There were three thousand five hundred 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 behind them Lefebvre-Desnouettes's division: picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the Guard, the lancers of the Guard. They wore casques without horse-tails, and cuirasses of beaten iron. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at nine o'clock, with trumpets and the music of Let us watch o'er the Safety of the Empire, they had deployed between the roads to Genappe and Frischemont. Aide-de-camp 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 that cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to the breeze, descended like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering-ram, the hill of La Belle Alliance. They plunged into the terrible depths where so many men had already fallen, disappeared in the smoke, then emerged on the other side of the valley, still compact, mounting at a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot, the terrible muddy slope of Mont-Saint-Jean. They ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable. In the intervals their colossal trampling was audible. Wathier's division held the right, Delort's the left. It seemed as though two immense adders of steel were crawling toward the crest. Nothing like it had been seen since the great redoubt of the Moskowa. Murat was lacking here, but Ney was again present. The mass had become a monster and had but one soul.
Odd numerical coincidence: twenty-six battalions rode to meet twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest, in the shadow of the masked battery, the English infantry waited in thirteen squares, two battalions to the square, stocks of their guns to their shoulders, taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing. Calm, mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse, the symmetrical tramp, the jingling of the cuirasses, a sort of grand and savage breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence. Then, all at once, a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the crest, and casques, trumpets, standards, and three thousand heads with grey moustaches, shouting Vive l'Empereur! All this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an earthquake. All at once, a tragic incident. On the English left, on the French right, the head of the column reared up with a frightful clamor. On arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, given over to fury, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain. It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning, directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms deep. The second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed on the second. The horses reared and fell backward, landed on their haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air. 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 there pell-mell, forming but one mass of flesh. When this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss. This began the loss of the battle.
A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates, says two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow road of Ohain. The figure probably comprises corpses flung there the day after. It was Dubois's sorely tried brigade which, an hour before, had captured the flag of the Lunenburg battalion. Napoleon, before giving the order, 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 by the little white chapel that marks its junction with the Nivelles highway, he had probably put a question as to 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 does not come within the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which there was no longer any room for Napoleon. 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. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears: these are formidable pleaders. 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.
