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As we pressed on our road, which, broken by the heavy guns, and ploughed up in many places by the artillery, was nearly impassable, we could distinctly hear from time to time the distant boom of the large guns, as the retiring and pursuing armies replied to each other; while behind us, but still a long way off, a dark mass appeared on the horizon: they were the advancing columns of Ney's Division.
It is a lamentable fact, but no less historical truth, that the Roman Catholic Church has ever sought to make the graves of its enemies the foundations of its power. The Duke of Wellington was never able to approach the King or use his influence to save Marshal Ney's life; but everything he could do was done, in order to accomplish his benevolent views.
He esteems those who staunchly oppose him, and seeks to gain them over by generosity: for those who come over he ever has a secret contempt; for those who desert him, hatred. Doubtless that is why he heard the news of Ney's execution unmoved. Brilliantly brave as the Marshal was, he had abandoned him in 1814, and Louis XVIII. in the Hundred Days.
At Bautzen his timidity ruined Napoleon's combinations; in the campaign of Leipsic he showed himself incapable of independent command; and he cannot be acquitted of hesitation at Quatre Bras. It was in the same circumstances that Ney's courage invariably gave way that Jackson's courage shone with the brightest lustre.
Meanwhile the British guns were not idle; but shot and shell ploughed fast through the ranks of the stately array of veterans that still moved imposingly on. Several of the French superior officers were at its head. Ney's horse was shot under him, but he still led the way on foot, sword in hand. The front of the massive column now was on the ridge of the hill.
Night alone saved Ney's army from complete dissolution: as it was, he lost some 9,000 killed and wounded, 15,000 prisoners along with eighty cannon, and frankly summed up the situation thus to his master: "I have been totally beaten, and still do not know whether my army has reassembled." Ultimately his army assembled and fell back behind the Elbe at Torgau.
When Ney's corps replaced Soult's at Corunna, I had camped the companies of the artillery-train between Betanzos and Corunna, in the midst of four brigades distant from the camp from two to three leagues, and no Spanish forces had been seen within fifty miles; Soult still occupied Santiago de Compostela, the division Maurice-Mathieu was at Ferrol and Lugo, Marchand's at Corunna and Betanzos: nevertheless, one fine night the companies of the train men and horses disappeared, and we were never able to discover what became of them: a solitary wounded corporal escaped to report that the peasants, led by their monks and priests, had thus made away with them.
Wellington had left Brussels that morning at 8 o'clock, and thanks to Ney's inaction, was able to reach the crest south of Quatre Bras a little after 10, long before the enemy showed any signs of life. There he penned a note to Blücher, asking for news from him before deciding on his operations for the day. He then galloped over to the windmill of Bussy to meet Blücher.
He in the steel corselet, with high cheek-bones, ferret, cold eyes, and high, thin nose, its nostrils drawn back in an aristocratic sniff camps were evil-smelling in those days his casquette resting on his arm, was the progenitor of him with the Louis XIV. curls; he of the early nineteenth century, with a face like Marshal Ney's, was the progenitor of him with the mustache and imperial of the sixties.
I have no positive proofs of the fact, but in my opinion Ney's life was a pledge of gratitude which Fouche thought he must offer to the foreign influence which had made him Minister. About this time I learned a fact which will create no surprise, as it affords another proof of the chivalrous disinterestedness of Macdonald's character.
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