About midnight Wellington, having already learned that the outposts had been engaged, went to the ball, where he found the Prince of Orange. Now, the Prince of Orange, who seemed fated to cause the useless sacrifice of valuable life, ought to have been at his post at Binche, and thither the duke promptly sent him, after first inquiring if there were any news. “No, nothing, but that the French have crossed the Sambre, and had a brush with the Prussians!” Müffling had previously brought the intelligence, which should have arrived much sooner, the duke afterwards saying to Napier: “I cannot tell the world that Blücher picked the fattest man in his army to ride with an express to me, and that he took thirty hours to go thirty miles.” Far from being surprised (as some writers have it), the duke’s orders were despatched _before_ he went to that now historic entertainment, and the dancing continued long after he and his officers had left. At two o’clock, while it was yet dark, strange sounds were heard under the trees--the shuffling of men’s feet, the ringing of musket-butts on the ground, short words of command, and the running ripple of the roll-call along the ranks. People opened their windows and looked out; carriages returning from the ball drew up and waited: it was Picton’s Division off to the front. [Illustration: PICTON’S DIVISION OFF TO THE FRONT.] At four o’clock Pack’s Highlanders, in kilt and feather bonnet, swung across the Place Royale and passed through the Namur Gate--the rising sun glinting on their accoutrements, their bagpipes waking the sleeping streets. “Come to me and I will give you flesh,” was the weird pibroch of the Black Watch, and many a Highland laddie heard it that morning for the last time. Some of the officers marched in silk stockings and dancing-pumps. Lingering too long at the ball, they had not had time--or perhaps, as the night was warm, they had not troubled--to change them; and there were not a few who never found time again. Out in the early morning along the great highway they went, past lonely farms and clustering villages, through the grey-green gloom of the beech woods of Soigne to Mont St. Jean, where they halted for breakfast, and where about eight the duke passed them with his staff, leaving strict orders to keep the road clear; and at noon the troops were on the march again for Quatre Bras, which was the fiery prelude to the greatest battle fought in modern times. The heat was so intense that one man of the 95th Rifles went mad, and fell dead in the road; but the others pushed on, and were soon afterwards under fire.