Page 552 - les-miserables

of the English badly alarmed, the left wing badly cut into;
Ney’s strange mistake in massing, instead of echelonning
the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to
grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with
a frontage of two hundred; the frightful holes made in these
masses by the cannon-balls; attacking columns disorga-
nized; the side-battery suddenly unmasked on their flank;
Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised; Quiot re-
pulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the
Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was
beating in with an axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under
the downright fire of the English barricade which barred
the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels; Marcog-
net’s division caught between the infantry and the cavalry,
shot down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by
Best and Pack, put to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery
of seven pieces spiked; the Prince of Saxe-Weimar holding
and guarding, in spite of the Comte d’Erlon, both Frisch-
emont and Smohain; the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of
the 45th captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped by
runners of the flying column of three hundred light cavalry
on the scout between Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming
things that had been said by prisoners; Grouchy’s delay; fif-
teen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougomont in
less than an hour; eighteen hundred men overthrown in a
still shorter time about La Haie-Sainte,—all these stormy
incidents passing like the clouds of battle before Napoleon,
had hardly troubled his gaze and had not overshadowed
that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon was accustomed

552 Les Miserables