That there should be so great a concentration of vitality, so large a world contained within the mind of a single man, must in the end have been fatal to civilization. The time had come for the Supreme Arbiter to decide. Probably a murmur of complaint had come from those principles and elements on which the ordering of all things, moral and material, depends. The reek of blood, the over-filled graveyard, the weeping mother, these are powerful arguments. When the earth is overcharged with suffering, a mysterious lament rising from the shadows is heard in the heights.

Napoleon had been impeached in Heaven and his fall decreed; he was troublesome to God.

Waterloo was not a battle but a change in the direction of the world.

The plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean

Simultaneously with the disclosure of the ravine the guns were unmasked. Sixty cannon and the musket-fire from thirteen squares ravaged the cuirassiers at point-blank range. The intrepid General Delord greeted his enemies with a military salute, and the charge of the cuirassiers continued without a pause. The disaster of the sunken lane had decimated but not dismayed them. They were men of the kind whose hearts grow larger as their numbers shrink.

Only Wathier’s column had suffered. Delord’s column, which Ney had caused to veer to the left, as though he suspected a trap, was still intact. Galloping ventre à terre, reins loose, pistol in hand and sabre between the teeth, the cuirassiers charged the English squares.

There are moments in battle when the souls of men so harden as to turn flesh to stone. Beneath this furious assault the English forces were unshaken. The mêlée was indescribable. The squares were attacked on all sides, ringed round with an inferno of assailants, and stayed immovable. The first row, kneeling, met the horsemen with their bayonets while the second row fired; and behind the second row the gunners of the light artillery reloaded. The ranks parted to allow the discharge of grape-shot and then re-closed. The cuirassiers’ answer was to crush them, the huge horses trampling down the men and overleaping the bayonets to plunge gigantically within those living walls. The hail of fire ploughed gaps in the ranks of the cuirassiers and the cuirassiers forced breaches in the squares. The squares shrank in size as their numbers diminished, but they did not break, and they kept up a ceaseless fire against their assailants. The battle assumed a monstrous aspect, with the squares ceasing to be formations of men and becoming craters, the horsemen ceasing to be cavalry and becoming a tempest, every square a volcano enveloped in a thunder-cloud, lava defying the lightning.

The square on the extreme right, the most vulnerable of all being partly isolated, was almost annihilated in the first assault. It consisted of the 75th Highland regiment. Indifferent to the slaughter around him, the regimental piper, seated on a drum, continued to play airs that were the echo of his native forests, lakes, and hills. Those Scotsmen died remembering Ben Nevis as the Greeks had died remembering Argos – until a sabre-stroke, cutting down both bagpipe and the arm that held it, put an end to the lament.

The cuirassiers, relatively few in numbers and further weakened by the disaster of the sunken lane, were opposed to nearly the whole strength of Wellington’s army, but they seemed to multiply, each man to possess the strength of ten. Certain of the Hanoverian battalions showed signs of giving ground, and seeing this Wellington bethought him of his own cavalry. If Napoleon at the same moment had thought of his infantry he would have won the battle. This oversight was his fatal error.

Suddenly the attacking cuirassiers found themselves under a two-fold attack, the infantry squares in front of them and in their rear Somerset with his fourteen hundred dragoons. On his right was Dornberg with the German Light Horse, and on his left Trip with the Belgian heavy cavalry. The cuirassiers were thus attacked on all sides, but they were a whirlwind, their bravery beyond words. Only Englishmen of equal stature could confront Frenchmen such as these.

It was no longer a conflict of men but of shadows, furies, spirits exalted in a tempest of high courage amid the flashing of swords. Within minutes Somerset’s fourteen hundred dragoons had been reduced to eight hundred, and Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, was dead.