At seven o'clock things looked very serious along the Allied front. To the west, only some Prussian cavalry had arrived to guard the left flank; Papelotte and the farm of Ter La Haye were held by Durutte, whose skirmishers stretched to the crest of the Allied position; the gunners and the tirailleurs at La Haye Sainte were raking the centre with their fire; and although twelve thousand men of Reille's Corps d'Armee had failed all day to dislodge twelve hundred British Guards from the ruins of Hougoumont, all along the Allied line the front was broken, and in some places utterly disorganised.
The Duke remained calm, but kept looking at his watch. Once he said: "It's night, or Blucher," but for the most part he was silent. An aide-de-camp rode up to him with a message from his general that his men were being mowed down by the artillery fire, and must be reinforced. "It is impossible," he replied. "Will they stand?"
"Yes, my lord, till they perish!"
"Then tell them that I will stand with them, till the last man."
Turmoil and confusion, made worse by the smoke that hung heavily over the centre, and the debris that littered the ground from end to end of the line, seemed to reign everywhere. Staff officers, carrying messages to brigades, asked mechanically: "Who commands here?" The Prince of Orange had been taken away by March; three generals had been killed; five others carried off the field, too badly wounded to remain; the adjutant-general and the quartermaster-general had both had to retire. Of the Duke's personal staff, Canning was dead; Gordon dying in the inn at Waterloo; and Lord Fitzroy, struck in the right arm while standing with his horse almost touching the Duke's, had left the field in Alava's care. Those that were left had passed beyond feeling. It was no longer a matter for surprise or grief to hear of a friend's death: the only surprise was to find anyone still left alive on that reeking plain. Horse after horse had been shot under them; sooner or later they would probably join the ranks of the slain: meanwhile, there were still orders to carry, and they forced their exhausted mounts through the carnage, indifferent to the heaps of fallen red-coats sprawling under their feet, themselves numb with fatigue, their minds focused upon one object only: to get the messages they carried through to their destinations.
Just before seven o'clock, a deserting colonel of cuirassiers came galloping up to the 52nd Regiment, shouting: "Vive le Roi!" He reached Sir John Colborne, and gasped out: "Napoleon est la avec les Gardes! Voila l'attaque qui se fait!"
The warning was unnecessary, for it had been apparent for some minutes that the French were mustering for a grand attack all along the front. D'Erlon's corps was already assailing with a swarm of skirmishers the decimated line of Picton's 5th Division; and to the west of La Haye Sainte, on the undulating plain facing the Allied right, the Imperial Middle Guard was forming in five massive columns.
Colonel Audley was sent on his last errand just after seven. He was mounted on a trooper, and the strained and twisted strapping round his thigh was soaked with blood. He was almost unrecognisable for the smoke that had blackened his face, and was feeling oddly light-headed from the loss of blood he had suffered. He was also very tired, for he had been in the saddle almost continually since the night of June 15th. His mind, ordinarily sensitive to impression, accepted without revulsion the message of his eyes. Death and mutilation had become so common that he who loved horses could look with indifference upon a poor brute with the lower half of its head blown away, or a trooper, with its forelegs shot off at the knees, raising itself on its stumps, and neighing its sad appeal for help. He had seen a friend die in agony, and had wept over him, but all that was long past. He no longer ducked when he heard the shots singing past his head; when his trooper shied away, snorting in terror, from a bursting shell, he cursed it. But there was no sense in courting death unnecessarily; he struck northwards, and rode by all that was left of the two heavy brigades, drawn back since the arrival of Vivian and Vandeleur some three hundred paces behind the front line. An officer in the rags of a Life Guardsman's uniform, his helmet gone, and a blood-stained bandage tied round his head, rode forward, and hailed him.
"Audley! Audley!"
He recognised Lord George Alastair under a mask of mud, and sweat, and bloodstains, and drew rein. "Hallo!" he said. "So you're alive still?"