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The road to Brussels was already thronged with the fugitive English troops, and Wellington, scarcely able to keep his weakened lines together, was apparently on the brink of destruction, when the thunder of artillery was suddenly heard in the direction of Wavre. "It is Grouchy!" joyfully exclaimed Napoleon, who had repeatedly sent orders to that general to push forward with all possible speed.
Push on, I say! The whole war will be ended in one blow. Bring Pirsch up, and we can throw sixty thousand men into the scale while Thielmann holds Grouchy beyond Wavre." Gneisenau shrugged his shoulders, but at that instant an orderly appeared at the door. "An aide-de-camp from the Duke of Wellington," said he. "Ha, ha!" cried the old man; "let us hear what he has to say!"
Meanwhile Bülow's powerful corps was marching unmolested from the Roman road near Hannut to a position two miles east of Wavre, where it arrived at nightfall. Equally fortunate was the reserve ammunition train, which, unnoticed by the French cavalry, wound northwards by cross-roads through Gembloux, and reached the army by 5 p.m. In his "Commentaries," written at St.
He marched upon Wavre and fought for the rest of the day with Thielman accordingly, while Blucher and Bulow were attacking the Emperor. But such were the arrangements of the Prussian General, that even if Grouchy had marched upon Waterloo, he would have been held in check by the nearest Prussian corps, or certainly by the two nearest ones, while the rest proceeded to join Wellington.
Grouchy "must therefore move thither in order to approach us, to put yourself within the sphere of our operations, and to keep up your communications with us, pushing before you those bodies of Prussians which have taken this direction and which may have stopped at Wavre, where you ought to arrive as soon as possible."
On Tuesday, the 29th of September, the great fortress of Wavre St. Catherine fell, blown up, it is believed, by the accidental explosion of a shell inside the galleries. It had been seriously battered by the big German howitzers, and it could not in any case have held out for another day. But the results of the explosion were terrible.
He disliked a "dry frontier": he must have a riverine boundary: in fact, he claimed the banks of the Lower Niemen, and, further south, the course of the rivers Wavre, Narew and Bug. To this claim he had perhaps been encouraged by some alluring words of Napoleon that thenceforth the Vistula must be the boundary of their empires.
We had the satisfaction of knowing that the whole of our army had assembled on the hill behind in the course of the night. About nine o'clock, we received the news of Blucher's defeat, and of his retreat to Wavre. Lord Wellington, therefore, immediately began to withdraw his army to the position of Waterloo.
But it was not Grouchy, it was Blucher. The distance from Wavre, whence they had been driven, to Waterloo, where Wellington was then in action, was not great, but was rendered arduous owing to these circumstances. The men sometimes fell down from extreme weariness, and the guns stuck fast in the deep mud.
Here was Belgium's last stronghold on the verge of downfall: the outer line of forts had already fallen; Forts Wavre, St. Catherine, Waelham, and Lierre were already prey to the Krupp mortars; the German hosts were swarming across the River Nethe, six miles to the city's south, and the cowering populace in their flight made the streets terrible to look upon. Yet at the St.
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