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The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen,
took or spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from
the English regiments six flags, which three cuirassiers and
three chasseurs of the Guard bore to the Emperor, in front
of the farm of La Belle Alliance.
Wellington’s situation had grown worse. This strange
battle was like a duel between two raging, wounded men,
each of whom, still fighting and still resisting, is expending
all his blood.
Which of the two will be the first to fall?
The conflict on the plateau continued.
What had become of the cuirassiers? No one could have
told. One thing is certain, that on the day after the battle, a
cuirassier and his horse were found dead among the wood-
work of the scales for vehicles at Mont-Saint-Jean, at the
very point where the four roads from Nivelles, Genappe,
La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. This
horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men
who picked up the body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His
name is Dehaze. He was eighteen years old at that time.
Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at
hand.
The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was
not broken through. As every one was in possession of the
plateau, no one held it, and in fact it remained, to a great
extent, with the English. Wellington held the village and
the culminating plain; Ney had only the crest and the slope.
They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both sides.
But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable.