From midday till after four, a kind of mysterious haze covers this field of noble deeds. Fog after the rain wraps the gently-billowing Flemish ground in a white semi-transparent veil—covers with impartial coolness all the mighty actions, the heroic charges and still more heroic stands, all the silent uncomplaining sufferings, the glorious deaths, all the courage and all the endurance.
Through the grey mists we see a medley of moving colours—blue and grey and scarlet and black—of shakos and sabretaches, of English and French and Hanoverian and Scotch, of epaulettes and bare knees; we hear the sound of carbine and artillery fire, the clank of swords and bayonets, the call of bugle and trumpet and the wail of the melancholy pibroch: tunics and gold tassels and kilts—a medley of sounds and of visions!
We see the attack on Hougoumont—the appearance of Bülow on the heights of Saint Lambert—the charge of the Inniskillings and the Scots Greys—the death of valiant Ponsonby. We see Marshal Ney Prince of Moskowa—the bravest soldier in France—we see him everywhere where the mêlée is thickest, everywhere where danger is most nigh. His magnificent uniform torn to shreds, his gold lace tarnished, his hair and whiskers singed, his face blackened by powder, indomitable, unconquered, superb, we hear him cry: "Where are those British bullets? Is there not one left for me?"
He knows—none better!—that the plains of Mont Saint Jean are the great gambling tables on which the supreme gambler—Napoleon, once Emperor of the French and master of half the world—had staked his all. "If we come out of this alive and conquered," he cries to Heymès, his aide-de-camp, "there will only be the hangman's rope left for us all."
And we see the gambler himself—Napoleon, Emperor still and still certain of victory—on horseback all day, riding from end to end of his lines; he is gayer than he has ever been before. At Marengo he was despondent, at Austerlitz he was troubled: but at Waterloo he has no doubts. The star of his destiny has risen more brilliant than ever before.
"The day of France's glory has only just dawned," he calls, and his mind is full of projects—the triumphant march back into Paris—the Germans driven back to the Rhine—the English to the sea.
His only anxiety—and it is a slight one still—is that Grouchy with his fresh troops is so late in arriving.
Still, the Prussians are late too, and the British cannot hold the place for ever.
II
At three o'clock the fog lifts—the veil that has wrapped so many sounds, such awful and wonderful visions, in a kind of mystery, is lifted now, and it reveals . . . what? Hougoumont invested—Brave Baring there with a handful of men—English, German, Brunswickians—making a last stand with ten rounds of ammunition left to them per man, and the French engineers already battering in the gates of the enclosing wall that surrounds the château and chapel of Goumont: the farm of La Haye Sainte taken—Ney there with his regiment of cuirassiers and five battalions of the Old Guard: and the English lines on the heights of Mont Saint Jean apparently giving way.