Read Ebook: The Eagle of the Empire: A Story of Waterloo by Brady Cyrus Townsend

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 134 lines and 14477 words, and 3 pages

tire selfishness of the colossal man, but they cannot resist his appeal, even after one hundred years!

Yet in the long run no personal attachment, however deep, however ardent, however complete, can take the place as the inspiration for heroic deeds of that deeper passion of love of country. Nor can any personal devotion to a mere man produce such a steadfastness of character as is brought about by adherence to a great cause or a great land. A great passion like the love of a people for a great country and that for which it stands is eternal. Usually the feet of clay upon which the idol stands have only to be recognized to dissipate the ardor and fervor of the worshipers. But Napoleon was then an exception to all rules. Though he slew men, wasted them, threw them away, they trusted him. We look at him through the vista of years and in some way understand his soldiers. Reason to the contrary, we can experience in some degree, at least, even in the cold-blooded humanitarian materialism of the present, the old thrill and the old admiration. Did his contemporaries love him because they believed he thought in terms of France, we wonder?

So that this body of soldiery was probably the most formidable army in the quality of its units that had ever been mustered on the globe. There was not a man in it who was not a veteran. Some of them were veterans of fifteen years of campaigning with Napoleon. This that came was to be the sixtieth pitched battle in which some of them had participated. Even the younger men had gone through more than one campaign and taken part in much hard fighting. Back from the prisons where they had been confined and the great fortresses they had held until the Emperor's abdication had come the veterans. The Old Guard had been reconstituted. As a reward for its action at Grenoble, the Fifth-of-the-Line had been incorporated in it as a supplementary regiment, a second Fifth regiment of Grenadiers. The ranks of the Guard had been most carefully culled, the unserviceable had been weeded out, their places taken by men well fitted by their record, their physical prowess and their personal appearance to belong to that famous corps. Not the Immortals of Xerxes, the Spartan Band of Leonidas, the Companion Cavalry of Alexander, the Carthaginians of Hannibal, the Tenth Legion of Caesar, the Spanish Infantry of Parma, or the Ironsides of Cromwell, had surpassed the record of these Pretorians of Imperial France.

The same weeding-out process had been carried out in the rest of the army. The flower of French cavalry, the matchless French artillery and the famous infantry which had trampled down the world were ranged under the Eagles. Other corps had been drained for equipment. But in some particulars the army differed from the Imperial armies of the past. With two exceptions, the great Marshals were not there. Murat, king of horsemen and swordsmen, was a prisoner in his ignoble Neapolitan realm awaiting trial and execution. Marmont and Mortier dared not present themselves before the Emperor they had betrayed. Wily Massena, the wisest and ablest of them all, was old and in convenient retirement. Macdonald, the incorruptible, was with the fat-bodied, fat-witted Bourbon King in Ghent. Berthier, with his marvelous mastery of detail and his almost uncanny ability to translate the Emperor's thoughts even into orders, had not rejoined the Eagles--a terrible loss, indeed.

There were but two of the Marshals of old with Napoleon. Soult, in some respects the acutest strategist and finest tactician, was Chief of Staff. He tried his best to fill Berthier's position and did it acceptably, if not with the success of that master. The other Marshal was pre?minently the battle-leader, red-headed Michael Ney, the fighter of fighters, a man whose personality was worth an army-corps, whose reputation and influence with the soldiers was of the very highest.

The rest of the officers, while veterans, were younger and less-known men. Drouet d'Erlon commanded one of the corps; Reille another; Grouchy another; Druot was the leader of the Guard; Kellerman, Milhaud, Gerard and Maurice the cavalry. It was an army of veterans, officered by young men, commanded by the greatest of soldiers.

But the army had not yet "found itself." It had no natural coherence and there had been no time to acquire any. It had not yet been welded together. Officers, men, regiments, brigades, divisions were, more or less, new and strange to one another. There was a vast deal of suspicion in the ranks. The discipline was rather because of past habit than present practice. That army needed a few victories, and badly needed them. A welding process was required. Given time and success to shake it together, and it might laugh at the world.

Would it get time and win victory? That was the question. And if it got neither, what then? How would it stand up under the strain? Would the tie that bound hold in defeat? Could the rest of the army live up to the Guard, for instance? Yes, that was the grave, the all-important question.

There was an enormous disparity in numbers between the French army--or it would better be called Napoleon's army--and that of the allies he purposed to attack. The allies were to the French in the ratio of about two to one. Whatever else was lacking, Napoleon had not lost his audacity, nor when his intentions are disclosed by a study of his plans, can it be argued that his strategic intention was lacking in brilliancy or daring.

He determined with his smaller but compact and manageable army to thrust himself between the two wings of the somewhat loosely coherent enemy under its divided command; to hold off one while he smashed the other and then to concentrate upon the surviving half and mete out to it the same hard fortune. In other words, trusting to his ability, he deliberately placed his own army between two others, each of which practically equaled his own. He thrust himself within the jaws of a trap, to use a homely simile, intending to hold one arm of the trap open while he broke up the other. He intended to burst through the allied line and smash up each half in succession.

Of course there was always the danger that he could not burst through that line; or that he could not hold back one half while he fought the other, or that holding back one half he could not beat the other, or having beaten one half he would be too weak to fall on the other. There was always the danger that the trap would be sprung, that he would be caught in its jaws or, to change the metaphor, that he would be like the wheat between the upper and the nether millstone. Still he did not think so, and he did not go into the undertaking blindly. As he had said, in his own case, "War was not a conjectural art," and he had most carefully counted the cost, estimated the probabilities. In short, he looked well before he leaped--yet a man may look well and leap wrong after all.

On these considerations he based his grand strategy. The army of the Prussians had approached the French frontier from the east; the army of the English and allies from the northwest. Napoleon had a complete knowledge of one of the Captains opposing him. He knew and accurately estimated Bl?cher. He did not know and he did not accurately estimate Wellington. He viewed the latter with contempt; the former with a certain amount of disdainful approbation, for while Bl?cher was no strategist and less of a tactician, he was a fighter and a fighter is always dangerous and to be dreaded. Gneisenau, a much more accomplished soldier, was Bl?cher's second in command, but he was a negligible factor in the Emperor's mind. The fact that Wellington had beaten all of Napoleon's Marshals with whom he had come in contact had intensified the Emperor's hatred. Instead of begetting caution in dealing with him, Napoleon's antagonism had blinded him as to Wellington's ability.

He also rated the Prussians higher than the English as fighters, and when his officers, who had felt the power of the thin red line which had so often wrecked the French column, explained to him that there were no better defensive fighters on earth than the English, not even the Russians, he had laughed them to scorn, attributing their warnings to the fact that they had been beaten in Spain and had grown timid. The Emperor did not purpose to be beaten in France or Belgium by the stolid English.

In more detail his first plan was to confuse Wellington, who held the right of the allied line, then fall upon him before he had time to concentrate, and beat him or contain him with a detachment under Ney, while the Emperor in person thereafter put Bl?cher to rout--and all of these things he came very near accomplishing completely. Certainly, he carried out his plans successfully and to the letter until the final day of battle.

He reasoned that if he could beat Bl?cher and threaten his communications, what was left of the Prussian army, which Napoleon hoped would not be much, would immediately retreat eastward; and that when Bl?cher had been thrown out of the game for the present, he could turn on Wellington and his English and allies and make short work of him. It did not occur to him that even if he beat Bl?cher and beat Wellington, provided the defeats did not end in utter routs, and they both retreated, they might withdraw on parallel lines and effect a junction later when even after the double defeat they would still so greatly outnumber him that his chances of success would be faint indeed.

The possibility of their pursuing any other course than that he had forecast for them never entered his mind. His own conception of their action was, in fact, an obsession with him. Yet that which he thought they would do they did not; and that which he was confident they would not do they did!

WATERLOO--THE FINAL REVIEW

In a romance like this, in which campaigns and marches, maneuvers and battles, however decisive they may be in history, are only incidental to the careers of the characters herein presented to the reader, it is not necessary for the chronicler to turn himself into a military historian, much as he would like it. Therefore, in great restraint, he presses on, promising hereafter only so much history as may serve to show forth the somber background.

In this setting of the scene of the great drama to be played, young Marteau has been necessarily somewhat lost sight of. He was very much in evidence during that hundred days of feverish and frantic activity. Napoleon had distinguished him highly. He had given him the rank of a Colonel of the Guard, but he had still retained him on his staff. Good and experienced staff-officers were rare, and the Emperor needed all he could get; he could have used many more than were available. And as Marteau was one of those who were attached to the Emperor by the double motive of love of the man and love of his country, believing as he did that the destiny of the two could not be dissevered, he had served the Emperor most efficiently, with that blind, passionate devotion to duty by which men give to a cause the best that is in them and which sometimes leads them to almost inconceivable heights of achievements.

Suffice it to say that the great strategic conception of Napoleon was carried out with rather striking success in the first three days of the campaign. The Emperor, crossing the Sambre, interposed himself between Wellington and Bl?cher, completely deceived the Englishman, who thought his extreme right was threatened, detached Ney to seize the village of Quatre Bras, where Wellington had at last decided to concentrate, and with eighty thousand men fell on the Prussians at Ligny.

Ney did not seize Quatre Bras; Wellington got there ahead of him and stubbornly held the position. Although Ney had twice the number of troops at the beginning of the battle that the English Field-Marshal could muster, they were not well handled and no adequate use was made of the French preponderance. Napoleon, on the far right of Ney, at Ligny, on the contrary, fought the Prussians with his old-time skill and brilliance. The contending forces there were about equal, the Prussians having the advantage in numbers, but victory finally declared for the Emperor. It was the last victory, not the least brilliant and not the least desperately fought of his long career. The importance and quality of the battle has been lost sight of in the greater struggle of Waterloo, which took place two days after, but it was a great battle, nevertheless. One of the crude ways in which to estimate a battle is by what is called the "butcher's bill" and eighteen thousand dead and wounded Prussians and twelve thousand Frenchmen tells its tale. But it was not the decisive battle that Napoleon had planned to make it.

The Prussians retreated. They had to. But they retreated in good order. Bl?cher having been unhorsed and temporarily incapacitated in a charge, the command and direction of the retreat devolved upon Gneisenau. His chief claim to military distinction lies in the fact that he did not do what Napoleon expected, and what Bl?cher would have done. He retreated to the north instead of the east! A pursuit was launched, but it did not pursue the Prussians. It went off, as it were, into thin air. It pursued Napoleon's idea, his forecast, which owing to the accident to Bl?cher was wrong!

One reason why the victory of Ligny and the drawn battle at Quatre Bras were not decisive was because of a strange lack of generalship and a strange confusion of orders for which Napoleon and Ney are both responsible. Ney was constructively a victor at Quatre Bras, finally. That is, the English retreated at nightfall and abandoned the field to him; but they retreated not because they were beaten but because Wellington, finding his position could be bettered by retirement and concentration, decided upon withdrawal. But Ney could have been the victor in every sense, in spite of his indifferent tactics, if it had not been for the same blunder that the Emperor committed.

D'Erlon, at the head of perhaps the finest corps in the army, numbering twenty thousand men, through the long hours of that hot June day marched from the vicinity of Quatre Bras to Ligny, whence he could actually see the battle raging, only to be summoned back from Ligny to Quatre Bras by orders from Ney. Retracing his course, therefore, he marched back over the route he had just traversed, arriving at Quatre Bras too late to be of any service to Ney! Like the famous King of France who with twenty thousand men marched up the hill and then marched down again, this splendid corps which, thrown into either battle, would have turned the Prussian retreat into a rout on the one hand, or have utterly cut to pieces Wellington on the other, did nothing. The principal fault was Napoleon's. He saw d'Erlon's corps approaching, but he sent no order and took no steps to put it into the battle.

Well, in spite of the fact that the energies of d'Erlon had been spent in marching instead of fighting, the Emperor was a happy man that night. He had got himself safely placed between the two armies and he had certainly severely if not decisively beaten one of them. Strategically, his operations had been characterized by unusual brilliancy. If things went as he hoped, surmised and confidently expected, all would be well. He was absolutely sure that Bl?cher was retiring to the east, toward Namur. He dispatched Grouchy with thirty-five thousand of his best men to pursue him in the direction which he supposed he had taken.

Napoleon's orders were positive, and he was accustomed to exact implicit obedience from his subordinates. He had a habit of discouraging independent action in the sternest of ways, and for the elimination of this great force from the subsequent battle the Emperor himself must accept the larger responsibility. But all this does not excuse Grouchy. He carried out his orders faithfully, to be sure, but a more enterprising and more independent commander would have sooner discovered that he was pursuing stragglers and would earlier have taken the right course to regain his touch with his chief and to harry the Prussian Field-Marshal. He did turn to the north at last, but when the great battle was joined he was miles away and of no more use than if he had been in Egypt. His attack on the Prussian rear-guard at Wavre, while it brought about a smart little battle with much hard and gallant fighting, really amounted to nothing and had absolutely no bearing on the settlement of the main issue elsewhere. He did not disobey orders, but many a man has gained immortality and fame by doing that very thing. Grouchy had his chance and failed to improve it. He was a veteran and a successful soldier, too.

Comes the day of Waterloo. Bl?cher had retreated north to Wavre and was within supporting distance of Wellington. His army had been beaten but not crushed, its spirit was not abated. The old Prussian Marshal, badly bruised and shaken from being unhorsed and overridden in a cavalry charge in which he had joined like a common trooper, but himself again, promised in a famous interview between the two to come to the support of the younger English Marshal, should he be attacked, with his whole army. Wellington had retreated as far as he intended to. He established his headquarters on a hill called Mont St. Jean, back of a ridge near a village called Waterloo, where his army commanded the junction point of the highroads to the south and west. He drew up his lines, his red-coated countrymen and his blue-coated allies on the long ridge in front of Mont St. Jean, facing south, overlooking a gently sloping valley which was bounded by other parallel ridges about a mile away. On the right center of Wellington's lines, a short distance below the crest of the ridge, embowered in trees, lay a series of stone buildings, in extent and importance between a ch?teau and a farmhouse, called Hougomont. These were surrounded by a stone wall and the place was impregnable against everything but artillery if it were properly manned and resolutely held. Both those conditions were met that day. Opposite the left center of the Duke's line was another strong place, a farmhouse consisting of a series of stone buildings on three sides of a square, the fourth closed by a wall, called La Haye Sainte. These outposts were of the utmost value, rightly used.

The Duke had sixty-seven thousand men and one hundred and eighty guns. His right had been strengthened at the expense of his left, because he expected Napoleon to attack the right and he counted on Bl?cher's arrival to support his left. To meet him Napoleon had seventy-five thousand men and two hundred and sixty guns. Off to the northeast lay Bl?cher at Wavre with nearly eighty thousand more men and two hundred guns, and wandering around in the outer darkness was Grouchy with thirty-five thousand.

The valley was highly cultivated. The ripening grain still stood in the fallow fields separated by low hedges. Broad roads ran through the valley in different directions. The weather was horrible. It rained torrents during the night and the earlier part of the morning. The fields were turned into quagmires, the roads into morasses. It was hot and close. The humidity was great. Little air was stirring. Throughout the day the mist hung heavy over the valley and the ridges which bordered it. But the rain ceased in the morning and Napoleon made no attack until afternoon, waiting for the ground to dry out somewhat. It was more important to him that his soldiers should have good footing than to the English, for the offensive, the attack, the charge fell to him. Wellington determined to fight strictly on the defensive. Nevertheless, precious hours were wasted. Every passing moment brought some accession to the allied army, and every passing hour brought Bl?cher nearer. With all the impetuosity of his soul, the old man was urging his soldiers forward over the horrible roads.

"Boys," he said in his rough, homely way to some bitterly complaining artillerists stalled in the mud, "I promised. You would not have me break my word, would you?"

Grouchy meanwhile had at last determined that the Prussians had gone the other way. He had learned that they were at Wavre and he had swung about and was coming north. Of course, he should have marched toward the sound of the cannon--generally the safest guide for a soldier!--but, at any rate, he was trying to get into touch with the enemy. No one can question his personal courage or his loyalty to his cause.

Napoleon, when he should have been on the alert, was very drowsy and dull that day at Waterloo. He had shown himself a miracle of physical strength and endurance in that wonderful four days of campaigning and fighting, but the soldiers passing by the farmhouse of La Belle Alliance--singular name which referred so prophetically to the enemy--sometimes saw him sitting on a chair by a table outside the house, his feet resting on a bundle of straw to keep them from the wet ground, nodding, asleep! And no wonder. It is doubtful if he had enjoyed as much as eight hours of sleep since he crossed the Sambre, and those not consecutive! Still, if ever he should have kept awake, that eighteenth of June was the day of days!

So far as one can discern his intention, his battle plan had been to feint at Hougomont on the right center, cause the Duke of Wellington to weaken his line to support the ch?teau, and then to break through the left center and crush him by one of those massed attacks under artillery fire for which he had become famous. The line once broken, the end, of course, would be more or less certain.

The difference in the temperaments of the two great Captains was well illustrated before the battle was joined. The Duke mainly concealed his men behind the ridge. All that the French saw when they came on the field were guns, officers and a few men. The English-Belgian army was making no parade. What the British and Flemish saw was very different. The Emperor displayed his full hand. The French, who appeared not to have been disorganized at all by the hard fighting at Ligny and Quatre Bras, came into view in most splendid style; bands playing, drums rolling, swords waving, bayonets shining even in the dull air of the wretched morning. They came on the field in solid columns, deployed and took their positions, out of cannon-shot range, of course, in the most deliberate manner. The uniforms of the army were brand-new, and it was the fashion to fight in one's best in those days. They presented a magnificent spectacle.

Presently the Duke, his staff, the gunners and the others who were on the top of the ridge and watching, saw a body of horsemen gallop rapidly along the French lines. One gray-coated figure riding a white horse was in advance of the rest. The cheers, the almost delirious shouts and cries, told the watchers that it was the Emperor. It was his last grand review, his last moment of triumph.

It was after one o'clock before the actual battle began. More books have been written about that battle than any other that was ever fought. One is tempted to say, almost than all others that were ever fought. And the closest reasoners arrive at different conclusions and disagree as to many vital and important details. The Duke of Wellington himself left two accounts, one in his dispatches and one in notes written long afterward, which were irreconcilable, but some things are certain, upon some things all historians are agreed.

The battle began with an attack on the Hougomont Ch?teau and the conflict actually raged around that ch?teau for over six hours, or until the French were in retreat. Macdonell, Home and Saltoun, Scotsmen all, with their regiments of the Household Guard, held that ch?teau, although it was assailed over and over again, finally, by the whole of Reille's corps. They held that ch?teau, although it burned over their heads, although the French actually broke into it on occasion. They held it, although every other man in it was shot down and scarcely a survivor was without a wound. It was assaulted with a fury and a resolution which was only matched by the fury and resolution of its defense. Why it was not battered to pieces with artillery no one knows. At any rate, it occupied practically the whole of Reille's corps during the whole long afternoon of fighting.

The space between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte was about a thousand yards. La Haye Sainte was assaulted also but, to anticipate events, it held out until about five o'clock in the evening, when, after another wonderful defense, it was carried. The French established themselves in it eighty yards from Wellington's line.

WATERLOO--THE CHARGE OF D'ERLON

Meanwhile the French had not confined their efforts to the isolated forts, if they may be so called, on Wellington's center and left center. After a tremendous artillery duel d'Erlon's men had been formed up for that massed attack for which the Emperor was famous, and with which it was expected the English line would be pierced and the issue decided. The Emperor, as has been noted, had intended the attack on Hougomont as a mere feint, hoping to induce the Duke of Wellington to reinforce his threatened right and thereby to weaken his left center. It was no part of the Emperor's plan that an attempt to capture Hougomont should become the main battle on his own left that it had, nor could he be sure that even the tremendous attack upon it had produced the effect at which he aimed. Nevertheless, the movement of d'Erlon had to be tried.

It must be remembered that Napoleon had never passed through the intermediate army grades. He had been jumped from a regimental officer to a General. He had never handled a regiment, a brigade, a division, a corps--only an army, or armies. Perhaps that was one reason why he was accustomed to leaving details and the execution of his plans to subordinates. He was the greatest of strategists and the ablest of tacticians, but minor tactics did not interest him, and the arrangement of this great assault he left to the corps and its commander.

Giving orders to Ney and d'Erlon, therefore, the Emperor at last launched his grand attack. One hundred and twenty guns were concentrated on that part of the English left beyond the westernmost of the two outlying positions, through which it was determined to force a way. Under cover of the smoke, which all day hung thick and heavy in the valley and clung to the ridges, d'Erlon's splendid corps, which had been so wasted between Quatre Bras and Ligny, and which was burning to achieve something, was formed in four huge parallel close-ranked columns, slightly ?cheloned under Donzelot, Marcognet, Durutte and Allix. With greatly mistaken judgment, these four columns were crowded close together. The disposition was a very bad one. In the first place, their freedom of movement was so impaired by lack of proper distance as to render deployment almost impossible. Unless the columns could preserve their solid formation until the very point of contact, the charge would be a fruitless one. In the second place, they made an enormous target impossible to miss. The attack was supported by light batteries of artillery and the cavalry in the flanks.

Other things being equal, the quality of soldiers being the same, the column is at an obvious disadvantage when attacking the line. It was so in this instance. Although it was magnificently led by Ney and d'Erlon in person, and although it comprised troops of the highest order, the division commanders being men of superb courage and resolution, no valor, no determination could make up for these disadvantages. The tremendous artillery-fire of the French, which did great execution among the English, kept them down until the dark columns of infantry mounting the ridge got in the way of the French guns which, of course, ceased to fire.

The drums were rolling madly, the Frenchmen were cheering loudly when the ridge was suddenly covered with long red lines. There were not many blue-coated allies left. Many of them had already laid down their lives; of the survivors more were exhausted by the fierce battling of the preceding days when the Belgians had nobly sustained the fighting traditions of a race to which nearly two thousand years before Caesar himself had borne testimony. As a matter of fact, most of the allies were moved to the rear. They did not leave the field. They were formed up again back of the battle line to constitute the reserve. The English did not intend to flee either. They were not accustomed to it and they saw no reason for doing it now.

Wellington moved the heavy cavalry over to support the threatened point of the line and bade his soldiers restrain their fire. There was something ominous in the silent, steady, rock-like red wall. It was much more threatening to the mercuric Gallic spirit than the shouting of the French was to the unemotional English disposition. Still, they came intrepidly on.

Meanwhile, renewed attacks were hurled against the ch?teau and the farmhouse. Ney and d'Erlon had determined to break the English line with the bayonet. Suddenly, when the French came within point-blank range, the English awoke to action. The English guns hurled shot into the close-ranked masses, each discharge doing frightful execution. Ney's horse was shot from under him at the first fire. But the unwounded Marshal scrambled to his feet and, mounting another horse, pressed on.

The slow-moving ranks were nearer. At point-blank range the English infantrymen now opened fire. Shattering discharges were poured upon the French. The fronts of the divisions were obliterated. The men in advance who survived would have given back, but the pressure of the masses in their rear forced them to go on. The divisions actually broke into a run. Again and again the British battalions spoke, the black muskets in the hands of the red coats were tipped with redder flame. It was not in human flesh and blood to sustain very long such a fire.

It was a magnificent charge, gloriously delivered, and such was its momentum that it almost came in touch with the English line. It did not quite. That momentum was spent at last. The French deployed as well as they could in the crowded space and at half-pistol-shot distance began to return the English fire. The French guns joined in the infernal tumult. The advance had been stopped, but it had not been driven back. The French cavalry were now coming up. Before they arrived that issue had to be decided. The critical moment was at hand, and Wellington's superb judgment determined the action. He let loose on them the heavy cavalry, led by the Scots Grays on their big horses. As the ranks of the infantry opened to give them room, the men of the Ninety-second Highlanders, mad with the enthusiasm of the moment, caught the stirrup-straps of the Horse and, half running, half dragged, joined in the charge.

The splendid body of heavy cavalry fell on the flank of the halted columns. There was no time for the French to form a square. Nay more, there was no room for them to form a square. In an instant, however, they faced about and delivered a volley which did great execution, but nothing could stop the maddened rush of the gigantic horsemen. Back on the heights of Rossomme Napoleon, aroused from his lethargy at last, stared at the great attack.

Yes, they were more terrible to the men at the point of contact than they were to those back of La Belle Alliance. No infantry that ever lived in the position in which the French found themselves could have stood up against such a charge as that. Trampling, hacking, slashing, thrusting, the horses biting and fighting like the men, the heavy cavalry broke up two of the columns. The second and third began to retreat under an awful fire. But the dash of the British troopers was spent. They had become separated, disorganized. They had lost coherence. The French cavalry now arrived on the scene. Admirably handled, they were thrown on the scattered English. There was nothing for the latter to do but retire. Retire they did, having accomplished all that anyone could expect of cavalry, fighting every step of the way. Just as soon as they opened the fronts of the regiments' in line, the infantry and artillery began again, and then the French cavalry got its punishment in its turn.

It takes but moments to tell of this charge and, indeed, in the battlefield it seemed but a few moments. But the French did not give way until after long hard fighting. From the beginning of the preliminary artillery-duel to the repulse of the charge an hour and a half elapsed. Indeed, they did not give way altogether either, for Donzelot and Allix, who commanded the left divisions, were the men who finally succeeded in capturing La Haye Sainte. And both sides suffered furiously before the French gave back.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet