The vicious spitting of musketry had sounded up and down the line of pickets at intervals during the night, but with the daylight a general popping began, as the men fired their pieces in the air to clean the barrels of rust. The vedettes and the sentries were withdrawn; optimists declared the weather to be fairing up; old soldiers became busy drying their clothes and cleaning their arms; young soldiers stared over the dense mist in the valley to the ridge where the French were beginning to show themselves.
At five o'clock, drums, bugles, and trumpets all along the two-mile front sounded the Assembly. Staff officers were seen galloping in every direction; brigades began to move into their positions: here a regiment of Light Dragoons changed ground; there a battalion of blue-coated Dutch-Belgians marched along the hollow road with their quick, swinging step; or a troop of horse artillery thundered over the ground to a position in the front line. A breakfast of stir-about was served to the men; a detachment of riflemen, posted in a sandpit on the left side of the Charleroi road, immediately south of its junction with the hollow road, began to make an abattis across the chaussee with branches of trees.
A tumbledown cottage on the main road, between Mont St Jean and the hollow way, had been occupied during the night by the Colonel of the 95th Rifles, and some of his officers and men had kindled a fire against one of its walls, and had boiled a huge camp kettle full of tea, milk, and sugar over it. The Duke stopped there for a cup of this sticky beverage on his way from Waterloo; and Colonel Audley, standing beside his horse, and also sipping tea from a pannikin, found himself accosted by Captain Kincaid, whose invincible gaiety did not seem to have been in the least impaired by a night spent in the pouring rain. He had slept soundly, waking to find his clothes drenched and his horse, which he had tethered to a sword stuck in the ground, gone.
"Just drew his sword, and marched off" he said. "Did you ever hear of an adjutant going into action without his horse? You might as well go without your arms."
"Johnny, you crazy coot!" the Colonel exclaimed, laughing.
"How was I to know the brute had no proper feeling towards me? He's a low fellow: I found him hobnobbing half a mile off with a couple of artillery horses."
"You know, you have the luck of the devil!" the Colonel told him.
"I have, haven't I? You'd have said I might as well have looked for a needle in a haystack as for one horse in this mob. Have some more tea? That kettle of ours ought to get its brevet for devotion to duty. It has supplied everyone of the bigwigs with tea, from the Duke downwards."
"No, I won't have any more. Where are you stationed?"
"Oh, right in the forefront! Our 2nd and 3rd Battalions have been drafted to General Adam, and I believe are over there, on the right wing," replied Kincaid, with an airy gesture to the west. "But the rest of us are going to occupy a snug sandpit, and the knoll behind it, on the chaussee, opposite to La Haye Sainte. I've had a look at the position: we shall have our right resting on the chaussee and as far as I can see we ought to get the brunt of whatever the French mean to give us."