and Ney one o'clock.
Lord Hill may be credited with having settled this minute question of
fact. He took two watches with him into the fight, one a stop-watch,
and he marked with it the sound of the first shot fired, and this
evidence is now accepted as proving that the first flash of red flame
which marked the opening of the world-shaking tragedy of Waterloo took
place at exactly ten minutes to twelve.

As these sketches are not written for military experts, but only
pretend to tell, in plain prose, and for younger Britons, the story of
the great deeds which are part of their historical inheritance, all the
disputed questions about Waterloo may be at the outset laid aside. It
is a great tale, and it seems all the greater when it is simply told.
The campaign of Waterloo, in a sense, lasted exactly four days, yet
into that brief space of time there is compressed so much of human
daring and suffering, of genius and of folly, of shining triumph and of
blackest ruin, that the story must always be one of the most exciting
records in human history.

I. THE RIVAL HOSTS

"Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands,
And of armed men the hum;
Lo! a nation's hosts have gathered
Round the quick alarming drum,--
Saying, 'Come,
Freeman, come,
Ere your heritage be wasted,' said the quick alarming drum.

* * * * * *

'Let me of my heart take counsel:
War is not of life the sum;
Who shall stay and reap the harvest
When the autumn days shall come?'
But the drum
Echoed, 'Come!
Death shall reap the braver harvest,' said the solemn-sounding drum.

What if, 'mid the cannons' thunder,
Whistling shot and bursting bomb,
When my brothers fall around me,
Should my heart grow cold and numb?'
But the drum
Answered, 'Come!
Better there in death united, than in life a recreant,--Come!'"
--BRET HARTE.

For weeks the British and Prussian armies, scattered over a district
100 miles by 40, had been keeping guard over the French frontier.
Mighty hosts of Russians and Austrians were creeping slowly across
Europe to join them. Napoleon, skilfully shrouding his movements in
impenetrable secrecy, was about to leap across the Sambre, and both
Bluecher and Wellington had to guess what would be his point of attack;
and they, as it happened, guessed wrongly. Napoleon's strategy was
determined partly by his knowledge