The sun is now about to go down--the storm is over--and Blücher gets a view of the whole field. His army has been cut in two. Desperately he calls in the troops on his right; desperately he gallops to his squadrons on the left to lead them to the charge. Bravely they come on in the gathering gloom to fling themselves against the French. In vain--torn by musketry and charged by the cuirassiers, they fall back. Blücher’s horse is shot down and falls on his rider. “Nostitz, now I am lost!” cries the old hero to his adjutant. But the French dash by without noticing these two Prussians, and when the Prussians, in a countercharge, pass over the same ground, Blücher’s horse is lifted and the old Marshal borne from the field. Night puts an end to the conflict and saves the Prussian army from annihilation. Had the attack been made when Napoleon first ordered, there would have been no Blücher to rescue Wellington at Mont-Saint-Jean. The carnage of the day had been prodigious. Twelve thousand Prussians and eighty-five hundred Frenchmen strewed the villages, the ravine, and the plain. At this cost the great Captain won his last victory. As he returned to Fluerus that night Napoleon’s heart must have been very heavy. The fortune of France had slipped through his fingers. The enemy should have been destroyed. Had his orders been obeyed, Blücher’s army would have been swept off the face of the earth. As it was, Blücher had simply received one of the ordinary drubbings to which he was so much accustomed that he was not even discouraged. Neither his staff nor his troops were demoralized. They had given way to an onset which they could not withstand; but they meant to reform, retreat to another position, and fight again. Most of those who have written of Ligny and of the fatality which deprived both Ney and the Emperor of D’Erlon,--whose corps would have accomplished such decisive results had it gone into action at either Ligny or Quatre Bras,--dwell upon the ignorance and presumption of the staff-officer, Col. Laurent, who took it upon himself to direct the march of D’Erlon’s leading column upon Ligny when it was upon its way to Quatre Bras. But it seems to me that had the staff-officer not turned D’Erlon’s corps away from Quatre Bras and toward Ligny, the Emperor’s own order, sent by Forbin-Janson, would have brought about precisely the same result. CHAPTER V “There is my ugly boy, Arthur,” said Lady Mornington on seeing Wellington at the Dublin Theater after a long absence. Like Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, Washington, Byron, Webster, Disraeli, and many other great men, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, owed nothing to his mother! The sentimental notion that all great men derive their strength from their mothers is an idle fancy.