1.C.1.6. 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 Chasse, 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 Chasse'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.