the night during which the other three defeated corps fell
back upon Wavre.

That night was full of their confused but unmolested retreat. With the
early morning of the Saturday Bulow's 32,000 fell back along a line
parallel to the general retirement, and all that day they were making
their way by the cross-country route through Welhain and Corroy to Dion Le
Mont.

This task was accomplished through pouring rain, by unpaved lanes and
through intolerable mud, over a distance of close on seventeen miles for
the hardest pushed of the troops, and not less than thirteen for those
whom the accident of position had most spared.

The greater part of the Fourth Corps had spent the first night in the
open; all of it had spent the second night upon the drenched ground. Upon
the _third_ day, the Sunday of Waterloo, this force, though it lies
furthest from the field of Waterloo of all the Prussian forces, is picked
out to march first to the aid of Wellington, because it as yet has had no
fighting and is supposed to be "fresh." On the daybreak, therefore, after
bivouacking in that dreadful weather, Bulow's force is again upon the
move. It does not get through Wavre until something like eight o'clock,
and the abominable conditions of the march may be guessed from the fact
that its centre did not reach St Lambert until one o'clock, nor did the
last brigade pass through that spot until three o'clock. Down the steep
ravine of the Lasne and up on the westward side of it was so hard a
business that, as we have seen, the brigades did not begin to debouch from
the woods at the summit until after four o'clock. It was not until after
five o'clock that the last brigade, the 14th, had come up in line with the
rest upon the field of Waterloo, having moved, under such abominable
conditions of slow, drenched marching, another fifteen miles.

In about forty-eight hours, therefore, this magnificent piece of work had
been accomplished. It was a total movement of over fifty miles for the
average of the corps--certainly more than sixty for those who had marched
furthest--broken only by two short nights, and those nights spent in the
open, one under drenching rain. The whole thing was accomplished without
appreciable loss of men, guns, or baggage, and at the end of it these men
put up a fight which was the chief factor in deciding Waterloo.

Such was the supreme effort of the Fourth Prussian Army Corps which
decided Waterloo.

There are not many ex