Waterloo is the strangest encounter recorded in history; Napoleon and Wellington are not enemies, but contraries.  Never did God, who delights in antitheses, produce a more striking contrast, or a more extraordinary confrontation.  On one side precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, a retreat assured, reserves prepared, an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy profiting by the ground, tactics balancing battalions, carnage measured by a plumb-line, war regulated watch in hand, nothing left voluntarily to accident, old classic courage and absolute correctness.

On the other side we have intuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, a flashing glance; something that gazes like the eagle and strikes like lightning, all the mysteries of a profound mind, associated with destiny; the river, the plain, the forest, and the hill summoned, and, to some extent, compelled to obey; the despot going so far as even to tyrannize over the battlefield; faith in a star, blended with a strategic science, heightening, but troubling it.

Wellington was the Bareme of war, Napoleon was its Michelangelo, and this true genius was conquered by calculation.  On both sides somebody was expected; and it was the exact calculator who succeeded.  Napoleon waited for Grouchy, who did not come; Wellington waited for Bluecher, and he came.

Wellington is the classical war taking its revenge; Bonaparte, in his dawn, had met it in Italy, and superbly defeated it—­the old owl fled before the young vulture.  The old tactics had been not only overthrown, but scandalized.  Who was this Corsican of six-and-twenty years of age?  What meant this splendid ignoramus, who, having everything against him, nothing for him, without provisions, ammunition, guns, shoes, almost without an army, with a handful of men against masses, dashed at allied Europe, and absurdly gained impossible victories?  Who was this new comet of war who possest the effrontery of a planet?

The academic military school excommunicated him, while bolting, and hence arose an implacable rancor of the old Caesarism against the new, of the old saber against the flashing sword, and of the chessboard against genius.  On June 18, 1815, this rancor got the best; and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Marengo, and Arcola, it wrote—­Waterloo.  It was a triumph of mediocrity, sweet to majorities, and destiny consented to this irony.  In his decline, Napoleon found a young Suvarov before him—­in fact, it is only necessary to blanch Wellington’s hair in order to have a Suvarov.  Waterloo is a battle of the first class, gained by a captain of the second.

What must be admired in the battle of Waterloo is England, the English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood, and what England had really superb in it, is (without offense) herself; it is not her captain, but her army.  Wellington, strangely ungrateful, declares in his dispatch to Lord Bathurst that his army, the one which fought on June 18, 1815, was a “detestable army.”