The army fell back rapidly from all sides at once. A disbanding army is a thaw. The whole bends, cracks, snaps, floats, rolls, falls, crashes, hurries, plunges. Ney borrows a horse, leaps upon him, and, without hat, cravat, or sword, plants himself in the Brussels road, arresting at once the English and the French. He endeavors to hold the army; he calls them back, he reproaches them, he grapples with the rout. He is swept away. The soldiers flee from him, crying, “Long live Ney!” Durutte’s two regiments come and go, frightened and tossed between the sabres of the Uhlans and the fire of the brigades of Kempt. Rout is the worst of all conflicts; friends slay each other in their flight; squadrons and battalions are crushed and dispersed against each other, enormous foam of the battle.
Napoleon gallops among the fugitives, harangues them, urges, threatens, entreats. The mouths which in the morning were crying “Long live the Emperor,” are now agape. He is hardly recognized. The Prussian cavalry, just come up, spring forward, fling themselves upon the enemy, sabre, cut, hack, kill, exterminate. Teams rush off; the guns are left to the care of themselves; the soldiers of the train unhitch the caissons and take the horses to escape; wagons upset, with their four wheels in the air, block up the road, and are accessories of massacre.
They crush and they crowd; they trample upon the living and the dead. Arms are broken. A multitude fills roads, paths bridges, plains, hills, valleys, woods, choked up by this flight of forty thousand men. Cries despair; knapsacks and muskets cast into the rye; passages forced at the point of the sword; no more comrades, no more officers, no more generals; an inexpressible dismay. Lions become kids. Such was this flight.
A few squares of the Guard, immovable in the flow of the rout as rocks in running water, held out until night. Night approaching and death also, they awaited this double shadow, and yielded unfaltering to its embrace. At every discharge the square grew less, but returned the fire. It replied to grape by bullets, narrowing in its four walls continually. Afar off, the fugitives, stopping for a moment out of breath, heard in the darkness this dismal thunder decreasing.
When this legion was reduced to a handful, when their flag was reduced to a shred, when their muskets, exhausted of ammunition, were reduced to nothing but clubs, when the pile of corpses was larger than the group of the living, there spread among the conquerors a sort of sacred terror about these sublime martyrs, and the English artillery, stopping to take breath, was silent. It was a kind of respite. These combatants had about them a swarm of spectres, the outlines of men on horseback, the black profile of the cannons, the white sky seen through the wheels and gun-carriages. The colossal death’s head, which heroes always see in the smoke of the battle, was advancing upon them and glaring at them.
They could hear in the gloom of the twilight the loading of the pieces. The lighted matches, like tigers’ eyes in the night, made a circle about their heads. All the linstocks of the English batteries approached the guns, when, touched by their heroism, holding the death-moment suspended over these men, an English general cried to them:
“Brave Frenchmen, surrender!”
The word “Never!” fierce and desperate came rolling back.
To this word the English general replied, “Fire!”
The batteries flamed, the hill trembled; from all those brazen throats went forth a final vomiting of grape, terrific. A vast smoke, dusky white in the light of the rising moon, rolled out, and when the smoke was dissipated, there was nothing left. That formidable remnant was annihilated—the Guard was dead! The four walls of the living redoubt had fallen. Hardly could a quivering be distinguished here and there among the corpses; and thus the French legions expired.