Men mad with battle-lust threw themselves and their horses upon the bayonets. The guns were captured and recaptured. The horsemen overran the ridge, they got behind the squares, they counter-charged over their own tracks, they rode until the breasts of the horses touched the guns. They fired pistols in the face of the English. One such charge is enough to immortalize its makers, and during that afternoon they made twelve!
Ney, raging over the field, had five horses killed under him. The British suffered horribly. If the horsemen did draw off to take breath, and reform for another effort, the French batteries, the English squares presenting easy targets, sent ball after ball through them. And nobody stopped fighting to watch the cavalry. Far and wide the battle raged. Toward the close of the day some of the English squares had become so torn to pieces that regiments, brigades and divisions had to be combined to keep from being overwhelmed.
Still the fight raged around Hougomont. Now, from a source of strength, La Haye Sainte had become a menace. There the English attacked and the French held. Off to the northeast the country was black with advancing masses of men. No, it was not Grouchy and his thirty-five thousand who, if they had been there at the beginning, might have decided the day. It was the Prussians.
They, at least, had marched to the sound of the cannon. Grouchy was off at Wavre. He at last got in touch with one of Blücher's rear corps and he was fighting a smart little battle ten miles from the place where the main issue was to be decided. As a diversion, his efforts were negligible, for without that corps the allies outnumbered the French two to one.
Telling the troops that the oncoming soldiers were their comrades of Grouchy's command who would decide the battle, Napoleon detached the gallant Lobau, who had stood like a stone wall at Aspern, with the Young Guard to seize the village of Planchenoit and to hold the Prussians back, for if they broke in the end would be as certain as it was swift. And well did Lobau with the Young Guard perform that task. Bülow, commanding the leading corps, hurled himself again and again upon the French line. His heavy columns fared exactly as the French columns had fared when they assaulted the English. But it was not within the power of ten thousand men to hold off thirty thousand forever, and there were soon that number of Prussians at the point of contact. Frantic messages from Lobau caused the Emperor to send one of the divisions of the Old Guard, the last reserve, to his support.
It was now after six o'clock, the declining sun was already low on the horizon, the long June day was drawing to a close. The main force of the Prussians had not yet come up to the hill and ridge of Mont St. Jean. Wellington, in great anxiety, was clinging desperately to the ridge with his shattered lines wondering how long he could hold them, whether he could sustain another of those awful attacks. His reserves, except two divisions of light cavalry, Vivian's and Vandeleur's, and Maitland's and Adams' brigades headed by Colborne's famous Fifty-second Foot, among his troops the de luxe veterans of the Peninsula, had all been expended.
Lobau was still holding back the Prussians by the most prodigious and astounding efforts. If Napoleon succeeded in his last titanic effort to break that English line, Blücher would be too late. Unless night or Blücher came quickly, if Napoleon made that attack and it was not driven back, victory in this struggle of the war gods would finally go to the French.
Hougomont still held out. The stubborn defense of it was Wellington's salvation. While it stood his right was more or less protected. But La Haye Sainte offered a convenient point of attack upon him. If Napoleon brought up his remaining troops behind it they would only have a short distance to go before they were at death's grapple hand to hand with the shattered, exhausted, but indomitable defenders of the ridge.