of victory.

Such a retirement was ruin. It was more impossible morally even than it
was impossible physically, under the conditions of the field. Therefore it
was that, under conditions so desperate, with his battle lost if ever
battle was, the Emperor yet attempted one ultimate throw, and in this
half-hour before the sunset sent forward the Guard.

In those solemn moments, wherein the Imperial Guard formed for their
descent into that hollow whose further slope was to see their last feat of
arms, Ziethen, with the First Prussian Corps, pressed on into the far
corner the field of battle. At the far end of the long ridge of the Mont
St Jean, more than a mile away, this last great body and newest
reinforcement of the Emperor's foes had emerged from the walls and
thickets of Smohain and, new to the fighting, was already pushing in the
weary French line that had stood the carnage of six hours. It was not
enough that the Fourth Prussian Corps should have determined the day
already with its 30,000 come up from the east against him; now the
foremost battalions of the First coming up from the north were appearing
to clinch the matter altogether.

It was under such conditions of irretrievable disaster that Napoleon
played for miracle, and himself riding slowly down the valley at the head
of his comrades and veterans, gave them over to Ney for the final attack
against Wellington's line which still held the opposing slope.

It was then, at the moment when Ziethen and the men of the First Prussian
Army Corps began to press upon the north-eastern angle of the fight, and
were ready to determine it altogether, that the Guard began its ponderous
thrust up between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte, to the west of the
Brussels road. Up that fatal hill, which had seen the four great cavalry
charges, and more recently the breaking of the Second Corps, the tall men,
taller for the bearskins and the shouldered musket, the inheritors of
twenty-two victorious and now immortal years, leant forward, advancing. To
the hanging smoke of the cannon in the vale was added the rising mist of
evening; and when the furious cannonade which was to support their attack
had ceased with their approach to the enemy's line, a sort of silence fell
upon the spectators of that great event.

The event was brief.

It was preceded by a strange sight: a single horseman galloped unharmed
from the French to the English line (a captain); he announced to the enemy
the ap