“Charge, charge! Hurrah!” cried Picton, his little black eyes sparkling, his florid complexion redder with excitement--a ball struck his right temple, he fell dead from his horse, and his men passed over him driving the foe down hill. A mounted French officer had his horse shot, and getting to his feet seized the regimental colour of the 32nd, which was nearly new. Belcher, who carried it, grasped the silk and the Frenchman groped for his sabre hilt, but Colour-sergeant Switzer thrust a pike at his breast. “Save the brave fellow!” was the cry, but it came too late; a private, named Lacy, fired point blank into him, and he fell lifeless. Ney stood in the road beyond La Haye Sainte watching Donzelot’s attack on the farm, where the “Green Germans” were forced, after a struggle, out of the long orchard into the buildings, and simultaneously a mass of Cuirassiers tore past the Hougoumont side and rode at the ridge. Our Household Cavalry and Ponsonby’s Heavies had walked on foot to the height overlooking the struggle; the trumpets rang out “Mount,” and swinging into their saddles they swooped down into the thick of it. With a clatter across the causeway, and the muffled thunder of hoofs on the ground beyond it, the scarlet-coated Life Guards, wearing no armour then, and mounted on black horses, dashed past the Wellington tree into the potato field, with the Blues and King’s Dragoon Guards, swinging, slashing, stirrup to stirrup, to meet Kellermann’s troopers and Ordoner’s Cuirassiers. There was the snort of eager horses, the creaking of leather, the clash of sword on steel cuirass, the yell of passion and the scream of agony; a seething mass of fighting-men and steeds, glinting and gleaming, swaying this way and that way, but always onward, jostling down the hill. The 1st Lifes got jammed in the road beyond the farm with a body of Cuirassiers, on the spot where Ney had just before been standing, voltigeurs firing into them, on friend and foe alike! Their Colonel, Ferner, led eleven charges, although badly wounded by sabre and lance. The King’s Dragoons jumped their horses over a barrier of trees which our Rifles had built across the causeway and went thundering along that way, while the Blues were reaping a harvest of glory in another direction, and the 2nd Life Guards charged to the left for a great distance beyond the sandpit alongside the farm, where Corporal Shaw met his fate after slaying _nine_ of the enemy singlehanded. After the battle men remembered this mighty swordsman, and told in solemn voices his deeds of derring-do. One cuirassier sat, out of the _mêlée_, coolly loading his carbine and picking off our troopers, and it is believed he gave Shaw his mortal hurt.