Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

I was beginning to understand the Old Man’s obsession with Napoleon and Waterloo. For a long while, it had seemed little more than another of his passing, erratic distractions, his characteristic way of not thinking about a thing that pained him, a practice that he was periodically inclined to indulge in, especially in times of stress, usually financial. Sometimes familial, of course. Sometimes political. But these wayward interests of his rarely lasted longer than the particular period of stressfulness, and as soon as the pressures on him eased a little, as they always did, he would return to his two great, permanent, ongoing obsessions — religion and the war against slavery.

This interest in Napoleon and Waterloo, however, had lasted longer than it should have. His expectations of financial success in the English wool market were now realistic, it seemed, and the pressures ought to have lifted. For the first time in years, he could think about wool and money without wincing in pain, which should have brought him straight back to slavery and religion. He did not have to think any longer about Napoleon — the greatest man of the century to most people, even to most Americans, but to John Brown, one would have thought, an evil genius, a small Corsican puffed up with delusions of imperial grandeur, a man whose vanity and shocking ambition had been responsible for the death and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of men at arms and the permanent impoverishment of millions of civilians. Father had no love for Caesar, and even less for those who, like Napoleon, wished to emulate him, no matter how brilliantly they waged war or how much adored they were by their followers.

That very morning, before leaving for the battlefield, I had asked him directly what was so wonderfully attractive about Napoleon. We were eating our breakfast, smoked fish and bread and cheese and rich, creamy milk — how clearly I remember that rough, fresh Flemish food! We were seated at a bench-like table in a roadside tavern a short ways outside the bustling, large market-town of Brussels, where, on our arrival late the night before, we had taken lodgings. We spoke no French, of course, nor any other European language, so Father had compensated by much pointing and by shouting in very slow English to the waiters, station attendants, and hotelkeepers, as if they themselves spoke English but did it badly and were hard of hearing. He managed to make himself understood, however, but only because our wants and needs were simple and obvious.

“I know that Napoleon’s an important man,” I said to him, “especially here, to the Europeans. But really, Father, what’s he to us Americans, except a sort of cynical, power-hungry humbugger? In a democracy, a man like that would be successful only on the stage, or he’d be put in prison early.”

Father laughed. “Or hed run for senator from New York. And probably win it, too.”

“I’m serious. Why do you admire him so?”

“Admire him, Owen? I loathe him! However brilliant a military man he was, he was nevertheless an atheistic monster, an egotistical dictator of the first rank. When he was finally declared dead on his little island of Saint Helena, while all over the world people wept, I cheered.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Well, to put it simply, I want to understand why he lost. And this one battle made all the difference.” It was Bonaparte’s hundred days’ march, Father explained, his final, mad plunge back into Europe from Elba, that intrigued him. Not that he was so successful, storming back from exile the way he did. Father said he would have expected that. It was a supremely intelligent move, with predictable results, once he made it. Except for his loss at Waterloo — that was not predictable. No, what intrigued and puzzled Father was that after such a success, which shocked and terrified all of Europe, in the end Napoleon failed. For future reference, Father explained, he wanted to know if Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was due to a tactical blunder or to the superiority of Wellington and Blikher, the Prussian. Or did his own generals, the Frenchmen Ney and Grouchy, betray him? No evidence for that. Was it cowardice? Not likely. Too much caution? Highly unlikely. Too little? Perhaps. Regardless, it was important to know.

“You expect to learn that,” I said, “here, now… what is it? Nearly forty years after the event?”

“Ah, my boy, sometimes you can only smell out these things in person. When you walk the very ground of the history you’re investigating, when you sniff the air, check the light, glance sideways and over your shoulder, when you pick up a handful of the dirt and crumble it between your fingers, you can learn things that no history book can ever teach.” Besides, he pointed out, the English historians all want to celebrate Wellington, so they tell that version of the story, and the Prussians are touting Blücher, and the French are intent on selling everyone on either Napoleon’s grandeur or the legitimacy of Louis XVIII. The Old Man frankly didn’t care who or what was won or lost here. “I’m an American” he said. “I want only to know why he failed.”

“Yes,” I said, “but why do you need to know this? What’s it got to do with your plans?”

It was those one hundred days, he explained. One hundred days — from Napoleon’s unexpected departure with a half-dozen faithful lieutenants from the island of Elba, where he’d been exiled, to his arrival here at Waterloo three months later with a quarter-million armed men at his command. “That’s what it’s got to do with my plans,” he said, smiling, and he got up from our table and made for the door. “Let’s get going, son!” he called. “We don’t have a hundred days. As you said. We’ve only got this one!”

The battlefield was a huge, rolling, hillocky expanse of low grass, like an enormous cemetery without markers, criss-crossed by soft, overgrown ditches and low ridges and bordered in the distance by a dark line of yew trees, with squared-off, small fields beyond, where local farmers in blue smocks and short spades made the fall turning of their soil by hand. When we first arrived at the battlefield, the dew was barely off the grass, and I followed the Old Man from site to site, while he counted off steps, as if he were surveying the land and I were his assistant lugging the chain. Marking the advances and retreats, first of Wellington’s forces and the Flemish infantry, then those of his Prussian counterpart, General Blücher, and the several French armies, Father seemed to have memorized the battlemaps, for he knew the exact positions of all the armies that had met here that June day in 1815, and he walked straight to them and paced off the distances between their lines.

“The ground all along here” he said, “where it slopes down to the plain, there, was soppy and wet. Yes, yes,” he said, squinting down the field. On the night of the seventeenth, when Bonaparte arrived from Ligny, the Old Man explained, the ground was soft from two days and nights of rain, and then it stopped raining, and he waited until eleven the next morning. Up on the heights there, he said, pointing. Then, before marching against the Belgians and the Dutch, he waited for the ground to dry. That was important, the Old Man said — said to himself, actually, not to me. That was a crucial delay. It gave Wellington time to dig in on the opposite heights, Mont St. jean they called it, barely a hill, but a good redoubt, if Wellington was given the time to fortify it.

Father strode abruptly down the long, grassy slope, to check the soil, I assumed, so as to determine how muddy it must have been at eleven A.M. on June 18,1815, while I lagged behind and watched from the ridge. The sun had risen to above the hilltops behind us, and the day was growing hot, the air heavy with moisture. Making my way across the vast expanse of the battlefield, I came in a short while to a low grove of trees where a narrow stream wandered through. Here I took a seat in the shade beneath the trees, removed my hat, and leaned back against the friendly trunk of one and watched Father off in the distance, as he marched straight-legged uphill and down, counting out the paces, then stopped, peered around, touched the soil, scratched his chin, and, pondering for a moment, turned on his heels and marched off in a new direction, casting himself first as the entire army of one side and, a few minutes later, turning himself into the army of the other.