An instant later the noise had died away, and the two armies stood facing each other in absolute deadly silence--a sight which often comes back to me in my dreams.

Then, of a sudden, there was a lurch among the men just in front of us; a thin column wheeled off from the dense blue clump, and came swinging up towards the farm-house which lay below us.

It had not taken fifty paces before a gun banged out from an English battery on our left, and the battle of Waterloo had begun.
It is not for me to try to tell you the story of that battle, and, indeed, I should have kept far enough away from such a thing had it not happened that our own fates, those of the three simple folk who came from the border country, were all just as much mixed up in it as those of any king or emperor of them all.

To tell the honest truth, I have learned more about that battle from what I have read than from what I saw, for how much could I see with a comrade on either side, and a great white cloud-bank at the very end of my firelock?
It was from books and the talk of others that I learned how the heavy cavalry charged, how they rode over the famous cuirassiers, and how they were cut to pieces before they could get back.

From them, too, I learned all about the successive assaults, and how the Belgians fled, and how Pack and Kempt stood firm.