Picturing a real battle

Victor Hugo's Les Miserábles can be quite exhausting sometimes. Very detailed descriptions of things unrelated to what we think is the story is a little challenging even to experienced readers. But it is at some of those passages of the book that Victor Hugo makes us picture one of the most famous battles of the world: the battle of Waterloo. 

The passage read below introduces us to what a real battle is with all its nuances. Enjoy it.

Whatever the calculations of the generals, the clash of armed masses has unpredictable repercussions; each commander's plan shapes and distorts that of the other. One sector of the battlefield swallows up more combatants than another, just as water drains away more or less rapidly according to the nature of the soil. More men have to be sent to a particular point than wad originally intended, the line writhes and wavers like a thread blowing in the wind. There is no logic in the flow of blood; the army fronts are like waves on the seashore, advancing and retreating regiments forming bays and headlands, impermanent as shifting sand. Where there was infantry, artillery appears; artillery is replaced by cavalry; battalions are like puffs of smoke. At a given place there was a given object: look for it again and it is gone. The light shifts, the dark patches advance and retreat, a graveyard wind blows, driving and scattering the tragic multitude of men. All is movement and oscillation. The immobility of a mathematical plan or diagram may present a moment but never a day. To depict a battle we need a painter with chaos in his brush. Rembrandt is better than Van der Meulen; he who was accurate at noon is a liar by three o'clock. Geometry is misleading; only the tempest is true. And there comes a stage in every battle when it degenerates into hand-to-hand combat, dissolves in fragments, innumerable separate episodes concerning which Napoleon himself said that they belong more to regimental records than to the history of an army. Thus the historian has a right to summarize. He can do no more than grasp the broad line. No narrator, be he never so conscientious, can fix the exact shape of that ugly cloud that is called a battle.

This, which is true of all great clashes between armies, applies particularly to Waterloo. Nevertheless there came a point, during the afternoon, when the shape of the battle was defined.

(HUGO, Victor. Les Miserábles. London: Penguin Group, 2013. p. 291.) *First published in 1862.