Page 591 - les-miserables

denseness the carnage arose.
The following calculation has been made, and the fol-
lowing proportion established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz,
French, fourteen per cent; Russians, thirty per cent; Austri-
ans, forty-four per cent. At Wagram, French, thirteen per
cent; Austrians, fourteen. At the Moskowa, French, thirty-
seven per cent; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French,
thirteen per cent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Wa-
terloo, French, fifty-six per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total
for Waterloo, forty-one per cent; one hundred and forty-
four thousand combatants; sixty thousand dead.
To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs
to the earth, the impassive support of man, and it resembles
all plains.
At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from
it; and if a traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches,
if he dreams like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the
hallucination of the catastrophe takes possession of him.
The frightful 18th of June lives again; the false monumental
hillock disappears, the lion vanishes in air, the battle-field
resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate over the plain,
furious gallops traverse the horizon; the frightened dream-
er beholds the flash of sabres, the gleam of bayonets, the
flare of bombs, the tremendous interchange of thunders; he
hears, as it were, the death rattle in the depths of a tomb,
the vague clamor of the battle phantom; those shadows are
grenadiers, those lights are cuirassiers; that skeleton Napo-
leon, that other skeleton is Wellington; all this no longer
exists, and yet it clashes together and combats still; and the

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