f thankfulness and cordial good-will. They told
each other of their adventures in the day--its episodes, perils,
narrow, hair-breadth escapes! they inquired eagerly for friends; and
then, as they learnt gradually the whole terrible truth, the awful
price at which victory had been secured, moments that had been radiant
grew overcast, and short-lived gladness fled.

"Next to a battle lost, nothing is so dreadful as a battle won," said
Wellington, at the end, too, of his most triumphant day. The
slaughter is a sad set-off against the glory; groans of anguish are
the converse of exulting cheers. The field of conquest was stained
with the life's blood of thousands. The dead lay all around; some on
their backs, calmly sleeping as though death had inflicted no pangs;
the bodies of others were writhed and twisted with the excruciating
agony of their last hour. The wounded in every stage of suffering
strewed the ground, mutilated by round shot and shell, shattered by
grape, cut and slashed and stabbed by bayonet and sword.

Their cries, the loud shriek of acute pain, the long-drawn moan of
the dying, the piercing appeal of those conscious, but unable to move,
filled every echo, and one of the first and most pressing duties for
all who could be spared was to afford help and succour.

Now the incompleteness of the subsidiary services of the English army
became more strikingly apparent. It possessed no carefully organised,
well-appointed ambulance trains, no minutely perfect field-hospitals,
easily set up and ready to work at a moment's notice; medicines were
wanting; there was little or no chloroform; the only surgical
instruments were those the surgeons carried, while these indispensable
assistants were by no means too numerous, and already worked off their
legs.

Parties were organised by every regiment, with stretchers and
water-bottles, to go over the field, to carry back the wounded to the
coast, and afford what help they could. The Royal Picts, like the
rest, hasten to send assistance to their stricken comrades. The
bandsmen, who had taken no part in the action, were detailed for the
duty, and the sergeant-major, at his own earnest request, was put in
charge.

As they were on the point of marching off, General Wilders rode up. He
had been separated, it will be remembered, from part of his brigade,
and had still but a vague idea of how it had fared in the fight.

"I saw nothing of you, colonel, during the action. Worse