The French, at first, on the left wing of the enemy, took the heights commanding the Château d'Hougoumont as far as the farms of the Haye-Sainte and Papelotte; on the right wing, they attacked the village of Mont Saint-Jean; the farm of the Haye-Sainte was carried in the centre by Prince Jerome. But the Prussian reserves appeared in the direction of Saint-Lambert at six o'clock in the evening: a new and furious attack was delivered upon the village of the Haye-Sainte; Blücher arrived with fresh troops and cut off the squares of the Imperial Guard from the rest of our forces. Around this immortal phalanx, the torrent of fugitives carried all with it among waves of dust, fiery smoke and grape-shot, in darkness ploughed with congreve-rockets, amid the roar of three hundred pieces of artillery and the headlong gallop of five-and-twenty thousand horses: it was as it were the summary of all the battles of the Empire. Twice the French shouted, "Victory!" and twice their shouts were stifled under the pressure of the enemy's columns. The fire from our lines died out; the cartridges were exhausted; some wounded grenadiers, amid thirty thousand slain and a hundred thousand blood-stained cannon-balls, cooled and conglomerated at their feet, remained erect, leaning on their muskets, with broken bayonets and empty barrels. Not far from them, the man of battles listened, with a fixed stare, to the last cannon-shot he was to hear in his life. In that field of carnage, his brother Jerome was still fighting with his expiring battalions overwhelmed by numbers; but his courage was unable to retrieve the victory. [Sidenote: The battle of Waterloo.] The number of killed on the side of the Allies was estimated at eighteen thousand men, on the side of the French at twenty-five thousand; twelve hundred British officers had perished; almost all the Duke of Wellington's aides-de-camp were killed or wounded; there was not a family in England but went into mourning. The Prince of Orange[327] was hit by a bullet in the shoulder; the Baron de Vincent, the Austrian Ambassador, was shot through the hand. The English were beholden for the success to the Irish and to the Highland Brigade, whom our cavalry charges were unable to break. General Grouchy's[328] corps, not having advanced, was not present in the action. The two armies crossed steel and fire with a valour and desperation inspired by a national enmity of ten centuries. Lord Castlereagh, giving an account of the battle in the House of Lords[329], said: "The British and French soldiers, after the action, washed their blood-stained hands in the same stream, and from opposite banks congratulated each other on their courage."