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Updated: June 6, 2025
There on a slight elevation, in the wheatfield of June, sitting on his white horse, with his triangular hat lifted in silent salutation, surrounded by the princes and marshals of his Empire, sits the sardonic somnambulist, while before him on the left the Cuirassiers of the Guard, on their tremendous horses gathered out of Normandy, plunging at full gallop, bearing down through the broken wheat, with buglers in the van and sabers flashing high and bearded mouths wide open with yellings that resound through the world till now, charge wildly, irresistibly onward against the unseen enemy, reckless alike of life and death, but choosing rather death if only the marble face but smile!
His division consisted of the hussars and chasseurs under Kellermann, the cuirassiers of D'Auvergne, and the heavy dragoons of Nansouty, making a force of eight thousand sabres, supported by twenty pieces of field artillery. Again were we ordered to dismount, for although the battle continued to rage on the right, the whole of the centre and left were unengaged.
When cuirassiers break through they serve as examples, and emulation extends to others, who another time try to break through as they did. Why cuirassiers? Because they alone, in all history, have charged and do charge to the end. To charge to the end the cuirassiers need only half the courage of the dragoons, as their armor raises their morale one half.
The weapon of this tremendous militia was an immense club or cane, reaching from the sole of the foot to the nose, and heavily mounted with gold. Nothing could stand before this terrific weapon, and the breast-plates and plumed morions of the French cuirassiers would have been undoubtedly crushed beneath them, had they ever met in mortal combat.
I hear you, replied Pantagruel. By St. Christopher's whiskers, said Friar John, I dare lay a wager that it was because they had formerly engaged Chitterlings, or men as little valued; whom to rout, conquer, and destroy, cooks are without comparison more fit than cuirassiers and gendarmes armed at all points, or all the horse and foot in the world.
But the darkness enabled Napoleon to wheel a division of French infantry on the rear of the Prussians, while a dense body of cuirassiers forced Ligny on the other side, and not till then did Blücher fall back.
The cuirassiers, too, with their low cocked hats, and straight, black feathers, as well as the "Portes Drapeaux," whose brilliant uniforms, all slashed with gold, seemed scarcely in keeping with yellow-topped boots: all were now seen by me for the first time.
A lieutenant of the cuirassiers who had just undergone an amputation was placed in the landau of the Emperor, while he traveled on horseback. This answers every accusation of cruelty so gratuitously made against the memory of a great man who has passed away.
He sat very erect in his saddle, and from the way in which he straightened out his long legs against the sides of his beast, one suspected that he could, if necessary, repeat the Marshal de Saxe's feats of skill. He stopped his horse suddenly at the very spot which the two men had just vacated and called out in a voice which would startle a regiment of cuirassiers: "Here, Lambernier!"
No one could have entered that awful mêlée and faced the bayonet charge of Pelet's cuirassiers and the hail of bullets from their tirailleurs without taking imminent risk of death. Yet Clyffurde had done it. Why? Maurice wide-eyed and sullen could only find one answer to that insistent question.
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