Waterloo (22 page)

Hougoumont was a smoking ruin. The clearing outside the south gate was a graveyard. The remains of the barn were a charnel house. In the yard heaps of bodies lay awaiting burial. They would have to wait. Macdonell would order burial pits dug the next morning. In the garden Sellers was doing his best for the wounded. Macdonell found Mrs Osborne, her dress soaked in blood from her wound. Mrs Rogers was with her. ‘The battle is over, ladies,’ he said, ‘and we are victorious. Do your husbands live?’

‘They do, Colonel,’ replied Mrs Rogers. ‘Both safe, thank the good Lord.’

‘And you, Mrs Osborne, how do you fare?’

‘A bullet through my breast and into my shoulder, Colonel. The surgeon says he will extract it and I will live to be an old lady.’

‘I am glad of it. How did you get to Hougoumont without my knowing?’

‘We slipped down with the men when you were with the Duke, Colonel. We wanted to be with them,’ replied Mrs Rogers with a grin.

Macdonell nodded and moved on. He exchanged a word or two with each wounded man until he came to Joseph Graham. His thigh had been bandaged with a pair of trousers. He was deathly pale. ‘Corporal Graham?’ whispered Macdonell. The Irishman opened his eyes briefly. He showed no sign of recognising his colonel. Macdonell left him to sleep.

James Hervey and his troops were in the north yard, inside the gates. ‘I think we may open the gates now, Mister Hervey,’ said Macdonell. ‘We must get the wounded up to the dressing stations.’

Two guards lifted the cross-beam off its housings and pushed open the gates. Outside them, the lane was full of French bodies. ‘Check for wounded, Mister Hervey. If there are any, send them up too.’

‘I will, Colonel.’

‘And send a foraging party up to the ridge. Food and water, whatever they can find.’

Darkness was falling and the clash of battle had been replaced by the cries of the wounded. Macdonell found James Graham in the south yard. ‘James, we need wagons for the wounded. Send a party to fetch some. Your brother is in the garden. Make sure he and Mrs Osborne are on the first wagon. Are you hurt?’

‘Me, sir? Good Lord, no, sir. Not a scratch. But I fear for Joseph.’

‘He has lost much blood. Get him to a surgeon, James.’

From the corner of his eye, Macdonell saw two figures emerge from the gardener’s house – a broad-shouldered man in a leather jerkin and a battered old hat and a blonde girl of about five in a dirty white smock. They were holding hands and, despite the failing light, were blinking as if they had emerged from a cave into bright sunlight. ‘Who the devil are you?’ he called out before collapsing into a fit of coughing. The two figures came towards him and the man held out a bottle. James took a mouthful and coughed again. It was brandy. He handed back the bottle. ‘Thank you.
Merçi
.’

‘
Mon plaisir, monsieur. Je m’appelle van Cutsem, le jardinier. Voiçi ma fille
.’ Macdonell shook his head. The man claimed to be the gardener and the little girl to be his daughter. Where had they come from?

With mounting astonishment, he discovered that Monsieur van Cutsem and his daughter had spent a night and a day in the cellar under the gardener’s house and had emerged only when the sounds of battle had died. They did not know which way the battle had gone until they climbed the stairs and saw red uniforms in the farm and the garden. The gardener did not trust the French and was relieved that they had been defeated. Best of all, he had food and wine in the cellar, and would be happy to share them with the British soldiers. Macdonell advised him not to visit the garden with his daughter until it had been cleared of bodies. He did not tell them that they were fortunate not to have been burnt alive or buried under a ton of rubble.

More than half the remaining Guards did not wait for the
foraging party to return. They simply found a place to sleep and something with which to cover themselves and lay down. They lay in the gardener’s house and the shed, among horses burnt to skeletons by the fire and among their own dead comrades in the yards and the garden. Wagons trundled down the lane to take the wounded up to a dressing station or the makeshift hospital in the village.

When the last of the wounded had gone and such food and water as the foragers could find had been distributed, Macdonell went to the chapel and crept inside. The fire had destroyed the door, the walls were scorched and blackened. He looked up to where the wooden carving of Christ had hung over the door. It was still there. The flames had reached his feet and no further. The rest of the carving was intact.

Macdonell found a place in the gardener’s house, spread a filthy blanket on the stone floor, lay down and slept.

It was an hour after dawn and the sun was rising into a cloudless sky. After the recent storms, it would be another scorching day.

The two men sat on their horses under the elm tree at the crossroads at Mont St Jean from which Wellington had conducted the battle. Behind the slope of the ridge to their right, where he had concealed the main body of his army, tired men lit fires, grubbed about looking for food and sipped tea or gin. There had been no issue of rations. Some nursed wounds, all were battered, numb, starving. They were the lucky ones.

In the valley below them, as far as the eye could see to their left, to the Château Hougoumont on their right and as far as the inn at La Belle Alliance on the far side of the valley, the fields were piled with the bodies of men and horses and the detritus of war. Some still lived, pleading pitifully for help but too weak to stand or walk unaided. Most were dead. Friend and foe together, they lay entwined, heaped one on top of another,
under broken artillery pieces and beside upturned wagons. They lacked arms and legs and stomachs and heads.

Grotesquely injured horses wandered aimlessly, heads down, exhausted, dying. One by one the wretched beasts were put out of their misery with a single pistol shot. Some were hacked into bloody chunks and carted up the slope in carts. And while the butchers worked, so did the blacksmiths. The saddles and bridles of cavalry horses were valuable and horseshoes could be hammered back into shape and reused. The chipping of the smiths’ hammers rang out in the still air.

Clouds of carrion crows filled the sky above the fields, squawking their hateful warnings and swooping to fight over a scrap. Silent figures in peasants’ smocks and strange long-eared hats moved among the corpses, hands slipping under jackets and into packs in search of coins or tobacco or a silver watch. Grubby children crawled in the dirt, looking for treasures. Dogs sniffed and licked and lifted their legs. Muskets and swords and boots were loaded into handcarts. Earrings were ripped from the ears of the Emperor’s guards, gold buttons from officers’ uniforms. Bodies were stripped even of the uniforms themselves, leaving them cruelly naked and exposed. A coat or a shirt not too bloodstained might fetch a few pennies.

Among the women and children and dogs, soldiers too searched for plunder. As survivors they thought it their right and knew that their officers would turn a blind eye. Red uniforms rifling the packs and pockets of their comrades and enemies alike made a gruesome sight, but in the eyes of a soldier it was no more than justice. He had fought, he had won and he
would take the spoils. The dead did not need them any more than dead Imperial Guardsmen needed their pigtails. They too were cut off and stuffed into packs.

Most shocking, perhaps, of all, a tall figure in morning coat and black top hat picked his way carefully among the bodies, a handkerchief pressed to his nose. Now and again he prodded a body with his cane. The first of the sightseers had arrived.

Outside the ruins of the farm at La Haye Sainte, a company of bare-chested pioneers hacked at the earth with picks and shovels. They were digging the first of the many huge graves that would be needed before the dead were finally put to rest. There would be no distinction – officers, private soldiers, cavalry, infantry and artillery, British, German, Dutch, French, Catholic, Protestant and heathen – all would share the same graves. There were too many of them to do otherwise.

Here and there a fight broke out. Wives and sweethearts who had been sent to the rear before the battle started were beginning to arrive. They too wandered among the dead, hoping to find a husband or a brother or a sweetheart. They waved their fists and shrieked insults at the looting Belgian women, who stood and stared dumbly back until they were shoved aside and forced to slouch off in search of easier pickings elsewhere.

Neither of the mounted men at the crossroads wore jackets or shakos. Their trousers and shirts were bloody and ragged. Their boots were streaked with mud and gore.

‘Is there an artist or author who could do justice to this?’ asked James Macdonell. He was dirty and unshaven and black rings drooped under his eyes.

‘There is not,’ replied Alexander Saltoun. ‘And even if there
were, he would not be believed.’ A livid bruise from the hilt of a French sabre ran from his ear to his chin.

‘Yet it was a victory. Buonaparte was beaten.’

‘He was, and has fled to Paris, I hear, chased by the Prussians.’

‘So he lives. How many do not?’

‘Tens of thousands,’ said a quiet voice behind them. General Byng had ridden from the town of Waterloo and seen the two of them at the tree. ‘Can there be a more melancholy sight than a field of battle after the battle is done?’ He paused. ‘But you gentlemen are alive and I rejoice for it.’

‘We are obliged, General,’ replied Macdonell. ‘And rejoice also for you.’

‘The fortunes of war, James. Picton and Ponsonby are dead, Somerset may not live, Cooke is wounded, Uxbridge has lost a leg, Fitzroy and Harris have one pair of arms between them. Yet the Duke, astonishingly, is unharmed. He was seldom out of danger and four of his aides fell around him. At one time he found himself without an aide to hand and had to send a civilian down to General Kempt to warn him to form square. A button salesman who had come to watch the battle, the Duke says. The man got rather more than he had bargained for. The fortunes of war.’

‘I had four horses shot from under me yet I too have not a scratch,’ added Saltoun.

‘You know,’ went on Byng, ‘the young frog ordered me to evacuate Hougoumont when he saw the fire. He did not believe it could be held. I ignored the order. He, too, is wounded, although not seriously.’

‘One trusts there will not be ramifications, General.’

‘There will not. The Prince was proved wrong and in any event will have forgotten the matter or possibly even remembered that his orders were to hold the place.’ He gazed out over the valley. ‘Look at the poor devils. Brave men who fought and died and are now robbed and stripped and will be dumped in unmarked holes.’

‘Was it not ever the lot of the soldier, General?’ asked Macdonell.

‘It was, of course, James, yet I pray never to look on anything like this again. I doubt if the Duke is yet aware of the scale of his victory or of its price and I shall not be the one to tell him. I do not have the words. It was a desperate affair, was it not? And your own efforts will not go unnoticed, gentlemen.’

‘Others would have done the same,’ replied Macdonell, a trifle gruffly. He had never been comfortable with compliments.

‘Perhaps,’ replied the general. ‘Old Blücher did arrive, although late in the day, and I thank God for it. His Prussians kept two French divisions occupied around Planchenois. Their losses were high, but without them, the outcome might have been very different.’

‘And what now, General?’ asked Saltoun. ‘Will Buonaparte try again?’

‘Good God, Alexander, I pray not. Can you imagine another day like yesterday? No, his invincible Imperial Guard proved anything but, and their reputation, and his, have been destroyed. Surely the French will not rise for him again.’

‘I recall hearing similar words when he escaped from Elba, General,’ said Macdonell quietly.

‘It will not be Elba this time, James, if the Duke has his
way, which, of course, he will. Somewhere very much more distant and inhospitable will be found for him. If the royalists do not get their hands on him first, that is. Looking at what lies before us, I for one rather hope that they do.’ For some minutes they sat in silence. ‘Gentlemen, the Duke sent his preliminary despatch to London last night. He intends to send another, more complete, within a day or two and has asked me for my report. To write it, I shall need yours.’

‘You shall have mine this evening, General,’ replied Macdonell, dreading the prospect of having to sit down and write it.

‘And mine, General,’ added Saltoun.

Byng nodded. ‘It was a terrible day. I thank God it is over.’ He turned his horse and trotted back up the road to the village. Macdonell and Saltoun did not move. For all its horror, the battlefield had a mesmerising effect. They sat and stared at it.

A carriage rattled down the road towards them. The driver reined in his huge black carthorse and came to a halt at the crossroads. He wore the grey trousers of the Royal Waggon Train. The door of the carriage opened and a crimson-jacketed surgeon with a large bag of instruments stepped out, followed by three women in floral dresses and pink bonnets. Each of them carried a basket of bandages. All four were so bloodstained and filthy that their own mothers might not have recognised them. They took no notice of the two mounted men under the elm tree but walked a little way along the ridge and looked down into the valley.

A single rider had followed the carriage. ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said as he approached. He looked down on the
battlefield. ‘Well, perhaps not good, but for us at least better than it might have been.’

‘Good morning, Francis,’ replied James. ‘Have you ever set eyes on a more desolate sight? I certainly have not. Did you find a billet for the night?’

‘No. I slept in a haystack in the village. A trifle prickly but not too bad. The surgeons and their assistants were at work all night. I came down with Daisy. She’s exhausted.’

‘Is that Daisy with the surgeon?’ asked James. ‘I did not recognise her.’

‘It is.’

‘There were two women with us at Hougoumont, wives of privates helping with the wounded. One was wounded, a shot to the breast.’

‘I am sorry for it. Now I shall attend the ladies. Daisy has taken to calling me general, the impertinent child, although I have told her not to.’

‘General?’

‘When General Cooke was wounded, General Byng took his place and I in turn took General Byng’s place. A temporary state of affairs only but it amuses Daisy to think otherwise.’

‘Yet you remained in the orchard.’

‘I did.’ He grinned. ‘From there I could stand in for the general whilst keeping an eye on you. My new role made no difference. The orchard had to be defended.’

‘Yet you might have told me,’ replied Macdonell. ‘I should have been happy for you.’

‘Tush, James, you were much too busy.’

‘There,’ said the surgeon loudly, ‘the battlefield. It is as we
were warned, is it not? Let us waste no time. Miss Brown, Miss Westfield, kindly make your way down the slope to the left. Take great care where you step. Call out if you find a man living. Miss Box, if you would, accompany me. We will do what we can for them.’

Francis dismounted and led his horse along the path to where the little party stood. He called out. Daisy turned. Tears ran down her unwashed cheeks but her eyes were blank. Francis put his arms around her shoulders and embraced her. It was no time for convention.

‘Time I went to work,’ said James quietly. With a flick of the reins he set off down the path towards Hougoumont, leaving Saltoun on the ridge.

He passed groups of haggard soldiers, sitting, squatting and lying around their fires or in roughly constructed bivouacs. The men glanced up but looked quickly away again when they realised he was not an officer in their battalion and was not there to give them orders. Soldiers need orders and they had none. Until orders came they would have to stay where they were and fend for themselves.

Behind the rows of bivouacs, Gunners sat propped against the wheels and carriages of their artillery pieces, smoking their pipes and sipping from their canteens. Their carriage horses, hobbled together, searched in vain for tufts of grass in the narrow strip of mud between the guns and the wood.

At the top of the ridge the path was still stony and hard. Lower down, the earth had been churned to mud and they had to go slowly. Twice Macdonell’s mount slipped and he only just avoided a fall. The ground was littered with
discarded packs, shakos and blankets. The dead had been cleared to one side to await burial or burning. The looters would find them soon.

In the field outside the orchard that Saltoun and Hepburn had defended all day, half a dozen soldiers were going from body to body. At first Macdonell thought they were checking for signs of life but soon realised that they too were looting. He spurred his horse and cantered towards them. When they saw him, they ran off towards the woods. None of them wore jackets. It was hard to be sure but he thought three were British and three French.

Smoke was still rising from the ruins of the chateau and the farm. He entered through the north gates, battered but intact and standing open. Bodies filled the yard, many, to his fury, already stripped naked. The looters had been at their foul work during the night. What had been the barn was a smouldering heap of debris. Fragments of bone and skull lay flensed and charred in the ashes. The cowshed and the farmer’s house were gone, the draw well was a hellish tangle of bricks and bodies, the garden wall was barely standing.

The walls of the chateau and the tower – what remained of them – were pitted with bullet holes and still warm to the touch. The chapel door had gone – burnt to cinders – but the chapel itself still stood. Macdonell bowed his head and went in. The walls and floor were scorched black. He turned to look at the place above the door where the carving of Christ on the cross had hung on the wall. It was still there. The flames that had destroyed the chateau, and the farm which had brought death to so many, had reached Christ’s feet but no higher.
Macdonell crossed himself. The Grahams had been right. God had watched over them.

In the south yard, where the worst of the fighting had been raging no more than twelve hours earlier, a party of men under James Hervey had begun the task of collecting the dead and carrying them outside. Hervey, too, was blank-eyed and exhausted. ‘I thought before the looters find them, Colonel …’ he began.

‘Quite so, Mister Hervey,’ replied Macdonell. ‘The scavengers must have been here all night. Let us bury them as quickly as we can. Where are you digging?’

‘Near the woods, Colonel.’

‘Good. Use every man you can find and do not forget the wretched souls in the barn.’