Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up with the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes's light-horse. The plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. The cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to put it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other without releasing the other.
The squares still held firm.
There were a dozen assaults.
Ney had four horses killed under him. Half the cuirassiers remained on the plateau.
This conflict lasted two hours.
The English army was profoundly shaken.
There is no doubt that, had they not been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the hollow road the cuirassiers would have overwhelmed the centre and decided the victory.
This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen Talavera and Badajoz.
Wellington, three-quarters vanquished, admired heroically.
He said in an undertone, "Sublime!"
The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English regiments six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard bore to the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.
Wellington's situation had grown worse.
This strange battle was like a duel between two raging, wounded men, each of whom, still fighting and still resisting, is expending all his blood.
Which of the two will be the first to fall?
The conflict on the plateau continued.
What had become of the cuirassiers?
No one could have told. One thing is certain, that on the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his horse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles at Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles, Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other.
This horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up the body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze.
He was eighteen years old at that time.
Wellington felt that he was yielding.