Page 547 - les-miserables

pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As at Bri-
enne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of
the heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades,
and shapeless projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked
up at the spot where his horse’ feet stood. Scabra rubigine.
A few years ago, a shell of sixty pounds, still charged, and
with its fuse broken off level with the bomb, was unearthed.
It was at this last post that the Emperor said to his guide,
Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached
to the saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every
discharge of canister and tried to hide behind Napoleon:
‘Fool, it is shameful! You’ll get yourself killed with a ball in
the back.’ He who writes these lines has himself found, in
the friable soil of this knoll, on turning over the sand, the
remains of the neck of a bomb, disintegrated, by the oxi-
dization of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron
which parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.
Every one is aware that the variously inclined undula-
tions of the plains, where the engagement between Napoleon
and Wellington took place, are no longer what they were on
June 18, 1815. By taking from this mournful field the where-
withal to make a monument to it, its real relief has been
taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds her
bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorify-
ing it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two
years later, exclaimed, ‘They have altered my field of bat-
tle!’ Where the great pyramid of earth, surmounted by the
lion, rises to-day, there was a hillock which descended in an
easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but which was almost

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