But meanwhile every hour was telling against Napoleon. To win the battle he must crush the English army before Blücher joined it; and the English army was still uncrushed. Terrible as was his loss, and many of his regiments were reduced to a mere handful of men, Wellington stubbornly held his ground while the Prussians, advancing from Wavre through deep and miry forest roads, were slowly gathering to his support, disregarding the attack on their rear by which Grouchy strove to hold them back from the field. At half-past four their advanced guard deployed at last from the woods; but the main body was far behind, and Napoleon was still able to hold his ground against them till their increasing masses forced him to stake all on a desperate effort against the English front. The Imperial Guard--his only reserve, and which had as yet taken no part in the battle--was drawn up at seven in two huge columns of attack. The first, with Ney himself at its head, swept all before it as it mounted the rise beside La Haye Sainte, on which the thin English line still held its ground, and all but touched the English front when its mass, torn by the terrible fire of musketry with which it was received, gave way before a charge. The second, three thousand strong, advanced with the same courage over the slope near Hougomont, only to be repulsed and shattered in its turn. At the moment when these masses fell slowly and doggedly back down the fatal rise, the Prussians pushed forward on Napoleon's right, their guns swept the road to Charleroi, and Wellington seized the moment for a general advance. From that hour all was lost. Only the Guard stood firm in the wreck of the French army; and though darkness and exhaustion checked the English in their pursuit of the broken troops as they hurried from the field, the Prussian horse continued the chase through the night. Only forty thousand Frenchmen with some thirty guns recrossed the Sambre while Napoleon himself fled hurriedly to Paris. His second abdication was followed by a triumphant entry of the English and Prussian armies into the French capital; and the long war ended with his exile to St. Helena, and the return of Lewis the Eighteenth to the throne of the Bourbons. * * * * * TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES Reference to the Index has been removed from the Table of Contents. The word manoeuvre uses an oe ligature in the original. Variations in spelling have been left as in the original.