us, and all
the morning we could see that a terrible fight was going on there, for
the walls and the windows and the orchard hedges were all flame and
smoke, and there rose such shrieking and crying from it as I never heard
before. It was half burned down, and shattered with balls, and ten
thousand men were hammering at the gates; but four hundred guardsmen
held it in the morning and two hundred held it in the evening, and no
French foot was ever set within its threshold. But how they fought,
those Frenchmen! Their lives were no more to them than the mud under
their feet. There was one--I can see him now--a stoutish ruddy man on a
crutch. He hobbled up alone in a lull of the firing to the side gate of
Hougoumont and he beat upon it, screaming to his men to come after him.
For five minutes he stood there, strolling about in front of the
gun-barrels which spared him, but at last a Brunswick skirmisher in the
orchard flicked out his brains with a rifle shot. And he was only one
of many, for all day when they did not come in masses they came in twos
and threes with as brave a face as if the whole army were at their
heels.

So we lay all morning, looking down at the fight at Hougoumont; but soon
the Duke saw that there was nothing to fear upon his right, and so he
began to use us in another way.

The French had pushed their skirmishers past the farm, and they lay
among the young corn in front of us popping at the gunners, so that
three pieces out of six on our left were lying with their men strewed in
the mud all round them. But the Duke had his eyes everywhere, and up he
galloped at that moment--a thin, dark, wiry man with very bright eyes, a
hooked nose, and big cockade on his cap. There were a dozen officers at
his heels, all as merry as if it were a foxhunt, but of the dozen there
was not one left in the evening.

"Warm work, Adams," said he as he rode up.

"Very warm, your grace," said our general.

"But we can outstay them at it, I think. Tut, tut, we cannot let
skirmishers silence a battery! Just drive those fellows out of that,
Adams."

Then first I knew what a devil's thrill runs through a man when he is
given a bit of fighting to do. Up to now we had just lain and been
killed, which is the weariest kind of work. Now it was our turn, and,
my word, we were ready for it. Up we jumped, the whole brigade, in a
four-deep line, and rushed at the cornfield as hard as we could tear.
The skirmishers sna