It was not till long after two o’clock that the French were ready to attack. Then the battery of the Guard fired the signal guns, and Vandamme dashed upon the enemy, while the military bands played “La victoire enchantant.” The Prussians posted in the village, the cemetery, the church, the orchards, the houses, fought desperately. Entrenched in the old castle and in the farm buildings, they raked the advancing French with a terrible fire, which littered the ground with the dead and wounded. Under the cannonade of the French, houses burst into flames. The villages became a roaring hell, in which the maddened soldiers fought from house to house, in the streets, in the square, with a ferocity which amazed the oldest officers. No quarter was asked or given. Driven over the Ligne, the Prussians lined the left bank, and across this brook the soldiers shot each other, with guns only a few feet apart. In the houses wounded men were being burned to death, and their frightful cries rang out above the roar of battle. The hot day of June was made hotter by the fierce flames which wrapped the buildings; clouds hung in the heavens, and the smoke from the guns, dense and foul, was pierced by tongues of fire from the blazing houses and by the flashes of the guns as Prussians and Frenchmen shot each other down. After four charges in force; after sanguinary hand-to-hand fights for every hedge and wall and house; after the fiercest struggle for the brook, the Prussians fell back--the French pouring over the bridges. That Blücher had failed to blow up the bridges was a disastrous mistake. But this was only the right wing of Blücher’s army; the center and the left wing were unhurt. Blücher came down from his observatory, on the roof of the mill of Bussy, to order in person a movement on Wagnalée, from which the Prussians would take the French in flank. While the Prussians, reanimated by the presence of “Old Marshal Forwards,” sprang forward with cheers, and began to drive the French back, Napoleon made ready for his master-stroke. Ney at Quatre Bras is in the rear of the Prussians. Let him merely hold in check whatever force of English is coming from Brussels, and detach D’Erlon with his 20,000 men to fall upon the Prussian flank and rear. This done, 60,000 Prussians will be slaughtered or captured. Directly to D’Erlon flew the order to march to the rear of the Prussian right. Colonel de Forbin-Janson, who carried the order to D’Erlon, was instructed to inform Ney, also.