nt where the four roads from Nivelles, Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other.
This horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up the body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze.
He was eighteen years old at that time.
Wellington felt that he was yielding.
The crisis was at hand.
The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was not broken through.
As every one was in possession of the plateau, no one held it, and in fact it remained, to a great extent, with the English. Wellington held the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the crest and the slope.
They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both sides.
But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleeding of that army was horrible.
Kempt, on the left wing, demanded reinforcements.
"There are none," replied Wellington; "he must let himself be killed!"
Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidence which paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney demanded infantry from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, "Infantry! Where does he expect me to get it?
Does he think I can make it?"
Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the two. The furious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses of iron and breasts of steel had ground the infantry to nothing.