Bull’s howitzers sent a shower of 5½-inch shells over the château into the wood, and as often as the death-dealing globes fell crashing through the branches, so often did the enemy retire in confusion, until Jerome Bonaparte, ex-king of Westphalia, who was in command at Hougoumont, brought up Foy’s Division to help the attack. Bravely led by their officers, the tall shakoes and square white coat-facings of the line regiments, the dark-blue and black gaiters of the light infantry, pressed through the wood until they reached a stiff quickset hedge, separated by a thin strip of apple orchard from the long south wall, over which peeped the head-gear of our Guardsmen, and in the confusion of smoke and skirmish the bright-red brickwork was mistaken for a line of British--you can see to-day where the French balls crumbled that barrier. But soon discovering their error, the brave fellows struggled through the hedge and rushed forward. A line of loopholes perforated the wall about three feet from the ground, crossed bayonets protruded viciously from the openings, and a hail of bullets poured forth with such ghastly effect that in half-an-hour there were _fifteen hundred_ of God’s creatures dead and dying on the green grass in the orchard, and still the others came on. Some got as far as the loopholes, and seized the bayonets; others struck with their gunbutts at the men, who, on platforms behind the wall, fired down over the top, piling up the dead in dreadful heaps--privates and officers, conscripts and veterans. From time to time our Foot Guards charged over the large orchard at the east end of the enclosed garden, and also at the south-west angle of the farm buildings, where a haystack helped to cover them until the French burned it; and this repulse and attack went on, time and again, until the evening, the enemy gaining no advantage but the beechwood for all their desperate valour. [Illustration: THE FARM OF HOUGOUMONT.] The rest of our line had remained passive listeners to the firing, except for a little skirmishing here and there, but a hurricane was brewing and about to burst against our left and centre. * * * * * La Haye Sainte was a farm, lying like Hougoumont in a hollow; it was on the Brussels road, and was built with barn and stabling round three sides of an oblong yard, the fourth side being a high white wall, with a gate and a piggery alongside the roadway. Towards the French position stretched a long orchard, a small garden lay behind the house, and a large double door opened from the yard into the fields on the Hougoumont side, half of which door had been burned for bivouac fires the night previous. The 2nd Rifles of the German Legion, dressed like our own in green with slate-coloured pantaloons, held the post, and held it like the heroes of old, three companies in the orchard, two in the building, and one in the garden, Major Baring, who had two horses shot under him, being in command.