Four hundred of them were all crashing at once now, and the noise was enough to split the drum of your ear.

Indeed, there was not one of us but had a singing in his head for many a long day afterwards.
Just opposite us on the slope of the hill was a French gun, and we could see the men serving her quite plainly.

They were small active men, with very tight breeches and high hats with great straight plumes sticking up from them; but they worked like sheep-shearers, ramming and sponging and training.

There were fourteen when I saw them first, and only four left standing at the last, but they were working away just as hard as ever.
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.