The Child of Waterloo, or, The Horrors of the Battle-Field — page 4: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE CHILD OF WATERLOO; oR, THE HORRORS OF THE BATTLE-FIELD. By GEORGE W. M. REYNOLDS, —a CHAPTER I. It was half-past nine o’clock on the evening of June the 18th, 1814. The battle of Waterloo had been fought and won. The. wer of Napoleon lay scattered in the blood of those who, for is giant ambition, had bled in vain. Many miles of country were covered with a flying host, hotly pursued by those who had earned the laurels of that dreadful day. The slant rays of the scarcely yet expiring daylight fell across the field of carnage, where lay thousands of human forms dab- bled in gore,— ‘* The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.” The sharp rattle of musketry might still occasionally be heard, and now and then the sullen boom of some cannon fired from a height at the gasping, retreating foe. No time had there yet been to attend to the wounded; uo time to look for friends; no time scarcely to think upon the various events of that dreadful day’s work—a day’s work which England can never forget, and which France still shows is fresh in her recollection, as if it were but yesterday she sutfered a defeat unparalleled in the history of warfare. There was one spot in particular where the slain and the wounded lay most thickly. The bodies of men and horses were intermingled in strange confusion. It was a hollow of not many yards in extent, and it would seem as if many had crawled there to die; while others, writhing from their wounds, bad rolled into it, and there breathed their last sigh. A gigantic cuirassier lay dead with his head nearly eut off. By his side was a light cavalry man, an Englishman, who was frightfully mangled, having been borne off his horse by a can- nou-ball, which had hit him in the chest, and disfigured him fearfully. comicbooks. com