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Marcognet's Division is surrounded; the dragoons ride them down on every side; the guns are captured; the drivers cut down; and two thousand prisoners are carried off. A sudden panic seems to seize upon the French, as cavalry, infantry, and artillery are hurried back on each other.
The battle once begun, its very various changes, the resistance of Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin; the disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was shattered; Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of the bombs falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves in the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud, so that the canister was turned into a splash; the uselessness of Pire's demonstration on Braine-l'Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost exterminated; the right wing of the English badly alarmed, the left wing badly cut into; Ney's strange mistake in massing, instead of echelonning the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage of two hundred; the frightful holes made in these masses by the cannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised; Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright fire of the English barricade which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels; Marcognet's division caught between the infantry and the cavalry, shot down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, put to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of seven pieces spiked; the Prince of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding, in spite of the Comte d'Erlon, both Frischemont and Smohain; the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the 45th captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped by runners of the flying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavre and Plancenoit; the alarming things that had been said by prisoners; Grouchy's delay; fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougomont in less than an hour; eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter time about La Haie-Sainte, all these stormy incidents passing like the clouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty.
Equally brilliant was the charge of the Inniskillings, in the centre of the brigade. They rode down Donzelot's division, jostled its ranks into a helpless mass, and captured a great number of prisoners. The Scots Greys, too, succouring the hard-pressed Gordons, fell fiercely on Marcognet's division.
Had I known this, I could have marked the onset with a less failing spirit. "There goes Marcognet's Division," said my companion, springing to his legs; "they're moving to the right of the road. I should like to see the troops that will stand before them." So saying, he mounted his horse, and desiring me to accompany him, rode to the height beside La Belle Alliance.
Equally brilliant was the charge of the Inniskillings, in the centre of the brigade. They rode down Donzelot's division, jostled its ranks into a helpless mass, and captured a great number of prisoners. The Scots Greys, too, succouring the hard-pressed Gordons, fell fiercely on Marcognet's division.