"Sauve qui peut" is echoed now and re-echoed all along the crest of the plateau. And the echo rolls down the slope into the valley where Reille's infantry and a regiment of cuirassiers, and three more battalions of chasseurs, are making ready to second the assault on Mont Saint Jean. Reille and his infantry pause and listen: the cuirassiers halt in their upward movement, whilst up on the ridge of the plateau where Donzelot's grenadiers have attacked the brigade of Kempt and Lambert and Pack, the whisper goes from mouth to mouth:
"We are betrayed! Sauve qui peut!"
Panic seizes the younger men: they turn their horses' heads back toward the slopes. The stampede has commenced: very soon it grows. The British in front, the Prussians in the rear: "Sauve qui peut!"
Ney amongst them is almost unrecognisable. His face is coal-black with powder: he has no hat, no epaulettes and only half a sword: rage, anguish, bitterness are in his husky voice as he adjures, entreats, calls to the demoralised army—and insults it, execrates it in turn. But nothing but Death will stop that army now in its headlong flight.
"At least stop and see how a Marshal of France dies on the field of honour," he calls.
But the voice which led these same men to victory at Moskowa has lost its potency and its magic. The men cry "Vive Ney!" but they do not stand. The stampede has become general. In the valley below the infantry has started to run up the slope of La Belle Alliance: after it the cavalry with reins hanging loose, stirrups lost, casques, sabretaches, muskets—anything that impedes—thrown into the fields to right and left. La Haye Sainte is evacuated, Hougoumont is abandoned; Papelotte, Plancenoit, the woods, the plains are only filled with running men and the thunder of galloping chargers.
Alone the Old Guard has remained unshaken. Whilst all around them what was once the Grand Army is shattered, destroyed, melted like ice before a devastating fire, they have continued to advance, sublime in their fortitude, in their endurance, their contempt for death. One by one their columns are shattered and there are none now to replace those that fall. And as the gloom of night settles on this vast hecatomb on the plateau of Mont Saint Jean the conquerors of Jena and Austerlitz and Friedland make their last stand round the bronze eagle—all that is left to them of the glories of the past.
And when from far away the cry of "Sauve qui peut" has become only an echo, and the bronze eagle shattered by a bullet lies prone upon the ground shielded against capture in its fall by a circling mountain of dead, when finally Night wraps all the heroism, the glory, the sorrow and the horrors of this awful day in the sable folds of her all-embracing mantle, Napoleon's Old Guard has ceased to be.
And out in the western sky a streak of vivid crimson like human blood has broken the bosom of the clouds: the glow of the sinking sun rests on this huge dissolution of what was once so glorious and unconquered and great. Then it is that Wellington rides to the very edge of the plateau and fronts the gallant British troops at this supreme hour of oncoming victory, and lifting his hat high above his head he waves it three times in the air.
And from right and left they come, British, Hanoverians, Belgians and Brunswickers to deliver the final blow to this retreating army, wounded already unto death.