they were in the act of
pressing upon the only line open to the French for retreat, and now here
came Ziethen with his new masses upon the top of all.

If, at this hour, just after seven, upon that fatal day, retreat had been
possible or advisable to Napoleon, every rule of military art demanded it.
He was now quite outnumbered; his exhausted troops were strained up to and
beyond the breaking point. To carry such strains too far means in all
things, not only in war, an irretrievable catastrophe.

But retreat was hardly possible as a military action; it was impossible as
a political one.

Napoleon could hardly retreat at that hour, although he was already
defeated, because the fury and the exhaustion of the combat, its
increasing confusion, and the increasing dispersion of its units, made any
rapid concentration and organisation for the purposes of a sudden
retirement hazardous in the extreme. The doomed body, held closer and
closer upon its right flank, menaced more and more on its right rear, now
suddenly threatened on its exposed salient angle, would fight on.

Though Napoleon had withdrawn from the combat an hour before, when Buelow's
30,000 had struck at his right flank and made his destruction certain;
though he had then, while yet he could, organised a retirement, abandoned
the furious struggle for La Haye Sainte before it was successful, and
covered with his best troops an immediate retreat, that retreat would not
have availed his cause.

The appearance of the Prussians on his right proved glaringly the nature
of his doom. Grouchy--a quarter of his forces--was cut off from him
altogether. The enemy, whom he believed to be beyond Grouchy, and pursued
by Grouchy, had appeared, upon the contrary, between Grouchy and himself.
Now Ziethen too was here.

Did Napoleon retire, he would retire before forces half as large again as
his own, and destined to grow to double his own within a few hours. His
retirement would leave Grouchy to certain disaster.

Politically, retreat was still more hopeless. He himself would re-enter
France defeated, with, at the most, half the strength that had crossed the
frontier three days before. He would so re-enter France--the wealthier
classes of which watched his power, nearly all of them with jealousy, most
with active hate--surrounded by general officers not ten of whom, perhaps,
he could sincerely trust, and by a whole society which supported him only
upon the doubtful condition