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The most fearful and the most exhausted quickened their pace, and drew their sabres or loaded their muskets. It was plain that there would be a veritable butchery if the guards did not give way. Buche himself shouted: "They ought all to be murdered, we are betrayed. Come, Joseph, let us be revenged." But I held him back by the collar and exclaimed: "No, Jean, no!
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.
At that moment the shouts of "Vive l'Empereur" broke from thousands of throats behind us. Buche, who stood near me in a corner of the loft, shouted with all the rest of his comrades, "Vive l'Empereur!" I leaned over his shoulder and saw all the cavalry of our right wing; the cuirassiers of Milhaud, the lancers and the chasseurs of the Guard, more than five thousand men advancing at a trot.
But this was much more terrible; it was the last appeal of France, of a proud and courageous nation; it was the voice of the country saying, "Help, my children! I perish!" This rolling of the drums of the Old Guard in the midst of disaster, had in it something touching and horrible. I sobbed like a child; Buche hurried me along, but I cried, "Jean, leave me we are lost, everything is lost!"
The Old Guard formed a square for the emperor and his officers, and the rest of us simply straggled away, back to France. The most awful thing of all was the beating of the drum of the Old Guard in that hour of disaster. It was like a fire-bell, the last appeal of a burning nation. Buche was by my side in the retreat. Several times the Prussians attacked us.
Buche and I with five or six of our comrades ran toward the farm-house the bombs were bursting all around us, we reached the road in our wild flight just as the English cavalry passed at full gallop, shouting, "No quarter! no quarter!" At this moment the square of the Guard began to retreat, firing from all sides in order to keep off the wretches who sought safety within it.
About two hundred paces to the left of the road there was a little beech grove. Buche said: "Look, Joseph, let us go in there and lie down and sleep." It was just what I wanted. We went down across the oat-field to the wood, and entered a close thicket of young trees. We had both kept our guns and knapsacks and cartridge-boxes.
No one spoke, even Buche raised his head and shut his teeth, and Zébédé, who was at the left of the company, did not look toward me, but right ahead into the shadow of the trees, like everybody else. It took us nearly an hour to reach the forest, and when within two hundred paces the order came to "halt." The hussars fell back on the flanks of the battalion, and one company deployed as scouts.
I looked at it about six o'clock that morning very attentively, as a man will do who is to run the risk of breaking his bones and losing his life in some enterprise, and who at least likes to know if he has any chance of escape. Zébédé, Sergeant Rabot, and Captain Florentin, Buche, and indeed every one as he rose cast a glance at that hill-side without saying a word.
They fired up at our floor, and finally, when it seemed we were lost, and were all to be massacred we heard the shout of "Vive l'Empereur!" and the Prussians fled. Out of that fifteen only six were left alive, but Zébédé and Buche were among the survivors. The battle still raged in the village streets, dead and dying were everywhere.
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