Everyone is acquainted with the first phase of this battle: troubled, uncertain, hesitating, menacing to both armies, still more so for the English than for the French. It had rained all night. The earth had been cut up by the downpour. Water had accumulated in the hollows as if in casks. At some points the gear of the artillery carriages was buried up to the axles. The horses' circingles were dripping with liquid mud. If the wheat and rye trampled by the transports had not filled the ruts, movement toward Papelotte would have been impossible. The affair began late. Napoleon was in the habit of keeping all his artillery well in hand, like a pistol, aiming it now at one point, now at another. He had wished to wait until the horse batteries could gallop freely. For that the sun had to come out and dry the soil. The sun did not make its appearance. It was no longer the rendezvous of Austerlitz. 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 began furiously, with more fury perhaps than the Emperor would have wished, by the left wing resting on Hougomont. At the same time Napoleon hurled Quiot's brigade on La Haie-Sainte, and Ney pushed the right wing against the English left at Papelotte. The attack on Hougomont was something of a feint, meant to draw Wellington left. It would have succeeded if four companies of English guards and Perponcher's Belgians had not held. Wellington sent only four more companies and one Brunswick battalion. The attack on Papelotte was meant to cut the road to Brussels and bar the Prussians. With the exception of a few incidents it succeeded. Papelotte was taken. La Haie-Sainte was carried. A detail: many raw recruits in Kempt's brigade, valiant, their inexperience making them their own generals as skirmishers. This novice infantry had dash. This displeased Wellington. After the taking of La Haie-Sainte the battle wavered.
There is in this day an obscure interval, from midday to four o'clock. The middle portion is almost indistinct and participates in the sombreness of the hand-to-hand conflict. Twilight reigns over it. Vast fluctuations in that fog: colbacks, sabre-taches, red boots, the black infantry of Brunswick mingled with the scarlet of England, Scotch with bare knees, the white gaiters of the grenadiers. Pictures, not strategic lines. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces the feature which pleases him. The shock of armed masses has an incalculable ebb. The plans of the two leaders enter into each other and become thrown out of shape. A point of the field devours more combatants than another, as spongy soil soaks up water. The line of battle waves like a thread. Battalions are like smoke. There was something there; seek it. It has disappeared. What is a fray? an oscillation? The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute, not a day. Rembrandt is better than Vandermeulen; Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o'clock. Geometry is deceptive; the hurricane alone is trustworthy. There is a certain instant when the battle degenerates into a combat and disperses into feats that, as Napoleon said, belong rather to the biography of the regiments than to the history of the army. No narrator can fix, absolutely, the form of that horrible cloud which is called a battle. This is particularly applicable to Waterloo. Nevertheless, at a certain moment in the afternoon the battle came to a point.
Coming Up in Chapter 76
Towards four o'clock the condition of the English army was serious. Picton was dead. Hougomont still held, but was on fire. La Haie-Sainte was taken. Of the German battalion that defended it, only forty-two men survived.
