Page 530 - les-miserables

As for the plain itself, let the reader picture to himself a
vast undulating sweep of ground; each rise commands the
next rise, and all the undulations mount towards Mont-
Saint-Jean, and there end in the forest.
Two hostile troops on a field of battle are two wrestlers.
It is a question of seizing the opponent round the waist. The
one seeks to trip up the other. They clutch at everything: a
bush is a point of support; an angle of the wall offers them
a rest to the shoulder; for the lack of a hovel under whose
cover they can draw up, a regiment yields its ground; an
unevenness in the ground, a chance turn in the landscape,
a cross-path encountered at the right moment, a grove, a
ravine, can stay the heel of that colossus which is called an
army, and prevent its retreat. He who quits the field is beat-
en; hence the necessity devolving on the responsible leader,
of examining the most insignificant clump of trees, and of
studying deeply the slightest relief in the ground.
The two generals had attentively studied the plain of
Mont-Saint-Jean, now called the plain of Waterloo. In the
preceding year, Wellington, with the sagacity of foresight,
had examined it as the possible seat of a great battle. Upon
this spot, and for this duel, on the 18th of June, Welling-
ton had the good post, Napoleon the bad post. The English
army was stationed above, the French army below.
It is almost superfluous here to sketch the appearance of
Napoleon on horseback, glass in hand, upon the heights of
Rossomme, at daybreak, on June 18, 1815. All the world has
seen him before we can show him. That calm profile under
the little three-cornered hat of the school of Brienne, that

530 Les Miserables