Les Misérables Volume 2, Chapter 10 Summary

Summary

The chapter describes the terrible cavalry struggle on the plateau of Mont‑Saint‑Jean during the battle. At dawn the French cuirassiers, led in part by General Delort and columns including Wathier’s and Ney’s, charge the English squares and artillery. The attack is violent and chaotic: horses rear and fall among bayonets, grape-shot tears through ranks, and the Highlanders play on while dying. The cuirassiers achieve repeated breakthroughs, spike guns, and capture flags, but the English squares repeatedly close and hold, producing a monstrous combat where cavalry and infantry alternately prevail. Fuller, Somerset and other cavalry leaders fall; Ney rides amid the fray with multiple horses killed beneath him. The plateau is taken and retaken; the struggle lasts about two hours and leaves enormous losses on both sides.

As the fighting grinds on, the English army shows signs of collapse: wagons and wounded flee toward Brussels, cavalry is exhausted or routed, and senior officers are wounded or killed. Wellington, though his situation grows desperate, remains outwardly calm and utters the worried words, “Blücher, or night!” Napoleon and Ney both call for infantry reinforcements they cannot provide, which underlines the exhausted state of both armies. Eyewitness testimony and casualty details—regimental losses, officers killed or wounded, and the discovery of a cuirassier and his horse dead at a crossroads—convey the human cost. The chapter ends with the arrival of a distant line of bayonets on the heights toward Frischemont, a development that shifts the momentum of the gigantic, bloodied duel.

Key events

1. French cuirassiers launch a furious charge against English squares and batteries.
2. Hand‑to‑hand slaughter: horses leap bayonets, grape‑shot explodes, squares close again and again.
3. Cuirassiers spike guns, capture flags, and the plateau is captured, recaptured, and held in deadly contest.
4. Both armies suffer massive officer and troop losses; English columns and wagons begin to rout toward Brussels.
5. Wellington, sensing danger, murmurs “Blücher, or night!” as distant bayonets gleam on the heights.

Analysis

This chapter functions as a concentrated set piece that dramatizes Napoleonic warfare’s physical horror and the thin margin between victory and disaster. Hugo focuses tightly on the cuirassiers’ fury and the English infantry’s discipline, using stark bodily imagery—horses impaled, men ground to dust—to highlight combat’s dehumanizing force. The contrast between the almost mythic bravery of the French heavy cavalry and the immovable steadiness of the English squares advances themes of valor, sacrifice, and the randomness of fate in battle. Structurally, the episode serves as the climactic centerpiece of the larger engagement: it suspends narrative judgment by alternating moments that favor each side and closes on a portentous external change (bayonets on the heights), preserving suspense.

Narratively, Hugo shifts from panoramic description to intimate details—individual names, the bagpipe player, a found cuirassier’s corpse—to humanize mass slaughter and ground grand strategy in personal cost. Repetition and explosive verbs convey momentum and chaos; metaphors (volcanoes, storms, craters) elevate the scene to epic scale while maintaining precise tactical notes (regiment numbers, commanders). The chapter also foreshadows the critical importance of infantry reinforcements and reserves, emphasizing how exhaustion and missed opportunities—Napoleon’s inability to supply infantry—shape outcomes. Lastly, the passage interrogates glory and ruin together: acts hailed as sublime are simultaneously catastrophic.

Important quotes

“There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man until the soldier is changed into a statue, and when all this flesh turns into granite.”

NarratorDescribes the terrifying, almost superhuman steadiness and ferocity soldiers attain in the heat of close combat.

“The plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again.”

NarratorSummarizes the chaotic back-and-forth struggle for control of the key ground that defines the chapter.

“Blücher, or night!”

WellingtonWellington’s grim whisper that reveals his sense of crisis and the army’s desperate need for relief at a critical hour.

Characters in Volume 2, Chapter 10

• General Delort
• Wathier
• Ney
• Fuller
• Somerset
• Dornberg
• Trip
• Dehaze
• Wellington
• Clinton
• Kempt
• Napoleon
• Alten
• Van Kluze
• Lord Uxbridge
• l’Héritier
• Colbert
• Dnop
• Travers
• Blancard
• Barne
• Delancey
• Van Meeren
• Ompteda
• Colonel Hacke
• Prince de Condé
• Louis XVIII
• Vivian
• Vandeleur
• Vincent
• Alava
• Siborne
• Pringle
• Blücher