And when they say we were in a panic of terror and tried to run away like cowards, it is not true. When the news arrived that Grouchy was coming, even the wounded rose up and took their places in the ranks; it seemed as if a breath had raised the dead; and all those poor fellows in the rear of Haie-Sainte with their bandaged heads and arms and legs, with their clothes in tatters and soaked with blood, every one who could put one foot before the other, joined the Guard when it passed before the breaches in the wall of the garden, and every one tore open his last cartridge. The attack sounded, and our cannon began again to thunder. All was quiet on the hill-side, the rows of English cannon were deserted, and we might have thought they were all gone, only as the bear-skin caps of the Guard rose above the plateau, five or six volleys of shot warned us that they were waiting for us. Then we knew that all those Englishmen, Germans, Belgians, and Hanoverians, whom we had been sabring and shooting since morning, had reformed in the rear, and that we must encounter them. Many of the wounded retired at this moment, and the Guard, upon which the heaviest part of the enemy's fire had fallen, advanced through the showers of shot almost alone, sweeping everything before it, but it closed up more and more, and diminished every moment. In twenty minutes every officer was dismounted, and the Guard halted before such a terrible fire of musketry, that even we, two hundred paces in the rear, could not hear our own guns; we seemed to be only exploding our priming. At last the whole army, in front, on the right and on the left, with the cavalry on the flanks, fell upon us. The four battalions of the Guard, reduced from three thousand to twelve hundred men, could not withstand the charge, they fell back slowly, and we fell back also, defending ourselves with musket and bayonet. We had seen other battles more terrible, but this was the last. When we reached the edge of the plateau, all the plain below was enveloped in darkness and in the confusion of the defeat. The disbanded troops were flying, some on foot and some on horseback. A single battalion of the Guard in a square near the farm-house, and three other battalions farther on, with another square of the Guard at the junction of the route at Planchenois, stood motionless as some firm structure in the midst of an inundation which sweeps away everything else. They all went--hussars, chasseurs, cuirassiers, artillery, and infantry--pell-mell along the road, across the fields, like an army of savages. Along the ravine of Planchenois the dark sky was lighted up by the discharges of musketry; the one square of the Guard still held out against Bulow, and prevented him from cutting off our retreat, but nearer us the Prussian cavalry poured down into the valley like a flood breaking over its barriers. Old Bluecher had just arrived with forty thousand men: he doubled our right wing and dispersed it.