the ground to improve, the Emperor consulted his charts and took a
brief snatch of sleep. He then rode to the front; and, as the
gray-coated figure passed along those imposing lines, the enthusiasm
found vent in one rolling roar of "Vive l'Empereur," which was wafted
threateningly to the thinner array of the allies. There the leader
received no whole-hearted acclaim save from the men who knew him; but
among these there was no misgiving. "If," wrote Major Simmons of the
95th, "you could have seen the proud and fierce appearance of the
British at that tremendous moment, there was not one eye but gleamed
with joy."[510]

The first shots were fired at 11.50 to cover the assault on the wood
of Hougoumont by Prince Jerome Bonaparte's division of Reille's corps.
The Nassauers and Hanoverians briskly replied, and Cleeve's German
battery opened fire with such effect that the leading column fell
back. Again the assailants came on in greater force under shelter of a
tremendous cannonade: this time they gained a lodgment, and step by
step drove the defenders back through the copse. Though checked for a
time by the Guards, they mastered the wood south of the house by about
one o'clock. There they should have stopped. Napoleon's orders were
for them to gain a hold only on the wood and throw out a good line of
skirmishers: all that he wanted on this side was to prevent any
turning movement from Wellington's advanced outposts. Reille also sent
orders not to attack the chateau; but the Prince and his men rushed on
at those massive walls, only to meet with a bloody repulse. A second
attack fared no better; and though some 12,000 of Reille's men
finally attacked the mansion on three sides, yet our Guards, when
reinforced, beat off every onset of wellnigh ten times their numbers.

For some time the Emperor paid little heed to this waste of energy; at
2 p.m. he recalled Jerome to his side. He now saw the need of
husbanding his resources; for a disaster had overtaken the French
right centre. He had fixed one o'clock for a great attack on La Haye
Sainte by D'Erlon's corps of nearly 20,000 men. But a delay occurred
owing to a cause that we must now describe.

Before his great battery of eighty guns belched forth at the centre
and blotted out the view, he swept the horizon with his glass, and
discerned on the skirts of the St. Lambert wood, six miles away, a
dark object. Was it a spinney, or a body of troops? His staff officers
could not agr