Along the ravine of Planchenois the dark sky was lighted up by the discharges of musketry; the one square of the Guard still held out against Bulow, and prevented him from cutting off our retreat, but nearer us the Prussian cavalry poured down into the valley like a flood breaking over its barriers. Old Blücher had just arrived with forty thousand men: he doubled our right wing and dispersed it.
What can I say more! It was dissolution—we were surrounded. The English pushed us into the valley, and it was through this valley that Blücher was coming. The generals and officers and even the Emperor himself were compelled to take refuge in a square, and they say that we poor wretches were panic-stricken! Such an injustice was never seen.
Combat of Hougoumont Farm.
Buche and I with five or six of our comrades ran toward the farm-house—the bombs were bursting all around us, we reached the road in our wild flight just as the English cavalry passed at full gallop, shouting, "No quarter! no quarter!"
At this moment the square of the Guard began to retreat, firing from all sides in order to keep off the wretches who sought safety within it. Only the officers and generals might save themselves.
I shall never forget, even if I should live a thousand years, the immeasurable, unceasing cries which filled the valley for more than a league; and in the distance the grenadière was sounding like an alarm-bell in the midst of a conflagration. But this was much more terrible; it was the last appeal of France, of a proud and courageous nation; it was the voice of the country saying, "Help, my children! I perish!"
This rolling of the drums of the Old Guard in the midst of disaster, had in it something touching and horrible. I sobbed like a child;—Buche hurried me along, but I cried, "Jean, leave me—we are lost, everything is lost!"
The thought of Catherine, and Mr. Goulden, and Pfalzbourg, did not enter my mind. What astonishes me to-day is, that we were not massacred a hundred times on the road, where files of English and Prussians were passing. But perhaps they mistook us for Germans, or they were running after the Emperor, for they were all hoping to see him.