It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning, directly under the horses’ feet, two fathoms deep between its double slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming the riders; and there being no means of retreat—the whole column being no longer anything more than a projectile—the force which had been acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled there pell-mell, grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois’s brigade fell into that abyss.
This began the loss of the battle.
A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says that two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow road of Ohain. This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which were flung into this ravine the day after the combat.
Let us note in passing that it was Dubois’s sorely tried brigade which, an hour previously, making a charge to one side, had captured the flag of the Lunenburg battalion.
Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milhaud’s cuirassiers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not been able to see that hollow road, which did not even form a wrinkle on the surface of the plateau. Warned, nevertheless, and put on the alert by the little white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelles highway, he had probably put a question as to the possibility of an obstacle, to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered No. We might almost affirm that Napoleon’s catastrophe originated in that sign of a peasant’s head.
Other fatalities were destined to arise.