The horse knew before I did.
Cantal — I had named him after the mountain département where I was born, because he was stubborn and grey and magnificent — had been carrying me through six charges against the English squares without flinching. On the seventh, as we formed up below the ridge at La Haye Sainte, he shifted his weight in a way I had never felt before. Not fear. Horses go quiet when they are afraid. This was something else. A kind of settling, as if he were accounting for himself.
It was past three in the afternoon. The battle had been going since eleven in the morning, when we had finally — finally — begun the assault, delayed by the wet ground from the previous night's rain. The delay had cost us the morning light. The delay had cost us, I think now, everything.
The Squares
I should explain the squares for anyone who has not faced one. An infantry square is four ranks of men arranged in a hollow rectangle, bayonets out on all four sides, officers and drummers in the middle. Against cavalry, it is nearly impregnable, because a horse will not charge into a wall of steel points. The trick is to break the square — to create a gap through artillery fire or concentrated musketry, and then send the cavalry through before the gap closes. But Marshal Ney had sent us without the artillery. He had sent us alone.
Six times we had swept up the ridge. Six times we had circled the squares — walking, cantering, looking for a gap — and found none. The English stood in those squares and shot us from ten yards and we could not break them. Men beside me fell. Horses fell. I saw a cuirassier whose horse was shot through the neck continue forward at a dead gallop for thirty yards before the animal went down, the rider pitching over the head and lying still.
Between charges I returned to the lines below the ridge. My saber arm ached. Cantal's flanks were heaving. I drank water from a dead man's canteen because I had given mine to the wounded.
The Sound of Hooves Behind Us
During the sixth charge, I heard something unusual from the direction of Plancenoit — a sound that should not have been there. Cannon fire. Not our cannon. The Prussians had been expected since morning. We had been told they would not arrive in time. It seemed they had not received this information.
The seventh charge formed up anyway. I do not know who ordered it. Perhaps Ney. Perhaps it ordered itself — an army in motion that did not know how to stop. We were four thousand horsemen on a ridge in Belgium in the middle of June and the sun was descending and the Prussian guns were growing louder to the east and we rode up the slope again toward the English squares.
I saw the square I was aimed at — the 27th Inniskilling Fusiliers, I learned later, men who had stood in that formation for three hours. They were grey with powder smoke and their faces were rigid. As we swept around them I was close enough to see the eyes of the man at the corner of the square — a sergeant, older than me, with a graze wound on his cheek. He looked at me with absolute attention. Not hatred. Not fear. Just absolute attention, the way a craftsman looks at the thing he is making.
Then the volley came and Cantal's front legs folded and I went over his neck and into the mud of Waterloo.
The Rout
I was not badly hurt. A bruised shoulder, mud in my mouth, the specific ringing in the head that comes from a fall at speed. I lay still for a moment taking account of myself. Around me, horses were down. Men were down. The firing from the squares continued at a steady, mechanical pace.
Then I heard — felt, really, through the mud — a sound that I had never heard before in eleven years of soldiering under the Emperor: the sound of the Imperial Guard retreating.
The Guard did not retreat. The Guard had been formed from the most decorated veterans in France. They had been with Napoleon in Egypt, in Italy, in Russia. They had held positions when armies dissolved around them. When the Guard retreated, it meant something that could not be meant — it meant the battle was finished.
I found a horse — I do not know whose — and rode east toward Genappe. Around me the army was becoming a mob. Men threw down their muskets. Cannon were abandoned. Officers rode in the same direction as privates without giving orders or receiving them. We had been an army at noon. We were a river of men moving away from something we could not name.
The Road Home
I did not see the Emperor during the retreat. I heard that he rode among the Guard for a while as they covered the withdrawal, that he offered to die at their head, that they told him to save himself for France. I heard many things during those weeks. Some of them may even have been true.
What I know is this: I rode through the night of June 18th and into the morning of June 19th. I crossed the border into France. I slept in a barn near Avesnes with forty other men I had never met, and we did not speak, and in the morning we went our separate ways.
Cantal had broken his right foreleg in the fall. I do not speak of this.
Napoleon abdicated four days later. He was taken to Saint Helena, an island in the South Atlantic from which no one had ever escaped because there was nowhere to escape to. He died there in 1821, at fifty-one, of causes that still argued about. I died in Lyon in 1847, of old age, having outlived two emperors and one republic and the country I had fought for, which had changed so many times in my lifetime that I am not sure it was the same country anymore.
I do not know if the seventh charge would have broken the English squares. I do not know if anything, that day, could have broken them. I know only what it felt like to ride toward them through the smoke: the particular combination of exhaustion and forward motion that becomes, after a while, indistinguishable from courage.
Narrator's note: Henri Lacombe is fictional. The tactical details — the uncoordinated cavalry charges, the holding squares, the Prussian arrival at Plancenoit, the Guard's retreat — are drawn from eyewitness accounts compiled in Andrew Roberts's Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Gamble (2005) and John Keegan's The Face of Battle (1976).