suers. From the height above Genappe to the ridge
of the Belle Alliance was but 5000 yards; and if a further reason be
quoted for the cessation of the pursuit and the ranging into battle array
of either force, the weather will provide that reason.

The soil of all these fields is of a peculiar black and consistent sort,
almost impassable after a drenching rain. The great paved high road which
traverses it was occupied and encumbered by the wheeled vehicles and by
the artillery. A rapid advance of infantry bodies thrown out to the right
and left of the road, and so securing speed by parallel advance, was made
impossible by mud, and the line grew longer and longer down the main road,
forbidding rapid movement. From mud, that "fifth element in war" (as
Napoleon himself called it), Wellington's troops--the mass of them at
least--had been fairly free. They had reached their positions before the
downpour. Only the cavalry of the rearguard and its batteries had felt the
full force of the storm. Dry straw of the tall standing crops had been cut
on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, and the men of Wellington's command
bivouacked as well as might be under such weather.

With the French it was otherwise. Their belated units kept straggling in
until long after nightfall. The army was drawn up only at great expense of
time and floundering effort, mainly in the dark, drenched, sodden with
mud, along the ridge of the Belle Alliance. It was with difficulty that
the wood of the bivouac fires could be got to burn at all. They were
perpetually going out; and all that darkness was passed in a misery which
the private soldier must silently expect as part of his trade, and which
is relieved only by those vague corporate intuitions of a common peril,
and perhaps a common glory, which, down below all the physical business,
form the soul of an army.

Napoleon, when he had inspected all this and assured himself that
Wellington was standing ranged upon the opposite ridge, returned to sleep
an hour or two at the farm called Le Caillou, a mile behind the line of
bivouacs. Wellington took up his quarters in the village of Waterloo,
about a mile and a half behind the bivouacs of his troops upon the Mont St
Jean.

In such a disposition the two commanders and their forces waited for the
day.

* * * * *

There must, lastly, be considered, before the description of action is
entered on, the nature of the field upon which