gun
with the fall of the Bastile more than a score of years before. Once
again from France, with the downfall of Napoleon, had been snatched the
hegemony of the world.

There was no reserve. There was nothing to cover a retreat. Someone
raised the wild cry not often heard on battlefields overlooked by
Napoleon, and it was echoed everywhere:

"_Sauve qui peut._"

The army as an army was gone. Thousands of men in mad terror fled in
every direction. Still, there were left a few battalions of the Guard
which had not been in action. They formed three squares to receive the
English and Prussians. Into the nearest square Napoleon, bewildered,
overwhelmed, stricken by the catastrophe, was led on his horse. His
sword was out. He would fain have died on that field. Doubtless, many
a bullet marked him, but none struck him. For a little while these
squares of the Guard, Napoleon in the center one, another square on
either side of the center one, stayed the British and Prussian advance,
but it was not to be. "The stars in their courses fought against
Sisera!" The Emperor gave no order. Bertrand and Soult turned his
horse about and the squares retreated.

It was night. They were the sole organized body left. Well, they
upheld their ancient fame and glorious reputation and untarnished
honor. Through the calm and moonlit night pursuers and pursued could
hear the rolling of the brass drums far and wide over the countryside
as the Guard marched away from that field back to stricken France, to
that famous grenadier march, "_La Grenadiere._"

Again and again they stopped to beat off the furious attack of the
cavalry. Again and again the Prussian pursuers hurled themselves
unavailingly on quadrangles of steel, worked up to a terrible pitch of
excitement by the possibility that they might seize the Emperor at
whose behest and for whose purpose fifty thousand men lay dead or
wounded on that fatal hill, in that dreadful valley. Happy the fate of
those who were dead--horrible the condition of those who were wounded.
English, Prussians, Germans, Bavarians, Hollanders, French, trampled
together in indistinguishable masses. Horses, guns, weapons,
equipment--everything in hopeless confusion. Every horror, every
anguish, every agony was there--incense burned about the altar of one
devouring ambition.

CHAPTER XXXII

AT LAST THE EAGLE AND THE WOMAN

Nearest the crest of the hill immortalized by the great conflict