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<h2> CHAPTER XIV—THE LAST SQUARE </h2>
<p>Several squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream of the defeat,
as rocks in running water, held their own until night. Night came, death
also; they awaited that double shadow, and, invincible, allowed themselves
to be enveloped therein. Each regiment, isolated from the rest, and having
no bond with the army, now shattered in every part, died alone. They had
taken up position for this final action, some on the heights of Rossomme,
others on the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean. There, abandoned, vanquished,
terrible, those gloomy squares endured their death-throes in formidable
fashion. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland, died with them.</p>
<p>At twilight, towards nine o'clock in the evening, one of them was left at
the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. In that fatal valley, at the
foot of that declivity which the cuirassiers had ascended, now inundated
by the masses of the English, under the converging fires of the victorious
hostile cavalry, under a frightful density of projectiles, this square
fought on. It was commanded by an obscure officer named Cambronne. At each
discharge, the square diminished and replied. It replied to the grape-shot
with a fusillade, continually contracting its four walls. The fugitives
pausing breathless for a moment in the distance, listened in the darkness
to that gloomy and ever-decreasing thunder.</p>
<p>When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left of
their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone, were no
longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger than the
group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors, around those men
dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English artillery,
taking breath, became silent. This furnished a sort of respite. These
combatants had around them something in the nature of a swarm of spectres,
silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profiles of cannon, the white
sky viewed through wheels and gun-carriages, the colossal death's-head,
which the heroes saw constantly through the smoke, in the depths of the
battle, advanced upon them and gazed at them. Through the shades of
twilight they could hear the pieces being loaded; the matches all lighted,
like the eyes of tigers at night, formed a circle round their heads; all
the lintstocks of the English batteries approached the cannons, and then,
with emotion, holding the supreme moment suspended above these men, an
English general, Colville according to some, Maitland according to others,
shouted to them, "Surrender, brave Frenchmen!" Cambronne replied, "——-."</p>
<p>{EDITOR'S COMMENTARY: Another edition of this book has the word "Merde!"
in lieu of the ——- above.}</p>
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