arred the road to Nivelles and to Genappe. It was
at the season when the grain is tall; on the edge of the plateau a
battalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th, armed with carabines, was
concealed in the tall wheat.

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 sa