered the courtyard on the south. A bit of the north door, broken by the French, hang suspended to the wall. It consists of four planks nailed to two crossbeams on which the scars of the attack are visible. The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall, sans half open at the bottom of the paddock. It is cut squarely in the wall, built of stone below, of brick above, which closes in the courtyard on the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in all farms, with the two large leaves made of rustic planks, beyond by the meadows. The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long time, all sorts of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the doorposts. It was there that Balouine was killed. The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard. Its horror is visible there. The confusion of the fray was petrified there. It lives, and it dies there. It was only yesterday. The walls are in the death agony. The stones fall. The breeches cry aloud. The holes are wounds. The drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee. This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is today. Buildings which have since been pulled down then formed radands and angles. The English barricaded themselves there. The French made their way in, could not stand their ground. Beside the chapel, one wing of the chateau, the only ruin now remaining of the manner of Hugomont, rises in a crumbling state. Disemboweled, one might say. The chateau served for a dungeon, the chapel for a blockhouse. There men exterminated each other. The French fired on from every point. From behind the walls, from the summits of the garrets, from the depths of the cellars, through all the casements, through all the airholes, through every crack in the stones.  The reply to the grape shot was a conflagration. In the ruined wing, through windows garnished with bars of iron, the dismantled chambers of the main building of brick are visible. The English guards were an ambush in these rooms. The spiral of the staircase, cracked from the ground floor to the very roof, appears like the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two stories. The English, besieged on the staircase, and massed on its upper steps, had cut off the lower steps. These consisted of large slabs on blue stone, which form a heap among the nettles. Half a score of steps still cling to the wall. On the first is cut the figure of a trident. These inaccessible steps are solid in their niches. All the rest resembles a jaw, which has been denuded of its teeth. There are two old trees there, one is dead. The other is wounded at its base, and is clothed with verder in April. Since 1815, it has taken to growing through the staircase. A massacre took place in the chapel. The interior, which has recovered its calm, is singular. The mass has not been said there since the carnage. Nevertheless, the altar has been left there. An altar of unpolished wood placed against the background of rough hewn stone. Four whitewashed walls adore opposite the altar, two small arched windows. A massacre took place in the chapel. The interior, which has recovered its calm, is singular. The mass has not been said there since the carnage. Nevertheless, the altar has been left there. An altar of unpolished wood placed against the background of rough hewn stone. Four whitewashed walls adore opposite the altar, two smaller to windows. Over the door are large wooden crucifix. Below the crucifix, a square air hole stocked up with a bundle of hay. On the ground in one corner, an old window frame with the glass all broken to pieces, such as the chapel. Near the altar, there is nailed up a wooden statue of Saint Anne, for the 15th century. The head of the infant Jesus has been carried off by a large ball. The French were masters of the chapel for a moment, and were then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames filled this building. It was a perfect furnace. The door was burned. The floor was burned. The wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen. Then it stopped, a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of the neighborhood. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was less fortunate than the Christ. The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of this Christ, this name is to be read, Henkinez. Then these others, Conde de Río Mayor Marquez and Marquez de Almagro Habana. There are French names with exclamation points, a sign of wrath. The wall was freshly whitewashed in 1849. The nations insulted each other there. It was at the door of this chapel that the corpse was picked up, which held an axe in its hand. This corpse was sublutinent legros. On emerging from the chapel, a well is visible on the left. There are two in this courtyard. One inquires, why is there no bucket and pulley to this? It is because water is no longer drawn there. Why is water not drawn there?  The last person who drew water from the well was named Guillaume Van Kielsen. He was a peasant who lived at Hugo Monde and was a gardener there. On the 18th of June, 1815, his family fled and concealed themselves in the woods. The forests surrounding the Abbey of Villiers sheltered these unfortunate people who had been scattered abroad for many days and nights. There are at this day certain traces recognizable, such as old bowls of burned trees, which mark the site of these poor Bivouacs trembling in the depths of the thickets. Guillaume Van Kielsen remained at Hugo Monde to guard the chateau and concealed himself in the cellar. The English discovered him there. They tore him from his hiding place and the combatants forced this frightened man to serve them by administering blows with the flats of their swords. They were thirsty. This Guillaume brought them water. It was from this well that he drew. Many drank there their last draft. This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die itself. After the engagement they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death has a fashion of harassing victory and she causes the pest to follow glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep and it was turned into a sepulcher. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into it. Too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the intermittent feeble voices were heard calling from the well. This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls part stone, part brick and simulating a small square tower and folded like the leaves of a screen surrounded on all sides. The fourth side is open. It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom has a sort of shapeless loophole. Possibly the hole made by a shell. This little tower had a platform of which only the beams remain. The iron supports of the well on the right form a cross. On leaning over the eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a heaped up mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is concealed in a growth of nettles. This wall has not in the front of it that large glue slab which forms the table for all walls in Belgium. The slab here has been replaced by a cross beam against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of knotty and petrovite wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer either pail, chain or pulley but there is still the stone basin which served the overflow. The rainwater collects there and from time to time a bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink and then flies away. One house in this ruin the farmhouse is still inhabited. The door of this house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door beside a pretty gothic lock plate there is an iron handle with trefoils placed slanting. At the moment when the Hanoverian Lieutenant Wilda grasped this handle in order to take refuge in the farm a French sapper hewed off his hand with an axe. The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume von Kilsen, the old gardener, dead long since. A woman with gray hair said to us, I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older, was terrified and wet. They carried us off to the woods. I went there in my mother's arms. We glued our ears to the earth to hear. I imitated the cannon and went boom, boom. A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard so we were told. The orchard is terrible. It is in three parts. One might almost say in three acts. The first part is a garden. The second is an orchard. The third is a wood. These three parts have a common enclosure. On the side of the entrance the buildings of the chateau and the farm. On the left a hedge. On the right a wall. And at the end a wall. The wall on the right is a brick. The wall at the bottom is of stone. One enters the garden first. Its slopes downwards is planted with gooseberry bushes choked with a wild growth of vegetation and terminated by a monumental terrace of cut stone with ballastrade with a double curve. It was a seniorial garden in the first French style which preceded Lenoiter. Today it is ruins and briars. The pilasters are surmounted by globes which resemble cannon balls of stone. Forty-three ballasters can still be counted on their sockets. The rest lie prostrate in the grass. Almost all bear scratches of bullets. One broken ballaster was placed on the pediment like a fractured leg. It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six light infantry men of the first, having made their way thither and being unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears in their dens, accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined this ballastrade in the fire from above. The infantry men, replying from below, six against two hundred, intrepid and with no shelter saved the current bushes, took a quarter of an hour to die. One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden to the orchard, properly speaking. There, within the limits of those few square fathoms, 1500 men fell in less than an hour. The wall seems ready to renew the combat. 38 loopholes, pierced by the English at irregular heights, are there still. In front of the sixth are placed two English tombs of granite. There are loopholes only in the south wall, as the principal attack came from that quarter. The wall is hidden on the outside by a tall hedge. The French came up, thinking that they had to deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle and an ambuscade. With the English guards behind it, 38 loopholes firing at once, a shower of grapeshot and balls, and Soye's brigade was broken against it. Thus Waterloo began. Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders, the French scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand amid the trees. All this grass has been soaked in blood. A battalion of Nassau, 700 strong, was overwhelmed there. The outside of the wall, against which Kalerman's two batteries were trained, is gnawed by grapeshot. This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May. It has its butter cups in its daisies. The grass is tall there. The cart horses browse there. Cords of hair, on which linen is drying, traverse the spaces between the trees and force the passerby to bend his head. One walks over this uncultivated land, and one's foot dives into moleholes. In the middle of the grass, one observes an uprooted tree-bowl, which lies there all verdant. A major black man leaned against it to die. Beneath a great tree in the neighborhood fell the German General du Pla, descended from a French family which fled on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. An aged and falling apple tree leans far over to one side, its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and clay alone. Nearly all the apple trees are falling with age. There is not one which has not had its bullet or its bisquian. The skeletons of dead trees abound in this orchard. Crows fly through the branches, and at the end of it is a wood full of violets. Baluine, kill. Foy, wounded. Conflagration, massacre, carnage. A rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled in a fury, a well crowned with corpses. The regiment of Nassau and the regiment of Brunswick destroyed, du Pla killed, black men killed. The English guards mutilated twenty French battalions, besides the forty from rail's corps, decimated. Three thousand men in that hovel of Hugo Mont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned with their throats cut, and all this, so that a peasant can say today to the traveler. Montsue, give me three francs, and if you like, I will explain to you the affair of water. Chapter 3 The Eighteenth of June, 1815 Let us turn back, that is, one of the storyteller's rights, and put ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took place. If it had not rained in the night between the seventeenth and the eighteenth of June, 1815, the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon. All that Providence required in order to make Waterloo the end of Austerlitz was a little more rain, and a cloud traversing the sky out of season sufficed to make a world crumble. The battle of Waterloo could not be begun until half past eleven o'clock, and that gave Bluthier time to come up. Why? Because the ground was wet. The artillery had to wait until it became a little firmer before they could manoeuvre. Napoleon was an artillery officer and felt the effects of this. The foundation of this wonderful captain was the man who, in the report to the Directory on Abu Qir, said, such a one of our balls killed six men. All his plans of battle were arranged for projectiles. The key to his victory was to make the artillery converge on one point. He treated the strategy of the hostile general like a citadel and made a breach in it. He overwhelmed the weak point with grapeshot. He joined and dissolved battles with cannon. There was something of the sharpshooter in his genius. To beat in squares, to pulverise regiments, to break lines, to crush and disperse masses, for him everything lay in this, to strike, strike, strike incessantly, and he entrusted this task to the cannonball. A redoubtable method, and one which, united with genius, rendered this gloomy athlete of the pugilism of war invincible for the space of fifteen years. On the eighteenth of June, 1815, he relied all the more on his artillery, because he had numbers on his side. Wellington had only one hundred and fifty-nine mouths of fire, Napoleon had two hundred and forty. Suppose the soil dry, and the artillery capable of moving, the action would have begun at six o'clock in the morning. The battle would have been won and ended at two o'clock, three hours before the change of fortune in favour of the Prussians. What amount of blame attaches to Napoleon for the loss of this battle? Is the shipwreck due to the pilot? Was it the evident physical decline of Napoleon that complicated this epoch by an inward diminution of force?  Did the veteran make himself disastrously felt in the leader? In a word, was this genius, as many historians of note of thought, suffering from an eclipse? Did he go into a frenzy in order to disguise his weakened powers from himself? Did he begin to waver under the delusion of a breath of adventure? Had he become, a grave matter in a general, unconscious of peril? Is there an age in this class of material great men who may be called the giants of action when genius grows short-sighted? Old age has no hold on the geniuses of the ideal, for the Dante's and the Michelangelo's to grow old is to grow in greatness. Is it to grow less for the Hannibal's and the Bonaparte's? Had Napoleon lost the direct sense of victory? Had he reached the point where he could no longer recognize the reef, could no longer divine the snare, no longer discern the crumbling brink of abysses? Had he lost his power of senting out catastrophes? He who had in former days known all the roads to triumph, and who, from the summit of his chariot of lightning, pointed them out with a sovereign finger? Had he now reached that state of sinister amazement, when he could lead his tumultuous legions harnessed to it to the precipice? Was he seized at the age of forty-six with a supreme madness? Was that titanic charioteer of destiny no longer anything more than an immense dare-devil? We do not think so. His plan of battle was, by the confession of all, a masterpiece, to go straight to the centre of the Allies' line, to make a breach in the enemy, to cut them in two, to drive the British half back on Hale and the Prussian half on Tongue, to make two shattered fragments of Wellington and Bluthier, to carry Mont-Saint-Jean, to seize Brussels, to hurl the German into the Rhine and the Englishmen into the sea. All this was contained in that battle according to Napoleon. Afterwards people would see. Of course we do not here pretend to furnish a history of the Battle of Waterloo. One of the scenes of the foundation of the story which we are relating is connected with this battle, but this history is not our subject. This history, moreover, has been finished, and finished in a masterly manner, from one point of view by Napoleon, and from another point of view by a whole pliade of historians. As for us, we leave the historians at loggerheads. We are but a distant witness, a passer-by on the plain, a seeker bending over that soil all made of human flesh, taking appearances for realities, perchance. We have no right to oppose in the name of science a collection of facts which contain illusions, no doubt. We possess neither military practice nor strategic ability which authorize a system. In our opinion a chain of accidents dominated the two leaders at Waterloo. And when it becomes a question of destiny, that mysterious culprit, we judge like that ingenious judge, the populace. End of Book 1 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of Book 1 of Les Misérables Vol. 2 by Victor Hugo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding. Les Misérables Vol. 2 by Victor Hugo Translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood Book 1st Waterloo Chapter 4 A Those persons who wish to gain a clear idea of the battle of Waterloo have only to place mentally on the ground a capital A. The left limb of the A is the road to Nivelle, the right limb is the road to Gena, the tie of the A is the hollow road to Hoare from Prenlaleux. The top of the A is Mont-Saint-Jean, where Wellington is. The lower left tip is Ougouement, where Ray is stationed with Jérôme Bonaparte. The right tip is the belle alliance where Napoleon was. At the centre of this cord is the precise point where the final word of the battle was pronounced. It was there that the lion has been placed, the involuntary symbol of the supreme heroism of the Imperial Guard. The triangle included in the top of the A, between the two limbs and the tie, is the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. The dispute over this plateau constituted the whole battle. The wings of the two armies extended to the right and left of the two roads to Gena and Nivelle, Derlon facing Picton, Ray facing Hill. Behind the tip of the A, behind the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, is the forest of Soigne. As to the plane itself, let the reader picture to himself a vast undulating sweep of ground. Each rise commands the next rise, and all the undulations mount towards Mont-Saint-Jean and their end in the forest. Two hostile troops on a field of battle are two wrestlers. It is a question of seizing the opponent round the waist. The one seeks to trip up the other. They clutch at everything. A bush is a point of support. An angle of the wall offers them a rest to the shoulder. For the lack of a hovel under whose cover they can draw up, a regiment yields its ground. An unevenness in the ground, a chance turn in the landscape, a cross-path encountered at the right moment, a grove, a ravine, can stay the heel of that colossus which is called an army, and prevent its retreat. He who quits the field is beaten, hence the necessity devolving on the responsible leader of examining the most insignificant clump of trees and of studying deeply the slightest relief in the ground. The two generals had attentively studied the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean, now called the plain of Waterloo. In the preceding year Wellington, with the sagacity of foresight, had examined it as the possible seat of a great battle. Upon this spot and for this duel on the 18th of June, Wellington had the good post, Napoleon the bad post. The English army was stationed above, the French army below. It is almost too perfluous here to sketch the appearance of a Napoleon on horseback, glass in hand, upon the heights of Rossum at Daybreak on June the 18th, 1815. All the world has seen him before we can show him. That calm profile under the little three-cornered hat of the school of Prienne, that green uniform, the white reveres concealing the star of the Legion of Honor. His great coat hiding his epaulets, the corner of red ribbon peeping from beneath his vest, his leather trousers, the white horse with the saddlecloth of purple velvet bearing on the corner's crowned ends and eagles. Hessean boots over silk stockings, silver spurs, the sword of Marengo. That whole figure of the last of the Caesars is present to all imaginations, saluted with acclamations by some, severely regarded by others. That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light. This arose from a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and which always veils the truth for a longer or shorter time. But today history and daylight have arrived. That light called history is pitiless. It possesses this peculiar and divine quality that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had hitherto beheld rays. From the same man it constructs two different phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader. Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations. Babylon violated Lessons Alexander. Rome enchained Lessons Caesar. Jerusalem murdered Lessons Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his form. Everyone is acquainted with the first phase of this battle. A beginning which was troubled, uncertain, hesitating, menacing to both armies, but still more so for the English than for the French. It had rained all night. The earth had been cut up by the downpour. The water had accumulated here and there in the hollows of the plain as if in casks. At some points the gear of the artillery carriages was buried up to the axels. The circangles of the horses were dripping with liquid mud. If the wheat and rye trampled down by this cohort of transports on the land had not filled in the ruts and strewn a litter beneath the wheels, all movement, particularly in the valleys in the direction of the papalod, would have been impossible. The affair began late. Napoleon, as we have already explained, was in the habit of keeping all his artillery well in hand. Like a pistol, aiming it now at one point, now at another of the battle, and it had been his wish to wait until all the horse batteries could move and gallop freely. In order to do that, it was necessary that the sun should come out and dry the soil. But the sun did not make it its appearance. It was no longer the rendezvous of Australis. When the first cannon was fired, the English general Colville looked at his watch and noted that it was thirty-five minutes past eleven. The action was begun furiously, with more fury perhaps than the Emperor would have wished, by the left wing of the French resting on Hugamon. At the same time, Napoleon attacked the center by hurling Cuyo's brigade on Lahaissante, and Ney pushed forward the right wing of the French against the left wing of the English, which rested on Papalod. The attack on Hugamon was something of a faint. The plan was to draw Wellington thither and to make him swerve to the left. This plan would have succeeded, if the four companies of the English guards and the brave Belgians of Propanches division had not held the position solidly. And Wellington, instead of massing his troops there, could confine himself to dispatching thither as reinforcements, only four more companies of guards, and one battalion from Brunswick. The attack of the right wing of the French on Papalod was calculated, in fact, to overthrow the English left, to cut off the road to Brussels, to bar the passage against possible Prussians, to force Mont-Saint-Jean, to turn Wellington back on Hugamon, thence on Brin-la-Lue, thence on Hale, nothing easier. With the exception of a few incidents, this attack succeeded. Papalod was taken, Lahaissante was carried. A detail to be noted. There was an English infantry, particularly in Kemptz Brigade, a great many raw recruits. These young soldiers were valiant in the presence of our redoubtable infantry. Their inexperience extricated them intrepidly from the dilemma. They performed particularly excellent services skirmishers. The soldier skirmisher, left somewhat to himself, becomes, so to speak, his own general. These recruits displayed some of the French ingenuity and fury. This novice of an infantry had dashed. This displeased Wellington. After the taking of Lahaissante, the battle wavered. There is in this day an obscure interval, from midday to four o'clock. The middle portion of this battle is almost indistinct, and participates in the somberness of the hand-to-hand conflict. Twilight reigns over it. We perceive vast fluctuations in that fog. A dizzy mirage, a paraphernalia of war almost unknown today. Pendant callbacks, floating sabertaches, cross-spells, cartridge boxes for grenades, hooser dolmens, red boots with a thousand wrinkles, heavy shakers garlanded with torsades. The almost black infantry of Brunswick mingled with the scarlet infantry of England, the English soldiers with great white circular pads on the slopes of their shoulders for epaulets, the Hanoverian light horse with their oblong cask of leather, with brass hands and red horsetails the scotch with their bare knees and plaids, the great white gators of our grenadiers' pictures, not strategic lines, what Salvatore Rosa requires, not what is suited to the needs of Gryboval. A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces, to some extent, the particular features which please him amid this palmel. Whatever may be the combinations of the generals, the shock of armed masses, as an incalculable ebb, during the action the plans of the two leaders enter into each other and become mutually thrown out of shape. Such a point of the field of battle devours more combatants than such another, just as more or less spongy soils soak up more or less quickly the water which has poured on them. It becomes necessary to pour out more soldiers than one would like. A series of expenditures which are foreseen, the line of battle waves and undulates like a thread, the trails of blood gush illogically, the fronts of the army's waiver. The regiments form capes and gulfs as they enter and withdraw. All these reefs are continually moving in front of each other where the infantry stood, the artillery arrives, the cavalry rushes in where the artillery was, the battalions are like smoke, there was something there, seek it, it has disappeared, the open spots change, the somber folds advance and retreat, a sort of wind from the sepulchre pushes forward, hurls back, distends and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a fray? An oscillation. The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute, not a day. In order to depict a battle there is required one of those powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt is better than Van der Mulen. Van der Mulen exacted noon lies at three o'clock. Geometry is deceptive. The hurricane alone is trustworthy. That is what confers on Folard the right to contradict polybias. Let us add, there is a certain instant when the battle degenerates into a combat, becomes specialized and disperses into innumerable detailed feats, which to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, belong rather to the biography of the regiments than to the history of the army. The historian has in this case the evident right to sum up the whole. He cannot do more than seize the principal outlines of the struggle and it is not given to any one narrator, however conscientious he may be, to fix absolutely the form of that horrible cloud which is called about. This which is true of all great armed encounters is particularly applicable to Waterloo. Nevertheless at a certain moment in the afternoon the battle came to a point. RECORDING BY GARRETT TULI Towards four o'clock the condition of the English army was serious. The Prince of Orange was in command of the centre. He lived the right wing picked in of the left wing. The Prince of Orange, desperate and intrepid, shouted to the Hollando Belgians, Nassau, Brunswick, never retreat. Hill, having been weakened, had come up to the support of Wellington. Picton was dead. At the very moment when the English had captured from the French the flag of the hundred and fifth of the line, the French had killed the English general Picton with a bullet through the head. The battle had for Wellington two bases of action, Ougman and La Aïe Saint. Ougman still held out but was on fire. La Aïe Saint was taken. Of the German battalion which defended it, only forty-two men survived, all of the officers except five were either dead or captured. Three thousand combatants had been massacred in that barn. A sergeant of the English guards, the foremost boxer in England, reputed invulnerable by his companions, had been killed there by a little French drummer-boy. Barring had been dislodged, Alton put to the sword. Many flags had been lost, one from Alton's division and one from the battalion of Lunenburg, carried by a Prince of the House of Dupont. The scotch-graze no longer existed. Ponsonby's great dragoons had been hacked to pieces. That valiant cavalry had bent beneath the lances of Broe and beneath the curiasers of Traverse. Out of twelve hundred horses, six hundred remained. Out of three lieutenant colonels, two lay on the earth. Hamilton, wounded, matter slain, Ponsonby had fallen riddled by seven lance thrusts. Gordon was dead. Marsh was dead. Two divisions, the fifth and sixth, had been annihilated. Ougment injured, and the ice-saint taken, there now existed but one rallying point, the center. That point still held firm. Wellington reinforced it. He summoned Thither Hill, who was at Meirprin. He summoned Chasse, who was at Prin-Alud. The center of the English army, rather concave, very dense and very compact, was strongly posted. It occupied the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, having behind it the village, and in front of it the slope, which was taller, really steep, then. It rested on that stout stone dwelling which at that time belonged to the domain of Nivelle, in which marks the intersection of the roads, a pile of the sixteenth century, and so robust that the cannonballs rebounded from it without injuring it. All about the plateau, the English had cut the hedges here and there, made embouchures in the Hawthorne trees, thrust the throat of a cannon between two branches, embattled the shrubs. There, artillery was ambushed in the brushwood. This punic labor, incontestably authorized by war, which permits traps, was done so well that Haxo, who had been dispatched by the emperor at nine o'clock in the morning to reckon-or-ter the enemy's batteries, had discovered nothing of it, and had returned and reported to Napoleon that there were no obstacles except the two barricades which barred the road to Nivelle in Gnap. It was at the season when the grain is tall, on the edge of the plateau, a battalion of chemts per grade, the ninety-fifth armed with carabines, was concealed in the tall wheat. Thus assured and buttressed, the center of the Anglo-Dutch army was well posted. The peril of this position lay in the forest of Saint, then adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds of Grandenelle and Bois-Fort. An army could not retreat tither without dissolving. The regiments would have broken up immediately there. The artillery would have been lost amongst the morasses. The retreat, according to many a man versed in the art, though it is disputed by others, would have been a disorganized flight. To this center, Wellington added one of Schaas's brigades taken from the right wing, and one of Winnick's brigades taken from the left wing, plus Clinton's division. To his English, through the regiments of Halkett, to the brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave as reinforcements and aides the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau's contingent, Kielman-Segh's Hendoverians, Ampeda's Germans. This placed twenty-six battalions under his hand. The right wing, as Charis says, was thrown back on the center. An enormous battery was masked by sacks of earth that the spot where there now stands what is called the Museum of Waterloo. Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground, Somerset's Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong. It was the remaining half of the justly celebrated English cavalry. Ponson be destroyed, Somerset remained. The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a readout, was ranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with a coating of bags of sand and a large slope of earth. This work was not finished. There had been no time to make a palisade for it. Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there remained the whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance of the old mill of Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence beneath an elm, which an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal purchased later on for two hundred francs, cut down and carried off. Wellington was coldly heroic. The bullets rained about him. His aide to Camp Gordon fell at his side, Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst said to him, My Lord, what are your orders in case you are killed? To do like me, replied Wellington. To Clinton, he said, laconically, to hold this spot to the last man. The day was evidently turning out ill. Wellington shouted to his old companions of Talavera, of Vittoria, of Salamanca, boys, can retreat be thought of? Think of old England. Towards four o'clock the English line drew back. Suddenly nothing was visible on the crest of the plateau except the artillery and the sharpshooters. The rest had disappeared. The regiments, dislodged by the shells and the French bullets, retreated into the bottom, now intersected by the back road of the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean. A retrograde movement took place, the English front hit itself, and Wellington drew back. The beginning of retreat, cried Napoleon. End of Book 1, Chapter 6, Recording by Garrett Tully. Chapter 7 of Book 1 of Lemiserable, Volume 2 by Victor Hugo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Marin Todorov. Lemiserable, Volume 2 by Victor Hugo Translated by Isabel Florence Hepgut. Book 1, Waterloo, Chapter 7, Napoleon in a Good Humour The Emperor, though ill and discriminated on the horseback by a local trouble, had never been in a better humour than on that day. His impenetrability had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of June, that profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly.  The greatest favourites of destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The supreme smile is God's alone. Riedet César, Pompeius Flevitt, said the legionnaires of the Fuminatrix Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is certain that Caesar laughed. While exploring on the horseback at one o'clock on the preceding night in Storm and Rain, in company with Bertrand, the communes in the neighbourhood of Rosson, satisfied at the sight of the long line of English campfires illuminating the whole horizon from Frichemont to Brain-la-leu, it had seemed to him that fate, the whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact to the appointment. He stopped his horse and remained for some time motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder. And this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterious saying, We are in a chord. Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer in a chord. He took not a moment for sleep. Every instant of that night was marked by a joy for him. He traversed the line of the principal outposts, halting hair and air to talk to the sentinels. At half past two, near the wood of Hogomont, he heard the thread of a column on the match. He thought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington. He said, it is the rearguard of the English getting under way for the purpose of decamping. I will take prisoners, the 6,000 English who have just arrived at Ostend. He conversed expansively. He regained the animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March, when he pointed out to the grand marshal, the enthusiastic peasant of Gulf Juan, and cried, Well Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already. On the night of the 17th to the 18th of June, he rallied Wellington. That little Englishman needs a lesson, said Napoleon. The rain redoubled in violence. The thunder rolled while the emperor was speaking. At half past three o'clock in the morning, he lost one illusion. Officers who had been dispatched to Reconauter announced to him that the enemy was not making any movement. Nothing was stirring, not a bivouac fire had been extinguished. The English army was asleep. The silence on earth was profound. The only noise was in the heavens. At four o'clock, a peasant was brought in to him by the scouts. This peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably Vivian's brigade, which was on its way to take up a position in the village of Orhan at the extreme left. At five o'clock, two Belgian deserters reported to him that they had just quitted their regiment and that the English army was ready for battle. So much the better, exclaimed Napoleon. I preferred to overthrow them rather than to drive them back. In the morning, he dismounted in the mud on the slope which forms an angle with the Place Noir road, had a kitchen table and a peasant's chair brought to him from the farm of Rosson, seated himself with a truss of straw for a carpet and spread out on the table the chart of the battlefield, saying to Saul, as he did so, a pretty checkerboard. In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports of provisions embedded in the soft roads had not been able to arrive by morning. The soldiers had had no sleep. They were wet and fasting. This did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney. We have 90 chances out of a hundred. At eight o'clock, the Emperor's breakfast was brought to him, invited many generals to it. During breakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to a ball two nights before, in Brussels at the Duchess of Richmond. And so, a rough man of war with a face of archbishop said, the ball takes place today. The Emperor gested with Ney who said, Wellington will not be so simple as to wait for your majesty. That was his way, however. He was fond of jesting, says Fleury de Chaboulon. A merry humor was at the foundation of his character, says Gorgor. He abounded in pleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty, says Benjamin Constant.  It was he who called his grenadiers his grumblers. He pinched their ears. He pulled their mustaches. The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on us, is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from the island of Elba to France on the 27th of February, on the open sea, the French Brigade of War, Le Zephir, having encountered the Brigue Lang Constant, on which Napoleon was concealed, and having asked the news of Napoleon from Lang Constant, the Emperor, who still wore in his hat the white and the marantine cocaine sewn with bees, which he had adopted at the Isle of Elba, laughingly ceased the speaking trumpet and answered for himself. The Emperor is well. A man who loves like that is on familiar terms with events. Napoleon indulged in many feats of this laughter during the breakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast, he meditated for a quarter of an hour. Then two generals seated themselves on the truss of straw, pen in hand, and their paper on their knees, and the Emperor dictated to them the order of battle. At nine o'clock, at the instant when the French army ranged in echelons and set in motion in five columns had deployed, the divisions in two lines, the artillery between the brigades, the music at their head, as they beat the march with rolls on the drums and the blasts of trumpets, mighty, vast, joyous, a sea of casks of sabers and of bayonets on the horizon, the Emperor was touched and twice exclaimed, magnificent, magnificent. Between nine o'clock and half past ten, the whole army, incredible as it may appear, had taken up its position and raged itself in six lines, forming, to repeat the Emperor's expression, the figure of six Vs. A few moments after the formation of the battle array, in the midst of that profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a storm which precedes engagement, the Emperor tapped hex on the shoulder as he beheld the three batteries of twelve pounders, detached by his order from the corpse of Erlon, Reyl and Labot, and destined to begin the action by taking Mont Saint-Jean, which was situated at the intersection of the Nivelle and the Jeannot roads and said to him, there are four and twenty handsome maids general. Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile as they passed before him the company of sabers of the first corps which he had appointed to the barricade Mont Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried. All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughty pity, perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large tomb, those admirable scotch-grace with their superb horses massing themselves, he said. It is a pity. Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond the Rosson, and selected for his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right of the road from Jeannot to Brussels, which was his second station during the battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o'clock in the evening between La Belle Alliance and La Haye Sainte, is formidable. It is a rather elevated knoll which still exists and behind which the guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around the knoll, the bulls rebounded from the pavements of the road up to Napoleon himself. As at Brie, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of the heavy artillery. Maudley cannon bulls, old sword blades and shapeless projectiles eaten up with rust were picked up at the spot where his horse feats stood. Scabra ruby jean. A few years ago, a shell of 60 pounds still charged and with its fuse broken off-level with the bomb was unearthed. It was at this last post that the emperor said to his guide Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached to the saddle of a hussar and who turned round at every discharge of canister and tried to hide behind Napoleon. Fool, it is shameful.  He who rides these lines has himself found in the frable soil of this knoll on turning over the sand the remains of the neck of a bomb disintegrated by the oxidization of 640 years and all fragments of iron which parted like elder twigs between the fingers. Everyone is aware that the various inclined indolations of the plains where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took place are no longer what they were on June 18th, 1815. By taking from this mournful field the were-widdle to make a monument to it, its real relief has been taken away and history disconcerted no longer finds her bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more two years later, exclaimed, they have altered my field of battle. Where the great pyramid of earth surmounted by the lion rises today there was a hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelle road but which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genève. The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height of the two knolls of the two great sepultures which enclose the road from Genève to Brussels. One the English tomb is on the left, the other the German tomb is on the right. There is no French tomb. The whole of that plain is a sepulture for France. Thanks to the thousands upon thousands of cartelots of earth employed in the hillock, 150 feet in height and half a mile in circumference, the plateau of Mont Saint-Jean is now accessible by an easy slope. On the day of battle, particularly on the side of La Haye Sainte, it was abrupt and difficult of approach. The slope there is so steep that the English canon could not see the farm situated in the bottom of the valley which was the center of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the rains had still further increased this cleavity. The mud complicated the problem of the ascent and the men not only slipped back but stuck fast in the mire. Along the crest of the plateau run a sort of trench whose presence it was impossible for the distant observer to divine. What was this trench? Let us explain. Rien la Lotte is a Belgian village. Our Hain is another. These villages, both of them concealed in curves of the landscape, are connected by a road about a league and a half in Lent which traverses the plain along its indulating level and often enters and buries itself in the hills like a furrow which makes a ravine of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the present day, this road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont Saint-Jean between the two highways from Genap and Niver. Only it is now on a level with the plain. It was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have been appropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and still is, a trench throughout the greater portion of its course. A hollow trench, sometimes a dozen feet in depth and whose banks, being too steep, crumbled away here and there, particularly in winter, under driving rains. Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at the brand la Lotte entrance that a passerby was crushed by a cart as is provided by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery and which gives the name of the dead, Montsior Bernard de Brier, merchant of Brussels, and the date of the accident, February 1637. It was so deep on table land on Mont Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicez, was crushed there in 1783 by a slide from the slope as is stated on another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process of clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible on the grassy slope to the left of the highway between the La Hayesse and the farm of Mont Saint-Jean. On the day of battle, this hollow road, whose existence was in no way indicated, bordering the crest of Mont Saint-Jean, a trench at the summit of the excarpement, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible, that is to say, terrible. End of Book 1 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 of Book 1 of Les Misérables volume 2 by Victor Hugo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding. Les Misérables volume 2 by Victor Hugo Translated by Isabelle Florence Hapgood Book 1st Waterloo Chapter 8 The Emperor Puts a Question to the Guide la Coste So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content. He was right. The plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen, really admirable. The battle once begun, its very various changes, the resistance of Ugumon, the tenacity of La Hayesse Sainte, the killing of Boudoir, the disabling of Foix, the unexpected war against which Soir's Brigade was shattered, Guillemineau's fatal heedlessness when he had neither patard nor powder sacks, the miring of the batteries, the fifteen unescorted pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge. The small effect of the bombs falling in the English lines and there embedding themselves in the rain-soaked soil and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud so that the canister was turned into a splash. The uselessness of Pierre's demonstration on Brien-la-leur, all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost exterminated. The right wing of the English badly alarmed, the left wing badly cut into. Né's strange mistake in massing instead of echeloning the four divisions of the first corps. Men delivered over to Grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage of two hundred. The frightful holes made in these masses by the cannon-balls, attacking columns disorganized, the side-batteries suddenly unmasked on their flank. Bourgeois, D'Angelo and Durrut compromised, Kio repulsed. Yet an envieux that Hercule graduated at the Polytechnique school wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an axe, the door of la Aire-Sainte, under the downright fire of the English barricade, which barred the angle of the road from Genap to Brussels. Marc Cognier's division, caught between the infantry and the cavalry, shot down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain, by best and pack, put to the sword by Ponsonby. His battery of seven pieces spiked. The prints of Saxe-Vaimard holding and guarding in spite of the Comte-d'Erlon, both Fréchement and Smoin, the flag of the Hundred and Fifth taken, the flag of the Forty-Fifth captured. That black Prussian Hazard stopped by runners of the flying column of 300 light cavalry on the scout between Noivre and Plancenois. The alarming things that had been said by prisoners. Crochets-de-lai, fifteen hundred men, killed in the orchard of Auge-Mont in less than an hour. Eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter time about La Aix-Sainte. All these stormy incidents, passing like the clouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon was accustomed to gaze steadily at war. He never added up the heart-rending details, cipher by cipher.  He was not alarmed if the beginnings did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor at the end. He knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question, and he treated destiny as his equal. He seemed to say to fate, Thou wilt not dare. Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought himself protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought that he had, a connivance—one might almost say a complicity—of events in his favour, which was equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity. Nevertheless, when one has Berezina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens. At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered. He suddenly beheld the table-land of Mont Saint-Jean cleared, and the van of the English army disappeared. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperor half rose in his stirrups, the lightning of victory flashed from his eyes. Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soigne, and destroyed—that was the definitive conquest of England by France. It was Crécy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramey, avenged. The man of Marengo was wiping out Agincourt. So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept his glass for the last time over all the points of the field of battle. His guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from below with a sort of religion. He pondered. He examined the slopes, noted the declivities, scrutinised the clumps of trees, the square of rye, the path. He seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness at the English barricades of the two highways. Two large abatis of trees, that on the road to Genap above Laës Saint, armed with two cannon, the only ones out of all the English artillery which commanded the extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelle, where gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chasse's brigade. Near this barricade, he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicolas, painted white, which stands at the angle of the cross-road, near Prenlaleur. He bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide made a negative sign with his head, which was probably perfidious. The Emperor straightened himself up and fell to thinking. Wellington had drawn back. All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing him. Napoleon, turning round abruptly, dispatched an express at full speed to Paris to announce that the battle was won. Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts. He had just found his clap of thunder. He gave orders to Milo's cuirassier to carry the table-land of Maul Saint-Jean. 1. Waterloo. Chapter 9. The Unexpected. There were 3,500 of them. They formed a front a quarter of a league in extent. They were giant men on colossal horses. There were six and twenty squadrons of them, and they had behind them to support them the Feverre-Deneuet's division. The 106-picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the guard, 1197 men, and the lancers of the guard of 880 lancers. They wore casks without horsetails and cuirasses of beaten iron, with horse pistols in their holsters, and long sabre swords. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at nine o'clock, with braing of trumpets and all the music playing, let us watch o'er the safety of the Empire, they had come in a solid column, with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their centre, and deployed in two ranks between the roads to Jeannap and Frichemont, and taken up their position for battle in that powerful second line, so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its extreme left Kellermann's cuirassiers, and on its extreme right Miloud's cuirassiers, had, so to speak, two wings of iron. Edicamp Bernard carried them the Emperor's orders. Ney drew his sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set in motion. Then a formidable spectacle was seen. All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended by a simultaneous movement, and like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering ram, which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle Alleyance. Plunged into the terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow reappeared on the other side of the valley, still compact and in close ranks, mounting at a full trot, through a storm of grapeshot which burst upon them, the terrible muddy slope of the table land of Monsangine. They ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable. In the intervals between the musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was audible. Being two divisions, there were two columns of them. Warfare's division held the right. Delort's division was on the left. It seemed as though two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest of the table land. It traversed the battle like a prodigy. Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great readout of Moskva by the heavy cavalry. Mirat was lacking there, but Ney was again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster, and had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabers, a stormy heating of the croppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult, over all the curasses like the scales on the hydra. These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told of the centaurs, the old hip-anthropes, those titans with human heads and equestrian chests, who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible, invulnerable, sublime, gods and beasts. Odd numerical coincidence. Twenty-six battalions rode to meet twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau in the shadow of the masked battery, the English infantry formed into thirteen squares, two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders, taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, weighted, calm, mute, motionless. They did not see the curaseers, and the curaseers did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse. They alternate and symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the jingling of the curases, the clang of the sabers, and a sort of grand and savage breathing. They're ensued a most terrible silence. Then, all at once, a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabers, appeared above the crest, and casks, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads with gray moustaches shouting, Vive l'Empereur! All this cavalry debauched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an earthquake. All at once a tragic incident. On the English left, on our right, the head of the column of curaseers reared up with a frightful clamor. On arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and cannon, the curaseers had just caught sight of a trench, a trench between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohane. It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning, directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms deep, between its double slopes. The second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed on the second, though horses reared and fell backward, landed on their haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming the riders, and there being no means of retreat, the whole column being no longer anything more than a projectile, the force which had been acquired to crush the English crushed the French. The inexorable ravine could only yield when filled. Horses and riders rolled their pell-mell, grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf. When this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois' brigade fell into that abyss. This began the loss of the battle. A local tradition which evidently exaggerates matters, says that 2,000 horses and 1,500 men were buried in the Hollow Road of Ohayne. This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which were flung into this ravine the day after the combat. Let us note in passing that it was Dubois' sorely tried brigade, which, an hour previously, making a charge to one side, had captured the flag of the Lunaburg battalion. Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milaud's curaseers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not been able to see that Hollow Road which did not even form a wrinkle on the surface of the plateau. Warned nevertheless and put on the alert by the little white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelle Highway. He had probably put a question as to the possibility of an obstacle to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered no. We might almost affirm that Napoleon's catastrophe originated in that sign of a peasant's head. Other fatalities were destined to arise. Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God. Bonaparte Victor at Waterloo? That does not come within the law of the 19th century. Another series of facts was in preparation in which there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had declared itself long before. It was time that this vast man should fall. The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head, the world mounting to the brain of one man, this would be mortal to civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements on which the regular gravitations of the moral as of the material world depend had complained. Smoking blood, overfilled cemeteries, mothers in tears, these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades to which the abyss lends an ear. Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been decided on. He embarrassed God. Waterloo is not a battle. It is a change of front on the part of the universe. End of Book 1, Chapter 9, Reading by Father Ziley of Detroit. Chapter 10 of Book 1 of Les Miserables, Volume 2 by Victor Hugo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kailu. Les Miserables, Volume 2 by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood. Book 1, Waterloo. Chapter 10, The Plateau of Monseigneur. Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning point blank on the crassies. The intrepid General DeLore made the military salute to the English battery. The whole of the flying artillery of the English had re-entered the squares at Gallup. The crassies had not had even the time for a halt. The disaster of the Hollow Road had decimated but not discouraged them. They belonged to that class of men who, when diminished in number, increased in courage. Wathier's column alone had suffered in the disaster. DeLore's column, which Ney had deflected to the left as though he had a resentment of an ambush, had arrived whole. The crassies hurled themselves on the English squares. At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth, pistols in fist, such was the attack. There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man until the soldier is changed into a statue and when all this flesh turns into granite, the English battalions desperately assaulted did not stir. Then it was terrible. All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenzied whirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained impassive. The first rank knelt and received the crassies on their bayonets. The second ranks shot them down. Behind the second rank the canoneers charged their guns. The front of the square parted, permitted the passage of an eruption of grapeshot, and closed again. The crassies replied by crushing them. Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks, leaped over the bayonets, and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these four living wells. The cannonballs plowed furrows in these crassies. The crassies made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared, ground to dust under the horses. The bayonets plunged into the bellies of these centaurs, hence a hideousness of wounds which has probably never been seen anywhere else. The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry, closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of grapeshot, they created explosions in their assailants midst. The form of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer battalions, they were craters. Those crassies were no longer cavalry, they were a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud, lava contended with lightning. The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in the air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. It was formed of the 75th Regiment of Highlanders. The bagpie player in the center dropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of the forests and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were being exterminated around him, and seated on a drum with his pibrock under his arm, played the Highland airs. These scotchmen died thinking of Ben Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argus. The sword of a crassie, which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to the song by killing the singer. The crassies, relatively few in number, and still further diminished by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English army against them. But they multiplied themselves so that each man of them was equal to ten. Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded. Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at that same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle. This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake. All at once the crassies, who had been via salence, found themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their back, before them two squares, behind them Somerset. Somerset meant fourteen hundred dragoons of the guard. On the right, Somerset had Dornburg with the German light horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian cariboneers. The crassies attacked on the flank and in front, before and in the rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What mattered it to them? They were whirlwind. Their valor was something indescribable. In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was still thundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could never have been wounded in the back. One of their crasses, pierced on the shoulder by a ball from a bisquian, is in the collection of the Waterloo Museum. For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen was needed. It was no longer a hand-to-hand conflict. It was a shadow, a fury, a dizzy transport of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In an instant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight hundred. Fuller their lieutenant colonel fell dead. Ney rushed up with the Lancers and Le Favre Denouet's light horse. The plateau of Mont Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. The crassies quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry, or to put it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other without releasing the other. The squares still held firm. There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half the crassies remained on the plateau. This conflict lasted two hours. The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, had they not been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the Hollow Road, the crassies would have overwhelmed the centre and decided the victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen Tellavera and Badajos. Wellington, three quarters vanquished, admired heroically. He said in an undertone, sublime. The crassies annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or spiked sixty pieces of ordinance, and captured from the English regiments six flags, which three crassies and three chasseurs of the guard bore to the emperor, in front of the farm of Labella Lions. Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle was like a duel between two raging wounded men, each of whom, still fighting and still resisting, is expending all his blood. Which of the two will be the first to fall? The conflict on the plateau continued. What had become of the crassies, no one could have told. One thing is certain, that on the day after the battle, a crassie and his horse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles of Mont Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nive, Genève, L'Houpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. This horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up the body still lives at Mont Saint-Jean. His name is De Hays. He was eighteen years old at the time. Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at hand. The crassies had not succeeded, since the centre was not broken through. As everyone was in possession of the plateau, no one held it, and in fact it remained to a great extent with the English. Wellington held the village and the culminating plain. Nay had only the crest and the slope. They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both sides. But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleeding of that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, demanded reinforcements. There are none, replied Wellington. He must let himself be killed. Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidence which paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Nay demanded infantry from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, Infantry, where does he expect me to get it? Does he think I can make it? Nevertheless, the English army was in the worst case of the two. The furious onsets of those great squadrons, with crisses of iron and breasts of steel, had ground the infantry to nothing. A few men clustered round a flag marked the post of regiment. Such-and-such a battalion was commanded only by a captain, or lieutenant. Alton's division, already so roughly handled at Lahaison, was almost destroyed. The intrepid Belgians of Van Clews's brigade screwed the Rye fields all along the Nivea road. Hardly anything was left of those Dutch grenadiers who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks in 1811, fought against Wellington, and who, in 1815, relative to the English standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers was considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on the following day, had his knee shattered. If, on the French side in that tussle of the Carassiers, DeLore, Lahartier, Colbert, Knopp, Travers, and Blankard were disabled, on the side of the English there was Alton wounded, Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Miren killed, Aumtata killed.  The second regiment of foot guards had lost five lieutenant colonels, four captains, and three ensigns. The first battalion of the 30th Infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200 soldiers. The 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18 officers killed, 450 soldiers killed. The Hanoverian Hussars of Cumberland, a whole regiment with Colonel Hackett's head, who was destined to be tried later on and cashiered, had turned bridal in the presence of the Frey, and had fled to the Forest of Soigne, sowing defeat all the way to Brussels. The transport's ammunition wagons, the baggage wagons, the wagons filled with wounded, on perceiving that the French were gaining ground and approaching the forest, rushed headlong thither. The Dutch, mowed down by the French cavalry, cried, Alarm, from Verre-Cosue to Grintendale, for a distance of nearly two leagues in the direction of Brussels, according to the testimony of eyewitnesses who are still alive. The roads were encumbered with fugitives. This panic was such that it attacked the Prince de Condat Mechwen and Louis XVIII at Ghent. With the exception of the feeble reserve echelon behind the ambulance established at the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean, and Vivien's and Vandalur's baguettes, which flanked the left wing, Wellington had no cavalry left. A number of batteries lay unhorsed. These facts are attested by Sevorne, and Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far as to say that the Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to 34,000 men. The iron duke remained calm, but his lips blanched. Vincent, the Austrian commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner, who were present at the battle in the English staff, thought the duke lost. At five o'clock Wellington drew out his watch, and he was heard to murmur these sinister words. It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets gleamed on the heights in the direction of Frichement. Here comes the change of face in this giant drama. Chapter 11 of Book 1 of Les Miserables, Volume 2 by Victor Hugo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding. Les Miserables, Volume 2 by Victor Hugo. Translated by Isabelle Florence Hapgood. Book 1. Waterloo. Chapter 11. A Bad Guide to Napoleon. A Good Guide to Bülow. The painful surprise of Napoleon is well known, called she hoped for, Blushia arriving, death instead of life. Fate has these turns. The throne of the world was expected, it was St Helena that was seen. If the little shepherd who served as guide to Bülow, Blushia's lieutenant, had advised him to debouch from the forest above Frichement instead of below Plancenois, the form of the nineteenth century might perhaps have been different. Napoleon would have won the Battle of Waterloo. By any other route than that below Plancenois, the Prussian army would have come out upon a ravine, impassable for artillery, and Bülow would not have arrived. Now the Prussian general Musling declares that one hour's delay and Blushia would not have found Wellington on his feet. The battle was lost. It was time that Bülow should arrive, as will be seen. He had moreover been very much delayed. He had bivouacked Dion-le-Mont and had set out at daybreak. But the roads were impassable, and his divisions stuck fast in the mire. The ruts were up to the hubs of the cannons. Moreover, he had been obliged to pass the deal on the narrow bridge of Wavre. The street leading to the bridge had been fired by the French, so the caissant and ammunition wagons could not pass between two rows of burning houses, and had been obliged to wait until the conflagration was extinguished. It was midday before Bülow's vanguard had been able to reach Chapelle Saint-Lombert. Had the action been begun two hours earlier, it would have been over at four o'clock, and Blushia would have fallen on the battle one by Napoleon. Such are these immense risks proportioned to an infinite which we cannot comprehend. The Emperor had been the first as early as midday to describe with his field-glass on the extreme horizon something which had attracted his attention. He had said, I see yonder a cloud which seems to me to be troops. Then he asked the Duke de Dalmasy, Soat, what do you see in the direction of Chapelle Saint-Lombert? The Marshal levelling his glass answered, Four or five thousand men sigh, evidently grouchy. But it remained motionless in the mist. All the glasses of the staff had studied the cloud pointed out by the Emperor. Some said it is trees. The truth is that the cloud did not move. The Emperor detached Dalmas's division of light cavalry to reconnoiter in that quarter. Boulot had not moved, in fact. His vanguard was very feeble and could accomplish nothing. He was obliged to wait for the body of the army corps, and he had received orders to concentrate his forces before entering into line. But at five o'clock, perceiving Wellington's peril, Bluthier ordered Boulot to attack, and uttered these remarkable words, We must give air to the English army. A little later, the divisions of Lostin, Hiller, Hacker, and Hressel deployed before Lobo's corps. The cavalry of Prince William of Prussia debouched from the forest of Paris. Plancenois was in flames, and the Prussian cannonballs began to rain even upon the ranks of the guard in reserve, behind Napoleon. End of Book 1, Chapter 11, Recording by Ruth Golding Chapter 12 of Book 1 of Les Misérables Volumes II by Victor Hugo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding Les Misérables Volumes II by Victor Hugo Translated by Isabelle Florence Hapgood Book 1, Waterloo, Chapter 12, The Guard Everyone knows the rest. The eruption of a third army, the battle broken to pieces, eighty-six mouths of fire thundering simultaneously, pierced the first coming up with Boulot, Teton's cavalry led by Blücher in person, the French-driven back, Marcognier swept from the plateau of Owen, du route dislodged from Papalot, Denselot and Chieu retreating, Lobo caught on the flank, a fresh battle precipitating itself on our dismantled regiments at nightfall. The whole English line resuming the offensive and thrust forward, the gigantic breach made in the French army, the English grape-shot and the Prussian grape-shot aiding each other, the extermination, disaster in front, disaster on the flank, the guard entering the line in the midst of this terrible crumbling of all things. Conscious that they were about to die, they shouted, History records nothing more touching than that agony bursting forth in acclamations. The sky had been overcast all day long. All of a sudden, at that very moment, it was eight o'clock in the evening, the clouds on the horizon parted, and allowed the grand and sinister glow of the setting sun to pass through a thwart the Elms on the Nivelle Road. They had seen it rise at Austerlitz. Each battalion of the guard was commanded by a general for this final catastrophe. Friant, Michel, Roguet, Arlé, Malet, Poré de Morvant were there. When the tall caps of the grenadiers of the guard, with their large plaques bearing the eagle, appeared symmetrical in line, tranquil in the midst of that combat, the enemy felt a respect for France. They thought they beheld twenty victories entering the field of battle with wings outspread, and those who were the conquerors believing themselves to be vanquished retreated, but Wellington shouted, Up guards and aim straight. The red regiment of English guards lying flat behind the hedges sprang up, a cloud of grapeshot riddled the tricoloured flag and whistle round our eagles. All hurled themselves forwards, and the final carnage began. In the darkness the imperial guard felt the army losing ground around it, and in the vast shock of the rout it heard the desperate flight which had taken the place of the vive l'empereur, and with flight behind it it continued to advance, more crushed, losing more men at every step that it took. There were none who hesitated, no timid men in its ranks. The soldier in that troop was as much of a hero as the general. Not a man was missing in that suicide. Nay bewildered, great with all the grandeur of accepted death, offered himself to all blows in that tempest. He had his fifth horse killed under him there.  But in vain he did not die. He was haggard and angry. At droid erlan he hurled this question, Are you not going to get yourself killed? In the midst of all that artillery engaged in crushing a handful of men he shouted, So there is nothing for me. Oh, I should like to have all these English bullets enter my bowels. Unhappy man, thou worked reserved for French bullets. Chapter 13 of Book 1 of Les Miserables, Volume 2 by Victor Hugo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kai Lu Les Miserables, Volume 2 by Victor Hugo Translated by Isabel Florence Hapkud Look first. Waterloo. Chapter 13. The Catastrophe The route behind the guard was melancholy. The army yielded suddenly on all sides at once. Hyugama, Lahissan, Papalo, Plancenois. The cry, treachery, was followed by a cry of Save yourselves who can. An army which is disbanding is like a thaw. All yields, splits, cracks, floats, rolls, falls, jostles, hastens, is precipitated. The disintegration is unprecedented. Ney borrows a horse, leaps upon it, and, without a hat, crevote, or sword, places himself across the Brussels road, stopping both English and French. He strives to detain the army. He recalls it to its duty. He insults it. He clings to the route. He is overwhelmed. The soldiers fly from him, shouting, Long live Marshal Ney! Two of Dorut's regiments go and come in a fright as though tossed back and forth between the swords of the Ulans and the fuselage of the brigades of Kempt, Best, Pack, and Relant. The worst of hand-to-hand conflicts is the defeat. Friends kill each other in order to escape. Squadrons and battalions break and disperse against each other, like the tremendous foam of battle. Lobo at one extremity and Ryle at the other are drawn into the tide. In vain does Napoleon erect walls from what is left to him of his guard. In vain does he expend in a last effort his last serviceable squadrons. Keel retreats before Vivian, Kellerman before Vandalur, Lubal before Boulot, Morand before Perch, Daman and Subirvik before Prince William of Prussia. Guyot, who led the emperor's squadrons to the charge, falls beneath the feet of the English Dragoons. Napoleon gallops past the line of fugitives, harangs, urges, threatens, entreats them. All the mouths which he in the morning had shouted, Long live the emperor, remain gaping. They hardly recognize him. The Prussian cavalry, newly arrived, dashes forward, flies, hues, slashes, kills, exterminates. Horses lash out, the cannons flee. The soldiers of the artillery train unharness the caissons and use the horses to make their escape. Transports overturned, with all four wheels in the air clog the road and occasion massacres. Men are crushed, trample down. Others walk over the dead and the living. Arms are lost. A dizzy multitude fills the roads, the paths, the bridges, the plains, the hills, the valleys, the woods, encumbered by this invasion of 40,000 men. Shouts of despair, knapsacks and guns flung among the rye. Passages forced at the point of the sword. No more comrades, no more officers, no more generals, an inexpressible terror. Zeit'n putting France to the sword at its leisure. Lions converted into goats. Such was the flight. At Genap an effort was made to wheel about, to present a battle front, to draw up a line. Lebeau rallied 300 men. The entrance to the village was barricaded, but at the first volley of Prussian canister, all took to flight again, and Lebeau was taken. That volley of grapeshot can be seen today, imprinted on the ancient gable of a brick building on the right of the road a few minutes' distance before you enter Genap. The Prussians threw themselves into Genap, furious, no doubt, that they were not more entirely the conquerors. The pursuit was stupendous. Blucher ordered extermination. Rogais had set the lugubrious example of threatening with death any French grenadier who should bring him up Prussian prisoner. Blucher outdid Rogais. Duème, general of the young guard, hemmed in at the doorway of an inn at Genap, surrendered his sword to a hasar of death, who took the sword and slew the prisoner. The victory was completed by the assassination of the vanquished. Let us inflict punishment since we are history. Old Blucher disgraced himself. This ferocity put the finishing touch to the disaster. The desperate route traversed Genap, traversed Caterbra, traversed Gossely, traversed Frayn, traversed Charleroi, traversed Thien, and only halted at the frontier. Alas, and who then was fleeing in that manner? The Grand Army. This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest bravery which ever astounded history. Is that causeless? No. The shadow of an enormous right is projected a thwart waterloo. It is the day of destiny, the force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence the terrified wrinkle of those brows, hence all those great souls surrendering their swords. Those who had conquered Europe have fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the present shadow of a terrible presence. That day the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the hinge of the 19th century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Someone, a person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than a cloud. There is something of the meteor. God has passed by. At nightfall, in a meadow near Jeanap, Bernard and Bertrand seized by the skirt of his coat and detained a man. Haggard, Pensive, Sinister, Gloomy, who, dragged to that point by the current of the route, had just dismounted, had passed the bridle of his horse over his arm, and with wild eye was returning alone to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, the immense sonambulist of this dream which had crumbled, essaying once more to advance. End of Book 1, Chapter 13