rereading Waterloo and having a lot of feelings as always but beyond my appreciation of how well it's written and all the commentary going on and such, I am just. Struck again by how stupid this, how useless, how wasteful all this empire bullshit is. So many people are dying here, so much material and money being spent, and for what. For WHAT. When the real question at hand (Which Powerful White Guy Will Rule France) could've all been settled with an arm wrestling match between the men in question or ,like, Ninja Warrior.
And I'm not unaware there are Many Issues at Stake in this battle and all battles; some of which of course would not be at stake if there weren't a battle now, but we're not gonna talk about that, obviously. I'm saying it's so pathetic that this has to go down because, basically, a small handful of very powerful people never learned basic toddler social skills enough to avoid this.
What horrid, incompetent people kings and dictators get to be. And for what. ( "all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the traveller: Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will explain to you the affair of Waterloo!" )
Each chapter covers a shorter period of time and becomes increasingly detailed, with more names introduced by Hugo. He is obviously carried away. At this point, the situation appears grim for the English and their allies. Wellington's response to Lord Hills' purported question, "My lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?" with "To do like me," is quite emblematic given the circumstances.
Another point that caught my attention—intertwining of plants and arms: “All about the plateau the English had cut the hedges here and there, made embrasures in the hawthorn-trees, thrust the throat of a cannon between two branches, embattled the shrubs. There artillery was ambushed in the brushwood.” This is so unnatural, yet not uncommon during the war.
The chapter concludes on an optimistic for the French note, yet this is not the end of the story.
Waterloo may be a digression, but Hugo’s giving it the feeling of having a plot by focusing on specific “characters” in this chapter. He still holds to his point on the overall chaos of battle by switching rapidly between them; the first paragraph alone covers various men and battalions, most of whom die suddenly within that very paragraph after being introduced. In addition to the randomness conveyed by this rapidity, Hugo specifies the unexpected ways in which many of them were killed as well. To offer just one example:
“A sergeant of the English Guards, the foremost boxer in England, reputed invulnerable by his companions, had been killed there by a little French drummer-boy.”
The “invulnerable” is suddenly killed at the hands of one who appears weak; experience and strength only offer so much protection against this form of carnage.
This section honestly feels like parts of Homer’s Iliad (as well as the mythology around it). The “weak” killing someone “invulnerable” resembles Paris taking down Achilles after the events of the epic and towards the end of the Trojan War. Similarly, the “listing” of deaths is common in several books of the Iliad where the focus is less on the feats of individual characters than the totality of the war itself, with many of the fallen characters being given a brief description of their deaths at most. Some examples from this chapter are:
“ Baring had been dislodged, Alten put to the sword.”
“ out of three lieutenant-colonels, two lay on the earth,— Hamilton wounded, Mater slain. Ponsonby had fallen, riddled by seven lance-thrusts.”
And here’s an example from Butler’s translation of Book XV of the Iliad:
“ Hector killed Stichius and Arcesilaus, the one, leader of the Boeotians, and the other, friend and comrade of Menestheus. Aeneas killed Medon and Iasus. The first was bastard son to Oileus, and brother to Ajax, but he lived in Phylace away from his own country, for he had killed a man, a kinsman of his stepmother Eriopis whom Oileus had married. Iasus had become a leader of the Athenians, and was son of Sphelus the son of Boucolos. Polydamas killed Mecisteus, and Polites Echius, in the front of the battle, while Agenor slew Clonius. Paris struck Deiochus from behind in the lower part of the shoulder, as he was flying among the foremost, and the point of the spear went clean through him.”
There’s a similar trend of giving quick lists of deaths, with occasional background (”lieutenant-colonels” vs “leader of the Boeotians”) or information on how they died (”seven lance-thrusts,” “point of the spear”). Overall, it’s quite gruesome and monotonous, making the battle as a whole feel senseless, gory, and dull in contrast to the “heroic” exploits of individuals, who are praised for participating in this same activity because they’re somehow considered distinctive (like Napoleon and Wellington here or any of the major Greek or Trojan heroes in the epic poem).
As in the rest of the epic, some characters are given moments of “glory” that highlight their courage and/or strength. In this chapter, Wellington stays standing in the middle of a rain of bullets even as his aide dies by his side, not flinching in the face of the French forces. While this certainly adds to the drama of the chapter, it also glorifies Wellington to an extent (which, of course, further raises the tension).
Spoilers below:
It’s notable that Hugo doesn’t only use this language for Waterloo; he takes this same approach to describe the deaths of most of Les Amis. He even makes the comparison explicit, quoting the Iliad immediately after they die. And of course, where Enjolras goes, classical metaphors will soon follow. He was the only one not wounded (suggesting invulnerability, like Achilles), and he’s also called “Apollo” (a deity) before he dies. Hugo certainly wants the reader to view their cause as glorious (hence the descriptions of Enjolras), but he also wants to underscore the pain and senselessness involved in any form of battle. It’s less “battle is awful and should be avoided at all costs” and more “we should live in a better world where les Amis wouldn’t have died like this, fighting for basic human dignity.”
LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - Four O'Clock in the Afternoon, LM 2.1.6 (I miserabili 1964)
Wellington was coldly heroic. The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell at his side. Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him: “My lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?” “To do like me,” replied Wellington.
This is another one of those explications of a moment, just like the chapter after Javert walks into Fantine’s sick room. No time passes, but we learn the necessary details of where we are and how we got here. We learn it’s four o’clock in the title and the first line--if Hugo really does foreshadow disaster with the numbers four and eight, that’s an ominous repetition--and then we get a run-down of how the English side is doing before hearing again that it’s four o’clock and Napoleon believes himself to have won.
It makes me think a lot about Javert as Napoleon, seeing himself victorious in precisely the moment of his doom. Javert’s arrogance and false triumph in that scene is exactly where Napoleon is right now.
While Valjean’s life parallels Napoleon’s, Javert may be the character who gets compared to him most directly. As @fremedon has pointed out, his initial descriptions have been Napoleon-free so far, but when we reach Javert Derailed (Rose because I have it to hand):
Until that day, Javert had only ever adopted, of Napoléon’s two poses, the one that expresses resolution, arms folded over the chest; the one that expresses uncertainty, hands behind the back, was unknown to him.
And that will be the final Napoleon mention in the text.
Javert and Napoleon share a lot--but only in their downfalls. I’m looking forward to seeing where that idea goes. I recall some images of a lost and baffled Napoleon coming up that will be interesting to compare to Javert.
The description of the English feels--bizarrely--like a cross between the year 1817 and the deaths of the Amis. It’s a lot of low-context information coming at us all at once, and no one in the list of deaths and woundings has shown up in this text before. If you really were contemporary with Hugo it would probably have meant a little to you, but it’s meant to be unemotional, I think. If nothing else--they’re English. But that plain structure of “So and so killed” is one we’ll emphatically see again. Only next time, Hugo will have set it up so we’re all fucking murdered by it.
The other thing that really strikes me in this chapter is the co-opting of flowers and gardens for war. There are guns hidden in the hawthorns, garden walls used as barricades. Gardens are a metaphor for growth and abundance in this story--everybody needs a garden, everything good is compared to flowers and gardens. But this garden is a trap. I don’t know whether I should be thinking of Cosette right now--the rose discovering that she’s an engine of war feels a lot less like literal roses and literal war, but it’s not like Hugo said it by accident. Most of what I get here is about the cruelty of war. It’s good strategy, it works, and Hugo often laments the exigencies of battle without condemning them--but I think there’s meant to be something tragic in this.
When the Amis fight, there will be flowers juxtaposed again: the most beautiful and riotous spring in the text, and also Cosette’s youth, innocence, and beauty if you take that interposed Cosette chapter in terms of the effect Hugo was going for instead of the (horrible, creeepy, ugghhh I hate that chapter) one he created.
And at that later moment, no flowers will be harmed by the war.* The garden will feed not only the birds and bees but two hungry children, and Cosette will wake up at peace. Once again, we see in Waterloo the same images as at the barricade, but the barricade will rectify them.
