Part II, Book 1, Chapter 13
The Catastrophe
Hugo presents the French defeat not as a single dramatic moment, but as a prolonged stretch of terror and chaos. “An army on the run is a thaw setting in,” he writes, presenting the cracking and collapse of the French forces in the most unexpectedly poetic way.
The French army, fleeing for their lives, were chased and attacked by the Prussians, and there was no dignity in the melee. Ney and Napoleon attempted and failed to marshal the remaining soldiers, who were outright trampling and slaying each other in their mad dash to escape. Hugo, at this point, switches from past tense—the default for the book so far–to present tense, which really puts the reader in the thick of the chaos.
The Prussians definitely committed war crimes on their way out—”no doubt infuriated at having so little proved themselves victors,” Hugo explains—and killed surrendering French soldiers despite that generally being something honorable militaries don’t do. “Let us punish, since history is ours: old Blücher brought dishonour on himself.”
Noted: do not commit war crimes, because they may be immortalized in classic novels. You think that’ll do it for today’s offenders?
Hugo, ever the biased narrator (this is a man who absolutely vibrated with unsolicited French pride, remember?), waxes poetic for a while about the “ruin of the greatest bravery that has ever amazed history.” Really? I don’t know if that statement is going to hold up with historians, but you do you, Hugo.
Oh, he has more to say. “On that day the prospects of the human race changed. Waterloo is the pivot of the nineteenth century.”
The prospects of the human race. Uh, can someone tell Victor Hugo that there is an entire world out there? The universe does not revolve around France, my guy!
That night, the English caught Napoleon, on his own, walking his horse in the countryside trying to make his way back to Waterloo. A totally ignominious end to your battle, if there ever was one—dude could have taken some advice from General Ney, who knew how to go out.
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