Adam, seeing this deliberate movement, galloped up, calling out: "Colborne! Colborne! What are you meaning to do?"
"To make that column feel our fire," replied Sir John laconically.
Adam took one look at the Chasseurs, another at the purposeful face beside him, and said: "Move on, then! The 71st shall follow you," and rode off to bring up the Highlanders.
The Chasseur column, advancing steadily, was met by a frontal fire of over eighteen hundred muskets from the 95th Rifles and the 71st Highlanders, and as it staggered, the Fighting 52nd, the men in third and fourth line loading and passing muskets forward to the first two lines, riddled its flank. It broke, and fell into hideous disorder, almost decimated by a fire it could not, from its clumsy formation, return. A cry of horror arose, taken up by battalion after battalion down the French lines: "La Guarde recule!"
Before the column could deploy, Sir John Colborne swept forward in a charge that carried all before it. The officer carrying the Colour was killed, and a hundred and fifty men on the right wing, but the advance was maintained, right across the ground in front of the Allied line, the Imperial Guard being driven towards the chaussee in inextricable confusion. The 2nd and 3rd battalions of the Rifles, with the 71st Highlanders, followed the 52nd in support; the Imperial Guard, helpless under the musketry fire, cast into terrible disorder through their inability to deploy, lost all semblance of formation, and retreated pele-mele to the chaussee, till the ground in front of the Allied position was one seething mass of struggling, fighting, fleeing infantry.
Hew Halkett brought up his Hanoverians into the interval between Hougoumont and the hollow road; the 52nd advanced across the uneven plain until checked by encountering some squadrons of Dornberg's 23rd Light Dragoons, whom, in the dusk, they mistook for French cavalry and fired upon.
The Duke, who had watched the advance from the high ground beside Maitland, galloped up to the rear of the 52nd, where Sir John, having ordered his adjutant to stop the firing, was exchanging his wounded horse for a fresh one.
"It is our own cavalry which has caused this firing!" Colborne told him.
"Never mind! Go on, Colborne, go on!" replied the Duke, and galloped back to the crest of the position, and stood there, silhouetted against the glowing sky on his hollow-backed charger. He raised his cocked hat high in the air, and swept it forward, towards the enemy's position, in the long-looked-for signal for a General Advance. A cheer broke out on the right, as the Guards charged down the slope. The crippled forces east of the chaussee, away down to their left, heard it growing louder as it swelled all along the line towards them, took it up by instinct, and charged forward out of the intolerable smoke surrounding them, on to a plain strewn with dead and dying, lit by the last rays of a red sun, and covered with men flying in confusion towards the ridge of La Belle Alliance.
Cries of: "Nous sommes trahis!" mingled with the dismayed shouts of "La Garde recule!" Donzelot's division was carried away in the rush of Grenadiers and Chasseurs; the retreat had become a rout. Ney, on foot, one epaulette torn off, his hat gone, a broken sword in his hand, was fighting like a madman, crying: "Come and see how a Marshal of France dies!" and, to D'Erlon, borne towards him in the press: "If we get out of this alive, D'Erlon, we shall both be hanged!"