Page 566 - les-miserables

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 ex-
haustion 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 infan-
try to nothing. A few men clustered round a flag marked
the post of a regiment; such and such a battalion was
commanded only by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten’s di-
vision, already so roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was
almost destroyed; the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze’s
brigade strewed the rye-fields all along the Nivelles road;
hardly anything was left of those Dutch grenadiers, who,
intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks in 1811, fought
against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to the Eng-
lish standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers
was considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on
the following day, had his knee shattered. If, on the French
side, in that tussle of the cuirassiers, Delort, l’Heritier, Col-
bert, Dnop, Travers, and Blancard were disabled, on the side
of the English there was Alten wounded, Barne wounded,
Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda killed, the
whole of Wellington’s staff decimated, and England had the
worse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment of foot-
guards had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and

566 Les Miserables