The farm that they called Hougoumont was down in front of us, and all the morning we could see that a terrible fight was going on there, for the walls and the windows and the orchard hedges were all flame and smoke, and there rose such shrieking and crying from it as I never heard before.  It was half burned down, and shattered with balls, and ten thousand men were hammering at the gates; but four hundred guardsmen held it in the morning and two hundred held it in the evening, and no French foot was ever set within its threshold.  But how they fought, those Frenchmen!  Their lives were no more to them than the mud under their feet.  There was one—­I can see him now—­a stoutish ruddy man on a crutch.  He hobbled up alone in a lull of the firing to the side gate of Hougoumont and he beat upon it, screaming to his men to come after him.  For five minutes he stood there, strolling about in front of the gun-barrels which spared him, but at last a Brunswick skirmisher in the orchard flicked out his brains with a rifle shot.  And he was only one of many, for all day when they did not come in masses they came in twos and threes with as brave a face as if the whole army were at their heels.

So we lay all morning, looking down at the fight at Hougoumont; but soon the Duke saw that there was nothing to fear upon his right, and so he began to use us in another way.

The French had pushed their skirmishers past the farm, and they lay among the young corn in front of us popping at the gunners, so that three pieces out of six on our left were lying with their men strewed in the mud all round them.  But the Duke had his eyes everywhere, and up he galloped at that moment—­a thin, dark, wiry man with very bright eyes, a hooked nose, and big cockade on his cap.  There were a dozen officers at his heels, all as merry as if it were a foxhunt, but of the dozen there was not one left in the evening.

“Warm work, Adams,” said he as he rode up.

“Very warm, your grace,” said our general.

“But we can outstay them at it, I think.  Tut, tut, we cannot let skirmishers silence a battery!  Just drive those fellows out of that, Adams.”

Then first I knew what a devil’s thrill runs through a man when he is given a bit of fighting to do.  Up to now we had just lain and been killed, which is the weariest kind of work.  Now it was our turn, and, my word, we were ready for it.  Up we jumped, the whole brigade, in a four-deep line, and rushed at the cornfield as hard as we could tear.  The skirmishers snapped at us as we came, and then away they bolted like corncrakes, their heads down, their backs rounded, and their muskets at the trail.  Half of them got away; but we caught up the others, the officer first, for he was a very fat man who could not run fast.  It gave me quite a turn when I saw Rob Stewart, on my right, stick his bayonet into the man’s broad back and heard him howl like a damned soul.  There was no quarter in that field, and it was butt or point for all of them.  The men’s blood was aflame, and little wonder, for these wasps had been stinging all morning without our being able so much as to see them.