The Eighteenth of June, — Les Misérables

Let us turn back, that is one of the story-teller's rights, and put ourselves once more in the year 1815, even a little earlier than the first part of this book. If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and the 18th of June, 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. A cloud traversing the sky out of season sufficed to make a world crumble. The battle could not be begun until half-past eleven, and that gave Blücher 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 captain was the man who, in the report on Aboukir, said that such a one of our balls killed six men. All his plans were arranged for projectiles. The key to his victory was to make the artillery converge on one point. He treated the hostile strategy like a citadel and made a breach in it. Strike, strike, strike, and he entrusted that task to the cannon-ball. On the 18th of June he relied all the more on his artillery because he had numbers: two hundred and forty mouths of fire against Wellington's one hundred and fifty-nine. Suppose the soil dry, and the action would have begun at six 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. Is the shipwreck due to the pilot? Had twenty years of war worn out the blade as well as the scabbard? Was this genius suffering from an eclipse? Had he become unconscious of peril? 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. Go straight to the centre, make a breach, cut them in two, drive the British half back on Hal and the Prussian half on Tongres, carry Mont-Saint-Jean, seize Brussels, hurl the German into the Rhine and the Englishman into the sea. Afterwards people would see. This history is not the subject; one scene of the story is connected with this battle, and the history has already been finished, from one point of view by Napoleon, from another by a whole pleiad 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. 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.