A day or two after this, we made a customary visit to a swimming-school on the Seine, and some of us entered into conversation with the gendarme, or police soldier, placed there to preserve order.  He was very reserved and unwilling to say much; but, at last, when we dwelt on the recent successes, he shook his head mournfully, and said he feared there had been some great disaster; adding, “The Emperor is in Paris.  I saw him alight from his carriage this morning, when on duty; he had very few attendants, and it was whispered that our army had been defeated.”  That my companions did not seek relief at the bottom of the river can be ascribed only to their entire disbelief of the gendarme’s story.  But, as they returned home, discussing his words at every step, fears began to steal over them when they reflected how seriously he talked and how sorrowful he looked.

The gendarme spoke the truth.  Napoleon was in Paris.  His army no longer existed, and his star had been blotted from the heavens.  His plans, wonderfully conceived, had been indifferently executed; a series of blunders, beyond his control, interrupted his combinations, and delay in important movements, added to the necessity of meeting two enemies at the same moment, destroyed the centralization on which he had depended for overthrowing both in succession.  The orders he sent to his Marshals were intercepted, and they were left to an uncertainty which prevented any unity of action.  The accusation of treason, sometimes brought against them, is false and ungenerous; and the insinuations of Napoleon himself were unworthy of him.  They may have erred in judgment, but they acted as they thought expedient, and they never showed more devotion to their country and to their chief than on the fatal day of Waterloo.

I have been twice over that field, and have heard remarks of military men, which have only convinced me that it is easier to criticize a battle than to fight one.  Had Grouchy, with his thirty thousand men, joined the Emperor, the British would have been destroyed.  But he stopped at Wavre, to fight, as he supposed, the whole Prussian army, thinking to do good service by keeping it from the main battle.  Bluecher outwitted him, and, leaving ten thousand men to deceive and keep him in check, hurried on to turn the scale.  The fate of both contending hosts rested on the cloud of dust that arose on the eastern horizon, and the eyes of Napoleon and Wellington watched its approach, knowing that it brought victory or defeat.  The one was still precipitating his impetuous columns on the sometimes penetrated, but never broken, squares of infantry, which seemed rooted to the earth, and which, though torn by shot and shell, and harassed by incessant charges of cavalry, closed their thinned ranks with an obstinacy and determination such as he had never before encountered.  The other stood amidst the growing grain, seeing his army wasting away before those terrible assaults; and when the officers around him saw inevitable ruin, unless the order for retreat was given, he tore up the unripened corn, and, grinding it between his hands, groaned out, in his agony,—­“Oh, that Bluecher, or night, would come!”