r and more vigorous assault upon a larger scale. Not only
the first great battery of eighty guns, but many of the batteries to the
west of the Brussels road (which had hitherto been turned upon Hougomont
and the English guns behind that position) were now directed upon the
centre of the English line, and there broke out a cannonade even more
furious than the one which had opened the action at one o'clock. Men
trained in a generation's experience of war called it the most furious
artillery effort of their time; and never, perhaps, even in the career of
the Gunner who was now in the last extremity of his fate, had guns better
served him.

Under the battering of that discharge the front of Wellington's command
was partially withdrawn behind the cover of the ridge. A stream of
wounded, mixed with not a few men broken and flying, began to swell
northward up the Brussels road; and Ney, imagining from such a sight that
the enemy's line wavered, committed his capital error, and called upon the
cavalry to charge.

Wellington's line was not wavering. For the mass of the French cavalry to
charge at such a moment was to waste irreparably a form of energy whose
high potential upon the battlefield corresponds to a very rapid
exhaustion, and which, invaluable against a front shaken and doubtful, is
useless against a front still solid.

It was not and could not have been the Emperor who ordered that false
step. It is even uncertain whether the whole body of horsemen that moved
had been summoned by Ney, or whether the rearmost did not simply follow
the advance of their fellows. At any rate, the great group of mounted
men[21] which lay in reserve behind the First Army Corps, and to the west
of the road, passed in its entirety through the infantry, and began to
advance at the trot down the valley for the assault upon the opposite
slope.

I repeat, it is not certain whether Ney called upon all this mass of
cavalry and deliberately risked the waste of it in one blow. It is more
probable that there was some misunderstanding; that Desnoettes' command,
which was drawn up behind Milhaud's, followed Milhaud's, under the
impression that a general order had been given to both; that Ney, seeing
this extra body of horse following, imagined Napoleon to have given it
orders. At any rate, Napoleon never gave such orders, and, from the height
upon which he stood, could not have seen the first execution of them, for
the first advance of that cavalry