Chapter 79 seven napoleon in a good mood

The emperor was riding on a horse. Although he was ill and felt inconvenient due to some local problems, he had never been in such a happy mood that day.From morning on, there was a smile in his unfathomable expression.On June 18, 1815, his deep soul, hidden under his cold face, radiated blindly.The man who was dull at Austerlitz was cheerful at Waterloo.All the aliens who are blessed by heaven often have that kind of incomprehensible performance.Our joys often harbor sorrows.The last smile belongs to God. "Caesar laughs, Pompey weeps," said Forminatrix's men.This time, Pompey should not cry, but Caesar did laugh.

Since one o'clock the night before, he had been riding on horseback and patrolling the mountains around Rosen with Bertrand in the storm. , reflected on the horizon, he was satisfied in his heart, as if he felt that the luck he had appointed to come to the Battle of Waterloo on a certain day had indeed come; he reined in his horse, watched the lightning, listened to the thunder, After staying for a while, someone heard the fatalist say such a mysterious sentence in the night: "We are in one mind." He was mistaken, they were not in one mind. He did not sleep for a minute, and every moment of the night was a joy to him.He walked all over the outpost, stopping to talk to the scout troopers here and there.At half-past two, he heard the sound of a column marching near the Hougoumont woods. He thought it was Wellington's retreat, and he said to Bertrand: "This is the British rear guard preparing to retreat. I want to capture the six thousand British soldiers who have just arrived in Ostend." He spoke boldly, recalling a farmer who was ecstatically surprised when he landed in the Bay of Jouin on March 1, and he pointed the farmer to Da The marshal looked and cried: "Look, Bertrand, the new army has arrived!" Now he had that heroic spirit again.On the evening of June 17th and 18th, he made fun of Wellington from time to time. "The little Englishman needs to learn a lesson," said Napoleon.The rain became heavier, and there was a loud thunder when the emperor spoke.

By three-thirty in the morning, his illusions had faded, and the officers sent out to reconnoite the enemy returned to report that the enemy was inactive.All is well, and the campfires are not extinguished.The British army is asleep, there is no movement on the ground, and the sound is all in the sky.At four o'clock, some patrols brought in a peasant who had acted as a guide for a brigade of British cavalry, probably Vivienne's brigade, who was going to garrison the village of Oin on the extreme left.At five o'clock two Belgian rebels reported to him that they had just left their ranks and that the British were waiting for battle.

"Excellent!" cried Napoleon, "I will not only repel them, but overthrow them." In the morning, dismounting on the embankment at the corner of the Rue Planchanoy, he stood in the mud, ordered a kitchen table and a peasant's chair to be brought from the Chateau de Rosenne, sat down, Using a bundle of straw to make a carpet, spread the map of the battlefield on the table, and said to Soult: "What a beautiful chessboard!" Because of the rain that fell during the night, the forage convoys were stuck in the mud on the road and could not arrive early; the soldiers were sleepless, wet, and had nothing to eat; but Napoleon shouted cheerfully to Ney: "We There is a ninety percent chance." At eight o'clock, the emperor's breakfast arrived.He invited several generals to have dinner with him.As they ate, someone talked about Wellington's ball at the Duchess of Richmond's in Brussels the night before, and Soult, a reckless warrior with the face of an archbishop, said: "The ball, the ball is today." Ney He also said: "Wellington can't simply wait for His Majesty's holy car." The emperor also made fun of it.His temperament was originally like that.Fleury de Chablon said he was "happy to taunt".Gurgo said he had "a good sense of humor and good banter by nature".Bangaman Constant said he was "capable of making many kinds of jokes, but more of a sudden than a clever one".That kind of geek's punch line is worthy of our special writing.He's the one who calls his Habayashi sergeants the "nosy ghosts" who twist their ears and pull their mustaches. "The emperor loves to play tricks on us." This is what one of them said.On February 27th, during the mysterious return journey from Elba Island to France, the French sailing ship "Zhefeng" met the "Impermanence" that secretly carried Napoleon on the sea, and asked the "Impermanence" to find out about Napoleon's whereabouts. According to the news, on the hat the emperor was wearing at that time, there was also the red and white round cap flower with a few bees that he used in Elba Island. He smiled, picked up the megaphone, and replied in person: "The emperor is safe!" .” Only those who are not surprised can make such jokes.Napoleon made this joke several times during his breakfast at Waterloo.After breakfast, he was silent for a quarter of an hour, and then the two generals sat on the sheaf of straw, with a pen in hand and a piece of paper on their knees, recording the attack orders dictated by the emperor.

At nine o'clock, the French army lined up and dispatched in five lines. Each division was divided into two lines. The artillery team was in the middle of the brigade. , vast, cheerful, sea-like helmets, sabers and spears, mighty and mighty, reaching the horizon. At this time, the emperor was greatly moved, and he shouted twice: "Magnificent! Magnificent!" From nine o'clock to ten-thirty, the whole army, it is incredible, was in position, arranged in six rows, "six Vs," as the Emperor said.A few minutes after the formation was formed, before the melee, as in the silence that is approaching the storm, the Emperor saw the three battalions of twelve-liver guns that he had drawn from the armies of Derlon, Rayer, and Robb in the middle of the battle. Advance in formation, which is to be used at the beginning of the attack to attack Mont Saint-John at the junction of the Rue Nivelles and Genappe.The emperor patted Yaxo on the shoulder and said to him, "General, look at those twenty-four beauties."

As the vanguard company of the First Corps, which had been ordered by him to defend the village during the capture of Mount St. John, passed in front of him, he smiled at them with confidence and encouraged them.In that solemn atmosphere, he only said a conceited and pitiful word, and he saw on his left, where there is a huge tomb today, the Scottish gray team with rich clothes and tall horses was going to gather there. , he said "Unfortunately". Then he got on his horse, ran forward from Rosson, and chose a grassy mound on the right side of the road from Genappe to Brussels as a viewing stand, which was the place where he stopped for the second time in that battle. .The third time he stopped at seven o'clock in the evening was between Jiameng and Saint-Lahe, which is a dangerous area; the rather high mound is still there today, when Habayashi was on the flat ground behind the mound. below a slope.All around the mound, shells fell on the stone pavement and flew straight at Napoleon.As in Brienne, shells and bullets hissed over his head.Later, in the area where his horseshoe had stood, someone picked up some rotten cannonballs, broken command swords and deformed bullets, all of which were rusty. "Dung and rotten wood." A few years ago, someone dug up a 60-jin bomb in that place. The explosives were still there, and the fuse was broken outside the casing.

It was at this last stop that the emperor spoke to his guide Lacoste, a hostile peasant, panicked, tied to a cavalry saddle, who turned away every time a cannonball exploded, thinking hide behind him.The emperor said to him: "Stupid! Shameless, people will kill you from behind." The person who wrote these lines also personally found a man who was buried in the loose soil of the mound while digging into the sand. Forty-six years of rust-corroded bomb heads and some rotten iron that shatters like a patchouli stalk. The undulating, unevenly sloping plain on which Napoleon and Wellington met, everyone knows that it is not what it was on June 18, 1815.When the Waterloo Memorial was built, the high ground on that tragic battlefield had been leveled, and history lost its basis, and it is now impossible to know its true face.In order to make it glorious, it destroyed its original appearance.Two years after the war, when Wellington saw Waterloo again, he exclaimed: "You have changed my battlefield." Where the large obelisk with a lion stands today, there was a ridge at that time, and it slowly The slope towards the Rue Nivelles is not very difficult, but on the side towards the Rue Genappe, it is almost a kind of cliff.The height of that cliff can still be estimated today from the height of the two great earthen graves which stand side by side on the road from Genappe to Brussels, the British cemetery on the left and the German cemetery on the right.The French army has no cemeteries.For France, that whole plain is a cemetery.The heights of Mont-Saint-Jean, with the removal of thousands of truckloads of earth for the mound, one hundred and fifty feet high and half a mile in circumference, now had a gentler slope, and on the day of the war, especially in the area of ​​Saint-Laye , the terrain is very steep.The slope was so steep that the British guns could not be aimed at the manor house in the valley below them which was the center of the battle.On June 18, 1815, the rain washed out countless ditches and pits on the steep slope, and the uphill became more difficult. Not only was it difficult for them to climb, they were literally crawling in the mud.On the high ground, along the ridge, there was a deep ditch.That's unexpected for people standing in the distance.

What is that deep ditch?We have to clarify.Both Branlalle and Oan are Belgian villages.The two villages are hidden in low-lying places, and between the two villages is a road about a mile and a half long. The place is literally a tunnel.That road in 1815, as now, ran between the Rue Genappe and the Rue Nivelles, and crossed the ridge of the heights of Mount St. But it is a concave road, and the inclined walls on both sides have been taken away to build memorial piers.The greater part of that road was, and still is, a sort of ditch, sometimes twelve feet deep, and with walls so steep that they crumbled in every direction, and some mischief has occurred, especially in winter, when the rains are heavy.The road was so narrow at the entrance to Branlal that a passer-by was crushed under a car, as evidenced by a stone cross next to the cemetery, on which the name of the deceased was written, "Bernard de Monsieur Berry, Merchant of Brussels", dated February 1637, the inscription reads:

In the section on the heights of Mount St. John, where the concave road was so deep that a peasant named Marty Nichez was crushed to death under the avalanche beside the road, in 1783, another stone cross was full proof of capital.The cross is on the left side of the road between St. Lae and St. John's Hill House. Its upper part is no longer in the field, but the overturned stone seat is still exposed on the grass slope today and can be seen. On the day of the battle, the invisible concave road along the high ridge of Mount St. John, the tunnel at the top of the steep slope, the trench hidden in the earth, was invisible, that is to say, dangerous.