Bauduin killed, Foy wounded, conflagration, massacre, carnage, a rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled in fury, a well crammed with corpses, the regiment of Nassau and the regiment of Brunswick destroyed, Duplat killed, Blackmann killed, the English Guards mutilated, twenty French battalions, besides the forty from Reille’s corps, decimated, three thousand men in that hovel of Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned, with their throats cut⁠—and all this so that a peasant can say today to the traveller: “Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will explain to you the affair of Waterloo!”

The Eighteenth of June, 1815

Let us turn back⁠—that is one of the storyteller’s rights⁠—and put ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took place.