“That night, the British bivac was on the same ridge which their beaten enemy had occupied on the preceding one; and as I lay upon the ground, I heard at times, and at no great distance from me, the voices of my more fortunate companions who had escaped from the slaughter, and some were roaming over the field in search of plunder. Momentarily, I expected that a friendly straggler would pass by. I must have been for a considerable period insensible; for the place where I fell, although the theatre of the final struggle between the relics of Ney’s columns and the British guards, was now totally deserted by the living, and cumbered only with the dying and the dead. “I seemed as if awakening from a dream: a difficulty of respiration painfully annoyed me, and I endeavoured to rise; but a weight, too mighty to be removed, pressed me to the earth. My sight was imperfect, my eyelids felt closed. I disengaged my left hand, and raising it to my face, found that a mask of congealed blood covered it. I rubbed it away, and, prepared as I was for a sanguinary spectacle by the continuous moanings of wounded men and dying horses, I closed my eyes in horror, when the clear cold moonlight revealed the sickening scene. “Directly over me, and in the very attitude in which he had groaned his last, an officer of the old guard was stretched: our faces were nearly touching, and his open eyes had fixed their glassy stare on mine. A sword-cut had divided his upper lip, and, exposing the teeth, gave to the dead man’s countenance a grin so horrible and ghastly, that I who had witnessed death in every form, was glad to avert my eyes. I made a desperate effort to shake him off; but a horse’s neck rested on my legs, and my feeble exertions were quite unequal to rid me of this double load.