de Lissac for having
taken Edie from him, and he would sit for hours with his chin upon his
hands glaring and frowning, all wrapped in the one idea. This made him
a bit of a butt among the men at first, and they laughed at him for it;
but when they came to know him better they found that he was not a good
man to laugh at, and then they dropped it.

We were early risers at that time, and the whole brigade was usually
under arms at the flush of dawn. One morning--it was the sixteenth of
June--we had just formed up, and General Adams had ridden up to give
some order to Colonel Reynell within a musket-length of where I stood,
when suddenly they both stood staring along the Brussels road. None of
us dared move our heads, but every eye in the regiment whisked round,
and there we saw an officer with the cockade of a general's aide-de-camp
thundering down the road as hard as a great dapple-grey horse could
carry him. He bent his face over its mane and flogged at its neck with
the slack of the bridle, as though he rode for very life.

"Hullo, Reynell!" says the general. "This begins to look like business.
What do you make of it?"

They both cantered their horses forward, and Adams tore open the
dispatch which the messenger handed to him. The wrapper had not touched
the ground before he turned, waving the letter over his head as if it
had been a sabre.

"Dismiss!" he cried. "General parade and march in half-an-hour."

Then in an instant all was buzz and bustle, and the news on every lip.
Napoleon had crossed the frontier the day before, had pushed the
Prussians before him, and was already deep in the country to the east of
us with a hundred and fifty thousand men. Away we scuttled to gather
our things together and have our breakfast, and in an hour we had
marched off and left Ath and the Dender behind us for ever. There was
good need for haste, for the Prussians had sent no news to Wellington of
what was doing, and though he had rushed from Brussels at the first
whisper of it, like a good old mastiff from its kennel, it was hard to
see how he could come up in time to help the Prussians.

It was a bright warm morning, and as the brigade tramped down the broad
Belgian road the dust rolled up from it like the smoke of a battery.
I tell you that we blessed the man that planted the poplars along the
sides, for their shadow was better than drink to us. Over across the
fields, both to the right and the left, were other