Waterloo, 1815. 3eme Cuirassiers, first cohort.
Mid-day, June 18th. The muggy June sun beat down on the 3eme Cuirassier division; their horses tossing their heads in impatience. Colonel Jean-Guillaume Lacroix, the division's leader, was only 37, but looked 57 thanks to several years of hard campaigning in Russia. He scanned the battlefield with a weary eye, each and every battle he had been in going through his mind. Under his steel armor, his heart and stomach fluttered most distressingly; he had had this feeling ever since the 100 Days had begun, but attempted to drown it in wine and willing wenches. Today, it refused to be quieted.
The roar of cannon rumbled across the field, as the light cavalry and infantry engaged the enemy at La Haye Sainte; the shouts of the men and the iron tang of blood permeating the stagnant Summer air. The horse's hooves squelched in the sticky reddish mud, and Lacroix silently wished Le Tondu had waited another day for the terrain to dry out.
A shout down the line jolted him out of his reverie and he looked in its direction. A broad, but lanky, cuirassier colonel was coming to him at the trot, his blood bay gelding already foaming around his breastplate; Colonel Louis-Stanislas Grandjean, his old friend and commander of the 2eme Cuirassiers.
"Ehe, Lacroix! Le Rougeaud is starting to become antsy - and that bastard Soult is no Berthier! Expect some warm work in about a quarter hour!" said the man as he reined his horse in.
"Lesemajestie, Grosjean! If that old robber hears you say that, he'll steal you blind!" laughed Lacroix as his heart did three, distinct, somersaults in his chest at the mention of "warm work" - he knew what that meant. A barely controlled stampede, wasting men and horses on formed squares, shrapnel singing in the air - why was it bothering him so much today? He could not shake his black mood.
"Somethin eatin you, Colonel?" asked Grandjean, leaning in his saddle towards his oldest friend.
"Ever get the feeling this is your last day on earth?" asked Lacroix.
"Yep. Today's it, I can feel it. As long as my death earns Le Tondu a victory, so be it." said Grandjean, thumping his steel armor with his fist.
The trumpets rang out their throaty call and Grandjean took his friend's hand in his.
"Until we meet again, Gilles."
Lacroix nodded his head, unable to form a response around the lump in his throat. He spun his mount around as Grandjean pounded back to the head of his column and barked his order to begin the charge.
He saw old Marshal Ney in the lead on his giant black Norman steed, slashing the air with his sabre as he rode along the divisions, the generals and worried ADCs following him. Ney had been a loose cannon since he promised fat King Louis to bring the Ogre back in a cage - and a man that was a loose cannon in combat was a liability, Lacroix thought, without rancor; we are all seeking our death here, as the Empire breathes her last. "Sabre au Clair!" the command came, and the grating sound of hundreds of sabres leaving their scabbards rolled down the line, muffled slightly by the roar of battle. The trumpeters blared the au pas, and as a unit, the men began to move - the slow, inexorable march to their inevitable ruin. The trumpets called again, and the horses stirred into the trot, the "chulk chulk chulk" of their sheaths the low undercurrent to the thudding of hooves on the ground, the rattle of sabre on iron cuirass, the jangle of spur and tack. The men continued on their way, the lines beginning to get wavy as the horses, sensing the charge to come, either surged forward or pulled back, heads tossing either way. The trumpet rang out a final time - the command "au galop" - and with a lurch, the great armored divisions of giant men on giant horses came forth against the squares in a final, desperate wave, the ground shaking with their approach, the screams of men and horses rending the air. The rattle of musketballs on steel sounded to Lacroix very much like hail on a tin roof, punctuated with an occasional crack as a ball found bone.
A musketball whizzed by his ear, severing the chinstrap that held his casque in place; it fell off at the next leap his crop-eared bay mount made (the poor bugger had survived Russia, but lost the tips of his ears in the process to frostbite) and tumbled to the ground, to be crushed under the iron-shod hooves of his troops. Angry at its loss (that was a new blasted plume!) he slashed left and right at the red-coated troops as they ran for the hills, attempting to form square.
As the barely controlled charge mounted the hill, Lacroix felt a curious tingle in the air, followed by what he thought felt like someone punching him in the head. He spurred his horse forward into the square, made mad with the pain, slashing left and right, clearing the square, the only man in his division to do so, taking wounds as he went. Curiously, the event seemed to happen in slow-motion to him. His hands lost their ability to hold the sabre, the reins, and with a muffled thud, he hit the ground as his mount continued to run head-long into the British lines before veering off into the brush. Momentarily, he regained the use of his arms and his head started to ache. He reflexively put his gloved hand on it, wincing as a white-hot lancet of pain shot through him. He dropped his hand and stared at it in horror as a very distinct blob of pinkish-gray matter clinging to bloody bone and hair stuck to his glove.
Lacroix attempted to rise to his feet in the melee, but was unable to due to the slippery nature of the mud and the plain and simple fact that any movement caused him extreme dizziness and nausea. Through dimming vision, he saw the battle rage around him, some of the more daring medical staff rushing hither and tither, checking bodies. He saw one approach him, but was unable to form words as the man asked him several questions. The man rushed off and returned with two more men and a stretcher. They stripped Lacroix of his armor and gently lifted him onto the canvas, returning at a quick, jolting trot to the surgeon's tent waiting just outside of the range of the cannon. For him, the battle was over. Mercifully, as the surgeon probed the area of injury, Lacroix fainted. He faded in and out of consciousness during the retreat to Paris and the subsequent return to his home. Infection and fever settled in and 12 days later, on June 30th, in the humid dawn hours, on 7 Rue de Beaune, he uttered his last and final words, if the legend was true: "Mes amis, Combattez pour la France, pour la Patrie, si j'ai toujours a la tete."
The dying throes of the Empire were finished not long after, with many tales to be told by men who had never experienced it, at a much later date, when an exiled Emperor's body came home to the banks of the Seine, and further into the future, when it was just a memory, an event committed to film, to literature and eventually - to men and women replaying it for future generations to remember what had passed in that fatal field in Belgium - a field that had seen wars since time immemorial and was rarely silent when the crowds had gone home, and it was nothing but the mist and the moonlight above. "Come, see how a Marshal of France dies!" "La garde meurt et ne se rend pas!" "Merde!" Phrases echoing across time, becoming legend - a legend we remember today, and honor those on all sides who were there.
