Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  If nothing, in retrospect, could seem crueller to her than the deluded happiness of those moments, they were, for a long time, the only ones she was to know. Captain Mitchell had brought his list to her at nine o’clock on the Monday, and at eleven Emma had come in to tell her that the consul from Brussels, Mr James, was down below along with another of that expatriate community that De Lancey and his new bride had so assiduously avoided in the days before the battle, Lady Dalrymple Hamilton. ‘I did not remark anything in her countenance,’ Magdalene later recalled – the scene, so laden with ironies, bitterness, and hard, dry-eyed, selfish, frightening sadness, still comes off the page with a terrible immediacy – ‘but I think I never saw feeling and compassion more strongly marked than in his expression. I then said I hoped Lady Emily was well. He answered that she was so, with a tone of such misery that I was afraid that something had happened, I knew not what, to somebody. I looked at Lady Hamilton for an explanation. She seemed a little agitated too, and I said, “One is so selfish: I can attend to nothing, I am so rejoiced Sir William is safe …”’

  It seemed ‘cruel’ to her to impinge their own obvious sadness on her at a time like this – even when Lady Hamilton told her that James had lost a brother and she a nephew – ‘but I tried to be polite, and again apologised for appearing glad, on account of my own good fortune’. It had never occurred to Magdalene that they might have come with news for her, and even when Lady Hamilton began to ask if she had plans to return to England or ‘any friends in the country’ she was so insistent that she ‘would not move until Sir William came or sent for me’, and ‘so obstinately confident that she began’–

  There is a break here in the original manuscript which she wrote for her brother Basil – a break more poignant than any tears could be – but then as before there was no time for tears. In the months to come Magdalene would try to persuade herself that Lady Hamilton’s motives had been kind in keeping his name off the list that Captain Mitchell had shown her, but at that moment in her Antwerp room, as she listened to the death sentence of all her Brussels hopes, there was only a cold and unforgiving anger that she might have been robbed by that ‘kindness’ of a last chance to see her husband alive.

  That was only the first of a series of reports and counter-reports that brought her very close to madness – he was dead, she was told, he was wounded but with every hope of recovery – and it was another thirty-six harrowing, sleepless hours before she finally reached Brussels to discover that he was alive and lying in a cottage at Mont-Saint-Jean. She had told herself in Antwerp that if she could just see him one last time she would never ask for anything again, and as she sat in a carriage on the Waterloo road, the stench of death all around her, waiting for an old Lothian neighbour to bring confirmation that she could go on, she reaffirmed her pledge: ‘I hope no one will ever be able to say that they can understand what my feelings must have been during the half-hour that passed till he returned’, she recalled the interminable minutes of waiting: ‘How fervently and sincerely I resolved that if I saw him alive for one hour I never would repine! I had almost lost my recollection, with the excess of anxiety and suspense, when Mr Hay called out, “All’s well; I have seen him. He expects you.”’

  De Lancey had been placed at first in an outer room of the cottage, but the faces of stragglers pressing at the windows – British, French, Belgian, Hanoverian, Dutch, Prussian, wounded, prisoners – had disturbed him, and by the time that Magdalene reached him he had been moved to a small inner room. She found him lying on a low wooden frame fastened to a wall, with a sack of chaff for a pillow and his great coat for a blanket, his knees hunched up towards his chest, too weak to move or lift his head. His voice, though, as she took his hand, was stronger and firmer than she had feared. ‘Come Magdalene’ – his first words and his last complaint – ‘this is a sad business, is it not,’ he greeted her.

  She could scarcely say whether she ‘hoped or feared most at first’, she remembered, but after thinking him dead ‘was ready to bear whatever might ensue without a murmur’. She had every reason to believe that there would soon be nothing but the memories of these hours to hold on to, and ‘by suppressing feelings that would have made him miserable, and myself unfit to serve him’, she determined ‘to lay up no store for regret’. He asked her if she was a good nurse. She told him that she had ‘not been much tried’. He then said he was sure he would be a good patient, for he would do whatever she asked till he was well again and then he would ‘grow very cross’. ‘I watched in vain for a cross word. All his endeavours seemed to be to leave none but pleasing impressions on my mind; and as he grew worse and suffered more, his smile was more sweet, and his thanks more fervent, for everything that was done for him.’

  It was a curious place to pick up the threads of their second honeymoon, but no poorer to either of them for that, and for the next six days the wretched Mont-Saint-Jean cottage took on something of the limitless dimensions of their brief Brussels existence. The cottage was hemmed in on all sides by lanes, but not even the constant din of an army on the move, the incessant rumbling of wagons on the Nivelles road, the flow of carriages bearing the wounded back to Brussels or the endless babble of voices at the open windows could penetrate a world that had simultaneously shrunk and expanded to a cramped sick-bed and a room seven feet across.

  Not just a world but a whole life had shrunk to the confines of that room and those six days. As she had waited in her carriage for Captain Hay to return she had vowed that an hour was all she asked, and now that it came to the test she was as good as her word, finding in the duties of nurse and wife a strength and maturity that separates by a lifetime of experience the Magdalene De Lancey of Waterloo from the woman who had left Antwerp only that morning.

  With leeches and blisters to be applied, doctors to be consulted, bedding to change, provisions to be found, blanket baths to be given – she insisted on doing it all herself – she needed all the strength she could muster to see out a vigil that she soon knew was hopeless. The wound itself seemed to cause her husband surprisingly little pain in these first days, but the slightest cough was agony and beyond lemonade or tea – when she could purloin some milk from a passing Prussian cow – he could take in nothing. ‘On Thursday he was not quite so well,’ she recalled – well versed by this time in reading the conflicting signs and rhythms of his decline; ‘Before this he had been making a gradual progress, and he could move about with more ease. He spoke much better than he did at first. His countenance was animated; but I fear this was the beginning of the most dangerous symptoms, and I saw that the surgeon now became uneasy at the appearance of the blood … That night … Sir William was restless and uncomfortable: his breathing was oppressed, and I had constantly to raise him on the pillow. The pain in his chest increased, and he was twice bled before morning.’

  There were other, subtler, but no less telling signs of his gradual withdrawal from this world. On the day that Magdalene arrived, the duke had been to visit him and talk of the battle but De Lancey no longer wanted to see anyone or hear any news. He had told Magdalene that all he wanted was to ‘settle down quietly at home for the rest of our lives’, but there was no talk now of any future. ‘He generally lay thinking,’ she remembered, ‘often conversed with me, but seemed oppressed with general conversation, and would not listen when anyone told him of the progress of the army. His thoughts were in a very different train.’

  On the Friday evening he was very feverish, and at one o’clock in the morning he was bled for the last time. Three hours later Magdalene was called away from his bedside and prepared for the end. The distressed surgeon attending him told her that if she had ‘anything particular to say to Sir William’ she ‘should not long delay’. Was it days or hours, she wanted to know, and on being told that it was not imminent, ‘I left him, and went softly into my husband’s room, for he was sleeping. I sat down at the other end of the room, and continued looking at him, quite stupefied; I could scarcely see. My mouth was
so parched that when I touched it, it felt as dry as the back of my hand. I thought I was to die first. I then thought, what would he do for want of me during the few remaining hours he had to live. This idea roused me.’

  After writing a letter to General Dundas asking for help – she hoped that she would be able to control herself when the end came, but did not know ‘what effect it might have on me’ – she returned to her usual station at her husband’s side and took his hand to tell him what the doctors had said. She knew that he was ‘far above being the worse’ for anything she had to tell him now, but his voice, nevertheless, faltered as he replied it was ‘sudden’. ‘This was the first day he felt well enough to begin to hope he should recover! He breathed freely, and was entirely free from pain; and he said that he had been thinking if he could be removed to Brussels, he should get well soon. I then asked if he had anything to desire me to do, or anything to say to anyone. He repeated most of what he had told me were his feelings before – that he had no sorrow but to part with his wife, no regret but leaving her in misery.’

  That Saturday’s vigil seemed to stretch out interminably, but the comings and goings of doctors, and all the talk of blistering, fomenting and further bleeding had as much to do with keeping Magdalene occupied as the patient comfortable. The application of a flannel bath – she had to tear up her petticoat for the flannel – brought him some brief relief, but that night the pain in his chest was intolerable and for the first time, as she lay pretending to sleep in an attempt to free him from at least one care, she had to listen to the uncontrolled groans of a dying man. ‘I went and stood near him,’ she wrote, ‘and he then ceased to complain, and said “Oh, it was only a little twitch.” I felt at the time as if I was an oppression to him, and I was going away, but he desired me to stay. I sat down and rubbed it, which healed the pain, and towards morning I put on the blister.’

  By nine o’clock he was breathing only with difficulty, constantly asking the ‘clock’ and pleading for the end of a night that he could no longer bear. He asked Magdalene to lie beside him to ease away the hours but there was so little room she was afraid to hurt him. His mind, though ‘seemed quite bent upon it. Therefore I stood upon a chair and stepped over him, for he could not move an inch, and he lay at the outer edge. He was delighted; and it shortened the night indeed, for we both fell asleep.’

  It was their last night together. The next morning he lay placidly quiet while she washed his hands and face and brushed his hair. ‘See what control your poor husband is under,’ he said to her. ‘He smiled, and drew me so close to him that he could touch my face, and he continued stroking it with his hand for some time.’

  The respite from pain was only brief. By eleven he had again become uneasy, his breathing hard, with a gurgling, choking sound in his throat. To the very end, though, he remained conscious and able to speak. Having asked to have his wound dressed – it had never been looked at – he took her hand, and said that ‘he wished she would not look so unhappy. I wept; and he spoke to me with so much affection. He repeated every endearing expression. He bade me kiss him. He called me his dear wife.’

  It was, at last, more than Magdalene De Lancey could take. When Dr Powell and John Hume came in to inspect the wound, she left the room, ‘not able to bear to see him suffering’. She had hardly gone, though, when Powell recognised a change in De Lancey’s countenance, and sent Emma to fetch her back. ‘I hastened to him,’ she confessed, ‘reproaching myself for having been absent a moment. I stood near my husband, and he looked up at me and said, “Magdalene, my love, the spirits.” I stooped down close to him and held the bottle of lavender to him: I also sprinkled some near him. He looked pleased. He gave a little gulp as if something was in his throat. The doctor said, “Ah, poor Lancey! He is gone.” I pressed my lips to his, and left the room.’

  While the immemorial rituals of death continued below, Lady De Lancey sat alone, too stupefied to hear or think of what was happening. General Dundas had come as she had asked the previous evening, and eventually Emma appeared to tell her that he was waiting to take her to the old apartment in Brussels from which, just ten days earlier, she and her husband had listened at the window to the fading sound of fifes and bagpipes as Wellington’s army marched out into the night for Quatre Bras.

  As she entered the now silent room, Magdalene De Lancey’s thoughts though were not for the thousands of those men who were now dead, nor even for the husband who lay on the cot she had shared with him only hours before. There seemed to her such a picture of peace and ‘placid calm sweetness’ on his face that her first reaction was one of envy, and the bitter thought that while he was released she was left behind to suffer. ‘Those moments that I passed by his lifeless body were awful, and instructive,’ she wrote later; ‘their impression will influence my whole life.’

  It was one death among tens of thousands – never before or since have so many men crowded into so confined a battlefield – and that sense of depression that hung over Waterloo through the night of the 18th became the universal medium of Brussels life. The surgeon Charles Bell was struck by the defiant, impenitent anger of the French wounded and dying he treated, but there was no corresponding triumphalism. From the night of Quatre Bras, Brussels had grown accustomed to the sight of wounded but nothing had prepared them for this. ‘You may form a guess of the slaughter and of the misery that the wounded must have suffered,’ Major Frye, a veteran of Egypt, could write even ten days after the battle, ‘and of the many that must have perished from hunger and thirst, when I tell you that all the carriages from Bruxelles, even elegant private equipages, landaulets, barouches and berlines, have been put in requisition to remove the wounded men from the field of battle to the hospitals, and that they are yet far from being all brought in.’

  While the funeral pyres smouldered on the battlefield, and the burial parties and resurrection men went about their work, and the stench of rotten carcasses made men retch, and brothers searched the field for brothers, a city had become a hospital. Doctors operated on the disembowelled and limbless; friends sat at bedsides, making and changing bandages, feeding, nursing, writing letters; soldiers wept openly in the streets and the world – British, Belgian – looked on with an appalled, compassionate, classless, nationless sympathy at the broken, wounded and emasculated wrecks of victory. ‘Poor Lord Hay is the person I regret the most,’ wrote Georgiana Lennox, the future Lady de Ros, angry at him for dying when he was so young and full of life; but ‘I long to nurse even the poor privates … Poor Lord F. Somerset is low at having lost his arm; he says all his prospects in life are blighted; poor thing she [his wife] was nearly distracted with anxiety during the action …’

  ‘We saw Lord Fitzroy Somerset yesterday,’ she wrote again, ‘he walked a few yards in the Park, he does not sleep and they hope the air will make him pass more comfortable nights. Poor fellow, he is much out of spirits; he does not look so ill as I expected he would, but I really could have cried when I saw him with only one arm.’ Only Uxbridge – cheerfully facing ‘the fact that he should no longer cut the young men out as a handsome well made fellow, which he had done for many years’ – seemed impervious, but a city that wept and shared its sadness was no place for Magdalene De Lancey. She had wanted nothing to do with it in the self-absorbed happiness of her few days there, and it wanted nothing to do with her now in her solipsistic grief. ‘Sir W. Delancy is dead after all,’ Lady Georgiana Lennox wrote to Lady G. Bathurst on the 27th, passing on what plainly was common gossip, ‘I cannot say that I felt much pity for her, which seems inhuman, but she really must be composed of flint … She wrote a most extraordinary letter before he died, saying she wished General Dundas would go to her as she wished to settle several things relative to his interment. Can you conceive it, and requesting General Dundas would take her to England when her husband was dead. She is a daughter of Lady Helen Halls. I hope I may never see her.’

  There would be no need. Within the week Magdalene De Lancey would follow th
is letter and a thousand others carrying news of the battle and of casualties and of which regiment had done what and whether or not the cavalry had behaved irresponsibly to a waiting England. ‘I have not been able to collect all the particulars,’ Major Frye wrote home, ‘but you will no doubt hear enough of it, for I am sure it will be said or sung by all the partisans of the British ministry and all the Tories of the United Kingdom for months and years to come, for further details, therefore, I shall refer you to the Gazette.’

  Frye was right. And it had already begun.

  The Days That Are Gone

  On Sunday 25 June, the day that Magdalene De Lancey returned to her old Brussels apartment on the Parc, the same wave that had swept away her future in a single moment broke across the Edinburgh world that just three months earlier had celebrated her marriage. Her naval brother Basil was away in the East at the time, and it is in the diary of a Miss Christian Dalrymple – the heir to Lord Stair – that we hear the first muted echo of Magdalene’s loss.1 ‘Church twice forenoon,’ Miss Dalrymple’s entry for the day reads: ‘Accounts of a great victory over Bonaparte. Many officers killed. Sir W de Lancey severely wounded. Hill’s lectures.’