18 squadrons of
cavalry, and 66 guns, making a total of about 18,000 men, or about a
fourth part of his force and almost a third of his artillery. This
subtraction from the army that ought to have been used in fighting
Wellington would alone have suffered gravely to compromise the French;
and it is well known that Napoleon felt the want of men to send against
the English long before the conflict was over; and this want was the
consequence of the pressure of the Prussians on his right flank,
threatening to establish themselves in his rear. But this was not all
the aid derived by Wellington from the Prussian advance. It was the
arrival of a portion of Zieten's corps on the field of Waterloo that
enabled the British commander to withdraw from his left the
comparatively untouched cavalry brigades of Vivian and Vandeleur, and to
station them in or near the centre of his line, where they were of the
greatest use at the very "crisis" of the battle,--Vivian, in particular,
doing as much as was done by any one of Wellington's officers to secure
victory for his commander. The Prussians followed the flying French for
hours, and had the satisfaction of giving the final blow to Napoleonism
for that time. It has risen again.

[52] No one who is not familiar with the correspondence of the Allied
commanders in 1815 can form an adequate idea of the ferocity which then
characterized the Prussian officers. On the 27th of June General von
Gneisenau, writing for Bluecher, declared that Napoleon must be delivered
over to the Prussians, "with a view to his execution." That, he argued,
was what eternal justice demanded, and what the Declaration of March
13th decided,--alluding to the Declaration against Napoleon published by
the Congress of Vienna, which, he said, and fairly enough too, put him
under outlawry by the Allied powers. Doing the Duke of Wellington the
justice to suppose he would be averse to hangman's work, Gneisenau, who
stood next to Bluecher in the Prussian service as well as in Prussian
estimation, expressed his leader's readiness to free him from all
responsibility in the matter by taking possession of Napoleon's person
himself, and detailing the intended assassins from his own army.
Wellington was astonished at such language from gentlemen, and so
exerted himself that Bluecher changed his mind; whereupon Gneisenau wrote
that it had been Bluecher's "intention to execute [murder?] Bonaparte on
the spot where the Duc d'Enghien