[These short essays are the preface and closure which I wrote in March of 2001 to accompany a formatted section of Hugo's 1862 masterpiece Les Miserables, which has haunted me ever since I read it in high school. It is hoped that these remarks will have their intended effect of inspiring readers to venture within and read the entire exerpt, which is available as a separate PDF file, linked at the end of the article.]

Editor’s Note 

The suspenseful story of the virtuous fugitive Jean Valjean and his mortal adversary Inspector Javert is famous from almost a century of dramatic adaptations. Yet how many of those who know ‘Les Mis’ realize that at the heart of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece lies one of the most wrenching historical accounts of warfare ever written? For at the center of his tale lies the battle that has given its name to that defeat from which there can be no recovering: the tragedy of errors, arrogance and geography that was Waterloo. And though it is a cliché, it may truly be said that these passages ‘bring the past to life’ — though only to die before our eyes in scenes of shocking brutality and heartbreaking irony.

The section comprising the first nineteen chapters of the second book of Les Miserables is not a history, in the sense of being an exhaustive and minutely detailed account of the battle; nor does it devote itself to considering the differing opinions and conflicting reports of eyewitnesses and experts in an effort to map out what the course of occurrences and causes most accurately was. Rather, it is a meditation on one apocalyptic day, considering it both as a fulcrum of human history, and as a purely human catastrophe, focusing on the epochal nature of the event as well as the appalling tragedy of individuals, to the exclusion of neither.

By writing in his own voice as a person walking the field a generation after the crisis, picking up spent bullets where unexploded shells were still found, pointing out that ‘progress’ has destroyed much of the historical structure of the battleground, and speaking to neighbors who remembered the events from their youth, Hugo lifts the final moments first world-wide war of our era (it touched every continent except Antarctica and Australia, ushered in a systemization and mechanization of warfare that had not been seen since the Roman legions, and left geopolitical fault lines which still actively shake the foundations of society) from a blank of memory, an ignorance too absolute even to be classed as ‘boring dusty history’, into a flashing panorama as vivid and terrible as Glory or Saving Private Ryan.

To those who doubt, I ask only that you read the first two chapters of the following excerpt, and see if the horrors of the morning orchard do not impel you to read on until the blood overflows the highway into the trees at the close of that summer day. You do not have to accept Hugo’s analysis of cosmic forces at work in human destiny to appreciate his portrayal of the  ‘artificially-created hells’ he hoped to hasten to an end by his writings.

A few comments on this excerpt are in order. It comprises the first section (entitled ‘Waterloo,’) of the second volume (‘Cosette’) of Les Miserables, and is taken from the Project Gutenberg edition, scanned and transcribed by Judith Boss, from the translation by Isabel F. Hapgood, with a few modifications which I will detail as follows. First of all, I have footnoted some obscure references, while leaving the majority of names for the interested to research in a comprehensive work on the Napoleonic Era. Additionally, I have distinguished those footnotes which are in the original text from my additions by numbering the former category, and indicating the latter with daggers. (†‡)

Secondly I have made a few corrections of usage, changing spellings which are outdated (e.g., to-morrow into tomorrow, Michaelangelo for Michael Angelo) and formulae which are incorrect or nonstandard (e.g. Scots for Scotch and the sunken road for the hollow road) and altered some punctuation for the sake of clarity. Otherwise, with one exception, I have left the text strictly alone, not modernizing stylistic usage nor Americanizing spellings.

The exception is a single word which, in some editions of the original text, was replaced with a dash. In the interests of historical accuracy as well as drama, I have replaced it with the actual word, both in the original and in its translation. You will understand when you get there.

In conclusion, I welcome you to one of the hidden gems of modern literature. Consider this: as Hugo was putting the mind-numbing statistics of Waterloo into the inescapable particulars of the well of skeletons, the Highlanders’ hollow square, and above all, the sunken road of Ohain — the armies of the next great superpower were already engaged in a progress that would end in less than three years where another sunken road traversed a small parcel of farmland in Pennsylvania. 

The parallels between Gettysburg and Waterloo are somewhat shocking; what is perhaps worse is the fact that so many of the same military errors were made, and continue to be made, into the present. Technological warfare, technology itself, cannot in itself overcome the brute facts of the physical universe and human psychology: all the information in the world is useless if we choose to ignore it, and a vast army with the might of a nation behind it may rise or fall on the simple fact that rain plus earth equals mud. 

Nor can it overcome the heartbreaking reality of human valor, which in defeat is no less awe-inspiring than in victory, whether it be French, German, Scots or English, Virginian or Mainer. For in the end, no matter who wins or loses the battle, the war, the economic contest — History defeats us all, and Time has the last laugh at empires. 
 
 

Afterword

The story now returns to the chronicles of Jean Valjean and those whose lives entangle with his for good or ill. Yet this interlude is no mere diversion, nor expository ‘info-dump’ inserted into the text without any real integration. For in Hugo’s assessment, as in Faulkner’s, the human world is not a stream in which events follow one after the other, and whose effects are ended once the moment is over. Rather, history is life, and stories involuted rather than linear, events and causes enfolded in the revelation of years gone by, and influences sometimes good, but more often ill, inherited from past deeds and misjudgments.

Social justice is Hugo’s overriding concern as a person, above and beyond his artistic concerns, as for Dickens; the brutality and grim tragedy depicted in Les Miserables’ chronicle of child prostitution, exploitation of the defenseless, substance abuse and governmental wrongdoing give the lie to any of our illusions that ‘the past’ was a gentler, simpler era than today. The problems of history are our problems, because there is only a continuum in this space-time we inhabit, and we work with what we’ve been given. 

From Waterloo in less than a lifetime comes Alsace-Lorraine; from 1870 the landslide to 1914 begins; from the avalanche's end in the bloody mud of Verdun and the ‘dismemberment’ of Versailles it is a short road to the beaches of Dunkirk and the savagery of Anzio. And, though history is no exact science, but a forensic reconstruction at best, the patient individual could undoubtedly trace the catastrophes of the Balkans and Central America back, not merely to the 18th century with its dual rise of imperialism and revolution, but even back to the gates of Rome and Babylon. The track of the past leads directly to where we stand today.

The first book of the second volume of Les Miserables should also dispel any delusion that war was less barbaric in bygone days. That, together with its ‘frightful beauties’ is the same as it has been for all of recorded history, and longer; it is Hugo’s honesty in depicting both which gives these passages their haunting power. For so long as we, the populace of earth, remain ‘that food for cannon which is so fond of the cannoneer,’ his depiction of the Battle of Waterloo will also remain relevant.
 

‘Waterloo’ by Victor Hugo (PDF file, 375k)