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FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
Towards four o'clock the condition of the English army was
serious. The Prince of Orange was in command of the centre, Hill
of the right wing, Picton of the left wing.
The Prince of Orange, desperate and intrepid, shouted to the
Hollando-Belgians: "Nassau! Brunswick!
Never retreat!"
Hill, having been weakened, had come up to the support of
Wellington; Picton was dead.
At the very moment when the English had captured from the
French the flag of the 105th of the line, the French had killed
the English general, Picton, with a bullet through the head.
The battle had, for Wellington, two bases of action, Hougomont
and La Haie-Sainte; Hougomont still held out, but was on fire;
La Haie-Sainte was taken.
Of the German battalion which defended it, only forty-two
men survived; all the officers, except five, were either dead
or captured.
Three thousand combatants had been massacred in that barn.
A sergeant of the English Guards, the foremost boxer in England,
reputed invulnerable by his companions, had been killed there
by a little French drummer-boy. Baring had been dislodged, Alten
put to the sword.
Many flags had been lost, one from Alten's division, and one
from the battalion of Lunenburg, carried by a prince of the house
of Deux-Ponts. The Scotch Grays no longer existed; Ponsonby's
great dragoons had been hacked to pieces. That valiant cavalry
had bent beneath the lancers of Bro and beneath the cuirassiers
of Travers; out of twelve hundred horses, six hundred remained;
out of three lieutenant-colonels, two lay on the earth,--Hamilton
wounded, Mater slain.
Ponsonby had fallen, riddled by seven lance-thrusts. Gordon
was dead.
Marsh was dead. Two divisions, the fifth and the sixth, had
been annihilated.
Hougomont injured, La Haie-Sainte taken, there now existed
but one rallying-point, the centre.
That point still held firm. Wellington reinforced it.
He summoned thither Hill, who was at Merle-Braine; he summoned
Chasse, who was at Braine-l'Alleud.
The centre of the English army, rather concave, very dense,
and very compact, was strongly posted.
It occupied the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, having behind
it the village, and in front of it the slope, which was tolerably
steep then.
It rested on that stout stone dwelling which at that time
belonged to the domain of Nivelles, and which marks the intersection
of the roads--a pile of the sixteenth century, and so robust that
the cannon-balls rebounded from it without injuring it.
All about the plateau the English had cut the hedges here
and there, made embrasures in the hawthorn-trees, thrust the throat
of a cannon between two branches, embattled the shrubs. There
artillery was ambushed in the brushwood.
This punic labor, incontestably authorized by war, which permits
traps, was so well done, that Haxo, who had been despatched by
the Emperor at nine o'clock in the morning to reconnoitre the
enemy's batteries, had discovered nothing of it, and had returned
and reported to Napoleon that there were no obstacles except the
two barricades which barred the road to Nivelles and to Genappe.
It was at the season when the grain is tall; on the edge of
the plateau a battalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th, armed with
carabines, was concealed in the tall wheat.
Thus assured and buttressed, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch
army was well posted.
The peril of this position lay in the forest of Soignes, then
adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds of
Groenendael and Boitsfort.
An army could not retreat thither without dissolving; the
regiments would have broken up immediately there. The artillery
would have been lost among the morasses.
The retreat, according to many a man versed in the art,--though
it is disputed by others,--would have been a disorganized flight.
To this centre, Wellington added one of Chasse's brigades
taken from the right wing, and one of Wincke's brigades taken
from the left wing, plus Clinton's division.
To his English, to the regiments of Halkett, to the brigades
of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave as reinforcements
and aids, the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau's contingent, Kielmansegg's
Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans.
This placed twenty-six battalions under his hand. The right
wing, as Charras says, was thrown back on the centre. An enormous
battery was masked by sacks of earth at the spot where there now
stands what is called the "Museum of Waterloo." Besides
this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground, Somerset's
Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong. It was the remaining
half of the justly celebrated English cavalry. Ponsonby destroyed,
Somerset remained.
The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a
redoubt, was ranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with
a coating of bags of sand and a large slope of earth.
This work was not finished; there had been no time to make
a palisade for it.
Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there
remained the whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance
of the old mill of Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence,
beneath an elm, which an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, purchased
later on for two hundred francs, cut down, and carried off. Wellington
was coldly heroic.
The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell
at his side.
Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him:
"My lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?"
"To do like me," replied Wellington. To Clinton
he said laconically, "To hold this spot to the last man."
The day was evidently turning out ill.
Wellington shouted to his old companions of Talavera, of Vittoria,
of Salamanca:
"Boys, can retreat be thought of?
Think of old England!"
Towards four o'clock, the English line drew back.
Suddenly nothing was visible on the crest of the plateau except
the artillery and the sharpshooters; the rest had disappeared:
the regiments, dislodged by the shells and the French bullets,
retreated into the bottom, now intersected by the back road of
the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean; a retrograde movement took place,
the English front hid itself, Wellington drew back.
"The beginning of retreat!" cried Napoleon.
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