Thus assured and buttressed, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch army was well posted.
The peril of this position lay in the forest of Soignes, then adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds of Groenendael and Boitsfort.
An army could not retreat thither without dissolving; the regiments would have broken up immediately there. The artillery would have been lost among the morasses.
The retreat, according to many a man versed in the art,--though it is disputed by others,--would have been a disorganized flight.
To this centre, Wellington added one of Chasse's brigades taken from the right wing, and one of Wincke's brigades taken from the left wing, plus Clinton's division.
To his English, to the regiments of Halkett, to the brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave as reinforcements and aids, the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau's contingent, Kielmansegg's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans.
This placed twenty-six battalions under his hand. The right wing, as Charras says, was thrown back on the centre. An enormous battery was masked by sacks of earth at the spot where there now stands what is called the "Museum of Waterloo." Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground, Somerset's Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong. It was the remaining half of the justly celebrated English cavalry. Ponsonby destroyed, Somerset remained.
The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a redoubt, was ranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with a coating of bags of sand and a large slope of earth.
This work was not finished; there had been no time to make a palisade for it.
Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there remained the whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance of the old mill of Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence, beneath an elm, which an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, purchased later on for two hundred francs, cut down, and carried off. Wellington was coldly heroic.
The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell at his side.
Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him:
"My lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?"
"To do like me," replied Wellington. To Clinton he said laconically, "To hold this spot to the last man." The day was evidently turning out ill.
Wellington shouted to his old companions of Talavera, of Vittoria, of Salamanca:
"Boys, can retreat be thought of?
Think of old England!"
Towards four o'clock, the English line drew back.
Suddenly nothing was visible on the crest of the plateau except the artillery and the sharpshooters; the rest had disappeared:
the regiments, dislodged by the shells and the French bullets, retreated into the bottom, now intersected by the back road of the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean; a retrograde movement took place, the English front hid itself, Wellington drew back.