We arrive now at the different versions which have been published of the battle of Waterloo, and which issued from St.-Helena. How much credit should be attached to these accounts, may be judged by the following extracts from the able work entitled “The Military life of the Duke of Wellington:” “It may perhaps be remarked, that we have attached little authority to the accounts of this campaign which emanated from St.-Helena. The writer of this portion of the present work had the honour of being intimately acquainted with some of the persons composing Napoleon’s suite at Longwood; and although he has reason to believe the volumes given to the world with the names of generals de Montholon and Gourgaud perfixed to them to be genuine; that is, that they were prepared from Napoleon’s notes and dictation; yet, he conceives, he has equal reason for rejecting them as testimony. An officer of Bonaparte’s establishment told him at Longwood, that the termination of the battle of Waterloo had occasioned the utmost perplexity amongst them; and that he himself, having been employed by the ex-Emperor to write an account of the campaign, had presented no less than _six_ distinct modes of ending the battle, all of which had been rejected. “_Ab uno disce omnes._”[88] Various accounts of the battle that subsequently emanated from St.-Helena, Grouchy characterizes as containing “supposed instructions and orders, imaginary movements, etc., deductions made after the event;” (“_des instructions et des ordres supposés, des mouvements imaginatifs_, etc.; _des assertions erronées, des hypothèses faites après coup_.”) I will not trouble my readers with any further remarks upon accounts so destitute of truth. Gourgaud’s account, dictated by Napoleon himself, is, for the most part, indignantly and completely refuted by marshal Grouchy as a mere “military romance.” From this trait of history-making, we may judge of the rest of the accounts that were concocted in the ever fertile imagination of Napoleon. His utter disregard of truth was part of his policy; and if, for a time, it enabled him to deceive a high-minded and gallant people, amongst whom the liberty of the press had been annihilated, in the end it contributed to his ruin, nearly as much as did the bravery and perseverance of his victorious opponents. Why did we meet him at Waterloo? We were not at war with France, with its legitimate sovereign, or with the French people. But we were at war with Napoleon: he had been declared _hors la loi_ (outlawed) by civilized Europe[89]; the idol indeed of a fine army, but a man devoid of truth and principle, whom no treaties could bind, and whose restless ambition was utterly incompatible with the peace of Europe.