--SCOTT.

Napoleon watched the huge black echelon of battalions mount the slope,
their right section crumbled under the rush of the British Guards.
Colborne and the 52nd tumbled the left flank into ruin; the British
cavalry swept down upon them. Those who stood near Napoleon watched
his face. It became pale as death. "Ils sont meles ensemble" ("they
are mingled together"), he muttered to himself. He cast one hurried
glance over the field, to right and left, and saw nothing but broken
squadrons, abandoned batteries, wrecked infantry battalions. "Tout est
perdu," he said, "sauve qui peut," and, wheeling his horse, he turned
his back upon his last battlefield. His star had set!

Napoleon's strategy throughout the brief campaign was magnificent; his
tactics--the detailed handling of his troops on the actual
battlefield--were wretched. "We were manoeuvred," says the disgusted
Marbot, "like so many pumpkins." Napoleon was only forty-seven years
old, but, as Wolseley says, "he was no longer the thin, sleek, active
little man he had been at Rivoli. His now bloated face, large stomach,
and fat and rounded legs bespoke a man unfitted for hard work on
horseback." His fatal delay in pursuing Bluecher on the 17th, and his
equally fatal waste of time in attacking Wellington on the 18th, proved
how his quality as a general had decayed. It is a curious fact that,
during the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon remained for hours motionless
at a table placed for him in the open air, often asleep, with his head
resting on his arms. One reads with an odd sense of humour the answer
which a dandy officer of the British Life Guards gave to the inquiry,
"How he felt during the battle of Waterloo?" He replied that he had
felt "awfully bored"! That anybody should feel "bored" in the vortex
of such a drama is wonderful; but scarcely so wonderful as the fact
that the general of one of the two contending hosts found it possible
to go to sleep during the crisis of the gigantic battle, on which hung
his crown and fate. Napoleon had lived too long for the world's
happiness or for his own fame.

The story here told is that of Waterloo on its British side. No
attempt is made to describe Bluecher's magnificent loyalty in pushing,
fresh from the defeat of Ligny, through the muddy cross-roads from
Wavre, to join Wellington on the blood-stained field of Waterloo. No
account, again, is attempted of Grouchy's wanderings into space, with
33,0