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Count Reille's corps formed the left or western wing, and was formed of Bachelu's, Foy's, and Jerome Bonaparte's divisions of infantry, and of Pire's division of cavalry. The right wing of the second general French line was formed of Milhaud's corps, consisting of two divisions of heavy cavalry. The left wing of this line was formed by Kellerman's cavalry corps, also in two divisions.
I cannot resist narrating the entry of the Forty-second Regiment into Edinburgh shortly after the battle of Waterloo. The old "Black Watch" is a regiment dear to every Scottish heart. It has fought and struggled when resistance was almost certain death. At Quatre Bras two flank companies were cut to pieces by Pire's cavalry.
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.
He now opened a destructive artillery fire on our front, to which the weak Dutch-Belgian batteries could but feebly reply. Nothing, however, could daunt the hardihood of Picton's men. Shaking off the fatigue of a twelve hours' march from Brussels under a burning sun, they steadily moved down through the tall crops of rye towards the farm and beat off a fierce attack of Piré's horsemen.
He now opened a destructive artillery fire on our front, to which the weak Dutch-Belgian batteries could but feebly reply. Nothing, however, could daunt the hardihood of Picton's men. Shaking off the fatigue of a twelve hours' march from Brussels under a burning sun, they steadily moved down through the tall crops of rye towards the farm and beat off a fierce attack of Piré's horsemen.
These proved wholly unable to encounter Kellerman's cuirassiers and Pire's lancers; the Dutch and Belgian infantry also gave way early in the engagement; so that the whole brunt of the battle fell on the British and German infantry. They sustained it nobly.
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