Both Wellington and
Napoleon are accused of having flung away their cavalry; but
Wellington--or, rather, Uxbridge--by expending only 2000 sabres,
wrecked, as we have seen, a French infantry corps, destroyed a battery
of 40 guns, and took 3000 prisoners. Ney practically used up 15,000
magnificent horsemen without a single appreciable result. Napoleon, at
St. Helena, put the blame of his wasted cavalry on Ney's hot-headed
impetuosity. The cavalry attack, he said, was made without his orders;
Kellerman's division joined in the attack without even Ney's orders.
But that Napoleon should watch for two hours his whole cavalry force
wrecking itself in thirteen successive and baffled assaults on the
British squares, without his orders, is an utterly incredible
supposition.

If two hours of cavalry assault, punctuated as with flame by the fire
of 200 guns, did not destroy the stubborn British line, it cannot be
denied that it shook it terribly. The British ridge was strewn with
the dead and dying. Regiments had shrunk to companies, companies to
mere files. "Our square," says Gronow, "presented a shocking sight.
We were nearly suffocated by the smoke and smell from burnt cartridges.
It was impossible to move a step without treading on a wounded or slain
comrade." "Where is your brigade?" Vivian asked of Lord Edward
Somerset, who commanded the Life Guards. "Here," said Lord Edward,
pointing to two scanty squadrons, and a long line of wounded or
mutilated horses. Before nightfall the two gallant brigades that made
the great cavalry charge of the morning had contracted to a single
squadron of fifty files. Wellington sent an aide-de-camp to ask
General Hackett, "What square of his that was which was so far in
advance?" It was a mass of killed and wounded men belonging to the
30th and 73rd regiments that lay slain, yet in ranks, on the spot the
square had occupied at one period of the fight, and from which it had
been withdrawn. Seen through the whirling smoke, this quadrangle of
corpses looked like a square of living men. The destruction wrought by
the French guns on the British squares was, in brief, terrific. By a
single discharge of grape upon a German square, one of its sides was
completely blown away, and the "square" transfigured into a triangle,
with its base a line of slaughtered men. The effect produced by
cannon-shot at short range on solid masses of men was sometimes very
extraordinary. Thus Croker tells ho