The little kingdom of Belgium was the scene of the momentous contest that brought Napoleon's marvelous career to an end. Thither he led his army, largely made up of new conscripts; and thither the English and the Prussians hastened to meet him. On June 16, 1815, the prelude to the great battle took place. Napoleon met Blücher at Ligny and defeated him; then, leaving Grouchy to pursue the Prussians, he turned against his island foes. On the same day Ney encountered the forces of Wellington at Quatre Bras, but failed to drive them back. On the 17th Wellington took a new position at Waterloo, and awaited there his great antagonist. [=The Terrible Defeat at Waterloo=] June 18th was the crucial day in Napoleon's career, the one in which his power was to fall, never to rise again. Here we shall but sketch in outline this famous battle, reserving a fuller account of it for our next chapter, under the story of Wellington, the victor in the fray. The stupendous struggle, as Wellington himself described it, was "a battle of giants." Long the result wavered in the balance. All day long the British sustained the desperate assaults of their antagonists. Terrible was the contest, frightful the loss of life. Hour after hour passed, charge after charge was hurled by Napoleon against the British lines, which still closed up over the dead and stood firm; and it seemed as if night would fall with the two armies unflinchingly face to face, neither of them victor in the terrible fray. The arrival of Blücher with his Prussians turned the scale. To Napoleon's bitter disappointment Grouchy, who should have been close on the heels of the Prussians, failed to appear, and the weary and dejected French were left to face these fresh troops without support. Napoleon's Old Guard in vain flung itself into the gap, and the French nation long repeated in pride the saying attributed to the commander of this famous corps: "The guard dies, but it never surrenders." [=Napoleon Meets His Fate=] In the end the French army broke and fled in disastrous rout, three-fourths of the whole force being left dead, wounded, or prisoners, while all its artillery became the prize of the victors. Napoleon, pale and confused, was led by Soult from the battlefield. It was his last fight. His abdication was demanded, and he resigned the crown in favor of his son. A hopeless and unnerved fugitive, he fled from Paris to Rochefort, hoping to escape to America. But the British fleet held that port, and in despair he went on board a vessel of the fleet, trusting himself to the honor of the British nation. But the statesmen of England had no sympathy with the vanquished adventurer, from whose ambition Europe had suffered so terribly. He was sent as a state prisoner to the island of St. Helena, there to end his days. His final hour of glory came in 1842, when his ashes were brought in pomp and display to Paris. [Illustration: THE EVE OF WATERLOO