The day of the 26th was employed in making ready. Garibaldi passed the picciotti in review at their camp of Gibilrossa. Then he ascended Monte Griffone to study the city and plain beneath. The royal guards along this south-east side of the city were almost within hearing of a trumpet blast from his mouth. They did not dream that he was nigh.

III.—THE DESCENT OF THE THOUSAND.

The sun set on the evening of the 26th in a mass of red vapours, portending the heat of the night. The army of Garibaldi was already forming on the table land of Gibilrossa, in the order which they were to follow in their attack on the Porta di Termini of Palermo.

First came the leaders, with Captain Misori at their head, and three men from each company of the Thousand under the command of Colonel Tukery. They were in all thirty-two men. Immediately behind them was the first corps of the picciotti. The first battalion of the Thousand followed, under the command of Bixio, who was afterwards a famous general. Garibaldi came next, with Türr and the remainder of his Staff, followed by the Second battalion under Carini. Last of all was the second corps of picciotti and the Commissariat. In all they were 750 trained and veteran soldiers—all that was available of the original 1,065—with two or three thousand picciotti, preparing to face 18,000 regular troops of the King of Naples.

It was essential to the success of their enterprise that the alarm should not be given in Palermo until as late as possible. Even if they had wished to follow it, there was no direct road to the city. With as much order as might be, they clambered down the sides of a ravine which led to the valley opening on the highway. It was eleven o’clock when they arrived at this point. Tukery halted his men to see if order was being kept in the rear. The picciotti had completely disappeared. A false alarm on the mountain-side had sent them flying. Two hours were needed to re-form the line, when it was found that their numbers were now reduced to 1,300 men. With all these delays, at half-past one in the morning they were still three miles from the city.

They marched forward in close columns until they came up with the Neapolitan outposts. It was now half-past three, and still dark. The soldiers fired three gun-shots and retreated to their guard-house. This was enough to disperse two-thirds of the picciotti who remained.

The thirty-two men composing the vanguard of Garibaldi now dashed forward to the bridge over the Oreto. This Ponte dell’ Ammiraglio, by a strange coincidence, was the scene of the first combat of Robert Guiscard, the Norman, with the Saracen lords of Palermo, nearly 800 years before, and of Metellus with the Carthaginians 1,200 years before that. It was now defended by some 400 men. The soldiers of Garibaldi first attacked them by a running fire from behind the trees along the road, and then entered on a hand-to-hand fight. A single captain, Piva, was able to bring down four Neapolitans with six shots from his revolver. Misori hastened back to summon Bixio. The first battalion charged, followed by Türr at the head of the second. The bayonets now came into play, and the Thousand had won their first position.

The alarm was now thoroughly given. While the defenders of the bridge were fleeing to the right, a strong column of the royal troops advanced on the left. Türr sent thirty men to stop their advance, and the rest of the Thousand charged past with fixed bayonets.

The Neapolitans now fell back on the street leading to the gate of Sant’ Antonino, at the end of the Via Maqueda. This road was lined with the houses of a small suburb, and cut across the street of Termini, by which Garibaldi’s men hoped to enter the town. The old gate of Termini had been torn down by King Bomba, and the street leading to the bridge widened to facilitate the movement of his troops. It now served the purpose of those who were trying to overthrow the rule of his son. The Neapolitan commander had already placed two cannons in the Via Sant’ Antonino, and at every moment their shots swept across the path of Garibaldi. Even his veterans held back for a moment. A carabineer seated himself in a chair in full line of the firing, to persuade the picciotti to go on.

Garibaldi now came up, just as his faithful Tukery fell mortally wounded. As if animated by his death, one of the leaders seized the banner of United Italy, and bore it unharmed through the enemy’s fire. He was followed by five others, and, little by little, the whole line passed under the eyes of their general. He alone was on horseback, and the most exposed, as he urged his men forward.

Two hundred men were soon scattered through the different streets of the city, nearest to the gate; and their leaders penetrated to the old market, which had been the place of the revolution in 1848. Garibaldi soon arrived in the midst of the fire which the royal troops were keeping up on the rear of the little column. The members of the Committee of Palermo were waiting to receive him. He at once gave orders to make barricades behind, and thus entrenched himself in the midst of his enemies.

The people in the houses remained deaf to his first appeal; but by dint of calling they were at length induced to appear at the windows, where the sight of their deliverers gave them courage. Mattresses were flung from every window, and soon piled up over the barricades most exposed to the royal artillery. Then a few of the inhabitants began showing themselves in the streets. They had but one answer to give to the invitation to join with the invaders: “We have no arms.” But they lent themselves bravely to the tearing up of paving-stones for the barricades, and the soldiers of Garibaldi found places of vantage in their houses.

With a part of his men Garibaldi now made his way to the centre of the city, where the Via Maqueda is crossed at right angles by the long Via Toledo (now the Corso Vittore Emanuele), leading from the port through the whole length of the city to the Royal Palace. The number of his men was greatly exaggerated in the imaginations of his opponents, and he easily drove back the royal troops close to their general’s headquarters at the Palace. The Bourbon Government had just been paving this street with large flags. These were now torn up and built into barricades, while waggons and obstructions of every kind were thrown across the neighbouring streets.

At this moment the bombardment of the city began from the Fort of Castellamare, in the bay, and from the Royal Palace. The warships with their great guns swept all the streets within line of their fire. Three days were next taken up with the constant advancing and retreating of the now infuriated soldiers of the king, aided by the steady downpour of shot and shell on the quarters where the men of Garibaldi—the Italians, as they were now called, even by their enemies—had entrenched themselves. But the crumbling of walls only aided to the making of new barricades, and impeded all the movements of the regular troops. As the royal mercenaries abandoned their positions, they set fire to the buildings they had left. The convent of the White Benedictines was burned, with fifty of the prisoners who had been confined in it. All Palermo worked actively with Garibaldi and his men, in a fury of rage against the royal army. Soon there remained to the latter only the two forts of the harbour, the Royal Palace, and the post at the Flora below the Porta di Termini, by the bay. Even these could no longer communicate with each other nor receive provisions.

Garibaldi had now conquered once more. On the fourth day the king’s general asked for an armistice—to bury his dead. It was prolonged, and at last the king ordered that the troops should evacuate the city, provided that the garrison in the forts might depart with the honours of war. To save the lives of the prisoners still confined, this was granted. On the 20th of June the last Neapolitan soldier had left Palermo. Two days later the Thousand of Garibaldi were on the way to deliver Messina, the last hold of the Bourbons in Sicily.

The Red man has fought his last great fight. The long and bloody struggle waged between the White man and the Red for the possession of the North American continent has ended, and ended for all time: the weaker has gone to the wall. From the day in 1609 when Samuel de Champlain and his hardy followers burst upon the Iroquois at Ticonderoga, and, armed with sticks that spoke with fire and spat out unseen death he put these hitherto invincible warriors to flight, to the day when the United States were preparing to celebrate with unheard-of splendour the centennial of their independence, a ceaseless state of war existed between the children of the forest and prairie and the pale-faced usurpers. Every year had its tragedy, every mile its white gravestone in history. And as a fit ending to these centuries of conflict and bloodshed came the crimson tragedy of the blotting-out of Custer and his cavalrymen in the Bad Lands of the Yellowstone. Many notable tragedies, dramatic in execution as appalling in effect, marked the long years, but none struck home to the hearts of the American people with such searching directness and force as the finale to the Indian tragedy, in which Sitting Bull, chief of the Sioux, and General Custer, one of America’s most dashing cavalry leaders, played the leading rôles.

Surely never were such Aborigines as the North American Indian! Surely never in the history of the world did the White man encounter so nearly his match as when he first plunged into the forests of the New World. A mere handful in numbers were these Red men at the best, and yet it can hardly be said that they were ever subdued. In turn they met and fought the Spaniard, then in all his glory, the Frenchman, the Englishman—long and savage wars these—and when Spaniard, Frenchman, and Englishman as such disappeared and the American took their place, the Indian fought him more fiercely than ever. When one thinks of the White man’s countless numbers and the weapons which his ingenuity and handicraft supplied, the marvel is that the Indian has not long since disappeared from the face of the earth. But given their numbers and weapons and all, it has been estimated that in the wars which the White man waged against the Indians they lost more than ten killed to the Redskin’s one. Yet notwithstanding the skill, the craftiness, the sensible recognition of existing facts, the clever stratagem and resistless ferocity which characterises the Indian nature, the level-headed way in which he set about his wars, to kill and not be killed his motto: notwithstanding all this, the prophecy of the great orator Red Jacket has come true. He said, “When I am gone and my warnings are no longer heeded, the craft and avarice of the White man will prevail. My heart fails me when I think of my people so soon to be scattered and forgotten.”

The feud which began on the Atlantic coast hundreds of years before, was destined to end in the far North-West, away up in a corner of the United States then almost wholly unknown to the White man, an angle of territory bounded on the west by the Rockies, and on the north by what formerly was known as Rupert’s Land—British territory. The immediate cause of the trouble which led up to the massacre of Custer and his battalion was one which had often before provoked active hostilities. It was the refusal of sundry bands of Indians to settle down on the reservations placed at the disposal of the Indians by the United States Government. The Indians resented the attempt to confine them to restricted districts. The Red man of the prairie had been, from time immemorial, a notorious nomad. On his lean, shaggy, ungainly pony, his bow and quiver slung across his back, his buckskin breeches and shirt fringed with horsehair and painted in gaudy colours, his long, greasy black hair stuck full of the feathers of the turkey, hawk and eagle, he had for centuries roamed the vast prairie at will: now fighting his hereditary foe, and again camping for weeks at a time on the trail of the mighty herds of buffalo in their wanderings over the boundless prairie. For ages the chafings of restriction were unknown to him, until freedom had become almost as necessary to the savage of the plains as the air itself. This he enjoyed, until one day the advance guard of civilisation, a grizzly trapper, dressed in leather, and carrying a flintlock under his arm, peered out of the bushes and saw in astonishment the great rolling prairie, the home of the buffalo and the Sioux. The hardy pioneer soon followed, restless, and ever pressing westward; and one day, the Sioux, sitting astride his barebacked pony, saw in amazement the long train of white-topped waggons—the prairie schooner—drawn by oxen, trailing westward through the tall grass, and realised that his ancient fastness had been invaded. Immediately there began massacres on the one hand and retaliation on the other. The Sioux, the Bedouins of the prairie, were gradually driven back and back in the process. They strained fiercely at the bonds, but were unable to break them.

During the winter of 1875–6 the authorities at Washington, after every peaceable means had been tried in vain, found it necessary to sanction the use of force to compel certain refractory bands of Indians to cease their wanderings and outrage, to place themselves under the control of the Indian officials, and to settle on the reservations set aside for their use. These recalcitrant savages were Sioux, than whom there were none more warlike and cruel, and in their raids they wandered over an area of something like 100,000 square miles in the then territories of Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. There were a number of these bands of “Hostiles,” each having a chief of its own; but as dissatisfaction spread among them, all gradually centred around two great chiefs, “Sitting Bull” and “Crazy Horse.” “Sitting Bull,” at the time hostilities commenced, was with his band in the vicinity of the Little Missouri River in Dakota, and “Crazy Horse” and band were camped on the banks of the Powder River in Wyoming. The region was a wilderness: rugged, mountainous, and deeply scarred by rapid streams and small rivers, and, as has been told, totally unknown to the United States soldiers. As guides to this unfamiliar region and to scout by the way, the command took with it Ree Indians under “Bloody Knife” Chief, and Crows, led by Chief “Half-Yellow Face.” These Indians did the scouting well, but the Rees took the earliest opportunity afforded them to slip away when fighting began.

The first move made against these Sioux was on March 1st, 1876. General Sheridan, a distinguished leader in the American Civil War, was given the direction of the campaign, with headquarters at Chicago. General Terry held the active command of the troops in the disaffected country. Subordinate to Terry were Generals Custer and Crook, at the head of mounted columns. Terry ordered these leaders to move out against the “Hostiles,” specifying the route each was to take. Crook marched on March 1st, and on March 17th encountered “Crazy Horse” and his braves, and the command was so severely handled in the engagement that Crook fell back to his base. Custer had been unable to make a simultaneous advance with Crook, owing to the weather being so bad that it was found impossible to venture into the region of heavy snows and swollen rivers.

The news of Crook’s defeat spread like wildfire among the Indian agencies. Couriers sped from the camps of “Crazy Horse” and “Sitting Bull.” To every Indian encampment in that part of the States one or more messengers came, and squatting on the hardened earth of some smoky Tepee, to the listening braves told of the killing of the Paleface and the triumph of the Red, and before he had finished his tale, wigwams were struck and loaded to the patient ponies, the squaws strapped their papooses to their backs, and the warriors, with faces painted in ghastly and fantastical streaks, danced the war-dance, snatched up their rifles, and mounting their ponies, set out to take part in reaping the harvest of scalps.

The defeat of Crook made a long war inevitable. General Sheridan reinforced the troops in the disaffected region, and remodelled his plan of campaign. The troops were formed into three columns instead of two; and as soon as the weather moderated, so as to admit of favourable progress, all set out to trap the Indians. The three columns were commanded respectively by Generals Terry, Crook, and Gibbon. Custer would have led in place of Terry, had it not been that just before the setting out of the expedition he fell from the good graces of President Grant. Indeed, so displeased was Grant with Custer, that he sent definite instructions that Custer was not to be allowed to accompany the expedition; and it was only after a personal appeal to Grant by Custer, and the intercession of Sheridan, that the famous cavalry leader was allowed to take his place at the head of his regiment and march away, never to return.

George Armstrong Custer’s career, from the day he graduated at the United States Military Academy to the day of his death, fifteen years after, was one of meteoric brilliancy. A native of New Rumley, Ohio, he graduated at West Point on the very outbreak of the Civil War. From West Point he went direct to Washington, and on the day of his arrival at the capital he was entrusted by General Scott with despatches for General McDowell, then on his way with the army of the Potomac to fight the first general battle of the Civil War—Bull Run.

Custer arrived in the nick of time, was assigned to duty as lieutenant of the 5th Cavalry, and took his place in the company just in time to take part in the fight that followed. In his first battles he attracted the attention of his superior officers by his daring and dash and his brilliancy in handling men; and in 1862 his many exploits effected his promotion to the captaincy of the company. Immediately afterwards, by a clever ruse, he surprised the Southerners and captured the first colours taken by the army of the Potomac from the South in the war.

Continuing as he had begun, in each successive engagement he did some notable deed which brought him again and again to the attention of his superior officers, and in 1865 he had risen to the position of Brigadier-General of Volunteers, and was given command of the Michigan brigades.

He participated in all but one of the battles of the army of the Potomac, and was in a position to say with truth to his men: “You have never lost a gun, never lost a colour, and never been defeated; and notwithstanding the numerous engagements in which you have borne a prominent part, you have captured every piece of artillery which the enemy has dared to open upon you.” He was a man of close upon six feet in height, lithe, active, handsome, a staunch teetotaller, and abstainer from the use of tobacco. Such was the soldier who took his place in command of the 7th United States Cavalry and rode away to the Bad Lands of the Yellowstone.

On May 17th the column marched from Fort Abraham Lincoln, on the Missouri River, and proceeding by easy stages, crossed the Little Missouri River on May 31st, and camped on the banks of the Powder, a tributary of the Yellowstone. The 7th Cavalry was divided into two columns, commanded by Major Reno and Captain Benteen. As the Indian country had now been reached, on June 10th General Terry sent Major Reno with his command (six troops) to scout up the Powder, and General Custer, with the left wing of the 7th, marched to the mouth of the Tongue and there awaited Reno’s return. The major reached Custer’s camp on the 19th, and reported plenty of Indian “signs” leading up the banks of the Rosebud. The whole command set out at once for that stream and pitched tents at its mouth on June 21st, and made ready for immediate active operations. At a consultation between Generals Terry, Gibbon and Custer, it was arranged that the 7th United States Cavalry, commanded in person by General Custer, should set out on the trail Major Reno had discovered, overtake the Indians, corner them, and bring about a fight. This they did.

With truly Anglo-Saxon superiority the generals wofully underestimated the fighting strength of the foe. General Custer, with his 700 cavalrymen, believed he would be able to cope with more savages than he was likely to have the good fortune to meet, and his brother generals were under the same impression. They found out their mistake when too late.

“Sitting Bull,” chief of a band of Uncpapa Sioux Indians, was at this time forty-two years old. A great, squatty, hulking, low-browed savage, of forbidding looks and enormous strength, and in height as near as might be to five feet eight inches. He had the reputation among his own followers, as well as the warriors of other bands, of being a Medicine-man of mark, a dealer in omens, a conjurer of demons, a weaver of magic, a foreteller of dire events, and a familiar of departed spirits. Outside of his magic he was known as a coward, but this defect they overlooked in the belief that his soothsayings fully compensated for the deficiency in his personal valour. Their faith in his incantations was unbounded. In the fight of the Little Big Horn, “Sitting Bull” divided his energies between getting as far from the scene of strife as his fat legs would carry him, and performing fanatical rites to the confounding of the White man. The actual leaders in the fight were “Crazy Horse,” “Gall,” and “Crow King”; and in a lesser degree, “Low Dog,” “Big Road,” “Hump,” “Spotted Eagle,” and “Little Horse,” all chiefs of bands and men of ability and unflinching personal courage. These superintended the movements of the “Hostiles,” and by their personal feats of daring encouraged their followers, while “Sitting Bull” looked after the Fates and took the kudos of the game.

At noon on June 22nd Custer and his men set out for the wilderness. Warnings and omens do not seem to have been confined to the wigwam of the Red man, for on the fatal march to the Little Big Horn there were many that foretold disaster to the expedition.

Captain Godfrey, who marched with the columns, in his written account of the calamitous affair, mentions many incidents which were taken to point to disaster. He tells, for instance, that on the evening of the first day of their march Custer sent for his officers.

After a “talk,” Lieutenant Wallace said to Godfrey, as they walked away from the general’s tent, “Godfrey, I believe General Custer is going to be killed.” Asked his reasons for this belief, he simply answered: “I have never heard Custer speak in that way before.”

A little later in the evening Captain Godfrey came upon a camp-fire, around which sat “Bloody Knife,” “Half-Yellow-Face,” and the interpreter Bouyer. The half-breed asked the captain if he had ever fought against the Sioux. Answered in the affirmative, the interpreter gazed into the fire for a few moments before saying emphatically, “I can tell you we are going to have a —— big fight.”

Then again an ominous thing happened. The general’s headquarters-flag was blown down and fell to the rear, and in being replanted again fell to the rear.

These and many other eerie happenings seem to have sent a thrill of foreboding through the whole command as it went on its way to the unexplored valley of the Little Big Horn. In their tents, when night had fallen and the fires were out—for on this march no fire burned and nothing was done likely to attract the eye of any Indian who might happen to be roaming about in the vicinity—the men sat in the dark and told stories of scalpings and burnings at the stake. Even the Red scouts caught the prevailing current of premonition, and hastened to their Medicine-man to be anointed as a charm against the cruelty of the dreaded Sioux.

During the march up the Rosebud, Indian “signs” were met with at every turn. Camping-place after camping-place was found. The grass had been closely cropped by herds of ponies; the ashes of a hundred camp-fires lay grey on the bare ground. On June 24th the column passed a great camping-place, the gaunt frame of a huge sundance-lodge still standing, and against one of the posts the scalp of a White man fluttered in the wind.

Soon after this the Crow scouts, who had been working energetically, returned to the camp and reported to Custer that although they had come across no Sioux, still, from indications discovered, they felt sure that the command was in the neighbourhood of an encampment. That night the column was divided into two, so as to raise as little dust as possible, and made a forced march; and on the morning of June 25th Custer, in a personal reconnoitre, discovered the foe of which he was in search. Although he found himself unable to locate the actual village, he saw great herds of ponies, saw the smoke curling up in the air of morning, and heard the barking of the dogs, denoting the presence of a village behind a hill that lay in front of him. It had been Custer’s intention to remain quietly where his command rested until night fell, when he would advance his forces, and in the grey of morning sweep down upon the Sioux. But this plan miscarried. Word reached the leader that a Sioux Indian had discovered the presence of the United States troops and had galloped off to warn his tribe. Custer resolved to attack at once.

The command set out for “Sitting Bull’s” village shortly before noon. It was divided into three battalions—Major Reno commanding the advance, General Custer following with the second, and Captain Benteen the third, the pack train being under the charge of Lieutenant Mathey. Custer’s battalion consisted of Troops “C,” commanded by the general’s brother, T. W. Custer; “I,” Captain Keogh; “F,” Captain Yates; “E,” Lieutenants Smith and Sturgis; “L,” Lieutenants Calhoun and Crittenden; with Lieutenant Cook adjutant, and Dr. G. E. Lord medical officer.

The whole command marched down a valley for some distance and then separated, intending to strike the village at different points. Custer’s battalion took to the right to cross the hills and ride down upon the encampment, and Major Reno branched off to the left and forded the Little Big Horn—a stream that gives the battle its name—at the mouth of a stream now called Benteen’s Creek. As they were separating, Custer sent an order to Reno to “move forward at as rapid gait as he thought prudent, and charge the village afterwards, and the whole outfit would support him.”

After separation the only word received from Custer was an order signed by the adjutant, and addressed to Captain Benteen, which read: “Benteen, come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring Packs;” and a postscript, “Bring Packs.” About the time this message must have been despatched, those with Reno beheld the general and his men on top of a hill two miles or more away, looking down upon the village, and saw Custer take off his hat and wave it in the air, as if either beckoning the other battalions to his assistance or cheering his men.

The battalion disappeared over the brow of the hill, and after that no word or sign ever came from Custer or anyone of his whole command. Not a man of the hundreds that followed the general in the charge lived to tell the tale. The battalion was simply wiped out of existence. In after years, some of the Indians who took part in the massacre, laying aside their inbred taciturnity, consented to show a few United States officers over the field and explain what had happened and how it had happened; but beyond these meagre reports, and the position in which the bodies of the soldiers were found after the Indians had finished with their rejoicings and the mutilations of the dead, nothing is known of Custer’s last charge. But those acquainted with Custer and with Indian fighting are able to picture the scene.

When Custer reached the top of the hill, instead of a village of some 800 or 1,000 warriors, he saw beneath him a veritable city of wigwams spread out in the valley. The smoke from the fires clouded the sky, great herds of ponies cropped the grass as far as the eye could see, thousands of painted Sioux, armed, and astride their shaggy ponies, galloped in circles, working themselves into a frenzy of fury to fight the White man. Medicine-men danced and yelled their incantations, and squaws busily struck the tents and hurried their papooses and swarms of dusky children out of harm’s way. When this scene of angry life met his gaze, General Custer, old Indian fighter that he was, must have recognised that he was in for what seemed likely to be his last fight. But the mistake had been made. The time had passed for new plans of battle. He could not turn his back on the warriors to join his battalion with the others, for already the painted bucks were circling round him and firing into his ranks, and already, in all probability, he heard the crack of rifles to his left, telling him that the Indians were upon Reno. Hemmed in, retreat out of the question, and trusting that his other battalions would hurry to his support, he called to his men, and together they plunged into the shrieking, shouting, seething mass of painted and befeathered Red men—and died.

Reno acted differently. Whether or no he carried caution to an unjustifiable length is a question that has been fiercely discussed, at least some of the officers who were with him being his greatest denouncers. So bitter were the charges made against him that a Government inquiry was instituted, and, it is only right to say, it exonerated him from blame.

Reno’s battalion struck the Indians shortly after crossing the Little Big Horn, and the Ree scouts at once made for the rear to be out of danger. When the Sioux Indians appeared in considerable force on his front, instead of charging the village as Custer had ordered, Reno dismounted his troops to fight on foot, and taking advantage of timber he remained stationary for some long time in almost absolute security. Later he ordered a retreat to the Bluffs, and while executing this order, and in the preceding skirmishes, Lieutenants McIntosh and Hodgson, Dr. De Wolf, and twenty-nine men and scouts were killed.

Soon after reaching the Bluffs Captain Benteen’s battalion joined Reno, placing the latter in command of a larger force than Custer had with him; but notwithstanding this, no active measures were adopted, the two battalions standing nerveless and inactive, listening to heavy firing and much ominous noise in the direction of the village, where Custer was engaged in his death-struggle. True, an advance was made to a hill—the hill from which earlier in the day Custer had been seen to wave his hat. From the top of this elevation could be seen a great commotion in the valley, much riding and shouting and firing; but still Reno and his men were not near enough to the spot to make out what it was all about. The officers with field-glasses tried their best to find out where Custer and his battalion were, but, of course, this was impossible, for by this time every man, with Custer, had been slain.

Chief “Gall” afterwards said that the news of the two columns of troops advancing against the village struck consternation to the heart of the Indians, but when Reno was seen to dismount and remain stationary, they were glad, for it allowed the whole Indian force to be hurled against Custer. Him out of the way, they concentrated against Reno. When this latter movement took place Reno retreated again to the Bluffs, where close to the river he picked upon a strong position and successfully withstood all the afternoon a heavy fire. Darkness came down, and the troops spent an anxious night intrenching themselves, and wondering what had happened to their companions with Custer, but knowing nothing except that the general must have been defeated.

Lying under the stars, surrounded by the “Hostiles,” they passed a night of restlessness and alarm. The sky was aglare with light from the bonfires; the silence of the night pierced by many strange cries of exultation and hate, by shots, and the monotonous beating of the tom-tom for the scalp-dance. At times a nervous man would spring from his bivouac on the earth to shout that he heard the march of approaching relief, and bugles rang out a welcome that was only answered by the echoes from the hills.

When morning dawned the Sioux opened fire, and the day which followed was one of fevered sorties and galling waiting. On the stronghold that day Reno’s men lost eighteen killed and had fifty-two wounded, and they spent a second anxious night. But on the morning of June 27th General Terry raised the siege and rode into camp. Terry, in his journey, had come across more than a hundred dead, and that an awful tragedy had been enacted he knew. But he did not know the full extent of the slaughter. On the 28th the army marched to the battle-field of the Little Big Horn. Scattered on the slope of the hill they found 212 dead. General Custer, his brother—Captain T. W. Custer—Captains Keogh and Yates, Lieutenants Cook, Crittenden, Reily, Calhoun, Smith, and other officers of their men were found, each scalped and mutilated except Custer himself. He lay apparently as he had fallen, the Indians refraining from wreaking vengeance on the leader, who was well known to “Sitting Bull” and others of the chiefs. The bodies of Lieutenants Porter, Harrington, and Sturgis, and Dr. Lord, were never found.

The killed of the entire command was 265, and the slaying of Custer and his men was the crimson spot of the first Centennial Year of the United States.

It is also rendered memorable as being the last great victory the Red man achieved over the White in the fight for the American continent. For as though frightened at the thoroughness of their victory, and fearing as harsh a retribution, the followers of “Sitting Bull” afterwards flitted from place to place, refusing to join issues with the armies sent to catch them, and gradually melted away, breaking up into small bands, or returning to the agencies from which they had surreptitiously marched but a few weeks before. The great armies which, immediately the news of Custer’s massacre reached Washington, were sent to trap the Indians, marched up and down the Bad Lands; but in all their marching and countermarchings were never able to find an Indian to fight.

The great Imperial Eagle of France had been caught and caged at Elba, and after close on twenty-five years of storm and tumult, Europe was at peace.

The armies which had driven the Eagle out of France had marched home again, robbing the Eagle’s nest of many ill-gotten trophies and leaving in his place a horde of vultures who claimed the nest as theirs.

As is the manner of vultures, there was much gorging: Louis XVIII., the man “who had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing,” brought back in his train a host of hungry folk, princes of the blood royal, dukes, and noble dames; and France soon found that it would be made to suffer for its Revolution and its Republic, and that the victories of its Emperor were like to cost it dear. Royalists filled the high places in Church and State. Shameless rapacity and mean reprisals were seen on every side; and in the army the most scandalous injustices were unblushingly practised.

People began to look with regret towards the Mediterranean isle where the Eagle plumed his ruffled feathers moodily.

There were mysterious nods and glances, and allusions to a certain flower which a certain “little corporal” was known to have loved.

“He will return again with the violet,” they said in whispers.

Ladies affected violet-coloured silks, and rings of the same hue became fashionable, bearing the motto “It will re-appear in Spring.”

Nor were they wrong, for on the 1st March, 1815, at five o’clock in the afternoon, Napoleon the Great, with a hundred dismounted Lancers of the Guard, some veteran Grenadiers and a few officers, landed in the Gulf of San Juan, and began that triumphal progress which ended at Waterloo.

His advance is curiously recorded in the papers of the day: I quote from the Moniteur:—

At midnight on the 19th March, Louis the Gross got into his carriage by torchlight, and was driven off to Lille; the Comte d’Artois and the Court followed an hour later, and the good citizens found when they rose next morning, two notices fastened to the railings of the Place Carrousel—

At eight o’clock that evening the Emperor was carried up the grand staircase of the Tuileries on the shoulders of his officers, and from that moment until the 12th June the master-mind was wrestling with a task vast enough to have discouraged twenty brains!

Out of chaos he produced order; a new Government was formed, a new army created: five days after his entry the Allied Sovereigns declared him an outlaw; on the 1st June he distributed Eagles to his troops, and took an oath of allegiance to the new Constitution. But Europe had meanwhile flown to arms, and 300,000 Austrians were to enter France by Switzerland and the Rhine; 200,000 Russians were marching on Alsace; Prussia had 236,000, half of whom were ready for action, so that, including our English 80,000, the Netherland contingent and the minor States of Germany, he had to face the onslaught of more than 1,000,000 men, with only 214,000 at his immediate command. England and Prussia were the first to arrive; it would be July before the others could reach the frontier, so, Napoleon, leaving armies of observation at various points, marched against Belgium, hoping to defeat Wellington and Blücher in time to turn about and face the storm clouds gathering in the east.

It was the month of June, and the weather was intensely warm. An army under Wellington, some 100,000 strong, including British, King’s German Legion, Hanoverian, Brunswick, Dutch, Belgian, and Nassau troops, was distributed in cantonments from the Scheldt to the Charleroi chaussée.

It was a heterogeneous force, hastily got together, and a large proportion of it by no means to be depended upon.

Of the British regiments, many were formed of weak second and third battalions which had never been under fire, and nearly 800 militiamen fought in the ranks of the 3rd Guards and 42nd Highlanders, those in the Guards actually wearing their Surrey jackets.

Blücher’s force, seasoned veterans for the most part, lay in four separate corps on the frontier south of Brussels, and so masterly were Napoleon’s movements, that until the lights of his bivouac fires were suddenly seen glowing redly in the darkness beyond Charleroi, no one knew exactly where he was.

Brussels swarmed with fashionable folk, and the families of officers who were with the army.

The Duchess of Richmond gave a ball on the night of the 15th June, the list of invited guests being curious, and not a little melancholy. Among the two hundred odd names we read those of Wellington, Uxbridge, and Hussey Vivian; two Ponsonbys, one of whom was to die three days later; Hay, the handsome lad who had won a sweepstake at Grammont the Tuesday before, and whose young life ebbed out on the Friday at Quatre Bras; Cameron, of Fassifern, who also fell there; Dick of the 42nd, killed at Sobraon in ’46; and aide-de-camp Cathcart, who lived till Inkerman, where a ball and three bayonet thrusts closed his strange career. These and many others of more or less note danced in the long, low-roofed, barn-like room which His Grace of Richmond had hired for the occasion from his neighbour, Van Asch, the coachbuilder.

About midnight Wellington, having already learned that the outposts had been engaged, went to the ball, where he found the Prince of Orange. Now, the Prince of Orange, who seemed fated to cause the useless sacrifice of valuable life, ought to have been at his post at Binche, and thither the duke promptly sent him, after first inquiring if there were any news.

“No, nothing, but that the French have crossed the Sambre, and had a brush with the Prussians!” Müffling had previously brought the intelligence, which should have arrived much sooner, the duke afterwards saying to Napier: “I cannot tell the world that Blücher picked the fattest man in his army to ride with an express to me, and that he took thirty hours to go thirty miles.”

Far from being surprised (as some writers have it), the duke’s orders were despatched before he went to that now historic entertainment, and the dancing continued long after he and his officers had left.

At two o’clock, while it was yet dark, strange sounds were heard under the trees—the shuffling of men’s feet, the ringing of musket-butts on the ground, short words of command, and the running ripple of the roll-call along the ranks.

People opened their windows and looked out; carriages returning from the ball drew up and waited: it was Picton’s Division off to the front.

At four o’clock Pack’s Highlanders, in kilt and feather bonnet, swung across the Place Royale and passed through the Namur Gate—the rising sun glinting on their accoutrements, their bagpipes waking the sleeping streets. “Come to me and I will give you flesh,” was the weird pibroch of the Black Watch, and many a Highland laddie heard it that morning for the last time.

Some of the officers marched in silk stockings and dancing-pumps. Lingering too long at the ball, they had not had time—or perhaps, as the night was warm, they had not troubled—to change them; and there were not a few who never found time again.

Out in the early morning along the great highway they went, past lonely farms and clustering villages, through the grey-green gloom of the beech woods of Soigne to Mont St. Jean, where they halted for breakfast, and where about eight the duke passed them with his staff, leaving strict orders to keep the road clear; and at noon the troops were on the march again for Quatre Bras, which was the fiery prelude to the greatest battle fought in modern times.

The heat was so intense that one man of the 95th Rifles went mad, and fell dead in the road; but the others pushed on, and were soon afterwards under fire.

If you take a map of Belgium, placing your finger on Brussels, and pass it down the great road running south, you will find, some twelve miles from the capital, the village of Mont St. Jean; a little beyond which place a cross-road from Wavre intersects the chaussée, and at that point move your finger at right angles, right and left, for a mile or so each way, and you have, roughly, the English position on the 18th June.

Continuing again, still southward, you will pass La Belle Alliance and Genappe, and nine miles from the cross-roads before Mont St. Jean is Quatre Bras.

Rolling ridges of waving grain, some woods in all their summer beauty, a gabled farmhouse, and a few cottages where four ways meet—that is one’s impression of Quatre Bras, which Ney had orders to take, and drive out Perponcher’s Dutch Belgians posted there; but we arrived to their assistance, corps after corps, at intervals, and forming up in line and square, repulsed the Cuirassiers and Lancers who charged through the tall rye.

The crops were so high that the gallant French cavalry had to resort to a curious device in singling out our regiments. A horseman would dash forward, find out the position, plant a lance in the ground, and disappear; then, in a few moments, guided by the fluttering pennon, his comrades would burst upon us—invisible until within a few horse-lengths.

Waterloo has put Quatre Bras into the shade, but few conflicts have been more brilliant.

Our 69th—thanks to Orange, who interfered with its formation just as the 8th Cuirassiers came through the corn—lost its only colour, taken by Trooper Lami, although Volunteer Clarke received twenty-three wounds and lost the use of an arm in its defence.

The 69th’s other colour had been captured at Bergen-op-Zoom, and was hung in the Invalides.

By four o’clock the 44th had upwards of 16 officers and 200 men killed and wounded.

A grey-headed French lancer drove his point into Ensign Christie’s left eye, down through his face, piercing his tongue and entering the jaw; but in that shocking condition he still stuck manfully to the colour-pole, until, finding himself overpowered, he threw the colour down and lay upon it, and some privates of the regiment closing round the Frenchman, lifted him out of his saddle on their bayonet points!

The 92nd Highlanders—the old Gordons of Peninsular fame—were the last of Picton’s men to reach the field, and were formed up in line.

“Ninety-second, don’t fire till I tell you!” cried Wellington, as a mass of Cuirassiers charged them in his presence; and the word was not given until the dashing horsemen were within twenty yards.

A little later, the duke said again: “Now, 92nd, you must charge these two columns of infantry”; and charge they did, over a ditch, driving the French before them, but their beloved colonel, Cameron, received a death-wound from the upper windows of a house.

His horse turned and bolted with him, back along the road, until he came to his master’s groom holding a second mount, when, stopping suddenly, the dying man was pitched on his head on to the stone causeway. But he had been terribly avenged; for the kilted Highlandmen burst into the house with a roar and put every soul inside to the bayonet.

“Where is the rest of the regiment?” asked Picton in the evening. Alas! upwards of half the “gay Gordons” had perished in the fray.

Through the broiling heat of that summer day our infantry stood firm, growing stronger as regiment after regiment arrived, and fresh batteries unlimbered in the trampled corn, until at night Ney fell back, leaving us in possession; our cavalry came up, jaded by their long marches; and we bivouacked on the battle-field, cooking our suppers in the cuirasses of the slain.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had beaten Blücher a few miles away at Ligny, but had neglected, in most un-Napoleonic fashion, to follow up his advantage, and the wily old hussar—he was over seventy-three—slipped off in the dark and retreated on Wavre.

When Wellington learned this next morning, he said to Captain Bowles: “Old Blücher has had a —— good licking, and has gone back to Wavre. As he has gone back, we must go too. I suppose in England they will say we have been licked. I can’t help that.” So back we went, along the Brussels road, our cavalry covering the retreat until we reached the stronger position before Mont St. Jean, where we halted and faced about, and glued ourselves on the ridge across the causeway in such a manner that all the magnificent chivalry of France could never move us.

During the retreat from Quatre Bras on the 17th, all went well until the middle of the day. The wounded had been collected; the columns filed off along the road; one of the regiments even found time to halt and flog a marauder: when, the enemy’s cavalry pressing our rear-guard too closely, some Horse Artillery guns opened fire, and the discharge seemed to burst the heavy rainclouds.

It poured down in torrents; roads were turned into watercourses, the fields and hollows became swamps; we had a smart brush with some Lancers at Genappe, where our 7th Hussars and 1st Life Guards charged several times; the 10th Hussars had also occasion to dismount some men and line a hedgerow with their carbines; but the main feature of the retreat was a weary tramp in a deluge of rain. The cavalry had their cloaks, it is true, but the greatcoats of the foot-soldiers had been sent back to England. Soaked to the skin, we arrived at the ridge above La Haye Sainte, and prepared to pass the night without covering of any kind. The French advanced almost up to us, and Captain Mercer was giving them a few rounds from his 9-pounders when a man in a shabby old drab overcoat and rusty round hat strolled towards him and began a conversation. Mercer, who thought him one of the numerous amateurs with whom Brussels was swarming, answered curtly enough, and the stranger went away.

That shabby man was General Picton, who fell next day on the very spot where he received this unmerited snubbing. He fought at Quatre Bras in plain clothes, having joined the army hurriedly in advance of his baggage, and there is good reason to believe that he wore the same dress at Waterloo.

Now commenced preparations for a dismal bivouac. The French fell back and did not disturb us again, they too suffering from the drenching rain, which beat with a melancholy hissing on the cornfields, the clover, the potato patches and ploughed land which formed both positions.

Some of our officers found shelter in neighbouring cottages; Lord Uxbridge, afterwards Marquis of Anglesey, crept into a piggery and sipped tea with Waymouth of the 2nd Life Guards; but most of them cowered with their men round wretched fires which here and there were coaxed into burning.

One of Mercer’s lieutenants had an umbrella, which had caused much merriment during the march, but he and his captain found it a haven of refuge under the lee of a hedge that night.

The cavalry stood to their horses, cloaked, with one flap over the saddle; some few were lucky enough to get a bundle of straw or peasticks to sit down upon, and all looked anxiously for the dawn—fated to prove the last to thousands of them. With morning the rain gradually declined to a drizzle, which finally ceased; fires sprang up, arms were cleaned, and a buzz of voices rose along the line as tall Lifeguardsmen went down behind La Haye Sainte to dig potatoes, where, a few hours later, they were charging knee to knee, and every one made shift to get what he could—with most it was only a hard biscuit—and to dry himself, which was a still more difficult matter.

Wet to the skin, splashed from head to foot in mud and mire, cold, shivering, unshaven (the foundation laid of acute rheumatism, to which a pension of five pence a day, in some cases ten pence, was applied by a grateful country, to its indelible disgrace), such was the condition of those brave hearts who were about to make the name of “Waterloo-man” a household word for all the ages.

The Brussels road runs across a shallow valley, three-quarters of a mile in width, all green and golden with the ripening grain, dipping sharply into it by the white-walled, blue-roofed farmstead of La Haye Sainte, and rising gently out again at the cabaret of La Belle Alliance on its way to the frontier beyond Charleroi.

The valley is bounded by two ridges: on the northern one along the cross road which runs nearly the whole length of the position, our army was posted in the form of a thin crescent; on the southern ridge and the slopes leading down into the valley the French forces were afterwards distributed, also, to some extent, in crescent shape.

These crescents had their tips advanced towards each other, and enclosed in the oval thus formed were two important strongholds—La Haye Sainte, in advance of our left centre, and the château of Hougoumont, some distance in front of our right wing; while away to the extreme left, the white buildings of Papelotte partly concealed Ter La Haye farm and the red-tiled hamlet of Smohain, the end of our line in that direction.