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Jean, and they had also the farmhouses of La Haie-Sainte and Hougomont. At six o'clock I looked at their position, with Zébédé, Captain Florentin, and Buche, and it seemed to me it was a difficult task before us. It was Sunday, and I could hear the bells of villages, recalling Phalsbourg.
After the charge of the cuirassiers, it took a little time for us to re-form: the battle continued at Hougoumont, and the cannonade re-opened on our right, and two batteries had been brought up to sweep the highway in the rear of Haie-Sainte, where the road begins to mount the hill. We all saw that that was to be the point of attack.
"Yes," he replied, "let us keep together." The smoke from our guns rose up into the air, and then we could see the batteries of the English, who still continued their fire all along the hedges which bordered the road. The first brigade of Alix's division advanced at a quick step along the road leading to Haie-Sainte. In the rear I recognized Marshal Ney with several of the officers of his staff.
But it was necessary to get possession of Haie-Sainte, and to force a passage from the highway to the enemy's centre just as an entrance must be effected into a fortification through the fire of the outworks and the demilunes. We had been repulsed the first time, but the battle was begun, and we could not go back.
Scarcely had he shown himself among the soldiers before they all fell into order as though by magic, and a moment afterwards the undaunted Ney could once more vault into the saddle to renew the attack. And this time he bore down the English and established himself in the farm-house of La Haie-Sainte. Napoleon is once more at Belle-Alliance.
At the same time Napoleon attacked the centre by hurling Quiot's brigade on La Haie-Sainte, and Ney pushed forward the right wing of the French against the left wing of the English, which rested on Papelotte. The attack on Hougomont was something of a feint; the plan was to draw Wellington thither, and to make him swerve to the left.
It was so deep on the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise, was crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated on another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process of clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible on the grassy slope to the left of the highway between La Haie-Sainte and the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.
A few men clustered round a flag marked the post of a regiment; such and such a battalion was commanded only by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten's division, already so roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was almost destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze's brigade strewed the rye-fields all along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of those Dutch grenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks in 1811, fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to the English standard, fought against Napoleon.
When the news arrived that Grouchy was coming, even the wounded rose up and took their places in the ranks; it seemed as if a breath had raised the dead; and all those poor fellows in the rear of Haie-Sainte with their bandaged heads and arms and legs, with their clothes in tatters and soaked with blood, every one who could put one foot before the other, joined the Guard when it passed before the breaches in the wall of the garden, and every one tore open his last cartridge.
And it was not yet finished: the companies and battalions and brigades were being re-formed, the musketry rattled in the vicinity of Haie-Sainte, and the cannon thundered near Hougoumont. "It was only just a beginning," the officers said. You would have thought that men's lives were of no value!
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