The two battalions went to work at once to barricade the doors and the breaches in the walls with timbers and paving stones, and men were stationed in ambush at all the holes which the enemy had made in the wall on the side toward the orchard and on that next the highway. Buche and I, with the remainder of our company, were posted over a stable in a corner of the barn, about ten or twelve hundred paces from Hougoumont. I can still see the row of holes which the Germans had knocked in the wall, about as high as a man's head, in order to defend the orchard. As we went up into this stable, we looked through these holes, and we could see our line of battle, the high-road to Brussels and Charleroi, the little farms of Belle-Alliance, Rossomme, and Gros-Caillou, which lie along this road at little distances from each other; the Old Guard which was stationed across it, with their shouldered arms, and the staff on a little eminence at the left, and farther away in the same direction, in the rear of the ravine of Planchenois, we could see the white smoke rising continually above the trees. This was the attack of the first Prussian corps. We heard afterward that the Emperor had sent Lobau with ten thousand men to turn them back. The battle had begun, but the Old and the Young Guard, the cuirassiers of Milhaud and of Kellerman, and the chasseurs of Lefebvre-Desnoettes; in fact the whole of our magnificent cavalry remained in position. The great, the real battle was with the English. What a crowd of thoughts must have been suggested, by that grand spectacle and that immense plain, to the Emperor, who could see it all mentally better than we could with our own eyes. We might have stayed there for hours, if Captain Florentin had not come up suddenly, and exclaimed, "What are you doing here? Are we going to dispute the passage with the Guard? Come! hurry! Knock a hole in that wall on the side toward the enemy!" We picked up the sledges and pickaxes which the Germans had dropped on the floor, and made holes through the wall of the gable. This did not take fifteen minutes, and then we could see the fight at Hougoumont; the blazing buildings, the bursting of the bombs from second to second among the ruins, and the Scotch chasseurs in ambuscade in the road in the rear of the place, and on our right about two gunshots distant, the first line of the English artillery, falling back on their centre, and stationing their cannon, which our gunners had begun to dismount, higher up the hill. But the remainder of their line did not change; they had squares of red and squares of black touching each other at the corners like the squares of a chess-board, in the rear of the deep road; and in attacking them we would come under their crossfire. Their artillery was in position on the brow of the hill, and in the hollow on the hill-side toward Mont-St.-Jean their cavalry was waiting.