Meanwhile, the Gordons had fully avenged their leader's death. With repeated rushes upon the roadside house, they did deadly work with the bayonet, and, amid the hail of bullets from superior forces of the enemy, they still continued their fierce onslaughts under conditions that would have demoralized soldiers less cool and experienced. In the midst of the appalling fire, they separated and formed up in three parts, one part moving to the right of the house and garden, another part to the left, while a third prepared to assault the garden itself. At a given moment, when the whole battalion was ready, the order to charge was given. Then, with a resounding cheer, they rushed forward, "the bagpipes screaming out the notes of the 'Cameron's Gathering,' as they levelled their bayonets, and charged with the elastic step learnt on the hillside." The enemy stood firm for a little while against the oncoming array of determined men; then they broke and fled, showing their backs as targets for the Highlanders, who scattered the passage of their retreat thickly with their dead bodies. In this action many prisoners were taken. The British troops, though in the minority in guns, as well as men, stood like a rock against the searching assaults of the enemy. Ebb and flow was the order of battle, until at last the flow of our indomitable troops gained ground, and the enemy finally ebbed away. Our last victory in that furious battle was gained foot by foot, and when, in the end, the day was won, and the stars looked down upon 10,000 slain, the piper of the Gordon Highlanders took his stand in front of the village of Quatre Bras to call the Highlanders in. "Loud and long blew Cameron," says one who heard that call of the highland mountain and the glen, "but his efforts could not gather above half of those whom his music had cheered on their march to the battlefield." Our Gordons had been through the thick of the fight; at the close of the day they were terribly hungry, and with the cool sang-froid which is the necessary complement to the bravery of such men, they took their supper cooked and served in the cuirasses which had shone in the enemy's forefront of battle some hours before. Various writers tell of the extreme kindness received by the Gordons after the battle from the inhabitants of Brussels and Antwerp. The "good and brave Scots" came in on drays and wagons, apparently none the worse for the fierce encounter, saving merely the loss of a leg, or an arm or two. "We're a' wantin' a leg or a' airm," cried one from the midst of a wagon-load of wounded, as if it were a kind of fraternal greeting. The good folk, seeing their plight, and not understanding the language, brought them wine in abundance, but the Highlanders did not understand the colour of it, and called for "guid sma' ale" as the next best thing to their own "white wine of the north."