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The second and decisive phase of the battle of Waterloo differed from the first in this: In the first phase Napoleon was attacking Wellington’s command alone. It was line against line. By hammering at the line opposed to him on the ridge of the Mont St. Jean, Napoleon confidently expected to break it before the day should close. His first hammer blow, which was the charge of the First Army Corps under Erlon, had failed, and failed badly. The cavalry in support of that infantry charge had failed as well as their comrades, and the British in their turn had charged the retiring French, got right into their line, sabred their gunners, only to be broken in their turn by the counter-effort of further French horse.

This first phase had ended in a sort of halt or faint in the battle, as I have described.

The second phase was a very different matter. It developed into what were essentially two battles. It found Napoleon fighting not only against Wellington in front of him, but against Blucher to his right and almost behind him. It was no longer a simple business of hammering with the whole force of the French army at the British and their allies upon the ridge in front, but of desperately attempting to break the Anglo-Dutch line against time, with diminishing and perpetually reduced forces; with forces perpetually reduced by the necessity of sending more and more men off to the right to resist, if it were possible, the increasing pressure of the accumulating Prussian forces upon the right flank of the French.

This second phase of the action at Waterloo began in the neighbourhood of four o’clock.

It is true that the arriving Prussians had not yet debouched from the screen of wood that hid them two and a half miles away to the east, but at that hour (four o’clock) the heads of their columns were all ready to debouch, and the delay between their actual appearance upon the field and the beginning of the second half of the battle was not material to the result.

That second half of the action began with a series of great cavalry charges which the Emperor had not designed, and which, even as he watched them, he believed would be fatal to him. As spectacles, these famous rides presented the most awful and memorable pageant in the history of modern war; as tactics they were erroneous, and grievously erroneous.

Before this second phase of the battle was entered it was easily open to Napoleon, recognising the Prussians advancing and catching no sight of Grouchy, to change his plan, to abandon the offensive, to stand upon the defensive along the height which he commanded, there to await Grouchy, and, if Grouchy still delayed, to maintain the chances of an issue which might at least be negative, if he could prevent its being decisively disastrous.

But even if such a conception had passed through the Emperor’s mind, military science was against it. If ever those opposed to him had full time to concentrate their forces he would, even with the reinforcement of Grouchy, be fighting very nearly two to one. His obvious, one might say his necessary, plan was to break Wellington’s line, if still it could be broken, before the full pressure of the arriving Prussians should be felt. Short of that, there could be nothing but immediate or ultimate disaster.

We shall see how, much later in the action, yet another opportunity for breaking away, and for standing upon the defensive, or for retreating, was, in the opinion of some critics, offered to the Emperor by fate.

But we shall see how, upon that second and later occasion in the day, his advantage in so doing was even less than it was now between this hour of half-past three and four o’clock, when he determined to renew the combat.

He first sent orders to Ney to make certain of La Haye Sainte, to clear the enemy from that stronghold, which checked a direct assault upon the centre, and then to renew the general attack.

La Haye Sainte was not taken at this first attempt. The French were repelled; the skirmishers, who were helping the direct attack by mounting the slope upon its right, were thrown back as well, and after this unsuccessful beginning of the movement the guns were called upon to prepare a further and more vigorous assault upon a larger scale. Not only the first great battery of eighty guns, but many of the batteries to the west of the Brussels road (which had hitherto been turned upon Hougomont and the English guns behind that position) were now directed upon the centre of the English line, and there broke out a cannonade even more furious than the one which had opened the action at one o’clock. Men trained in a generation’s experience of war called it the most furious artillery effort of their time; and never, perhaps, even in the career of the Gunner who was now in the last extremity of his fate, had guns better served him.

Under the battering of that discharge the front of Wellington’s command was partially withdrawn behind the cover of the ridge. A stream of wounded, mixed with not a few men broken and flying, began to swell northward up the Brussels road; and Ney, imagining from such a sight that the enemy’s line wavered, committed his capital error, and called upon the cavalry to charge.

Wellington’s line was not wavering. For the mass of the French cavalry to charge at such a moment was to waste irreparably a form of energy whose high potential upon the battlefield corresponds to a very rapid exhaustion, and which, invaluable against a front shaken and doubtful, is useless against a front still solid.

It was not and could not have been the Emperor who ordered that false step. It is even uncertain whether the whole body of horsemen that moved had been summoned by Ney, or whether the rearmost did not simply follow the advance of their fellows. At any rate, the great group of mounted men21 which lay in reserve behind the First Army Corps, and to the west of the road, passed in its entirety through the infantry, and began to advance at the trot down the valley for the assault upon the opposite slope.

I repeat, it is not certain whether Ney called upon all this mass of cavalry and deliberately risked the waste of it in one blow. It is more probable that there was some misunderstanding; that Desnoettes’ command, which was drawn up behind Milhaud’s, followed Milhaud’s, under the impression that a general order had been given to both; that Ney, seeing this extra body of horse following, imagined Napoleon to have given it orders. At any rate, Napoleon never gave such orders, and, from the height upon which he stood, could not have seen the first execution of them, for the first advance of that cavalry was hidden from him by a slight lift of land.

There were 5000 mounted men drawn up in the hollow to the west of the Brussels road for the charge. It was not until they began to climb the slope that Napoleon saw what numbers were being risked, and perceived the full gravity of Ney’s error.

To charge unshaken infantry in this fashion, and to charge it without immediate infantry support, was a thing which that master of war would never have commanded, and which, when he saw it developing under the command of his lieutenant, filled him with a sense of peril. But it was too late to hesitate or to change the disposition of this sudden move. The 5000 climbed at a slow and difficult trot through the standing crops and the thick mud of the rising ground, suffered—with a moment’s wavering—the last discharge of the British guns, and then, on reaching the edge of the plateau, spurred to the gallop and charged.

It was futile. They passed the line of guns (the gunners had orders to abandon their pieces and to retire within the infantry squares); they developed, in too short a start, too slight an impetus; they seethed, as the famous metaphor of that field goes, “like angry waves round rocks”; they lashed against every side of the squares into which the allied infantry had formed. The squares stood.

Wellington had had but a poor opinion of his command. It contained, indeed, elements more diverse and raw material in larger proportion than ever he, or perhaps any other general of the great wars, had had to deal with, but it was infantry hitherto unshaken; and the whole conception of that false movement, the whole error of that cavalry action, lay in the idea that the allied line had suffered in a fashion which it had been very far from suffering. Nothing was done against the squares; and the firmest of them, the nucleus of the whole resistance, were the squares of British infantry, three deep, against which the furious close-sabring, spurring, and fencing of sword with bayonet proved utterly vain. Upon this mass of horsemen moving tumultuous and ineffectual round the islands of foot resisting their every effort, Uxbridge, gathering all his cavalry, charged, and 5000 fresh horse fell upon the French lancers and cuirassiers, already shredded and lessened by grape at fifty yards and musket fire at ten. This countercharge of Uxbridge’s cleared the plateau. The French horsemen turned bridle, fled to the hollow of the valley again, and the English gunners returned to their pieces. The whole fury of the thing had failed.

But it had failed only for a moment. What remained of the French horse reformed and once again attempted to charge. Once again, for all their gravely diminished numbers, they climbed the slope; once again the squares were formed, and the torment of horsemen round about them struck once more.

Seen from the point where Napoleon stood to the rear of his line, the high place that overlooked the battlefield, it seemed to eyes of less genius than his own that this second attempt had succeeded. Indeed, its fierce audacity seemed to other than the French observers at that distance to promise success. The drivers of the reserve batteries in the rear of Wellington’s line were warned for retreat, and Napoleon, reluctant, but pressed by necessity, seeing one chance at last of victory by mere shock, himself sent forward a reserve of horse to support the distant cuirassiers and lancers. He called upon Kellerman, commanding the cavalry of the Guard, to follow up the charge.

He knew how doubtful was the success of this last reinforcement, for he knew how ill-judged had been Ney’s first launching of that great mass of horse at an unbroken enemy; but, now that the thing was done, lest, unsupported, it should turn to a panic which might gain the whole army, he risked almost the last mounted troops he had and sent them forward, acting thus like a man throwing good money after bad for fear that all may be lost.

A better reason still decided Napoleon so to risk a very desperate chance, and to hurl Kellerman upon the heels of Milhaud. That reason was the advent, now accomplished, of the Prussians upon his right, and the necessity, imperative and agonised, of breaking Wellington’s line before the whole strength of the newcomers should be felt upon the French flank and rear.

Let us turn, then, and see how far and with what rapidity the Prussians at this moment—nearly half-past five o’clock—had accomplished their purpose.

* * * * *

Of the four Prussian corps d’armée bivouacked in a circle round Wavre, and unmolested, as we have seen, by Grouchy, it was the fourth, that of Bulow, which was given the task of marching first upon the Sunday morning to effect the junction with Wellington. It lay, indeed, the furthest to the east of all the Prussian army,22 but it was fresh to the fight, for it had come up too late to be engaged at Ligny. It was complete; it was well commanded.

The road it had to traverse was not only long, but difficult. The passage of the river Lasne had to be effected across so steep a ravine and by so impassable a set of ways that the modern observer, following that march as the present writer has followed it, after rain and over those same fields and roads, is led to marvel that it was done in the time which Blucher’s energy and the traditional discipline of the Prussian soldiers found possible. At any rate, the heads of the columns were on the Waterloo edge of the Wood of Fischermont23 (or Paris) before four o’clock, and ready to debouch. Wellington had expected them upon the field by two o’clock at latest. They disappointed him by two hours, and nearly three, but the miracle is that they arrived when they did; and it is well here to consider in detail this feat which the Fourth Prussian Army Corps had accomplished, for it is a matter upon which our historians of Waterloo are often silent, and which has been most unfortunately neglected in this country.

The Fourth Prussian Army Corps, under Bulow, lay as far east as Liège when, on the 14th of June, Napoleon was preparing to cross the Sambre. Its various units were all in the close neighbourhood of the town, so none of them were spared much of the considerable march which all were about to undertake to the west; even its most westward detachment was no more than three miles from Liège city.

Bulow should have received the order to march westward at half-past ten on the morning of the 15th. The order, as we have seen in speaking of Ligny, was not delivered till the evening of that day. The Fourth Army Corps was told to concentrate in the neighbourhood of Hannut and a little east of that distant point. The corps, as a whole, did not arrive until the early afternoon of Friday the 16th.

It is from this point—Hannut—that the great effort begins.

Bulow, it must be remembered, commanded no less than 32,000 men. The fatigues and difficulties attendant upon the progress of such a body, most of it tied to one road, will easily be appreciated.

During the afternoon of the 16th, while Ligny was being fought, he advanced the whole of this body to points immediately north and east of Gembloux. Not a man, therefore, of his great command had marched less than twenty miles, many must have marched over twenty-five, upon that Friday afternoon.

Then followed the night during which the other three defeated corps fell back upon Wavre.

That night was full of their confused but unmolested retreat. With the early morning of the Saturday Bulow’s 32,000 fell back along a line parallel to the general retirement, and all that day they were making their way by the cross-country route through Welhain and Corroy to Dion Le Mont.

This task was accomplished through pouring rain, by unpaved lanes and through intolerable mud, over a distance of close on seventeen miles for the hardest pushed of the troops, and not less than thirteen for those whom the accident of position had most spared.

The greater part of the Fourth Corps had spent the first night in the open; all of it had spent the second night upon the drenched ground. Upon the third day, the Sunday of Waterloo, this force, though it lies furthest from the field of Waterloo of all the Prussian forces, is picked out to march first to the aid of Wellington, because it as yet has had no fighting and is supposed to be “fresh.” On the daybreak, therefore, after bivouacking in that dreadful weather, Bulow’s force is again upon the move. It does not get through Wavre until something like eight o’clock, and the abominable conditions of the march may be guessed from the fact that its centre did not reach St. Lambert until one o’clock, nor did the last brigade pass through that spot until three o’clock. Down the steep ravine of the Lasne and up on the westward side of it was so hard a business that, as we have seen, the brigades did not begin to debouch from the woods at the summit until after four o’clock. It was not until after five o’clock that the last brigade, the 14th, had come up in line with the rest upon the field of Waterloo, having moved, under such abominable conditions of slow, drenched marching, another fifteen miles.

In about forty-eight hours, therefore, this magnificent piece of work had been accomplished. It was a total movement of over fifty miles for the average of the corps—certainly more than sixty for those who had marched furthest—broken only by two short nights, and those nights spent in the open, one under drenching rain. The whole thing was accomplished without appreciable loss of men, guns, or baggage, and at the end of it these men put up a fight which was the chief factor in deciding Waterloo.

Such was the supreme effort of the Fourth Prussian Army Corps which decided Waterloo.

There are not many examples of endurance so tenacious and organisation so excellent in the moving so large a body under such conditions in the whole history of war.

* * * * *

When the Fourth Prussian Corps debouched from the Wood of Fischermont and began its two-mile approach towards his flank, Napoleon, who had already had it watched by a body of cavalry, ordered Lobau with the Sixth French Army Corps, or rather with what he had kept with him of the Sixth Army Corps, to go forward and check it.

It could only be a question of delay. Lobau had but 10,000 against the 30,000 which Bulow could ultimately bring against him when all his brigades had come up; but delay was the essential of the moment to Napoleon. To ward off the advancing Prussian pressure just so long as would permit him to carry the Mont St. Jean was his most desperate need. Lobau met the enemy, three to two, in the hollow of Plancenoit,24 was turned by such superior numbers, and driven from the village.

All this while, during the Prussian success which brought that enemy’s reinforcement nearer and nearer to the rear of the French army and to the Emperor’s own standpoint, the wasted though magnificent action of the French cavalry was continuing against Wellington’s right centre, west of the Brussels road. Kellerman had charged for the third time; the plateau was occupied, the British guns abandoned, the squares formed. For the third time that furious seething of horse against foot was seen from the distant height of the Belle Alliance. For the third time the sight carried with it a deceptive appearance of victory. For the third time the cavalry charge broke back again, spent, into the valley below. Ney, wild as he had been wild at Quatre Bras, failing in judgment as he had failed then, shouted for the last reserve of horse, and forgot to call for that 6000 untouched infantry, the bulk of Reille’s Second Corps, which watched from the height of the French ridge the futile efforts of their mounted comrades.

Folly as it was to have charged unbroken infantry with horse alone, the charges had been so repeated and so tenacious that, immediately supported by infantry, they might have succeeded. If those 6000 men of Reille’s, the mass of the Second Army Corps, which stood to arms unused upon the ridge to the west of the Brussels road, had been ordered to follow hard upon the last cavalry charge, Napoleon might yet have snatched victory from such a desperate double strain as no general yet in military history has escaped. He might conceivably have broken Wellington’s line before that gathering flood of Prussians to the right and behind him should have completed his destruction.

But the moment was missed. Reille’s infantry was not ordered forward until the defending line had had ample time to prepare its defence; until the English gunners were back again at their pieces, and the English squares once more deployed and holding the whole line of their height.

It is easy to note such errors as we measure hours and distances upon a map. It is a wonderment to some that such capital errors appear at all in the history of armies. Those who have experience of active service will tell us what the intoxication of the cavalry charges meant, of what blood Ney’s brain was full, and why that order for the infantry came too late. Of the 6000 infantry which attempted so belated a charge, a quarter was broken before the British line was reached, and that assault, in its turn, failed.

At this point in the battle, somewhat after six o’clock, two successes on the part of the French gave them an opportunity for their last disastrous effort, and introduced the close of the tragedy.

The first was the capture of La Haye Sainte, the second was the recapture of Plancenoit.

La Haye Sainte, standing still untaken before the very front of Wellington’s line, must be captured if yet a further effort was to be attempted by Napoleon. Major Baring had held it with his small body of Germans all day long. Twice had he thrust back a general assault, and throughout more than five hours he had resisted partial and equally unsuccessful attacks. Now Ney, ordered to carry it at whatever cost, brought up against it a division, and more than a division. The French climbed upon their heaped dead, broke the doors, shot from the walls, and, at the end of the butchery, Baring with forty-two men—all that was left him out of nine companies—cut his way back through to the main line, and the farm was taken. Hougomont, on the left, round which so meaningless a struggle had raged all day long, was never wholly cleared of its defenders, but the main body of it was in flames, and with the capture of La Haye Sainte the whole front was free for a final attack at the moment which Napoleon should decide.

Meanwhile, at Plancenoit, further French reinforcements had recaptured the village and again lost it. The Sixth Corps had given way before the Prussian advance, as we have seen. The next French reinforcements, though they had at first thrust the Prussians back, in turn gave way as the last units of the enemy arrived, and the Prussian batteries were dropping shot right on to the fields which bordered the Brussels road.

Napoleon took eleven battalions of the Guard (the Imperial Guard was his reserve, and had not yet come into action25) and drew them up upon his flank to defend the Brussels road; with two more battalions he reinforced the wavering troops in Plancenoit. They cleared the enemy out of the village with the bayonet, and for the moment checked that pressure upon the flank and rear which could not but ultimately return.

It was somewhat past seven by the time all this was accomplished. Napoleon surveyed a field over which it was still just possible (in his judgment at least) to strike a blow that might save him. He saw, far upon the left, Hougomont in flames; in the centre, La Haye Sainte captured; on the right, the skirmishers advancing upon the slope before the English line; his eastern flank for the moment free of the Prussians, who had retired before the sudden charge of the Guard. He heard far off a cannonade which might be that of Grouchy.

But even as he looked upon his opportunity he saw one further thing that goaded him to an immediate hazard. Upon the north-eastern corner of his strained and bent-back line of battle, against the far, perilous, exposed angle of it, he saw new, quite unexpected hordes of men advancing. It was Ziethen debouching with the head of his First Prussian Army Corps at this latest hour—and Napoleon saw those most distant of his troops ready to yield to the new torrent.

The sun, now within an hour of setting, had shone out again. Its light came level down the shallow valley, but all that hollow was so filled with the smoke of recent discharges that the last stroke which Napoleon was now preparing was in part hidden from the Allies upon the hill. That final stake, the only venture left, was to be use of his last reserve and the charge of the Guard.

No combat in history, perhaps, had seen a situation so desperate maintained without the order for retreat. Wellington’s front, which the French were attacking, was still held unbroken; upon the French flank and rear, though the Fourth Prussian Army Corps were for the moment held, they must inevitably return; more remained to come: they were in the act of pressing upon the only line open to the French for retreat, and now here came Ziethen with his new masses upon the top of all.

If, at this hour, just after seven, upon that fatal day, retreat had been possible or advisable to Napoleon, every rule of military art demanded it. He was now quite outnumbered; his exhausted troops were strained up to and beyond the breaking point. To carry such strains too far means in all things, not only in war, an irretrievable catastrophe.

But retreat was hardly possible as a military action; it was impossible as a political one.

Napoleon could hardly retreat at that hour, although he was already defeated, because the fury and the exhaustion of the combat, its increasing confusion, and the increasing dispersion of its units, made any rapid concentration and organisation for the purposes of a sudden retirement hazardous in the extreme. The doomed body, held closer and closer upon its right flank, menaced more and more on its right rear, now suddenly threatened on its exposed salient angle, would fight on.

Though Napoleon had withdrawn from the combat an hour before, when Bülow’s 30,000 had struck at his right flank and made his destruction certain; though he had then, while yet he could, organised a retirement, abandoned the furious struggle for La Haye Sainte before it was successful, and covered with his best troops an immediate retreat, that retreat would not have availed his cause.

The appearance of the Prussians on his right proved glaringly the nature of his doom. Grouchy—a quarter of his forces—was cut off from him altogether. The enemy, whom he believed to be beyond Grouchy, and pursued by Grouchy, had appeared, upon the contrary, between Grouchy and himself. Now Ziethen too was here.

Did Napoleon retire, he would retire before forces half as large again as his own, and destined to grow to double his own within a few hours. His retirement would leave Grouchy to certain disaster.

Politically, retreat was still more hopeless. He himself would re-enter France defeated, with, at the most, half the strength that had crossed the frontier three days before. He would so re-enter France—the wealthier classes of which watched his power, nearly all of them with jealousy, most with active hate—surrounded by general officers not ten of whom, perhaps, he could sincerely trust, and by a whole society which supported him only upon the doubtful condition of victory.

Such a retirement was ruin. It was more impossible morally even than it was impossible physically, under the conditions of the field. Therefore it was that, under conditions so desperate, with his battle lost if ever battle was, the Emperor yet attempted one ultimate throw, and in this half-hour before the sunset sent forward the Guard.

In those solemn moments, wherein the Imperial Guard formed for their descent into that hollow whose further slope was to see their last feat of arms, Ziethen, with the First Prussian Corps, pressed on into the far corner the field of battle. At the far end of the long ridge of the Mont St. Jean, more than a mile away, this last great body and newest reinforcement of the Emperor’s foes had emerged from the walls and thickets of Smohain and, new to the fighting, was already pushing in the weary French line that had stood the carnage of six hours. It was not enough that the Fourth Prussian Corps should have determined the day already with its 30,000 come up from the east against him; now the foremost battalions of the First coming up from the north were appearing to clinch the matter altogether.

It was under such conditions of irretrievable disaster that Napoleon played for miracle, and himself riding slowly down the valley at the head of his comrades and veterans, gave them over to Ney for the final attack against Wellington’s line which still held the opposing slope.

It was then, at the moment when Ziethen and the men of the First Prussian Army Corps began to press upon the north-eastern angle of the fight, and were ready to determine it altogether, that the Guard began its ponderous thrust up between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte, to the west of the Brussels road. Up that fatal hill, which had seen the four great cavalry charges, and more recently the breaking of the Second Corps, the tall men, taller for the bearskins and the shouldered musket, the inheritors of twenty-two victorious and now immortal years, leant forward, advancing. To the hanging smoke of the cannon in the vale was added the rising mist of evening; and when the furious cannonade which was to support their attack had ceased with their approach to the enemy’s line, a sort of silence fell upon the spectators of that great event.

The event was brief.

It was preceded by a strange sight: a single horseman galloped unharmed from the French to the English line (a captain); he announced to the enemy the approaching movement of the Guard. He was a hater of the flag and of the Revolution, and of its soldier: he was for the old Kings.

There was no need for this dramatic aid. The lull in the action, Napoleon’s necessity for a last stroke, possibly through the mist and smoke the actual movement of the Guard, were apparent. The infantry whom Wellington had retired behind the ridge during the worst of the artillery preparation was now set forward again. It was the strongest and the most trusted of his troops whom Wellington posted to receive the shock—Adams’ brigade and the brigade of Guards. Three batteries of the reserve were brought forward, with orders not to reply to the French cannon, but to fire at the advancing columns of the charge.

As the Guard went upward, the whole French front to the right moved forward and supported the attack. But upon the left, the Second Army Corps, Reille’s recently broken 6000, could not yet move. They came far behind and to the west of the Brussels road; the Guard went up the slope alone.

At two hundred yards from the English line the grape began to mow through them. They closed up after each discharge. Their advance continued unchecked.

Of the four columns,26 that nearest to the Brussels road reached, touched, and broke the line of the defenders. Its strength was one battalion, yet it took the two English batteries, and, in charging Halkett’s brigade, threw the 30th and the 73rd into confusion. It might have been imagined for one moment that the line had here been pierced, but this first and greatest chance of success was defeated, and with it all chances, for it is the head of a charge that tells.

The reader will have seen upon the map, far off to the west or left, at Braine l’Alleud, a body of reserve, Belgian, which Wellington had put so far off in the mistaken notion that the French would try to turn him in that direction. This force of 3000 men with sixteen guns Wellington had recalled in the last phases of the battle. It was their action, and especially that of their artillery, that broke this first success of the Guard. The Netherlanders charged with the bayonet to drive home the effect of their cannon, and the westernmost column of the French attack was ruined.

As the four columns were not all abreast, but the head of the first a little more forward than that of the second, the head of the second than that of the third, and so forth, the shock of the French guard upon the British came in four separate blows, each delivered a few moments later than the last.

We have seen how the Dutch broke the first column.

The second column, which attacked the right of Halkett’s brigade, failed also. The 33rd and 69th wavered indeed, but recovered, and their recovery was largely due to the personal courage of their chief.

The next column, again, the third, came upon the British Guards; and the Guards, reserving their fire until the enemy were at a stone’s-throw, fired point-blank and threw the French into confusion. During that confusion the brigade of Guards charged, pursued the enemy part of the way down the slope, were closed upon by the enemy and driven back again to the ridge.

The fourth column of the French was now all but striking the extremity of the British line. Here Adams’ brigade, a battalion of the 95th, the 71st, and the 52nd regiments, awaited the blow.

The 52nd was the inmost of the three.

It stood just where the confusion of the Guards as they were thrown back up the hill joined the still unbroken ranks of Adams’ extremity of the British line.

The 52nd determined the crisis of that day. And it was then precisely that the battle of Waterloo was decided, or, to be more accurate, this was the moment when the inevitable breaking-point appeared.

Colborne was its commander. Instead of waiting in the line, he determined to run the very grave risk of leaving it upon his own initiative, and of playing a tremendous hazard; he took it upon himself to bring the 52nd out, forward in advance of and perpendicular to the defending line, and so to bring a flank fire upon the last French charge.

The peril was very great indeed. It left a gap in the English line; the possibility, even the chance, of a French advance to the left against that gap and behind the 52nd meant ruin. It was the sort of thing which, when men do it and fail, is quite the end of them. Colborne did it and succeeded. No French effort was made to the left of the 52nd. It had therefore but its front to consider; it wheeled round, left that dangerous gap in the English line, and poured its fire in flank upon the last charge of the fourth French column. That fire was successful. The assault halted, wavered, and began to break.

The French line to the right, advancing in support of the efforts of the Guard, saw that backward movement, and even as they saw it there came the news of Ziethen’s unchecked and overwhelming pressure upon the north-east of the field, a pressure which there also had at last broken the French formation.

The two things were so nearly simultaneous that no historical search or argument will now determine the right of either to priority. As the French west of the Brussels road gave way, the whole English line moved together and began to advance. As the remnants of the First French Army Corps to the east of the Brussels road were struck by Ziethen they also broke. At which point the first flexion occurred will never be determined.

The host of Napoleon, stretched to the last limit, and beyond, snapped with the more violence, and in those last moments of daylight a complete confusion seized upon all but two of its numerous and scattered units.

Those two were, first, certain remnants of the Guard itself, and secondly, Lobau’s troops, still stubbornly holding the eastern flank.

Squares of the Old Guard, standing firm but isolated in the flood of the panic, checked the pursuit only as islands check a torrent. The pursuit still held. All the world knows the story of the challenge shouted to these veterans, and of Cambronne’s disputed reply just before the musket ball broke his face and he fell for dead. Lobau also, as I have said, held his troops together. But the flood of the Prussian advance, perpetually increasing, carried Plancenoit; the rear ranks of the Sixth Army Corps, thrust into the great river of fugitives that was now pouring southward in panic down the Brussels road, were swept away by it and were lost; and at last, as darkness fell, the first ranks also were mixed into the mass of panic, and the Imperial army had ceased to exist.

There was a moon that night; and hour after hour the Prussian cavalry, to whom the task had been entrusted, followed, sabring, pressing, urging the rout. Mile after mile, past the field of Quatre Bras itself, where the corpses, stripped by the peasantry, still lay stark after those two days, the rush of the breakdown ran. Exhaustion had weakened the pursuers before fear had given way to fatigue with the pursued; and when the remnants of Napoleon’s army were past the Sambre again, not 30,000 disjointed, unorganised, dispersed, and broken men had survived the disaster.27