Colonel Frederick Ponsonby had been cut up by French cavalry sabers and left for dead; he had been speared by a passing Polish lancer; given some brandy by a French officer; piled into a barricade of bodies by retreating French infantry; ridden over and tossed by Prussian cavalry; discovered by a British infantryman who stood guard over him throughout the night, while he felt the air pass in and out of his pierced lung; and finally taken off to a dressing-station at daybreak. He was known as “The Man Who Was Killed at Waterloo,” and spotted twelve years later, as governor of Malta, by Captain Codrington’s daughter, who found him “playing violent games of racquets with as much energy as the young soldiers around him.”
 
—Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830