564 Les Miserables
In addition to this, they had behind them the battery,
which was still thundering. It was necessary that it should
be so, or they could never have been wounded in the back.
One of their cuirasses, pierced on the shoulder by a ball
from a biscayan,[9] is in the collection of the Waterloo Mu-
seum.
[9] A heavy rifled gun.
For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen
was needed. It was no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was
a shadow, a fury, a dizzy transport of souls and courage, a
hurricane of lightning swords. In an instant the fourteen
hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight hundred.
Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up
with the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes’s light-horse.
The plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured,
captured again. The cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return
to the infantry; or, to put it more exactly, the whole of that
formidable rout collared each other without releasing the
other. The squares still held firm.
There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed
under him. Half the cuirassiers remained on the plateau.
This conflict lasted two hours.
The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no
doubt that, had they not been enfeebled in their first shock
by the disaster of the hollow road the cuirassiers would
have overwhelmed the centre and decided the victory. This
extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen Ta-
lavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished,
admired heroically. He said in an undertone, ‘Sublime!’