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.
CHAPTER VII—NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR
The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local trouble, had never been in a better humor than on that day.
His impenetrability had been smiling ever since the morning.
On the 18th of June, that profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly.
The man who had been gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo.
The greatest favorites of destiny make mistakes.
Our joys are composed of shadow.
The supreme smile is God’s alone.
Ridet C?sar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix Legion.
Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is certain that C?sar laughed.
While exploring on horseback at one o’clock on the preceding night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand, the communes in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of the long line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon from Frischemont to Braine-l’Alleud, it had seemed to him that fate, to whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact to the appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained for some time motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder; and this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterious saying,
“We are in accord.”
Napoleon was mistaken.
They were no longer in accord.
He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night was marked by a joy for him.
He traversed the line of the principal outposts, halting here and there to talk to the sentinels.
At half-past two, near the wood of Hougomont, he heard the tread of a column on the march; he thought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington.
He said:
“It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way for the purpose of decamping.
I will take prisoners the six thousand English who have just arrived at Ostend.”
He conversed expansively; he regained the animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March, when he pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Gulf Juan, and cried,
“Well, Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already!”
On the night of the 17th to the 18th of June he rallied Wellington.
“That little Englishman needs a lesson,” said Napoleon.
The rain redoubled in violence; the thunder rolled while the Emperor was speaking.
At half-past three o’clock in the morning, he lost one illusion; officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him that the enemy was not making any movement.
Nothing was stirring; not a bivouac-fire had been extinguished; the English army was asleep.