The bayonets plunged into the bellies of these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds which has probably never been seen anywhere else.
The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry, closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of grape-shot, they created explosions in their assailants' midst.
The form of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer battalions, they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, they were a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud; lava contended with lightning.
The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in the air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. lt was formed of the 75th regiment of Highlanders.
The bagpipe-player in the centre dropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of the forests and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were being exterminated around him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch under his arm, played the Highland airs.
These Scotchmen died thinking of Ben Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argos. The sword of a cuirassier, which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to the song by killing the singer.
The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further diminished by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English army against them, but they multiplied themselves so that each man of them was equal to ten.
Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded. Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry.
Had Napoleon at that same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle.
This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake.
All at once, the cuirassiers, who had been the assailants, found themselves assailed.
The English cavalry was at their back. Before them two squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset meant fourteen hundred dragoons of the guard.
On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with the German light-horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers; the cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in the rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides.
What mattered it to them?
They were a whirlwind. Their valor was something indescribable.
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 Museum.
[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.