“An hour before midnight, I saw a man in an English uniform, coming towards me; he was, I suspected, on the same errand. I spoke instantly, telling him who I was: he belonged to the 40th, and had missed his regiment. He released me from the dying soldier, took up a sword, and stood over me as sentinel. Day broke, and at six o’clock in the morning a messenger was sent to Hervé: a cart came for me, and I was conveyed to the village of Waterloo, and laid in the bed, as I afterwards understood, from which Gordon had but just before been carried out. I had received seven wounds; a surgeon slept in my room, and I was saved by excessive bleeding.”
Related by an officer.
... “Early on the following morning, the survivors arose and hurried out to seek, amidst the dying and the dead, those comrades and friends of whose fate they were as yet ignorant[112]. But even earlier still had the wretches who hang on the skirts of every army, for the purpose of rifling the new-made corpse, been at work: the watches and purses of many were already gone; while many a brave heart, still throbbing, had received its coup de grâce from the hands of these merciless plunderers.
“Waterloo was won; the sun set upon a scene of slaughter, and the stillness of death succeeded the roar of battle. The thunder of five hundred cannons, the roll of musketry, the shock of mail-clad horsemen, the Highland slogan, the Irish huzza, were heard no more; and the moon gleamed coldly on a field of death, whose silence was only broken by the groans of the wounded, as they lay in helpless wretchedness beside their dead companions.
“While many a sufferer listened to every sound in anxious expectation of relief, a dropping fire was occasionally heard in the direction of Genappe, announcing that the broken army of Napoleon was fiercely followed by its conquerors.
“Wearied by the unparalleled exertions of the tremendous day of Waterloo, the British pursuit gradually relaxed, and the light cavalry halted on the right of the road to Quatre-Bras; but the Prussians, less fatigued, continued to harass the flying enemy, and the mingled mass of fugitives were forced from every village where they had attempted to form bivacs. A barrier was hastily thrown across the entrance of Genappe, to arrest the progress of the jägers and hussars that hung upon the rear of the guard; but it was blown down by a few discharges of a howitzer, and the French were driven from the town. Throughout the disastrous night not a moment of repose was granted to the terror-stricken. To attempt anything like serious resistance to their pursuers, where all were inextricably confused, was absurd. Officers and soldiers were mobbed together; discipline had ended: none attempted to direct, where none were found to obey; and with unrelenting fury the Prussian cavalry sabred the exhausted fugitives, till, after passing Gosselies and Charleroi, the wreck of Napoleon’s army found a temporary shelter beneath the walls of Philippeville.
“That night, the British bivac was on the same ridge which their beaten enemy had occupied on the preceding one; and as I lay upon the ground, I heard at times, and at no great distance from me, the voices of my more fortunate companions who had escaped from the slaughter, and some were roaming over the field in search of plunder. Momentarily, I expected that a friendly straggler would pass by. I must have been for a considerable period insensible; for the place where I fell, although the theatre of the final struggle between the relics of Ney’s columns and the British guards, was now totally deserted by the living, and cumbered only with the dying and the dead.
“I seemed as if awakening from a dream: a difficulty of respiration painfully annoyed me, and I endeavoured to rise; but a weight, too mighty to be removed, pressed me to the earth. My sight was imperfect, my eyelids felt closed. I disengaged my left hand, and raising it to my face, found that a mask of congealed blood covered it. I rubbed it away, and, prepared as I was for a sanguinary spectacle by the continuous moanings of wounded men and dying horses, I closed my eyes in horror, when the clear cold moonlight revealed the sickening scene.