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Indd 13 1/20/2010 3:04:34 PM 14 terrible exile infantry battalions of the Old Guard, and a battalion of the Middle Guard, which had constituted the French reserve second line, formed squares and began an orderly withdrawal, step by step. There were only some 2,000 of them, but they proudly maintained discipline and held their pursuers at bay and slowly covered the retreat south along the Charleroi road. Napoleon and a handful of his generals, including Bertrand and Gourgaud, his future companions on St Helena, took refuge inside a square of the 1st regiment of grenadiers.

You are counting on the generosity of the English. ’36 But it was too late. Napoleon reached the Bellerophon and, after requesting Mesdames Bertrand and Montholon to precede him, climbed up the ladder onto the deck. He was received by Count de Las Cases, who had gone in advance and who presented Captain Maitland to him. indd 29 1/20/2010 3:04:35 PM 30 terrible exile According to the strict protocol procedures of the Royal Navy, it was, to the great relief of Maitland, too early in the morning for a full ceremonial welcome of any kind.

23 They obviously inherited the fiercely anti-British spirit of the inhabitants of the island, where a French fleet had been utterly humiliated and largely destroyed by English fireships under Captain Thomas Cochrane at the battle of Aix Roads in April 1809. Napoleon’s brother Joseph, the former King of Naples and then Spain, bravely and unselfishly even offered to abandon his own plans to go to America and impersonate Napoleon and surrender to the English in his place, thus allowing Napoleon to slip away unrecognized in another vessel.