battery
of the King's German Legion--opened upon them with grape. The poor remnant
of Kellerman's Horse turned and galloped back in confusion.

The second cavalry charge attempted by the French reserve, coming just too
late, necessarily failed, and at the same moment yet another
reinforcement--the first British division of the Guards, and a body of
Nassauers, with a number of guns--came up to increase the now overwhelming
superiority of Wellington's line.[10]

There was even an attempt at advance upon the part of Wellington.

As the evening turned to sunset, and the sunset to night, that advance was
made very slowly and with increasing difficulty--and all the while Ney's
embarrassed force, now confronted by something like double its own
numbers, and contesting the ground yard by yard as it yielded, received no
word of Erlon.

The clearing of the Wood of Bossu by the right wing of Wellington's army,
reinforced by the newly arrived Guards, took more than an hour. It took as
long to push the French centre back to Gemioncourt, and all through the
last of the sunlight the walls of the farm were desperately held. On the
left, Pierrepont was similarly held for close upon an hour. The sun had
already set when the Guards debouched from the Wood of Bossu, only to be
met and checked by a violent artillery fire from Pierrepont, while at the
same time the remnant of the cuirassiers charged again, and broke a
Belgian battalion at the edge of the wood.

By nine o'clock it was dark and the action ceased. Just as it ceased, and
while, in the last glimmerings of the light, the major objects of the
landscape, groups of wood and distant villages, could still be faintly
distinguished against the background of the gloom, one such object seemed
slowly to approach and move. It was first guessed and then perceived to be
a body of men: the head of a column began to debouch from Frasnes. It was
Erlon and his 20,000 returned an hour too late.

All that critical day had passed with the First Corps out of action. It
had _neither_ come up to Napoleon to wipe out the Prussians at Ligny,
_nor_ come back in its countermarch in time to save Ney and drive back
Wellington at Quatre Bras. It might as well not have existed so far as the
fortunes of the French were concerned, and its absence from either field
upon that day made defeat certain in the future, as the rest of these
pages will show.

* * * * *

Two things im