“A short time afterwards, I saw four regiments of the middle guard, conducted by the Emperor, arriving. With these troops, he wished to renew the attack, and to penetrate the centre of the enemy. He ordered me to lead them on: generals, officers, and soldiers, all displayed the greatest intrepidity; but this body of troops was too weak to resist, for a long time, the forces opposed to it by the enemy, and it was soon necessary to renounce the hope which this attack had, for a few moments, inspired. General Friant had been struck with a ball by my side; and I myself had my horse killed, and fell under it. The brave men who will return from this terrible battle will, I hope, do me the justice to say, that they saw me on foot with sword in hand during the whole of the evening, and that I only quitted the scene of carnage among the last, and at the moment when retreat could no longer be prevented. At the same time, the Prussians continued their offensive movements, and our right sensibly retired; the English advanced in their turn. There remained to us still four squares of the old guard to protect the retreat. These brave grenadiers, the choice of the army, forced successively to retire, yielded ground foot by foot, till, overwhelmed by numbers, they were almost entirely annihilated. From that moment, a retrograde movement was declared, and the army formed nothing but a confused mass. There was not, however, a total rout, nor the cry of _Sauve qui peut_, as has been calumniously stated in the bulletin. As for myself, constantly in the rear-guard, which I followed on foot, having all my horses killed, worn out with fatigue, covered with contusions, and having no longer strength to march, I owe my life to a corporal who supported me on the road, and did not abandon me during the retreat. At eleven at night, I found lieutenant-general Lefebvre-Desnouettes; and one of his officers, major Schmidt, had the generosity to give me the only horse that remained to him. In this manner I arrived at Marchiennes-au-Pont at four o’clock in the morning, alone, without any officers of my staff, ignorant of what had become of the Emperor, who, before the end of the battle, had entirely disappeared, and who, I was allowed to believe, might be either killed or taken prisoner. General Pamphile Lacroix, chief of the staff of the second corps, whom I found in this town, having told me that the Emperor was at Charleroi, I was led to suppose that his Majesty was going to put himself at the head of marshal Grouchy’s corps, to cover the Sambre, and to facilitate to the troops the means of rallying towards Avesnes, and, with this persuasion, I went to Beaumont; but parties of cavalry following on too near, and having already intercepted the roads of Maubeuge and Philippeville, I became sensible of the total impossibility of arresting a single soldier on that point, to oppose the progress of the victorious enemy. I