What a crowd of thoughts must have been suggested, by that grand spectacle and that immense plain, to the Emperor, who could see it all mentally better than we could with our own eyes.
We might have stayed there for hours, if Captain Florentin had not come up suddenly, and exclaimed, "What are you doing here? Are we going to dispute the passage with the Guard? Come! hurry! Knock a hole in that wall on the side toward the enemy!"
We picked up the sledges and pickaxes which the Germans had dropped on the floor, and made holes through the wall of the gable.
This did not take fifteen minutes, and then we could see the fight at Hougoumont; the blazing buildings, the bursting of the bombs from second to second among the ruins, and the Scotch chasseurs in ambuscade in the road in the rear of the place, and on our right about two gunshots distant, the first line of the English artillery, falling back on their centre, and stationing their cannon, which our gunners had begun to dismount, higher up the hill. But the remainder of their line did not change; they had squares of red and squares of black touching each other at the corners like the squares of a chess-board, in the rear of the deep road; and in attacking them we would come under their crossfire. Their artillery was in position on the brow of the hill, and in the hollow on the hill-side toward Mont-St.-Jean their cavalry was waiting.
The position of the English seemed to me still stronger than it was in the morning; and as we had already failed in our attack on their left wing, and the Prussians had fallen on our flank, the idea occurred to me, for the first time, that we were not sure of gaining the battle.
I imagined the horrible rout that would follow in case we lost the battle—shut in between two armies, one in front and the other on our flank, and then the invasion which would follow; the forced contributions, the towns besieged, the return of the émigrés, and the reign of vengeance.
I felt that my apprehension had made me grow pale.
At that moment the shouts of "Vive l'Empereur" broke from thousands of throats behind us. Buche, who stood near me in a corner of the loft, shouted with all the rest of his comrades, "Vive l'Empereur!"
I leaned over his shoulder and saw all the cavalry of our right wing; the cuirassiers of Milhaud, the lancers and the chasseurs of the Guard, more than five thousand men—advancing at a trot. They crossed the road obliquely and went down into the valley between Hougoumont and Haie-Sainte. I saw that they were going to attack the squares of the English, and that our fate was to be decided.
We could hear the voices of the English artillery officers, giving their orders, above the tumult and the innumerable shouts of "Vive l'Empereur."