Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle resembled a
fight between two savage wounded men, who constantly lose their blood
while continuing the struggle. Which would be the first to fall? The
combat for the plateau continued. How far did the cuirassiers get? No
one could say; but it is certain that on the day after the battle, a
cuirassier and his horse were found dead on the weighing machine of
Mont St. Jean, at the very spot where the Nivelles, Genappe, La Hulpe,
and Brussels roads intersect and meet. This horseman had pierced the
English lines. One of the men who picked up this corpse still lives at
Mont St. Jean; his name is Dehaye, and he was eighteen years of age
at the time. Wellington felt himself giving way, and the crisis was
close at hand. The cuirassiers had not succeeded, in the sense that
the English centre had not been broken. Everybody held the plateau,
and nobody held it; but, in the end, the greater portion remained in
the hands of the English. Wellington had the village and the plain;
Ney, only the crest and the slope. Both sides seemed to have taken
root in this mournful soil. But the weakness of the English seemed
irremediable, for the hemorrhage of this army was horrible. Kempt on
the left wing asked for reinforcements. "There are none," Wellington
replied. Almost at the same moment, by a strange coincidence which
depicts the exhaustion of both armies, Ney asked Napoleon for infantry,
and Napoleon answered, "Infantry? where does he expect me to get them?
Does he think I can make them?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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