We see too a vast hecatomb: glory and might must claim their many thousand victims: the dead and dying lie scattered like pawns upon an abandoned chessboard, the humble pawns in this huge and final gamble for supremacy and power, for national existence and for liberty. Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, Papelotte are sown with illustrious dead—but on the plateau of Mont Saint Jean the British still hold their ground.
Wellington is still there on the heights, with the majestic trees of Soigne behind him, the stately canopy of the elm above his head—more frigid than before, more heroic, but also more desperately anxious.
"Blücher or nightfall," he sighs as a fresh cavalry charge is hurled against those indomitable British squares. The thirteenth assault, and still they stand or kneel on one knee, those gallant British boys; bayonet in hand or carbine, they fire, fall out and re-form again: shaken, hustled, encroached on they may be, but still they stand and fire with coolness and precision . . . the ranks are not broken yet.
Officers ride up to the field-marshal to tell him that the situation has become desperate, their regiments decimated, their men exhausted. They ask for fresh orders: but he has only one answer for them:
"There are no fresh orders, save to hold out to the last man."
And down in the valley at La Belle Alliance is the great gambler—the man who to-day will either be Emperor again—a greater, mightier monarch than even he has ever been—or who will sink to a status which perhaps the meanest of his erstwhile subjects would never envy.
But just now—at four o'clock—when the fog has lifted—he is flushed with excitement, exultant in the belief in victory.
The English centre on Mont Saint Jean is giving way at last, he is told.
"The beginning of retreat!" he cries.
And he, who had been anxious at Austerlitz, despondent at Marengo, is gay and happy and brimming full of hope.