"Would to God we saw them!—the Prussians I mean. We are suffering dreadfully from the fire of these columns."
"Ay, faith!" replied the other, coolly adjusting his bonnet, which a ball had knocked awry, and turning towards the left flank of the company, before he had gone three paces, he was stretched prostrate on the turf.
He never stirred again. A ball had pierced his heart; and the bonnet, which a moment before he had arranged so jauntily over his fair hair, rolled to the feet of Ronald Stuart.
"I kent he was fey! Puir young gentleman!" said a soldier.
"I will add a stone to his cairn," observed another, figuratively; "and give this to revenge him," he added, dropping upon his knee and firing among the smoke of the opposite line.
Stuart would have examined the body of his friend, to find if any spark of life yet lingered in it, but his attention was attracted by other matters.
The Belgians at the hedge gave way, after receiving and returning a most destructive fire for nearly an hour. The 3rd battalion of the Scots Royals, and a battalion of the 44th, (the same regiment which lately distinguished itself at Cabul,) took up the ground of the vanquished men of Gallia Belgica, and after maintaining the same conflict against an overwhelming majority of numbers, and keeping staunch to their post till the unlucky hedge was piled breast high with killed and wounded, they were compelled also to retire, leaving it in possession of the enemy, who seized upon it with a fierce shout of triumph, as if it had been the fallen capital of a conquered country instead of the rural boundary of a field of rye.
It was now three o'clock in the afternoon. The strife had lasted incessantly for four hours, and no word was yet heard of the Prussians. For miles around, the plains were involved in smoke; and whether they were approaching or not no man knew, for a thick war-cloud enshrouded the vale of Waterloo. Three thousand of the allies had been put to the rout, and the dense mob-like columns of the enemy came rolling on from the ridge opposite to Lord Wellington's position, apparently with the determination of bearing all before them.
When they gained possession of the hedge before mentioned, Sir Dennis Pack, who had been with its defenders till the moment they gave way, galloped at full speed up to the Gordon Highlanders,—a corps reduced now to a mere skeleton, and barely mustering two hundred efficient bayonets.
"Highlanders!" cried the general, who was evidently labouring under no ordinary degree of excitement and anxiety, "you must charge! Upon them with the bayonet or the heights are lost, for all the troops in your front have given way!"