On the right we saw at some distance the church of Braine la Leude, which was in the rear of the extremity of the right wing of our army. From the top of the steeple of this church the battle might have been seen more distinctly than from any other place, if any one had possessed coolness and hardihood sufficient to have stood the calm spectator of such a scene; and if some cannon-ball had not stopped his observations by carrying off his head. Alighting from the carriage, which we sent back to the barrière of Mont St. Jean, we walked past the place where the beaten down corn, and the whole appearance of the ground, would alone have been sufficient to have indicated that it had been the bivouac of the British army on the tempestuous night before the battle, when, after marching and fighting all day beneath a burning sun, they lay all night in this swampy piece of ground, under torrents of rain. We rapidly hurried on, until our progress was arrested by a long line of immense fresh-made graves. We suddenly stopped--we stood rooted to the spot--we gazed around us in silence; for the emotions that at this moment swelled our hearts were too deep for utterance--we felt that we stood on the field of battle! "And these, then, are the graves of the brave!" at length mournfully exclaimed one of the party, after a silence of some minutes, hastily wiping away some "natural tears." "Look how they extend all along in front of this broken, beaten-down hedge--what tremendous slaughter!" "This is, or rather was," said an officer who was our conductor, "the hedge of La Haye Sainte;[23] the ground in front of it, and the narrow lane that runs behind it, were occupied by Sir Thomas Picton's division, which formed the left wing of the army; and it was in leading forward his men to a glorious and successful charge against a furious attack made by an immense force of the enemy, that this gallant and lamented officer fell. He was shot through the head, and died instantly, without uttering a word or a groan!" We gazed at the opposite height, or rather bank, upon which the French army was posted. We thought of the feelings with which our gallant soldiers must have viewed it, before the action commenced, when it was covered with the innumerable legions of France, ranged in arms against them. The solemn and portentous stillness which precedes the bursting of the tempest, is nothing to the awful sublimity of a moment such as this. The threatening columns of that immense army, which their valour had destroyed and scattered, were then ready to pour down upon them. The cannon taken in the action, which now stood in the field before us under the guard of a single British soldier, were then turned against them.