552 Les Miserables
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 disorga-
nized; the side-battery suddenly unmasked on their flank;
Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised; Quiot re-
pulsed; 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; Marcog-
net’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 Frisch-
emont 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; fif-
teen 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. Napoleon was accustomed