At its back was a stone mansion, part of the state-owned domain of Nivelles, standing at the road-intersection, a sixteenth-century building of such solid construction that musket-fire ricocheted off it. The trees and thickets bordering the plateau had been pruned to create embrasures and loop-holes behind which the guns waited in ambush, and this work of concealment, an entirely legitimate stratagem of war, had been so skilfully carried out that Haxo, who had been sent by Napoleon to reconnoitre the enemy batteries, saw nothing and reported that there were no defence works other than the barricades on the road to Nivelles and Genappe. It was the time of year when the crops are in full growth, and a battalion of Kempt’s brigade, armed with carbines, lay hidden in the standing corn.

In short, the Anglo-Dutch centre was well placed. What endangered its position was the forest of Soignes, a wide extent of woodland in its rear containing the marshes of Groenandel and Boitsfort. An army could not hope to carry out an orderly withdrawal over this rough terrain, where its units were bound to become separated and the artillery likely to be bogged down in the swamps. Many of the officers maintained – although it must be said that others disagreed with them – that retreat would become a rout.

Wellington reinforced the centre with one of Chassé’s brigades, brought in from the right wing, one of Wincke’s brigades, from the left, and Clinton’s division. In support of his British contingent, consisting of Halkett’s command, Mitchell’s brigade, and Maitland’s Guards, he brought in the Brunswick infantry, the Nassau contingent, Kielmansegge’s Hanoverians, and Ompteda’s Germans. Thus he had twenty-six battalions under his direct command. As Charras has said, ‘The right wing was folded back behind the centre.’ A very powerful battery occupied a fortified position on the site of what is now known as ‘the Waterloo Museum’. In addition, concealed in a fold in the ground, Wellington had Somerset’s Dragoon Guards, the other half of the justly renowned English cavalry. Ponsonby had been wiped out (he himself had been killed), but Somerset remained.

The battery, which might almost have been termed a redoubt if the work had been finished, was drawn up behind a low garden wall, hastily reinforced with sandbags, with a broad, open slope in front of it. There had been no time to complete its defence works.

Wellington, worried but impassive, had remained throughout the day seated on his horse in the same place, a little in front of the ancient mill of Mont-Saint-Jean, which still exists, and in the shade of an elm-tree which an Englishman, a vandal enthusiast, subsequently bought for 200 francs, cut down and took away. Wellington’s bearing was one of icy heroism. The bullets whistled past him. Gordon, one of his aides, was killed at his side. Lord Hill demanded of him after a shell-burst, ‘What are your orders, my lord, if you are killed?’ … ‘Do what I’m doing,’ Wellington replied, and he said tersely to Clinton, ‘Hang on to the last man.’ When things were clearly going badly he cried to the men of Talavera, Vitoria, and Salamanca, ‘Don’t yield an inch. Think of England!’

But at about four o’clock the English line wavered. There was suddenly nothing to be seen on the high ground of the plateau but the guns and gun-crews. The infantry regiments, unable to withstand the hail of French cannon and musketry fire, had taken refuge in the depression which the farm lane of Mont-Saint-Jean still crosses. There was a general movement of withdrawal. Wellington’s battle-line was crumbling. ‘It’s the beginning of the retreat!’ Napoleon cried.

Napoleon is well-pleased

Although he was a sick man and troubled by a local ailment which made riding uncomfortable, the Emperor had never been in higher spirits than on that day. Since the morning his inscrutable countenance had worn a smile. The man of marble, the profound visionary, was blindly radiant on that day of 18 June 1815; the frowning commander of Austerlitz was happy at Waterloo. Thus does Destiny deceive us; our joys are shadows, the last laugh is God’s.

‘Ridet Caesar, Pompieus flebit – if Caesar laughs Pompey will weep,’ said the men of the Fulminatrix legion. Pompey did not weep on this occasion, but it is certain that Caesar laughed.

It had seemed to Napoleon, since he and Bertrand had ridden after midnight through thunder and rain to the heights near Rossomme, thence to survey the line of English camp-fires lighting the horizon from Frischemont to Braine-l’Alleud, that the appointment with destiny fixed by him for the coming day on the field of Waterloo had been rightly determined. He had reined in his horse and sat for some time motionless gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder; and, fatalist that he was, he had been heard to mutter the cryptic words, ‘We are of one mind.’ But Napoleon was mistaken. Destiny and he were no longer of one mind.

He had spent no time at all in sleep, every minute of that night bringing a new cause for satisfaction. He had made the round of the picket-lines, pausing here and there to talk to the men. At half past two, near the wood of Hougomont, he heard the sound of a marching column and for a moment had thought that Wellington was already withdrawing.