dvanced through the showers of
shot almost alone, sweeping everything before it, but it closed up more
and more, and diminished every moment. In twenty minutes every officer
was dismounted, and the Guard halted before such a terrible fire of
musketry, that even we, two hundred paces in the rear, could not hear
our own guns; we seemed to be only exploding our priming. At last the
whole army, in front, on the right and on the left, with the cavalry on
the flanks, fell upon us.

The four battalions of the Guard, reduced from three thousand to twelve
hundred men, could not withstand the charge, they fell back slowly, and
we fell back also, defending ourselves with musket and bayonet.

We had seen other battles more terrible, but this was the last.

When we reached the edge of the plateau, all the plain below was
enveloped in darkness and in the confusion of the defeat. The
disbanded troops were flying, some on foot and some on horseback.

A single battalion of the Guard in a square near the farm-house, and
three other battalions farther on, with another square of the Guard at
the junction of the route at Planchenois, stood motionless as some firm
structure in the midst of an inundation which sweeps away everything
else.

They all went--hussars, chasseurs, cuirassiers, artillery, and
infantry--pell-mell along the road, across the fields, like an army of
savages.

Along the ravine of Planchenois the dark sky was lighted up by the
discharges of musketry; the one square of the Guard still held out
against Bulow, and prevented him from cutting off our retreat, but
nearer us the Prussian cavalry poured down into the valley like a flood
breaking over its barriers. Old Bluecher had just arrived with forty
thousand men: he doubled our right wing and dispersed it.

What can I say more! It was dissolution--we were surrounded. The
English pushed us into the valley, and it was through this valley that
Bluecher was coming. The generals and officers and even the Emperor
himself were compelled to take refuge in a square, and they say that we
poor wretches were panic-stricken! Such an injustice was never seen.

[Illustration: Combat of Hougoumont Farm.]

Buche and I with five or six of our comrades ran toward the
farm-house--the bombs were bursting all around us, we reached the road
in our wild flight just as the English cavalry passed at full gallop,
shouting, "No quarter! no quarter!"

At this moment the square of the