The Sage of Waterloo

by Leona Francombe

  Oh, must I go on?

  I’ve run out of words. How can there possibly be any more? A great poet might find some, I suppose, hidden in a corner of the battlefield I’ve overlooked. Old Lavender was certainly never at a loss, her long silences notwithstanding. If I thought it would do any good, I would stop this chin-wagging and pray to Moon instead, asking him to erase the memory of those terrible deeds forever, for the sake of all the inheritors of Waterloo . . . and of all wars, for that matter. Which is just about everyone, I should think. But I don’t know Moon very well, really. Few do. And one can never say for sure when he’s going to be at home.

  On the evening of June 18, Wellington rode back alone to the village of Waterloo. Here and there, moonlight broke through the clouds and fell in artful beams over the carnage, as if the final act of this tragedy had not quite ended and the house lights still burned. Wrote Charlotte Eaton: “He saw himself surrounded by the bloody corpses of his veteran soldiers who had followed him through distant lands, of his friends, his associates in arms, his companions through many an eventful year of danger and of glory.”

  Indeed, though he had miraculously escaped injury himself, Wellington came away more deeply wounded than anyone could have imagined.

  At around three o’clock the following morning, Dr. John Robert Hume, Wellington’s surgeon, paid a visit to his headquarters room:

  “I went upstairs and tapped gently at the door, when he told me to come in. As I entered, he sat up in bed, his face covered with the dust and sweat of the previous day, and extended his hand to me, which I took and held in mine, whilst I told him of [Sir Alexander] Gordon’s death, and of such of the casualties as had come to my knowledge.

  “He was much affected. I felt the tears dropping fast upon my hand, and looking towards him, saw them chasing one another in furrows over his dusty cheeks. He brushed them suddenly away with his left hand, and said to me in a voice tremulous with emotion: ‘Well, thank God I don’t know what it is to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.’ ”

  12

  The road between Brussels and Waterloo was a charnel house unto itself. Historians tend to overlook this, but those of us of nostalgic bent who live near the Chaussée de Waterloo can sometimes hear, hidden in the sound of angry car horns, and in the descending whine of buses slowing for a stop, a long-vanished acoustic. When darkness falls and a lull occurs in the traffic, there it is: horses’ hooves and wagon wheels, echoing along the mythical route beyond the wall.

  Charlotte Eaton paid a visit to Waterloo just a month after the battle. Intrepid lady that she was, she ventured with her party along the same road so recently employed by great men, anonymous sufferers, bold women and the dead. She’d already passed through Brussels, noting that it had filled up alarmingly with the wounded since her flight to Antwerp. Marked in chalk on every door was the number of casualties being harbored there: un, deux, trois, quatre, even huit militaires blessés. At every open window, Charlotte spotted victims of war, “languid and pale, the ghosts of what they were.”

  Heartsick, she made her way up the chaussée. Mile upon mile, a numbing succession of calvaries unfolded before her:

  “Bones of unburied horses, and pieces of broken carts and harness were scattered about. At every step we met with the remains of some tattered clothes, which had once been a soldier’s. Shoes, belts and scabbards, infantry caps battered to pieces . . . these mournful relics had belonged to the wounded who had attempted to crawl from the fatal field, and who, unable to proceed farther, had laid down and died upon the ground now marked by their graves—if holes dug by the way-side and hardly covered with earth deserved that name. The bodies of the wounded who died in the wagons on the way to Brussels had also been thrown out, and hastily interred . . .

  “Deep stagnant pools of putrid water, mingled with mortal remains, betrayed the spot where the bodies of men and horses had mingled together in death.”

  The Eaton party alighted from their carriage at the very spot where British troops had bivouacked on the night before the battle. Corn was still beaten down, the earth still trampled. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how swampy the camp would have been in torrential rain, and what misery had unfolded there. Charlotte ventured ahead a few paces and stopped short: a field of mass graves greeted them, freshly turned.

  Such a jaunt across the morne plaine of Waterloo could be construed as voyeuristic, perhaps. Even ghoulish. But Charlotte’s account has a feminine sensitivity which had clearly appealed to my grandmother, who insisted we learn this tale by heart. Through the forgiving lens of two hundred years, such a journey, if deeply felt, escapes judgment, it seems to me. The “glory” of war is often manufactured afterwards by male writers, after all, and not by the women, who are invariably left behind to pick up the pieces of their broken men, but who can read entire human stories in the torn sleeve or bloody hat in which men can only comprehend victory and defeat.

  Come, let’s stroll alongside Charlotte for a little while.

  Stop beside her as she surveys the ruined land: the broken, withered harvest that had once stood six feet high; footprints left pell-mell in the clay and baked hard by the sun, bearing witness to the desperate struggles of horses and men. The surface of the plain is literally whitened by innumerable books and papers of every description: love letters, novels, muster rolls, washing bills.

  Please, don’t look away. Not yet. Gaze with her.

  Pick up, as she did, one of those paper treasures. A volume of Candide, a pack of cards, a sheet of military music. “One German Testament, not quite so dirty as many that were lying about, I carried with me nearly the whole day . . .”

  Glance down: an outstretched hand, only partially decomposed, reaches up from a grave.

  Faint from bearing witness, Charlotte hurries off, only to find herself at Hougoumont, a still-open sepulcher.

  “Melancholy were the vestiges of death that continually met our eyes,” she wrote. “The carnage here had indeed been dreadful . . . At the outskirts of the wood, and around the ruined walls of the château, huge piles of human ashes were heaped up, some of which were still smoking . . . I took some of the ashes and wrapped them up in one of the many sheets of paper that were strewn around me; perhaps those heaps that then blackened the surface of this scene of desolation are already scattered by the winds of winter; perhaps the sacred ashes which I then gathered at Château Hougoumont are all that is now to be found upon earth of the thousands who fell upon this fatal field!”

  I’ve often speculated about what happened to those ashes Charlotte Eaton had gathered so reverently. Did she tuck them away in her writing desk when she returned home? Were they thrown into the fireplace by some unsuspecting maid? Or did the lady have a change of heart, slipping out to a corner of her English garden one day and, when no one was looking, tossing the ashes into the wind, praying that they would be carried back across the Channel to their rightful home?

  “Roads are symbolic,” Old Lavender used to say, after telling the story of the Eatons’ journey. “They lead us to great things, and away from disaster. They give us hope that there may be something better around the next bend. They take us home. Cloistered animals like us will never experience such a physical road journey, of course. But I can assure you that our kind of journeys—the sort you take without moving—are even more adventurous and illuminating. Not always, of course. Sometimes our routes are as rutted as the chaussée. We can despair on them . . . die on them, too . . . without anyone noticing. But if you don’t take them, you get nowhere. So rise up, William, and step over the ruts.”

  On quiet evenings in the city I can sometimes hear the Eatons’ carriage, taking them up the chaussée to my home.

  Battle is a precarious business—hit or miss, you might say; a chain of events that almost always goes wrong at some point or other, even for the winners. Historians do an admirable job cleaning up the wreckage, to be sure. It’s up
to them, after all, to survey the tangle of past centuries and put things in order for the ages to come. They are also not beyond a bit of editorializing: inflating heroism; overlooking atrocities; obscuring complexity by turning the vanquished into simplified rogues.

  If you’d spent your early days as I did, crouched against the flank of a Waterloo expert, you would deduce that history is really just a series of lucky breaks and stupid errors, and a favorite haunt of providence. Take the Battle of Ligny, for instance, Napoleon’s final military victory. The Ligny is a small but marshy stream about ten kilometers from Quatre Bras where the French engaged the Prussians two days before the main battle on June 18. Napoleon’s plan was to wedge his forces between the British and Prussian armies, thus fatally weakening their alliance.

  Only farmers lived around Ligny then, as they had for generations. Windmills dotted the landscape. The harvest would be a good one that year: crops soared as high as a man, as they were soaring at Quatre Bras and Waterloo. Human aggression seems fatally attracted to bucolic Nature.

  The dozing villages of Ligny, St. Amand, Wagnelée and all their connecting hamlets shook brutally awake with Napoleon’s opening cannonade. Combat soon raged from house to house, from hand to hand. Elderly residents cowered at their hearths, shell-shocked and speechless. Blücher and Napoleon had taken up observation points in windmills on opposing sides of Ligny, from where they could witness the fire and blood as a passing bird might, though without this creature’s truly panoramic perspective.

  Napoleon did manage to eke out a victory at Ligny, it’s true. But fate took the guise of Jean-

  Baptiste Drouet, comte d’Erlon, one of Napoleon’s generals, who ultimately spent that June 16 marching back and forth along the dusty road between Ligny and Quatre Bras to conflicting orders, never engaging in either battle. Old Lavender (among many other scholars) is fairly certain that had d’Erlon’s troops managed to fight that day—no matter where—the outcome of Waterloo might have turned in Napoleon’s favor.

  Don’t forget that in 1815, communiqués between commanders and their armies could only be written on paper and delivered by hand. Usually a horse was also involved. Clearly, the resulting trio was not always reliable; it most certainly wasn’t quick. And when more than one trio of paper, messenger and horse were involved—when, on the same afternoon, Ney ordered d’Erlon to Quatre Bras, Napoleon ordered him to Ligny and then Ney summoned him back to Quatre Bras again, with the hapless messengers sharing, ever so briefly, the same dust cloud as they galloped past each other—it would have surprised no one if the count had found himself irritated, saddle sore, and with some extra ammunition on his hands.

  History is in the details . . . lucky guesses, a good horse, the weather . . .

  Oh, yes: and digestion.

  Few creatures understand this last criterion better than the rabbit, whose digestive system functions with the most precarious equilibrium.

  Rather like Napoleon’s.

  Thus, chance roamed freely around the woods and fields near Waterloo, scattering unpredictability at every crossroads. I should have anticipated, therefore, an unforeseen twist in my own Waterloo history.

  13

  I hardly recognized Arthur when he flew in. I knew that he’d been busy, as an early spring green had brushed the courtyard, and his dawns and dusks were fully occupied with singing. But beyond the familiar tail-flicking and wing-thrumming, there was an agitation in his aspect that made me instinctively glance up at the walls. There must have been a predator about, I thought, and he’d come to warn me.

  “I have news,” he said curtly. (Wellington’s messengers may have used as few words, though they surely would have added “sir.”)

  Arthur said: “I have to start from the beginning.”

  “The beginning?”

  “Yes. The day of June eighteenth, 1815. Specifically, the siege of Hougoumont. The beginning of your story.”

  My story . . . What was he saying?

  Arthur stepped closer and stared hard at me. “The mystery of your past.”

  I experienced a moment of panic. It’s true that I’d asked him to find news of my relatives—and of Old Lavender in particular. But his question seemed booby-trapped, somehow. The mystery of my past was another matter. I mean, how many of us really want to solve an enigma that occurred many years before our birth? The very mystery is what makes life so colorful and intriguing, isn’t it? Nuance, illusion, quest . . . all seem much more agreeable than the scary unknowns of discovery.

  I thought about the magic of Hougoumont, especially at twilight: the vapors that crept over the walls and into the garden, and the restless pockets of air trapped in the milkiness. How could I forget the shadows fingering their way over the grass, and the occasional tremor in the darkness, as if it had been startled? Would my memories be ruined by Arthur’s revelation?

  I squared my shoulders. Wellington would have. “Yes,” I said. “I want to know.”

  He began:

  “The fighting at Hougoumont finally stopped at about seven-thirty in the evening. Your grandmother told you the details, I think. I don’t need to elaborate.”

  Arthur’s delivery lacked its usual elegance. He seemed anxious, as if he had to impart his news as quickly as possible.

  “Sometime that afternoon, a young soldier led a boy from the South Gate to safety in one of the barns.”

  “Ah, yes, the South Gate,” I mumbled to myself. “Private Matthew Clay.” Then, to Arthur: “Grandmother would be glad that you made that distinction, because most people think that the boy came through the North Gate.”

  “Theories differ,” Arthur said, rather coolly, I thought. He went on: “The air in the yard was suffocating. Everything was black with soot from the burning chateau. Flying embers scorched everyone. Horses went mad. Some of them ran the wrong way, straight into the fire. Livestock burned to death in their byres. There were many injured men in the barn where the boy had been taken—this was obvious to any creature by the prevailing odor of blood. And, of course, by the screams . . . ”

  Arthur paused with the drama of a natural storyteller.

  “A surgeon was amputating limbs.”

  Another pause. Then: “No one knows exactly what happened to the boy once he reached the barn. The young soldier may have given him a corner of rye cake, or some tainted water. Maybe the fact of being only a boy saved him from certain punishment for being French. At any rate, he was left to his own devices. According to what I heard, when darkness fell, he emerged into the courtyard.”

  The next pause seemed a bit exaggerated, so I urged him on. “Yes? And?”

  “And he was carrying a rabbit.”

  “A rabbit?” This development seemed anticlimactic, even for me.

  Arthur ignored the comment. “A white one. There were rabbit hutches in the barn, of course. It was an estate, after all. There were gardens. Livestock. The gentry would have raised delicacies like pigeon and rabbit.” He gave me a sympathetic glance before continuing.

  “I’ve spent some time going over the information I picked up at Hougoumont, you know.” Arthur spoke more earnestly now. “That’s why I haven’t been by to see you for a while. Here is my theory: It seems that the boy noticed the rabbit hutches when they took him into the barn. When no one was looking, he opened one of them, intending to liberate the occupants. But the creatures—­those that had survived the trauma, that is—were so terrorized, they couldn’t budge. None of them emerged. So the boy grabbed the one that had caught his attention and slipped away, tucking the rabbit into his uniform jacket as he crossed the courtyard.”

  The one that had caught his attention . . . I regretted tuning Arthur out at that point, as his story was moving apace, but I’d felt a frisson at the mention of choosing a white rabbit from among its terrorized relatives, thereby saving it from neglect . . . or the dinner plate. The anecdote has an oddly familiar ring, doesn’t it? There are people, it seems (thank heavens), who are naturally attracted to white ra
bbits.

  “There was too much chaos and smoke for anyone to bother about a boy,” Arthur went on. “Too many medical emergencies. So he carried the rabbit into the formal garden, and stopped about halfway across it, near the trellises.”

  At this point, Arthur meandered a bit from his plotline. He described the beauty of the Hougoumont gardens, and how they had miraculously survived the slaughter. Myrtle and fig trees were in bloom, he said. Jasmine and honeysuckle draped the trellises. Nature had been almost callous in her response to the violence, lacing the stench of corruption with such sweet perfume.

  In full swing now, Arthur embarked on a tale about how the British soldiers had butchered a pig the morning before the fighting started, and ate chunks of it warmed through over a fire and blackened with smoke. Finding his own portion too unsavory, Private Clay stuffed the meat in his pocket and went off to fight the French, after which, at the end of that long day, he found a fire burning on some ruin or other and gladly extracted his pork for cooking. He discovered, however, “that the glow of fire arose from the half-consumed body of some party who had fallen in the contest.”

  I hesitated for a moment to give dramatic timing its due. Then, impatient, I asked: “Where did the boy take the rabbit?”

  “He just let him go,” Arthur said.

  “He . . . ”

  “Yes. He just set him down in the garden. But the animal didn’t move from his side. Then someone yelled to him from the gate—maybe the young soldier, looking for him. The boy panicked and bolted, leaving the rabbit behind, and crawled through a tumbled-down section of the east wall, escaping into the orchard.”

  “Did the Allies on the ridge take him in?” I asked, my heartbeat accelerating. “Was he shot by a stray bullet?” He may have perished finding his way off the battlefield, Old Lavender had said. Or died of fever.