in a blaze with silver and scarlet
and gold, ride swiftly between the divisions, and as they went a roar of
cheering burst out from either side of them, and we could see arms
outstretched to them and hands waving. An instant later the noise had
died away, and the two armies stood facing each other in absolute deadly
silence--a sight which often comes back to me in my dreams. Then, of a
sudden, there was a lurch among the men just in front of us; a thin
column wheeled off from the dense blue clump, and came swinging up
towards the farm-house which lay below us. It had not taken fifty paces
before a gun banged out from an English battery on our left, and the
battle of Waterloo had begun.

It is not for me to try to tell you the story of that battle, and,
indeed, I should have kept far enough away from such a thing had it not
happened that our own fates, those of the three simple folk who came
from the border country, were all just as much mixed up in it as those
of any king or emperor of them all. To tell the honest truth, I have
learned more about that battle from what I have read than from what I
saw, for how much could I see with a comrade on either side, and a great
white cloud-bank at the very end of my firelock? It was from books and
the talk of others that I learned how the heavy cavalry charged, how
they rode over the famous cuirassiers, and how they were cut to pieces
before they could get back. From them, too, I learned all about the
successive assaults, and how the Belgians fled, and how Pack and Kempt
stood firm. But of my own knowledge I can only speak of what we saw
during that long day in the rifts of the smoke and the lulls of the
firing, and it is just of that that I will tell you.

We were on the right of the line and in reserve, for the Duke was afraid
that Boney might work round on that side and get at him from behind; so
our three regiments, with another British brigade and the Hanoverians,
were placed there to be ready for anything. There were two brigades of
light cavalry, too; but the French attack was all from the front, so it
was late in the day before we were really wanted.

The English battery which fired the first gun was still banging away on
our left, and a German one was hard at work upon our right, so that we
were wrapped round with the smoke; but we were not so hidden as to
screen us from a line of French guns opposite, for a score of round shot
came piping through the air and