Colonel Audley, his senses deadened to the iron rain about him, struggled after, saw Lord March, dismounted and kneeling on the ground, supporting a wounded man in his arms, and shouted to him: "March! March! Is Gordon alive?"
"Oh, my God, not Gordon too?" March cried out in an anguished tone.
The Colonel pushed up to him, saw that the man in his arms was Canning, and almost flung himself out of the saddle.
A musketball had struck Canning in the stomach; he was dying fast, and in agony that made it difficult for him to speak. Some men of the 73rd Regiment had raised him to a sitting position with their knapsacks. He gasped out: "The Duke - is he safe?"
"Yes, yes, untouched!"
A ghastly smile flickered over Canning's mouth; he tried to clasp Audley's hand; turned his head a little on March's shoulder; managed to speak their names; and so died.
An agitated officer from Ghigny's brigade came riding up while March still held Canning's body in his arms. "Milord, mon Capitaine, je vous en prie! C'est Son Altesse lui meme qui est en ce moment blesse! Il faut venir tout de suite!"
March, lost in grief, seemed not to hear him. Colonel Audley, hardly less distressed, laid a hand on his shoulder. "He's gone, March. Lay him down. Slender Billy's hurt."
March raised his head, dashing the tears from his eyes. "What's that?" he glanced up at the Dutchman standing over them. The message was repeated: the Prince had been hit in the shoulder while leading some of General Kruse's Nassauers to the charge, and had fallen so heavily from his horse that the sense seemed to have been knocked out of him. March laid Canning's body down, and got up. "I'll come at once. Where is he?"
He rode away with the Dutch officer; Colonel Audley, consigning Canning's body to the care of an officer of Halkett's brigade, also mounted, and plunged off through the confusion to find the Duke again.
Vandeleur had come up from the left flank with his brigade of light dragoons, and, passing behind Vivian, had formed his squadrons more to the right, immediately in rear of Count D'Aubreme's Dutch-Belgian line battalions, brought up from Vieux Foriez to fill a gap on the right centre. Here they were exposed to a galling fire, but D'Aubreme's men in their front were weakening, and to have withdrawn out of range of the guns would have left the road open to the Dutch-Belgians for retreat. They closed their squadron intervals, as Vivian had done, to prevent the infantry passing through to the rear, and stood their ground, while Vandeleur, with some of his senior officers, bullied and persuaded the Dutch-Belgians into forming their front again.
At seven o'clock things looked very serious along the Allied front. To the west, only some Prussian cavalry had arrived to guard the left flank; Papelotte and the farm of Ter La Haye were held by Durutte, whose skirmishers stretched to the crest of the Allied position; the gunners and the tirailleurs at La Haye Sainte were raking the centre with their fire; and although twelve thousand men of Reille's Corps d'Armee had failed all day to dislodge twelve hundred British Guards from the ruins of Hougoumont, all along the Allied line the front was broken, and in some places utterly disorganised.
The Duke remained calm, but kept looking at his watch. Once he said: "It's night, or Blucher," but for the most part he was silent. An aide-de-camp rode up to him with a message from his general that his men were being mowed down by the artillery fire, and must be reinforced. "It is impossible," he replied. "Will they stand?"
"Yes, my lord, till they perish!"
"Then tell them that I will stand with them, till the last man."
Turmoil and confusion, made worse by the smoke that hung heavily over the centre, and the debris that littered the ground from end to end of the line, seemed to reign everywhere. Staff officers, carrying messages to brigades, asked mechanically: "Who commands here?" The Prince of Orange had been taken away by March; three generals had been killed; five others carried off the field, too badly wounded to remain; the adjutant-general and the quartermaster-general had both had to retire. Of the Duke's personal staff, Canning was dead; Gordon dying in the inn at Waterloo; and Lord Fitzroy, struck in the right arm while standing with his horse almost touching the Duke's, had left the field in Alava's care. Those that were left had passed beyond feeling. It was no longer a matter for surprise or grief to hear of a friend's death: the only surprise was to find anyone still left alive on that reeking plain. Horse after horse had been shot under them; sooner or later they would probably join the ranks of the slain: meanwhile, there were still orders to carry, and they forced their exhausted mounts through the carnage, indifferent to the heaps of fallen red-coats sprawling under their feet, themselves numb with fatigue, their minds focused upon one object only: to get the messages they carried through to their destinations.
Just before seven o'clock, a deserting colonel of cuirassiers came galloping up to the 52nd Regiment, shouting: "Vive le Roi!" He reached Sir John Colborne, and gasped out: "Napoleon est la avec les Gardes! Voila l'attaque qui se fait!"
The warning was unnecessary, for it had been apparent for some minutes that the French were mustering for a grand attack all along the front. D'Erlon's corps was already assailing with a swarm of skirmishers the decimated line of Picton's 5th Division; and to the west of La Haye Sainte, on the undulating plain facing the Allied right, the Imperial Middle Guard was forming in five massive columns.
Colonel Audley was sent on his last errand just after seven. He was mounted on a trooper, and the strained and twisted strapping round his thigh was soaked with blood. He was almost unrecognisable for the smoke that had blackened his face, and was feeling oddly light-headed from the loss of blood he had suffered. He was also very tired, for he had been in the saddle almost continually since the night of June 15th. His mind, ordinarily sensitive to impression, accepted without revulsion the message of his eyes. Death and mutilation had become so common that he who loved horses could look with indifference upon a poor brute with the lower half of its head blown away, or a trooper, with its forelegs shot off at the knees, raising itself on its stumps, and neighing its sad appeal for help. He had seen a friend die in agony, and had wept over him, but all that was long past. He no longer ducked when he heard the shots singing past his head; when his trooper shied away, snorting in terror, from a bursting shell, he cursed it. But there was no sense in courting death unnecessarily; he struck northwards, and rode by all that was left of the two heavy brigades, drawn back since the arrival of Vivian and Vandeleur some three hundred paces behind the front line. An officer in the rags of a Life Guardsman's uniform, his helmet gone, and a blood-stained bandage tied round his head, rode forward, and hailed him.
"Audley! Audley!"
He recognised Lord George Alastair under a mask of mud, and sweat, and bloodstains, and drew rein. "Hallo!" he said. "So you're alive still?"
"Oh, I'm well enough! Do you know how it has gone with Harry?"
"Dead," replied the Colonel.
George's eyelids flickered; under the dirt and the blood his face whitened. "Thanks. That's all I wanted to know. You saw him?"
"Hours ago. He was dying then, in one of Maitland's squares. He sent you his love."
George saluted, wheeled his horse, and rode back to his squadron.
The Colonel pushed on to the chaussee. His horse slithered clumsily down the bank on to it; he held it together, and rode across the pave to the opposite bank and scrambled up, emerging upon the desolation of the slope behind Picton's division. He urged the trooper to a ponderous gallop towards the rear of Best's brigade. A handful of Dutch-Belgians were formed in second line; he supposed them to be some of Count Bylandt's men, but paid little heed to them, wheeling round their right flank, and plunging once more into the region of shot and shell bursts.