excitement of the struggle, sees only the long and increasing column
of wounded, stragglers, and perhaps of fliers. He sees his
companion fall without being able to answer the fire. He sees
nothing of the corresponding loss of the enemy, and he is apt to
take a most desponding view of the situation. Thus Englishmen
reading the accounts of men who fought at Waterloo are too ready to
disbelieve representations of what was taking place in the rear of
the army, and to think Thackeray's life-like picture in Vanity Fair
of the state of Brussels must be overdrawn. Indeed, in this very
battle of Waterloo, Zieten began to retreat when his help was most
required, because one of his aides de camp told him that the right
wing of the English was in full retreat. "This inexperienced young
man," says Muffling, p. 248, "had mistaken the great number of
wounded going, or being taken, to the rear to be dressed, for
fugitives, and accordingly made a false report." Further, reserves
do not say much of their part or, sometimes, no part of the fight,
and few people know that at least two English regiments actually
present on the field of Waterloo hardly fired a shot till the last
advance.

The Duke described the army as the worst he ever commanded, and said
that if he had had his Peninsular men, the fight would have been
over much sooner. But the Duke, sticking to ideas now obsolete, had
no picked corps. Each man, trusting in and trusted by his comrades,
fought under his own officers and under his own regimental colours.
Whatever they did not know, the men knew how to die, and at the end
of the day a heap of dead told where each regiment and battery had
stood.]--

the career of both had been marked by signal victory; Napoleon had