الفصل الفصل 77 · 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 Chassé, 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 Chassé’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.