If you take a map of Belgium, placing your finger on Brussels, and pass it down the great road running south, you will find, some twelve miles from the capital, the village of Mont St. Jean; a little beyond which place a cross-road from Wavre intersects the _chaussée_, and at that point move your finger at right angles, right and left, for a mile or so each way, and you have, roughly, the English position on the 18th June. Continuing again, still southward, you will pass La Belle Alliance and Genappe, and nine miles from the cross-roads before Mont St. Jean is Quatre Bras. Rolling ridges of waving grain, some woods in all their summer beauty, a gabled farmhouse, and a few cottages where four ways meet--that is one’s impression of Quatre Bras, which Ney had orders to take, and drive out Perponcher’s Dutch Belgians posted there; but we arrived to their assistance, corps after corps, at intervals, and forming up in line and square, repulsed the Cuirassiers and Lancers who charged through the tall rye. The crops were so high that the gallant French cavalry had to resort to a curious device in singling out our regiments. A horseman would dash forward, find out the position, plant a lance in the ground, and disappear; then, in a few moments, guided by the fluttering pennon, his comrades would burst upon us--invisible until within a few horse-lengths. Waterloo has put Quatre Bras into the shade, but few conflicts have been more brilliant. Our 69th--thanks to Orange, who interfered with its formation just as the 8th Cuirassiers came through the corn--lost its only colour, taken by Trooper Lami, although Volunteer Clarke received twenty-three wounds and lost the use of an arm in its defence. The 69th’s other colour had been captured at Bergen-op-Zoom, and was hung in the Invalides. By four o’clock the 44th had upwards of 16 officers and 200 men killed and wounded. A grey-headed French lancer drove his point into Ensign Christie’s left eye, down through his face, piercing his tongue and entering the jaw; but in that shocking condition he still stuck manfully to the colour-pole, until, finding himself overpowered, he threw the colour down and lay upon it, and some privates of the regiment closing round the Frenchman, lifted him out of his saddle on their bayonet points! The 92nd Highlanders--the old Gordons of Peninsular fame--were the last of Picton’s men to reach the field, and were formed up in line. “Ninety-second, don’t fire till I tell you!” cried Wellington, as a mass of Cuirassiers charged them in his presence; and the word was not given until the dashing horsemen were within twenty yards. A little later, the duke said again: “Now, 92nd, you must charge these two columns of infantry”; and charge they did, over a ditch, driving the French before them, but their beloved colonel, Cameron, received a death-wound from the upper windows of a house.