Major Wylie again attempted to go to the Place Royale, but he was instantly surrounded by a clamorous multitude, who, knowing him by his dress to be an aide-de-camp of the Duke, angrily exclaimed, "What is the reason that nothing is done for our security? Are we to be left here abandoned to the enemy? Are we to be given up to the French in this way? Why is not the City Guard ordered out to defend the town?" (The City Guard to defend the town from the French!) We could not help laughing at the idea of the excellent defence the City Guard of Brussels would make against the French army. But the frightened and enraged Belgians could not be pacified, and they beset poor Major Wylie so unmercifully that he was fain to retreat again within the Hôtel de Flandre. He told us that the battle of yesterday had been severe, and most obstinately contested. The French, whose superiority of force was so great as to surpass all computation, had borne down with dreadful impetuosity upon our little army. "During all his campaigns, and all the bloody battles of the Peninsula," Major Wylie said, "he had never seen so terrible an onset, nor so desperate an engagement. The British, formed into impenetrable squares, received the French cavalry with their bayonets; drove them back again and again; stood firm beneath the fire of their tremendous artillery; and, after many hours' hard fighting, completely repulsed the enemy, and remained masters of the field of battle." Our cavalry had come up in the evening, but too late to take any part in the action. A French general and colonel had come over to the British during the battle, crying "Vive le Roi!" Their names I heard, but they have since escaped my memory:[11] indeed, the names of men who were base enough treacherously to desert the cause even of a rebel and a tyrant in the hour of danger, which they had openly espoused, ought only to be stamped with everlasting infamy. These men must have been doubly traitors, first to Louis XVIII., and then to Napoleon Buonaparte.