nchecked and overwhelming pressure upon the north-east
of the field, a pressure which there also had at last broken the French
formation.

The two things were so nearly simultaneous that no historical search or
argument will now determine the right of either to priority. As the French
west of the Brussels road gave way, the whole English line moved together
and began to advance. As the remnants of the First French Army Corps to
the east of the Brussels road were struck by Ziethen _they_ also broke. At
which point the first flexion occurred will never be determined.

The host of Napoleon, stretched to the last limit, and beyond, snapped
with the more violence, and in those last moments of daylight a complete
confusion seized upon all but two of its numerous and scattered units.

Those two were, first, certain remnants of the Guard itself, and secondly,
Lobau's troops, still stubbornly holding the eastern flank.

Squares of the Old Guard, standing firm but isolated in the flood of the
panic, checked the pursuit only as islands check a torrent. The pursuit
still held. All the world knows the story of the challenge shouted to
these veterans, and of Cambronne's disputed reply just before the musket
ball broke his face and he fell for dead. Lobau also, as I have said, held
his troops together. But the flood of the Prussian advance, perpetually
increasing, carried Plancenoit; the rear ranks of the Sixth Army Corps,
thrust into the great river of fugitives that was now pouring southward in
panic down the Brussels road, were swept away by it and were lost; and at
last, as darkness fell, the first ranks also were mixed into the mass of
panic, and the Imperial army had ceased to exist.

There was a moon that night; and hour after hour the Prussian cavalry, to
whom the task had been entrusted, followed, sabring, pressing, urging the
rout. Mile after mile, past the field of Quatre Bras itself, where the
corpses, stripped by the peasantry, still lay stark after those two days,
the rush of the breakdown ran. Exhaustion had weakened the pursuers before
fear had given way to fatigue with the pursued; and when the remnants of
Napoleon's army were past the Sambre again, not 30,000 disjointed,
unorganised, dispersed, and broken men had survived the disaster.[27]

FINIS

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