ken up their position for battle in that powerful second line,
so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its extreme left
Kellermann's cuirassiers and on its extreme right Milhaud's cuirassiers,
had, so to speak, two wings of iron.

Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the Emperor's orders. Ney drew his
sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set
in motion.

Then a formidable spectacle was seen.

All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to
the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a simultaneous
movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering-ram
which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance, plunged into
the terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared
there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow, reappeared on the
other side of the valley, still compact and in close ranks, mounting at
a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot which burst upon them,
the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean. They
ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between
the musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was audible.
Being two divisions, there were two columns of them; Wathier's division
held the right, Delort's division was on the left. It seemed as though
two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest
of the table-land. It traversed the battle like a prodigy.

Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of
the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was lacking here, but Ney was
again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and
had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a
polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent
here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy
heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of
trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses
like the scales on the hydra.

These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to
this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told
of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human
heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible,
invulnerable, sublime--gods and beasts.

Odd numerical coincidence,--twenty-six battalions rode t