positively sought, death in the very press of the retreat, on horseback, with bare head and garments torn with shot and stained with mud, fierce with excitement, and waving a broken sword, strove to rally the flyers by exclaiming, "Come with me, and I will show you how a Marshal of France can die upon the field of battle! "You and I," he had said to D'Erlon, "if we are spared by British grape shot, we are sure of our lot, we shall be hanged! How nearly the bravest of the brave foresaw his fate.

Wellington halted his troops when the forward regiments had reached Rossomme; and Blucher undertook to pursue relentlessly the routed army. This task fell to the lot of Gneisenau. In his hands the pursuit was not likely to be slack, nor did it prove so. Through the night, sometimes with horse and foot, sometimes with horse alone, always with drums and bugles, he kept close on the heels of the enemy, and the sound of the bugle and beat of the drum alone sufficed to drive the French from nine bivouacs, and to force them before nightfall over the Sambre. Napoleon had made no preparation for a retreat, although he had fought with only one road in his rear. This alone shows the infatuation of the man. Having diverged from the press, he made a detour on the western side of the road, and cut in upon it again at Genappe. Here he found the defile blocked up by the wreck of the baggage, and a struggling, terrified, shouting mob, the wreck of that splendid host he had marshalled so arrogantly in the morning. Forcing his way through the throng, "preceded and escorted by the tumult," he reached Quatre Bras. Here he halted, and sent to Grouchy news of the lost battle, but forgot to name the point upon which he should march. Then, mounting once more, he rode off into the moonlight, and silently, without halting, passed through Charleroi at dawn. Outside the town he obtained a

carriage, and unattended, except by Bertrand, drove to Philippeville.

The Prussian pursuit had been a wild rollicking chase. The mere blare of a trumpet, the mere rattle of a drum, had scared away the unhappy French. When his infantry were exhausted Gneisenau mounted the drummers, and with these and a few squadrons he went clattering along the pavé and drumming through the night. At dawn he halted the French had disappeared.

They had fled through Marchienne and Charleroi. Napoleon made no effort to rally them. The pontoons, the spare artillery train, and the provision waggons were abandoned. The carts laden with bread, flour, wine and brandy, the military chest containing six millions, were overturned and pillaged by famished mobs of soldiers, and the crowd, ever increasing, fought with bayonet, sabre, and bullet, for food and gold. 'C'etaient les horreurs de Vilna aux portes de la France!" is the exclamation of Charras, after describing these scenes.

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§ 10. Losses.

It is not now, perhaps it never was, possible to ascertain exactly the losses of the Anglo-Allied and Prussian armies in the battle of Waterloo; but we believe 15,000 for the former and 7,000 for the latter is near the truth. Captain Siborne fixes Wellington's losses at 14,728, and Blucher's at 6,998.1 Colonel Charras estimates the British loss at 15,094; but he has included in his estimate the losses of the Hanoverians at Quatre Bras. The same writer is of opinion that 6,998, the Prussian estimate of Blucher's loss,

1 As a curious fact it may be stated that Siborne has added up incorrectly the items of a table of the Prussian losses, making the total 6,775 instead of 6,998; while the latter figure does not agree with the total in a table given in the Appendix-6,945.

is a maximum. The "missing," amounting to more than 4,000 men in both armies, includes many men who went to the rear with the wounded, and who subsequently rejoined their regiments, and many also who were killed.' What the losses of the French were is mere matter of estimate, but the total in killed, wounded, and prisoners cannot have been less than 30,000. They also lost the whole of their artillery, ammunition, waggons, baggage, and train. The Angloallied army captured 122 guns, 267 ammunition waggons, and twenty spare carriages, two eagles, and 5,000 prisoners.

The actual number of British troops engaged at Waterloo was 23,991-the loss 6,936, of whom more than 1,419 were killed. The British troops thus constituted a little more than one-third of the Anglo-Allied army, and their loss was a little under one-third of their strength. There were 85 officers killed and 365 wounded. Ten are returned as "missing," and these the Duke says must be "supposed killed." The troops of the German Legion, of value equal to our own troops, were 5,824 strong: they lost nearly onethird-1,584 of all ranks. The Dutch-Belgian loss is an estimate, no exact returns existing; putting it at 4,000, that number is a little less than one-fourth of their strength -17,784. The Nassauers lost one-fifth, the Hanoverians about one-seventh of the force engaged, respectively; and the Brunswickers one-ninth. Thus more than one-half of the total loss fell upon the British and the German Legionaries. The Prussians lost about one-seventh of the force actually engaged, under 7,000 out of 51,000. These figures would show, if the narrative of the battle did not, by whom the brunt of the action was borne.

For instance: the "missing," in a regiment of 210 swords in the field, as set down in the general return, is 97, yet 70 of these were lying stiff and stark on the field that night-dead. The return states the

§ 11. Reflections on Waterloo.

The plan and conduct of the battle of Waterloo may well be regarded as an exhausted subject of criticism, and the reader may be inclined to pass over what is here said thereon; yet, so great has been the influence of the writings of Napoleon, and of those who have drawn their inspiration from the poisoned fountains of St. Helena, that no one, pretending to narrate the campaign of 1815, can, with propriety, neglect that subject. There are some facts which need to be stated succinctly, so that they may remain fixed in the reader's mind. This it is proposed to do here.

It has been seen that Napoleon formed an exaggerated estimate of the injury he had inflicted on the Prussians at the battle of Ligny, and a totally erroneous conjecture respecting their line of retreat; that he detached upwards of 30,000 men to the right under Grouchy, but did not give that general sufficiently precise instructions, and that both Grouchy and himself neglected to keep up a constant and unintermitting watch from their inner flanks. Hence, in consequence of the lax watch maintained on the night and morning of the 16-17th, the Prussians were able to get away unperceived; and in consequence of the omission on the part of both to patrol the country between the two divergent lines of operation which they respectively adopted, Wellington and Blucher, who did not neglect this essential precaution, were able, not only to follow the movements of the French armies, but to concert a plan for the destruction of Napoleon. It cannot be too often repeated, since such erroneous ideas still prevail on this head, that the battle of Waterloo was the result of a plan of combined operations, arranged by the English and Prussian marshals on the number of "killed" in this regiment to be seventeen. The regiment referred to is the 2nd Life Guards.

morning of the 17th. Wellington's "temerity," therefore, turns out to have been not temerity, but wise daring based upon actual knowledge, and abounding confidence in Prince Blucher. That the English leader, with his unequal army, risked defeat in planting himself across the path of Napoleon, at the head of the choicest army he ever commanded, is certain; but risk is nothing new in warfare, which consists in knowing when to incur and when to avoid a peril like that which Wellington faced with so much equanimity and resolution on the 18th of June. His justification for incurring the peril was his belief in the pledged word of the Prussian marshal, and the marshal's justification for committing three-fourths of his army to a hazardous flank march across a broken and rain-saturated country, was his belief that Wellington would redeem his pledged word and stand the shock of the French legions until the Prussians developed a superior force upon their right flank and in their rear. The plan, therefore, was this simple one: Wellington was to fight a battle, coûte que coûte; the Prussians were to come up and turn the French army. To execute this well-defined purpose Wellington halted and fronted at Waterloo. This is the cardinal fact which should be ever present to the mind of the reader.

It will be seen that the issue depended upon the answers to two questions-Could the Anglo-Allied army stand long enough against the veterans of France ? Would the Prussians arrive in time? We have shown that the Prussians might have arrived earlier in the field had Bulow crossed the Dyle on the evening of the 17th, or had he on the morning of the 18th passed that river above the town. The delay caused by the fire in Wavre augmented the chances against Wellington. But on the other hand the balance was restored by delay on the other side-the postponement of the action until nearly noon. Again, the in