Les Misérables, page 83
CHAPTER VI--FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON
Towards four o'clock the condition of the English army was serious. ThePrince 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 fromthe French the flag of the 105th of the line, the French had killed theEnglish general, Picton, with a bullet through the head. The battlehad, for Wellington, two bases of action, Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte;Hougomont still held out, but was on fire; La Haie-Sainte was taken. Ofthe German battalion which defended it, only forty-two men survived; allthe officers, except five, were either dead or captured. Three thousandcombatants had been massacred in that barn. A sergeant of the EnglishGuards, the foremost boxer in England, reputed invulnerable by hiscompanions, had been killed there by a little French drummer-boy. Baringhad 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 nolonger existed; Ponsonby's great dragoons had been hacked to pieces.That valiant cavalry had bent beneath the lancers of Bro and beneaththe cuirassiers of Travers; out of twelve hundred horses, sixhundred remained; out of three lieutenant-colonels, two lay on theearth,--Hamilton wounded, Mater slain. Ponsonby had fallen, riddled byseven lance-thrusts. Gordon was dead. Marsh was dead. Two divisions, thefifth and the sixth, had been annihilated.
Hougomont injured, La Haie-Sainte taken, there now existed but onerallying-point, the centre. That point still held firm. Wellingtonreinforced it. He summoned thither Hill, who was at Merle-Braine; hesummoned Chassé, who was at Braine-l'Alleud.
The centre of the English army, rather concave, very dense, andvery compact, was strongly posted. It occupied the plateau ofMont-Saint-Jean, having behind it the village, and in front of it theslope, which was tolerably steep then. It rested on that stout stonedwelling which at that time belonged to the domain of Nivelles, andwhich marks the intersection of the roads--a pile of the sixteenthcentury, and so robust that the cannon-balls rebounded from it withoutinjuring it. All about the plateau the English had cut the hedges hereand there, made embrasures in the hawthorn-trees, thrust the throat ofa cannon between two branches, embattled the shrubs. There artillery wasambushed in the brushwood. This punic labor, incontestably authorizedby war, which permits traps, was so well done, that Haxo, who had beendespatched by the Emperor at nine o'clock in the morning to reconnoitrethe enemy's batteries, had discovered nothing of it, and had returnedand reported to Napoleon that there were no obstacles except the twobarricades which barred the road to Nivelles and to Genappe. It wasat the season when the grain is tall; on the edge of the plateau abattalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th, armed with carabines, wasconcealed in the tall wheat.
Thus assured and buttressed, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch army was wellposted. The peril of this position lay in the forest of Soignes,then adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds ofGroenendael and Boitsfort. An army could not retreat thither withoutdissolving; 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 byothers,--would have been a disorganized flight.
To this centre, Wellington added one of Chassé's brigades taken from theright wing, and one of Wincke's brigades taken from the left wing, plusClinton's division. To his English, to the regiments of Halkett, tothe brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave asreinforcements and aids, the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau's contingent,Kielmansegg's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans. This placed twenty-sixbattalions under his hand. _The right wing_, as Charras says, _wasthrown back on the centre_. An enormous battery was masked by sacks ofearth at the spot where there now stands what is called the "Museum ofWaterloo." Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground,Somerset's Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong. It was theremaining half of the justly celebrated English cavalry. Ponsonbydestroyed, Somerset remained.
The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a redoubt, wasranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with a coating of bagsof sand and a large slope of earth. This work was not finished; therehad been no time to make a palisade for it.
Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there remainedthe whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance of the old millof Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence, beneath an elm, whichan Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, purchased later on for twohundred francs, cut down, and carried off. Wellington was coldly heroic.The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell at hisside. Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him: "Mylord, what are your orders in case you are killed?" "To do like me,"replied Wellington. To Clinton he said laconically, "To hold this spotto the last man." The day was evidently turning out ill. Wellingtonshouted 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 nothingwas visible on the crest of the plateau except the artillery and thesharpshooters; the rest had disappeared: the regiments, dislodged bythe shells and the French bullets, retreated into the bottom, nowintersected by the back road of the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean; aretrograde movement took place, the English front hid itself, Wellingtondrew back. "The beginning of retreat!" cried Napoleon.
