o meet
twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of
the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen squares,
two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first
line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders,
taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm,
mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers
did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They
heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse, the alternate and
symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the jingling of the
cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand and savage
breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once,
a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the
crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads
with gray mustaches, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!" All this cavalry
debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an
earthquake.

All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the
head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On
arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly
given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and
cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,--a trench
between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.

It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning,
directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms deep between its double
slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed
on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their
haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming
the riders; and there being no means of retreat,--the whole column being
no longer anything more than a projectile,--the force which had been
acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine
could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled there pell-mell,
grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when
this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and
passed on. Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss.

This began the loss of the battle.

A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says that two
thousand horses and fifteen hundred men