You struggled with cold, wet, privations, and want of clothing; nevertheless you did not murmur,—­with great exertions you pursued your routed foe.  Receive my thanks for such laudable conduct.  The man alone who unites such qualities is a true soldier.  One hundred and three cannons, two hundred and fifty ammunition-wagons, the enemy’s field-hospitals, their field-forges, their flour-wagons, one general of division, two generals of brigade, a great number of colonels, staff and other officers, eighteen thousand prisoners, two eagles, and other trophies, are in your hands.  The terror of your arms has so seized upon the rest of your opponents, that they will no longer bear the sight of your bayonets.  You have seen the roads and fields between the Katzbach and the Bober:  they bear the signs of the terror and confusion of your enemy.”  The bluff old General, who at seventy had more “dash” than all the rest of the leaders of the Allies combined, and who did most of the real fighting business of “those who wished and worked” Napoleon’s fall, knew how to talk to soldiers, which is a quality not always possessed by even eminent commanders.  Soldiers love a leader who can take them to victory, and then talk to them about it.  Such a man is “one of them.”

Napoleon never recovered from the effects of the losses he experienced at Kulm and on the Katzbach,—­losses due entirely to the wetness of the weather.  He went downward from that time with terrible velocity, and was in Elba the next spring, seven months after having been on the Elbe.  The winter campaign of 1814, of which so much is said, ought to furnish some matter for a paper on weather in war; but the truth is, that that campaign was conducted politically by the Allies.  There was never a time, after the first of February, when, if they had conducted the war solely on military principles, they could not have been in Paris in a fortnight.

Napoleon’s last campaign owed its lamentable decision to the peculiar character of the weather on its last two days, though one would not look for such a thing as severe weather in June, in Flanders.  But so it was, and Waterloo would have been a French victory, and Wellington where Henry was when he ran against Eclipse,—­nowhere,—­if the rain that fell so heavily on the 17th of June had been postponed only twenty-four hours.  Up to the afternoon of the 17th, the weather, though very warm, was dry, and the French were engaged in following their enemies.  The Anglo-Dutch infantry had retreated from Quatre-Bras, and the cavalry was following, and was itself followed by the French cavalry, who pressed it with great audacity.  “The weather,” says Captain Siborne, “during the morning, had become oppressively hot; it was now a dead calm; not a leaf was stirring; and the atmosphere was close to an intolerable degree; while a dark, heavy, dense cloud impended over the combatants.  The 18th [English] Hussars were fully prepared, and awaited