FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON.
At about four o'clock P.M. the situation of the English army was
serious. The Prince of Orange commanded the centre, Hill the right,
and Picton the left. The Prince of Orange, wild and intrepid, shouted
to the Dutch Belgians: "Nassau! Brunswick! never yield an inch." Hill,
fearfully weakened, had just fallen back on Wellington, while Picton
was dead. At the very moment when the English took from the French the
flag of the 105th line regiment, the French killed General Picton with
a bullet through his head. The battle had two bases for Wellington,
Hougomont and La Haye Sainte. Hougomont still held out, though on fire,
while La Haye Sainte was lost. Of the German battalion that defended
it, forty-two men only survived; all the officers but five were killed
or taken prisoners. Three thousand combatants had been massacred in
that focus; a sergeant of the English Guards, the first boxer of
England, and reputed invulnerable by his comrades, had been killed
there by a little French drummer. Baring was dislodged, and Alten was
sabred; several flags had been lost, one belonging to Alten's division
and one to the Luxembourg battalion, which was borne by a Prince of the
Deux-ponts family. The Scotch Grays no longer existed; Ponsonby's heavy
dragoons were cut to pieces,--this brave cavalry had given way before
the lancers of Bro and the cuirassiers of Travers. Of twelve hundred
sabres only six hundred remained; of three lieutenant-colonels, two
were kissing the ground, Hamilton wounded, and Mather killed. Ponsonby
had fallen, pierced by seven lance wounds; Gordon was dead, March was
dead, and two divisions, the fifth and sixth, were destroyed. Hougomont
attacked, La Haye Sainte taken; there was only one knot left, the
centre, which still held out, Wellington reinforced it; he called in
Hill from Merbe-Braine and Chassé from Braine l'Alleud.
The centre of the English army, which was slightly concave, very dense
and compact, was strongly situated; it occupied the plateau of Mont
St. Jean, having the village behind it, and before it the slope, which
at that time was rather steep. It was supported by that strong stone
house, which at that period was a domainial property of Nivelles,
standing at the cross-road, and an edifice dating from the 16th
century, so robust that the cannon-balls rebounded without doing it any
injury. All round the plateau the English had cut through the hedges at
certain spots, formed embrasures in the hawthorns, thrust guns between
branches and loop-holed the shrubs,--their artillery was ambuscaded
under the brambles. This Punic task, incontestably authorized by the
rules of war which permit snares, had been so well effected that
Haxo, who had been sent by the Emperor at eight o'clock to reconnoitre
the enemy's batteries, returned to tell Napoleon that there was no
obstacle, with exception of the barricades blocking the Nivelles and
Genappe roads. It was the season when the wheat is still standing, and
along the edge of the plateau a battalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th,
was lying in the tall corn. Thus assured and supported, the centre of
the Anglo-Dutch army was in a good position.
The peril of this position was the forest of Soignies, at that time
contiguous to the battle-field and intersected by the ponds of
Groenendæl and Boitsford. An army could not have fallen back into
it without being dissolved, regiments would have been broken up at
once, and the artillery lost in the marshes. The retreat, according
to the opinion of several professional men, contradicted, it is true,
by others, would have been a flight. Wellington added to this centre
a brigade of Chassé's removed from the right wing, one of Wicke's
from the left wing, and Clinton's division. He gave his English--
Halkett's regiments, Mitchell's brigade, and Maitland's guards--as
epaulments and counterforts, the Brunswick infantry, the Nassau
contingent, Kielmansegge's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans. He
had thus twenty-six battalions under his hand; as Charras says, "the
right wing deployed behind the centre." An enormous battery was masked
by earth-bags, at the very spot where what is called "the Museum of
Waterloo" now stands, and Wellington also had in a little hollow
Somerset's Dragoon Guards, counting one thousand four hundred sabres.
They were the other moiety of the so justly celebrated English cavalry;
though Ponsonby was destroyed, Somerset remained. The battery which,
had it been completed, would have been almost a redoubt, was arranged
behind a very low wall, hastily lined with sand-bags and a wide slope
of earth. This work was not finished, as there was not time to palisade
it.
Wellington, restless but impassive, was mounted, and remained for the
whole day in the same attitude, a little in front of the old mill of
Mont St. Jean, which still exists, and under an elm-tree, which an
Englishman, an enthusiastic Vandal, afterwards bought for two hundred
francs, cut down, and carried away. Wellington was coldly heroic; there
was a shower of cannon-balls, and his aide-de-camp Gordon was killed
by his side. Lord Hill, pointing to a bursting shell, said to him, "My
Lord, what are your instructions, and what orders do you leave us, if
you are killed?" "Do as I am doing," Wellington answered. To Clinton
he said laconically, "Hold out here to the last man." The day was
evidently turning badly, and Wellington cried to his old comrades of
Vittoria, Talavera, and Salamanca, "Boys, can you think of giving way?
Remember old England."
About four o'clock the English line fell back all at once; nothing was
visible on the crest of the plateau but artillery and sharp-shooters,
the rest had disappeared. The regiments, expelled by the French shell
and cannon-balls, fell back into the hollow, which at the present day
is intersected by the lane that runs to the farm of Mont St. Jean. A
retrograde movement began, the English front withdrew. Wellington was
recoiling. "It is the beginning of the retreat," Napoleon cried.