I felt the sweat run down my forehead, and others with great gashes,
and their eyes full of blood, were wiping their faces and laughing
ferociously.
In ten minutes, seven hundred dragoons were _hors-de-combat_; their
gray horses were running wildly about on all sides, with their bits in
their teeth. Some hundreds of them had retired behind their batteries,
but more than one was reeling in his saddle and clutching at his
horse's mane.
They had found out that to attack was not all the battle, and that very
often circumstances arise which are quite unexpected.
In all that frightful spectacle, what impressed me most deeply, was
seeing our cuirassiers returning with their sabres red to the hilt,
laughing among themselves; and a fat captain with immense brown
mustaches, winked good-humoredly as he passed by us, as much as to say,
"You see we sent them back in a hurry, eh!"
Yes, but three thousand of our men were left in that little hollow.
And it was not yet finished: the companies and battalions and brigades
were being re-formed, the musketry rattled in the vicinity of
Haie-Sainte, and the cannon thundered near Hougoumont. "It was only
just a beginning," the officers said. You would have thought that
men's lives were of no value!
But it was necessary to get possession of Haie-Sainte, and to force a
passage from the highway to the enemy's centre just as an entrance must
be effected into a fortification through the fire of the outworks and
the demilunes. We had been repulsed the first time, but the battle was
begun, and we could not go back. After the charge of the cuirassiers,
it took a little time for us to re-form: the battle continued at
Hougoumont, and the cannonade re-opened on our right, and two batteries
had been brought up to sweep the highway in the rear of Haie-Sainte,
where the road begins to mount the hill. We all saw that that was to
be the point of attack.
We stood waiting with shouldered arms, when about three o'clock Buche
looked behind him on the road and said, "The Emperor is coming!"