battalions of chasseurs, are making ready to second the assault on Mont
Saint Jean. Reille and his infantry pause and listen: the cuirassiers
halt in their upward movement, whilst up on the ridge of the plateau
where Donzelot's grenadiers have attacked the brigade of Kempt and
Lambert and Pack, the whisper goes from mouth to mouth:

"We are betrayed! _Sauve qui peut!_"

Panic seizes the younger men: they turn their horses' heads back toward
the slopes. The stampede has commenced: very soon it grows. The British
in front, the Prussians in the rear: "Sauve qui peut!"

Ney amongst them is almost unrecognisable. His face is coal-black with
powder: he has no hat, no epaulettes and only half a sword: rage,
anguish, bitterness are in his husky voice as he adjures, entreats,
calls to the demoralised army--and insults it, execrates it in turn. But
nothing but Death will stop that army now in its headlong flight.

"At least stop and see how a Marshal of France dies on the field of
honour," he calls.

But the voice which led these same men to victory at Moskowa has lost
its potency and its magic. The men cry "Vive Ney!" but they do not
stand. The stampede has become general. In the valley below the infantry
has started to run up the slope of La Belle Alliance: after it the
cavalry with reins hanging loose, stirrups lost, casques, sabretaches,
muskets--anything that impedes--thrown into the fields to right and
left. La Haye Sainte is evacuated, Hougoumont is abandoned; Papelotte,
Plancenoit, the woods, the plains are only filled with running men and
the thunder of galloping chargers.

Alone the Old Guard has remained unshaken. Whilst all around them what
was once the Grand Army is shattered, destroyed, melted like ice before
a devastating fire, they have continued to advance, sublime in their
fortitude, in their endurance, their contempt for death. One by one
their columns are shattered and there are none now to replace those that
fall. And as the gloom of night settles on this vast hecatomb on the
plateau of Mont Saint Jean the conquerors of Jena and Austerlitz and
Friedland make their last stand round the bronze eagle--all that is left
to them of the glories of the past.

And when from far away the cry of "Sauve qui peut" has become only an
echo, and the bronze eagle shattered by a bullet lies prone upon the
ground shielded against capture in its fall by a circling mountain of
dead, when finally Night wraps all the her