Page 589 - les-miserables

In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of
Wellington.
Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain
of the second.
That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is
England; the English firmness, the English resolution, the
English blood; the superb thing about England there, no of-
fence to her, was herself. It was not her captain; it was her
army.
Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord
Bathurst, that his army, the army which fought on the 18th
of June, 1815, was a ‘detestable army.’ What does that som-
bre intermingling of bones buried beneath the furrows of
Waterloo think of that?
England has been too modest in the matter of Welling-
ton. To make Wellington so great is to belittle England.
Wellington is nothing but a hero like many another. Those
Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards, those regiments of Mai-
tland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt,
that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders
playing the pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those
battalions of Rylandt, those utterly raw recruits, who hard-
ly knew how to handle a musket holding their own against
Essling’s and Rivoli’s old troops,—that is what was grand.
Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we are
not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and
of his cavalry would have been as solid as he. The iron sol-
dier is worth as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our
glorification goes to the English soldier, to the English army,

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