THE French ought to be the most ingenious people in the world. There is a great standing problem on which they have been sharpening their wits for fifty years, and which is likely to be their intellectual grindstone for fifty more. That problem, the national squaring of the circle, is, How to explain away the Battle of Waterloo. There it stands, a most substantial landmark in the century; a pièce de résistance, on which, it is evident, many an expositor, historical, philosophical, military, or merely patriotic, may cut and come again. It will evidently bear no end of explanation. Theories the most ingenious are brought to bear upon it; it is obscured for a moment, every now and then, in a haze of cloud or gossamer; but the next moment there it is, "like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved," ready for a fresh essay of subtlety. While other people see the matter in an ordinary light, a French writer, when he directs his mind across the Belgian frontier, enters a land of enchantment. The old men see visions

and the young men dream dreams. What Britain was to Arthur, the Tauric Chersonese to Jason, or the domain of an enchanter to Orlando or Amadis, such is the marvellous region that lies beyond the Sambre to Napoleon. It is a kind of cosmopolitan Pandemonium-a land where evils gathered from all the mythologies are assembled to oppose the Emperor and his army of knights-errant. Fates and hostile powers from the poetic world of Greece-destinies from Arabia and stars from Chaldæa-pitfalls and delusions from the domain of chivalry, a pagan necessity and a modern French Providence, are all arrayed on the road to Brussels to harass and disconcert one conquering mortal. It is true there were also a couple of armies of material foes-but these are for the most part set aside and disregarded, the real opposition being made by the darker powers. Into this tremendous region Napoleon plunged, and into it plunge also the French chroniclers, boldly abandoning the prosaic domain of fact, and finding unlimited

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space for the play of fancy. In this strange land may be discerned a blundering demon, called in French mythology Blucher, and a most besotted enchanter of the name of Wellington, both full of impotent malice, and devising, in their blindness, snares for others into which they are always falling themselves. They lead hosts of inferior demons, who are constantly getting themselves into trouble by their spiteful opposition, who are belaboured, overthrown, cut to pieces, and massacred, and betray not one single demoniac attribute except malignity, and a remarkable power, on some occasions, of reappearing, after all their losses, in their original numbers. Amid these the good Corsican knight moves triumphant. Before him and his invincible followers these foes everywhere recoil-myriads fall" even in the fan and play of his fair sword" and he goes through the diabolic mêlée like Mr Greatheart through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The demon Blucher privily prepares a snare at Ligny, in which he is himself entrapped, and made a terrible example. The foul wizard Wellington constructs another pitfall at Quatre Bras, into which he would inevitably have descended head foremost, but for the interposition of a malign power which blinded the eyes of two of the French knights, Ney and D'Erlon, causing the one to boggle vainly before the wood of Bossu, and leading the other far astray by magical devices. But at the approach of the victorious Napoleon the wizard retires in confusion, feeling himself detected, and everything would have gone well but for the delusions of which the knight Grouchy is made the sport. He is pursuing the discomfited demon, Blucher, who is believed to be driven headlong in one direction, but who, aided by supernatural power, and lost even to such small sense of virtue and propriety as a demon may be supposed to retain, vanishes, leaving the pursuer to chase a shadow, and reap

pears at a critical moment to aid the stupid enchanter Wellington. From this epoch all is mystery and confusion. The devices of Wellington, though no less malignant, are also no less futile, than before. In his foolish craftiness he has placed himself where there is no escape. Behind him every avenue is closed -before him is his dazzling and all-conquering foe-all that is left for him is to display the dogged obstinacy suitable to such a situation, which, accordingly, he is said to have shown. But no amount of obstinacy could prevent his discomfiture. His feeble plans are easily seen through, and promptly disconcerted-his weak array is dispersed, overturned, cut up, crushed, broken, and destroyed. The peerless knight Ney careers triumphantly over the field, while the above participles become more and more emphatically descriptive of what happens to the foe. But now the dark powers of the air begin to take part in the conflict. According to some chroniclers, Destiny it was that intervened. Others ascribe the disaster that followed to the desertion of the goddess Fortune from the side of the Emperor. There is also a mysterious If, that plays a conspicuous part in this crisis. All authorities agree that if something had not been done which was done, or if something had been done which was not done, the whole event would have been totally different; though most of them disagree as to what it was that should or should not have been performed. However, generally, it may be stated, that if foes, vanquished by every rule of conflict, had not inopportunely reappeared to renew the struggle, and if those followers of the Emperor who had unhappily been expended in the fight had been forthcoming when most wanted, and in particular, if the knight Grouchy had not been basely beguiled by the demon Blucher, all would have been well. Many chroniclers, indeed, persist in stating that all was well in reality, and

that what passes for the history of subsequent events is necromantic illusion; but, in general, it is admitted that the Emperor and his followers, assailed by unearthly influences, which no man, not even a Frenchman, can resist, fled from the enchanted land, and reappeared, what was left of them, in most melancholy plight, in the regions of matter-of-fact, and subsequently faded into the light of common day.

Such in its main features is the marvellous tale that is imparted as the story of Waterloo to the youth of France. Of late, it is true, some sceptics have appeared who, no less solicitous than their predecessors for French glory, yet venture to speak of Napoleon as a mere fallible mortal. But these are as yet a small minority. M. Thiers, as we mentioned in reviewing him last month, adheres to the ancient myth, and will hear of no abatement either of the glory of France or of the glory of Napoleon, for the preservation of which no sacrifices are too great, not even that of the rules of arithmetic. But, however faithful he may be to French traditions, there is assuredly nothing clever or amusing in the romance of Waterloo by M. Thiers. To the old stage properties of "fatality" and the inevitable If, he adds nothing except an audacious falsification of numbers, and a more lavish censure of the Emperor's lieutenants. M. Victor Hugo is a spirit of another sort. He is a man of eloquence and imagination. Not driven, like the clumsy and commonplace conjuror Thiers, to rely on such transparent devices as telling his audience that two and two make five, he, like a man of resource, invents incidents, revels in fine similes and poetic language, and philosophises in a strain suited to the region of romantic fable. With him Napoleon is not merely the favourite of the gods, but almost their equal. He stands to the unseen powers something in the relation that Prometheus stood to

Zeus-and like him he is punished rather as an audacious rival than as a presumptuous mortal. M. Hugo also invents a pitfall, not a metaphorical but a veritable pitfall, to account for the French disaster; he makes a new use of the great If;

and, last and most wonderful of all his discoveries, he tells us that the destiny of the world was changed by the nod of a Belgian peasant's head. The new features, then, presented by M. Hugo's solution of the great Gallic problem, are—this extraordinary nod, potent as that of Jupiter-the fatal trap or pitfalland the singular relation in which Napoleon stands to the French Providence, all of which are perfectly original; but the originality of the incidents is not greater than that of the language and descriptions.

And here it is necessary to warn the sensitive reader, that in speaking of the French Providence we mean nothing irreverent, any more than if we were discussing Pluto or the Parcæ. It is a thoroughly Pagan deity, only without the picturesqueness of the gods of Greece. It is a modern French adaptation of an ancient model, and its principal use is, to interpose at critical moments for the benefit of art, to hang sentiments on, to be on terms of respectful intimacy with, to tag sentences, to point epigrams, and to give zest to obscenity.

In the year 1861 M. Hugo, it seems, was journeying from Nivelles to La Hulpe on foot, when he reached a picturesque old farm or chateau, which he describes very agreeably and minutely, noting even that a brave little bird was singing in a large tree, being, as he observes with true French gallantry, "probably amorous." As he is inspecting some damage done to the building, a peasant woman tells him that the injuries were caused by bullets, and that the place is called Hougomont. At the word he began to look about him. He presently perceived a hillock, surmounted by something that looked in the distance like a lion.

He

then perceived he was on the field of Waterloo. Such was our author's introduction to that Enchanted Ground where all natives of France become subject to strange delusions. M. Hugo was not exempt from the fate of his countrymen :that peasant woman was probably a Belgian Circe; and, after his brief parley with the witch, he began to dream about Waterloo, extravagantly of course, but still with the extravagance of a man of genius and a poet.

'Hougomont," he exclaims, "'twas a melancholy spot; the commencement of the obstacle, the first resistance met with at Waterloo by the great woodcutter of Europe called Napoleon; the first knot under the blow of his axe." He describes the courtyard, "the conquest of which," says he, was a dream of Napoleon. Could he have taken that corner of ground, it would perhaps have given him the world." And he, more generous than his countrymen, at once conciliates our goodwill by remarking that "the English behaved admirably there. The four companies of the Guards of Cooke maintained themselves there for seven hours against the fury of an army." This shows that M. Hugo's sense of justice, at least, is proof against the influence of the atmosphere, which usually causes the seer to look on the troops of perfidious Albion in a most contemptible light.

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The conflict for the entry of the courtyard was furious. For a long time there were visible on the beam of the gate all sorts of marks of bloody hands." That is a real touch of a master of the descriptive; -the following bit is perhaps better appreciated on the opposite side of the Channel than it will be here:

"The storm of combat is still in this court; horror is visible there; the hurly-burly of the fight is there petrified; that lives, that dies; it was yesterday. The walls agonise, the stones fall, the gaps cry out; the holes are wounds; the trees,

bending and trembling, seem trying to flee."

A massacre took place in the chapel; where no mass has since been said. The head of an infant Jesus in wood was carried away by a shell. The chapel was partly burnt; the door and the flooring were destroyed by the flames, but a Christ, in wood, was not burnt. The fire has consumed the feet, of which only blackened stumps are left, and there it stopped. The country people call this a miracle," says our author- and adds, with a touch of Voltaire, "The infant Jesus, decapitated, has not been so happy as the Christ."

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The walls, he tells us, are covered with inscriptions; "there are French names with notes of exclamationsigns of anger." And there is a well, from which no one draws water any more. Why does no one draw water any more? Because it is full of skeletons." "They cast into it three hundred dead. Perhaps but too diligently. Were all dead? Tradition says no. It seems that in the night which followed the burial, faint appealing voices were heard to issue from the well." Not groundless, this fancy, we lament to say, however horrible; for it is indubitable that the bodies laid in the common grave of the battle-field are not always lifeless.

He then proceeds to describe the garden and orchard. "It was in the garden," he says, that six voltigeurs of the First Light Infantry, having got in, and not being able to get out, taken and hemmed in, like bears in their cave, accepted battle with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was armed with carbines. The Hanoverians, occupying the balustrades of the terrace, fired from above. The voltigeurs replying from below, six against two hundred, intrepid, and having for shelter nothing but gooseberry bushes, took a quarter of an hour to die." After this the gooseberry bush must take high rank among fortifications. It has

certainly been too much neglected by military writers. He closes his spirited description with an account of the slaughter in the orchard. "Three thousand men," he moralises, "were in this single ruin of Hougomont, sabred, slashed, run through, shot, and burnt; and all, that to-day a peasant may say to a traveller, Monsieur, give me three francs; if you please, I will explain to you the affair of Waterloo.' This is epigrammatic, but it decidedly contradicts the former epigram, which said that "this corner of ground, if he could have taken it, would have perhaps given Napoleon the world." The men who died to prevent that result can hardly be said to have died in vain, nor do the countrymen of those who defended Hougomont look upon their lives as thrown

away.

Quitting this particular spot for a more general view of the battle, M. Hugo remarks: "If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and 18th of June 1815, the future of Europe would have been changed. Some drops of water more or less caused Napoleon to fall. In order that Waterloo might be the end of Austerlitz, Providence wanted nothing but a little rain, and a cloud crossing the sky quite out of season sufficed for the crumbling of a world." We quote this sentence because it exhibits compendiously several favourite points of the French myth-the great Ifthe certainty that but for the rain Napoleon would have been victorious-the intimate acquaintance with the most recondite workings of that mysterious power, the French Providence-the inference that the rain-cloud coming so unseasonably is a special interposition, as if, in Belgium, rain in June were an unheard of phenomenon-and lastly the inference also, that the rain wetted only the French side of the field. "The battle of Waterloo, and this gave Blucher time to arrive, could not begin till half-past eleven. Why? Because the ground

was miry. It was necessary to wait while it got a little firm in order that the artillery might manœuvre." Many Frenchmen really believe this. After mentioning, more truthfully and honourably than the charlatan historian, Thiers, that Napoleon had a great superiority of artillery, though M. Hugo diminishes it, we daresay inadvertently, by nine guns, he says, "Suppose the ground dry, the artillery able to move, the action would begin at six in the morning. The battle would be gained and finished at two o'clock, three hours before the sudden turn of fortune that the Prussians caused."

Next he inquires whether the fault was in Napoleon. "He who formerly knew all the paths of triumph, and who from the height of his chair of lightnings showed them with imperial finger, was he now possessed with this fatal foolhardiness of driving over precipices his tumultuous team of legions did he reach at forty-six years of age a climax of folly?-this Titanic coachman of destiny, was he nothing more than a huge dare-devil? We by no means think so." And the reason why he does not think so is "that his plan of battle was a masterpiece. To go right at the centre of the Allied line, to make a gap in the enemy, to cut them in two, to push the British half on Hal, and the Prussian half on Tongres, to make of Wellington and Blucher two fragments, to carry Mont St Jean, to seize Brussels, to cast the Germans into the Rhine and the English into the sea. All this was for Napoleon in this battle." Now, as this highly compendious and decisive plan was not executed, fortunately for the armies predestined to such an uncomfortable termination of their career, to what was the failure owing? If not to the fault of Napoleon, one might venture to ascribe it in some degree to the merit of Wellington, the course generally taken by public opinion with respect to victories, without good