Blücher had already played us the same trick at Leipzig—and he repeated it now in drawing Grouchy on to pursue him so far. Grouchy could not force him to return, and he could not prevent him from leaving thirty or forty thousand men to stop his pursuers, while he pushed on to the relief of Wellington.
Our only hope was that Grouchy had been ordered to return and join us, and that he would come up in the rear of the Prussians; but the Emperor sent no such order.
It was not we, the common soldiers, as you may well think, who had these ideas; it was the officers and generals; we knew nothing of it; we were like children, utterly unconscious that their hour is near.
But now having told you what I think, I will give you the history of the rest of the battle just as I saw it myself, so that each one of you will know as much about it as I do.
XXI
Almost immediately after the news of the arrival of the Prussians, the assembly began to beat, the soldiers of the different battalions formed their ranks, and ours, with another from Quiot's brigade, was left to guard Haie-Sainte, and all the others went on to join General d'Erlon's corps, which had advanced again into the valley, and was endeavoring to flank the enemy on the left.
The two battalions went to work at once to barricade the doors and the breaches in the walls with timbers and paving stones, and men were stationed in ambush at all the holes which the enemy had made in the wall on the side toward the orchard and on that next the highway.
Buche and I, with the remainder of our company, were posted over a stable in a corner of the barn, about ten or twelve hundred paces from Hougoumont. I can still see the row of holes which the Germans had knocked in the wall, about as high as a man's head, in order to defend the orchard. As we went up into this stable, we looked through these holes, and we could see our line of battle, the high-road to Brussels and Charleroi, the little farms of Belle-Alliance, Rossomme, and Gros-Caillou, which lie along this road at little distances from each other; the Old Guard which was stationed across it, with their shouldered arms, and the staff on a little eminence at the left, and farther away in the same direction, in the rear of the ravine of Planchenois, we could see the white smoke rising continually above the trees. This was the attack of the first Prussian corps.
We heard afterward that the Emperor had sent Lobau with ten thousand men to turn them back. The battle had begun, but the Old and the Young Guard, the cuirassiers of Milhaud and of Kellerman, and the chasseurs of Lefebvre-Desnoëttes; in fact the whole of our magnificent cavalry remained in position. The great, the real battle was with the English.