The Sage of Waterloo (18 page)

I
t's easy to think such thoughts in your youth, on a golden twilight, in the safety of close kin.

But I grew up, as we all must.

I left home, and lived alone. I lost Old Lavender, and with her my compass. I couldn't even burrow into sleeping relatives anymore when the weather got bad. And though I had that power source—my birthplace—humming away deep inside, its energy was not always steady. Heavy rains would come, and with them that dream, and then the power source would churn like some ghastly turbine.

Hougoumont
.

Whenever I awoke after that, it wasn't the sunny, carnival reenactment that filled my head, but rather all the lessons learned at my grandmother's side, drawn from the resonance of a single, monumental day.

J
une 18, 1815: dawn. Mists and driving rain continued, unabated, from the night before, wrapping Waterloo in perpetual twilight. The troops in and around Hougoumont were sleep-starved, waterlogged, filthy. Their French counterparts could be heard just three hundred yards away in the valley beyond the wood, faring no better. Fires smoked in the laden air, barely warming feet and tepid beverages. Voices rang out randomly through the fog.

Eleven o'clock . . . eleven-thirty . . . No one knows when, exactly, the first shots were fired. You'll recall that as we listened to Grandmother's stories, we imagined the village church bells chiming eleven times, so I'll stick to that interpretation.

Waterloo is small as battlefields go . . . the Hougoumont part of it even smaller. How extraordinary, then, that my farm—my tiny corner of Belgium, which even today people have difficulty locating on a map—should have made history in just a few hours.

There was a prelude of sorts for the hellish symphony to come: muskets crackled on all sides as soldiers tried to clear them of mud and damp. Men groaned their way out of the mire; called out wearily for a shot of gin; whistled to their chargers. Each new timbre and echo moved logically, inexorably towards the masterwork to come: a demon's creation that no human composer would ever admit to.

Combat raged in the orchard and all along the south wall.

By early afternoon, the chateau was alight.

In the words of Major Macready, Light Division, Thirtieth British Regiment, Halkett's Brigade: “Hougoumont and its wood sent up a broad flame through the dark masses of smoke that overhung the field; beneath this cloud the French were indistinctly visible. Here a waving mass of long red feathers could be seen; there, gleams as from a sheet of steel showed that the cuirassiers were moving; 400 cannon were belching forth fire and death on every side; the roaring and shouting were indistinguishably commixed—together they gave me an idea of a laboring volcano.”

Wellington could see the conflagration from the ridge and sent a message down to the farm:
You must keep your men in those parts which the fire does not reach. Take care that no men are hit by the falling of the roof or floors
. . .

The wounded, having been dragged into the chateau for shelter, had then to be evacuated. Many didn't survive this extra jostling. Others could be seen crawling from the conflagration, their clothes ablaze.

A severed hand . . . a jawbone shattered by a musket ball . . . compound skull fractures . . . These were not even the gravest injuries that William Whymper, surgeon to the Coldstreams, treated on-site. Casualties were taken to the great barn or other outbuildings that hadn't been torched, and laid next to the wounded from both armies. Strange, isn't it, how men who can fight, suffer and die in close proximity to each other have such difficulty actually
living
side by side?

For those huddling inside the little chapel, the Hougoumont flames would forever be remembered as sparks of grace, stopping as they had at the feet of Christ and harming no one.

The fighting at the South Gate was savage enough. But it was the North Gate—the very symbol of Hougoumont—that would go down in history. The gate had been deliberately left open for the passage of ammunition and supplies. Sometime around midday, the French forced their way down the lane skirting the west side of the barn and arrived at the North Gate.

Close it!
a Guardsman screamed, electrifying all those mustering within. Together they threw themselves against the gates, scrabbling for a foothold in the boggy entrance.

Myth took shape in the form of a French attacker, Sous-Lieutenant Legros—“l'Enfonceur,” or “the Smasher”—solid as an anvil, who hacked his way in with an axe. An infant myth found fertile ground and grew. Heroes sprouted at every thrust of the bayonet.
How many Frenchmen followed Legros through the gates?
Thirty? A hundred?
Truth and legend are tricky bedfellows. Whatever the number, the Coldstream Guard slaughtered all of their foes and became legends immediately.

What did it sound like, I'd always wondered, such killing? Many a sleepless night I'd spent imagining the animal cries from across the courtyard: the crack of weapons against wood, against steel, against bone. And the smell . . . earth battered to sludge; sweat cloying as urine; the bitter, choking gunpowder, so thick that it practically obscured those massive gates swinging in the balance.

Somehow, in the melée, they were heaved shut. Wellington would famously say: “The success of the battle of Waterloo depended on the closing of the gates of Hougoumont.”

And what about the drummer boy?

He was no footnote—not in our lives. Each legend has a beating heart, after all, and the drummer boy soon became this vital organ at our farm, even if, as you will recall from Private Matthew Clay, he had actually come through the South Gate and not the North, and during another skirmish entirely. What is legend, though, but history written in the way that moves us most? I'd grown up near the North Gate; I'd breathed the very exhale of its legacy. Over the years, that boggy spot had hardened like resin into an icon, and deep within this amber, far from anyone's control, the farm's preferred history will pulse forever.

Wellington's voice often fills my head, and I've listened to him many times as he extolled the crucial closing of the gates . . .
the
gates, through which the drummer boy simply
had
to have passed for legend to live on.

“
Please
, Grandmother,” we would implore her. “What happened to the boy?”

We knew for a fact that he'd been spared by men who, at the height of the bloodletting, had still retained some notion of when the killing should stop; that Private Clay had escorted him to safety in the great barn, his drum gone. We knew in our hearts that the boy must have been mute with fear. Our souls shuddered at the thought of what he had seen.

After that, the legend dangled loosely. Occasionally it would even let out a mournful sigh, like the open gate of our pen, though the sound carried only fitfully across the centuries.
Did the boy escape the smoking ruins of the farm? Did he ever recover his drum?
Grandmother would only speculate in the vaguest way. “Perhaps he died of fever . . .” But the all-knowing silence that followed suggested more . . . much more.

Whenever the wind rose at night, and the old beech tapped its rhythms against the south wall, I thought about that elusive boy.

J
une 18: dusk. The sun was shining blood-red through drifting smoke by the time Field Marshal Blücher arrived with his Prussians. The reinforcements had come in the nick of time for Wellington. One officer heard him declare: “Night or the Prussians must come!” It had, indeed, been a near-run thing.

Sauve qui peut!
was the cry among the French.
Everyone for themselves!
The ailing emperor fled the field, his ragged army—even his magnificent Imperial Guard—scattering in disarray.

When the red ball sank into darkness, the looters came.

The moon was only a few days shy of full on the night of June 18, 1815. Historians rarely mention this fact, though Old Lavender, as you can imagine, took great interest in it. The human animal would have had more illumination for plundering—though the benevolent souls administering relief would have been able to see better, too. For those of my kind, catatonic in their burrows, the full moon would have brought some comfort, reminding them that a being existed who just might see them through this cataclysm (although obviously, until that point, he had let them down royally). It makes one wonder where
your
god was on that night, by the way. He must have let quite a few of his followers down, too.

They say you couldn't take a step on the battlefield without brushing against a soldier's body, quick or dead. Indeed, countless souls were still breathing at day's end, though most would not make it out alive, trapped as they were under an army of corpses whose ranks they would soon be joining. Some had fallen in impossible postures, legs folded underneath them, their agony sharpening by the minute.
Minutes . . . quarter hours . . . half hours . . .
Grandmother told us that time idled cruelly on a battlefield, toying with victims as a cat with birds, and that this was one of humanity's punishments—greater, even, than death. And the wounded perished not only slowly, but anonymously, their names dissolving along with them in the mud. Four days would go by before the last survivors, deranged by thirst, pain and solitude, were finally dragged off the Waterloo field to makeshift, flyblown surgeries.

Crazed horses plunged about the wasteland, or sat helplessly on their rumps, their forelegs blown off. Some ten thousand horses died at Waterloo; many were barely cold by the time locals arrived to strip these faithful servants of their meat.

Looters roamed this Armageddon like hyenas. Some couldn't even wait for the fighting to stop, but crept over the field with bullets still flying bright-eyed as zealots. Soldiers themselves took part in the desecration: they stripped still-writhing,
still-bleeding men of purses, clothes, watches, pistols, swords . . . anything that could be sold or bartered. When the soldiers departed, the peasants moved in. Any victims who resisted were quietly knifed in the darkness; in their zeal, pillagers even killed each other.

I haven't mentioned the smell much, have I? You would think I would have, being a creature so inclined. But in truth, I realize now that the prevailing corruption was not what one would have assumed. No, it was the stench of greed. This is a phenomenon our kind has never actually experienced and I'm extemporizing here, but I do know of an example that might sway any of you still convinced of the glories of war: teeth, young and unstained, were pulled from the mouths of the dead and dying in such quantities that they would turn out to be a bonanza for the British denture industry. “Waterloo teeth,” they were called, and many a wealthy customer wore the smile of a battlefield corpse.