Four O’Clock in the Afternoon — Les Misérables

Towards four o'clock the condition of the English army was serious. The Prince of Orange held the centre and shouted to the Hollando-Belgians never to retreat. Hill had already been pulled in to support Wellington. Picton was dead. At the very moment when the English captured the flag of the 105th, a French bullet went through the English general's head. Wellington had two bases of action, Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte. Hougomont still held, but was on fire. La Haie-Sainte was taken. Of the German battalion that defended the farm, only forty-two men survived. All the officers except five were 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. The Scotch Grays no longer existed. Ponsonby's dragoons had bent under Bro's lancers and Travers's cuirassiers. Out of twelve hundred horses, six hundred remained. Ponsonby had fallen, riddled by seven lance-thrusts. Gordon was dead. Marsh was dead. The fifth and sixth divisions 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 Hill from Merle-Braine and Chassé from Braine-l'Alleud. The centre was rather concave, very dense, strongly posted on the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, the village behind it, a steep slope in front. It rested on a stout sixteenth-century stone house at the intersection of the roads, so robust that cannon-balls rebounded from it. All about the plateau the English had cut the hedges, made embrasures in the hawthorn, and thrust the throat of a cannon between two branches. Artillery was ambushed in the brushwood. This labour, authorized by war, was so well done that Haxo, sent by the Emperor at nine in the morning to reconnoitre, discovered nothing of it and reported only two barricades on the roads to Nivelles and Genappe. It was the season when the grain is tall. On the edge of the plateau a battalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th, lay concealed in the wheat. The peril of the position was the forest of Soignes, adjoining the field and cut by the ponds of Groenendael and Boitsfort. An army could not retreat thither without dissolving. The artillery would have been lost among the morasses. To this centre Wellington added brigades from both wings and Clinton's division. Twenty-six battalions came under his hand. An enormous battery was masked by sacks of earth where the Museum of Waterloo now stands. Behind a rise, Somerset's Dragoon Guards waited: fourteen hundred horse, the remaining half of the English cavalry. Ponsonby destroyed, Somerset remained.

Wellington, uneasy but impassive, stayed on horseback the whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance of the old mill of Mont-Saint-Jean, beneath an elm that an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, later bought 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, asked what his orders were in case he was killed. To do like me, Wellington replied. To Clinton he said, hold this spot to the last man. The day was evidently turning out ill. He 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 except the artillery and the sharpshooters. The rest had disappeared into the bottom behind the farm. The English front hid itself. Wellington drew back. The beginning of retreat! cried Napoleon.