CHAPTER XIV

THE LAST SQUARE


Several squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream of
the defeat, as rocks in running water, held their own until night.
Night came, death also; they awaited that double shadow,
and, invincible, allowed themselves to be enveloped therein.
Each regiment, isolated from the rest, and having no bond with
the army, now shattered in every part, died alone. They had taken
up position for this final action, some on the heights of Rossomme,
others on the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean. There, abandoned, vanquished,
terrible, those gloomy squares endured their death-throes
in formidable fashion. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland, died with them.

At twilight, towards nine o'clock in the evening, one of them was left
at the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. In that fatal valley,
at the foot of that declivity which the cuirassiers had ascended,
now inundated by the masses of the English, under the converging
fires of the victorious hostile cavalry, under a frightful density
of projectiles, this square fought on. It was commanded by an obscure
officer named Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished
and replied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade,
continually contracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing
breathless for a moment in the distance, listened in the darkness
to that gloomy and ever-decreasing thunder.

When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left
of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone,
were no longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger
than the group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors,
around those men dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror,
and the English artillery, taking breath, became silent. This furnished
a sort of respite. These combatants had around them something in
the nature of a swarm of spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback,
the black profiles of cannon, the white sky viewed through wheels
and gun-carriages, the colossal death's-head, which the heroes
saw constantly through the smoke, in the depths of the battle,
advanced upon them and gazed at them. Through the shades of twilight
they could hear the pieces being loaded; the matches all lighted,
like the eyes of tigers at night, formed a circle round their heads;
all the lintstocks of the English batteries approached the cannons,
and then, with emotion, holding the supreme moment suspended above
these men, an English general, Colville according to some, Maitland
according to others, shouted to them, "Surrender, brave Frenchmen!"
Cambronne replied, "-----."

{EDITOR'S COMMENTARY: Another edition of this book has the word
"Merde!" in lieu of the ----- above.}