The Sage of Waterloo

The Sage of
Waterloo

A Tale

Leona Francombe

For Peter, my sage,

and in honor of Mum and Dad

Y
ea, the coneys are scared by the thud of hoofs, And their white scuts flash at their vanishing heels . . .

—
THOMAS HARDY,
“The Field of Waterloo”

T
he conflict is there petrified; it lives, it dies; it was but yesterday. The walls are still in their final throes; the holes are wounds; the breaches are howling; the trees bend and shudder, as if making an effort to escape.

—
VICTOR HUGO
on visiting the site of
Hougoumont Farm after
the Battle of Waterloo

Preface

T
he ancient farmstead of Hougoumont sits beneath the ridge near Waterloo where, on June 17, 1815, the Duke of Wellington amassed his troops. He garrisoned the farm that evening and was determined to hold on to it, bringing in supplies and shoring up defenses throughout that rain-drenched night. The next day, French soldiers under the command of Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, mounted no fewer than seven attacks on the gates and walls of Hougoumont. What initially had been intended as a skirmish raged all day, sapping Napoleon of troops needed elsewhere.

Combat was brutal, often hand-to-hand. The chateau and several outbuildings were set ablaze by French artillery; the North Gate was momentarily breached, then retaken; heavy wooden doors are, to this day, riddled with musket shot. The British Guards and their German allies in the woods eventually prevailed. But the cost in blood was staggering: within eight hours, six thousand men from both sides were either dead or wounded. This remote Belgian farm would turn out to be pivotal to the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo, and had the French taken it, history might have followed a very different route.

Few had heard of Hougoumont before that tumultuous day. The estate was the seat of an obscure Belgian aristocrat and rather isolated, though it was prosperous, with a small chateau, formal walled garden in the French style, chapel, gardener's house and various outbuildings for animals and grain. Fine dining had no doubt been a daily ritual. As recipes for rabbit and pigeon dishes were—and still are—numerous in Belgian cuisine, both species, along with a decent onion patch, would have been nurtured on the property with the dinner table in mind. So there were almost certainly rabbits at Hougoumont at the time of the Battle of Waterloo.

 

L. Francombe

Brussels, Belgium

The Sage of
Waterloo

1

A
ll early memories are close-ups, aren't they? A blade of grass; a clump of earth; the underside of someone's tail. For me, it was Grandmother's flank. My nose still seeks that smell: a sour-sweet, heady brew of hay, dung and humidity, all alchemized in the crucible of old age. There was a decaying floral note to her perfume, too, hence her name: Old Lavender. She was very large and of no particular color—a mix of dull grays and browns, I suppose, though I'd never really thought about it. One never really thinks about such things when it comes to close family members. All the qualities we criticize in others—fatness, dullness, ugliness, smell—somehow don't matter so much in relatives.

Old Lavender possessed a different set of attributes altogether, some of them as unpalatable as those listed above, but her temperament was such that, in view of the strength of her kick, no one dared to criticize anything about her. She spent her days crouched in a hollow against the wire fence, eyes half shut, contemplating the infinite. One ear would lie flat against her neck, the other pointing to the sky. She always sat like that. We suspected this was how she gathered her information: one ear searching the heavens for signals while the other acted as a sort of ground.
The most interesting things in life cannot be seen, William
, Grandmother often told me, which made her sky-combing all the more intriguing.

No one could say how long Old Lavender had lived in the colony. She was grandmother to at least ten generations, and while other relatives disappeared over the years at the farmer's whims, or those of Moon, the invisible arbiter of our kind, she had always been permitted to stay. No one dared to cross her. She was just too big, for one thing. And of course, there was that smell . . .

But perhaps I ought to start at the beginning. Not out of any logic, but because, for some reason, the beginning is getting clearer and clearer all the time, as if I'm approaching the end of the route we rabbits call the Hollow Way: a delightfully sheltered avenue smelling of damp earth and rot. The route is wider at this point, as it happens. Trees overhead provide the perfect balance of light and shade. And you can see quite far in both directions from here (though forward motion is, of course, still the preferred kind). There are many soft hillocks and hollows along this part of the Way on which one can rest and look back, and I suggest that you do this, too, because the view behind is as clear as the view ahead, and offers some valuable lessons besides.

Our route thus offers up a curious sort of map: a path forward, but only decrypted by the path behind. I imagine the landmarks along our Way are familiar to you, too—they're more or less standard on your typical life journey, I think: odd family members; dubious trysts; providence; bliss; disaster. The Hollow Way of my story, however, is unique in that, along with a particularly odoriferous grandmother, it also takes in the Battle of Waterloo. If you think that such a tale is rather exceptional for a simple rodent, you'd be wrong. For in fact, strictly speaking I'm a lagomorph, not a rodent, and proud of it.

Here I find myself, then, arrived at a pleasant, grassy knoll, and with your indulgence I shall look back and tell you what I see.

W
e rabbits begin and end our lives in the earth, which may seem a vaguely circular progression, but I must hasten to say that we're not chained to an endless wheel of existence the way certain human sects are. I've heard that some people keep going round and round until the end of time, reincarnated as a fly, a reptile, someone's uncle, or, if you're terribly unlucky and happen to find yourself at Waterloo, as Napoleon. Moon can be louche at times, but he would never preside over such a dreary worldview.

Our philosophy is less hectic. We follow the Way at the speed it unfolds—no faster, no slower. This is very important. We are taught from infancy that any effort to adjust this speed is fruitless and can lead to ruin. Therefore we leap, graze, idle and cogitate according to a rhythm pulsing deep within us, like an essential organ. When things start to seem vaguely familiar, and then suddenly look very much like home, we take one, final step. And what a step it is! Take it, they say, and you enter the greenest, springiest, most sublime meadow of all. We know without question when we're on the right road to this place.

Waterloo is where I was born, and where I spent the first three years of my life. Well, technically it wasn't Waterloo itself but the ancient Brabant farm of Hougoumont, one of the iconic battle sites situated in the fields a few kilometers farther up the Chaussée de Waterloo
.
In 1815, this long, forested avenue funneled weary streams of humanity back and forth between the battlefield and the city—between destiny and deliverance. Their passage was perilous, the thoroughfare often impassable. Where the city of Brussels has now expanded into tony suburbs, there were once deep woods, isolated hamlets and a pavement so rutted after heavy rains that wagons often remained stuck for days, or were simply abandoned by the side of the road. Thick undergrowth pressed in on both sides, and in the forest beyond, deserters from the battle found ample shelter . . . as did plunderers. Cottages and inns all along the
chaussée
stood empty in the face of a rumored French advance.

Today the plunderers are gone, thank heavens. But go past the fast-food emporiums and supermarkets, cross over the Brussels ring road and suddenly, just beyond the electronics store, all the clamor of traffic and shopping gives way to a zone of silence, as if 1815 were not so very long ago after all. No one can miss it, this invisible boundary. Commerce stops dead at its feet. Venture on: when you spot the curious, conical hill with a statue on top—the Lion's Mound—you'll know you've entered the great battlefield itself: a wide, windy vacuum; the “
morne plaine
” of Victor Hugo. And indeed, beneath the winter barley, the clover, and the lumpen celeriac heads shrunken like mummies, this dreary plain is at its heart a tomb.

Cross the fields to your right and there, in a wooded valley, you'll find the farm I knew as home. Outbuildings and a gardener's house doze against a ragged hem of farmland. If you just stumble across Hougoumont, the scene is quite unremarkable: delapidated walls without ornament; encroaching weeds; the rusting remnants of farming life.

Until you see the three chestnuts.

At first you wonder why someone hasn't taken them down. Two are dead, the third not far behind them. They look like freaks—like alien carcasses stripped of their skin. Then you realize that they're over three hundred years old, and the only remaining witnesses to the fighting, and you understand. Place your hand on one of them—even on a dead one: you'll detect a pulse.