Читать книгу An Autobiography - Butler Elizabeth Southerden Thompson - Страница 8

“We then went, first, a short way up the mound, and the old warrior in our midst began his most interesting talk, full of stirring and touching anecdotes. What a story was that he was telling us, with the scenes of that story before our eyes! I, all eagerness to learn from the lips of one who took part in the fight, the story of that great victory of my country, was always throughout that long day by the side of the old hussar, and drank in the stirring narrative with avidity. There lay before us the farm of La Haie Sainte—‘lerhigh saint’ as he called it—restored to what it was before the battle, where the gallant Germans held out so bravely, fighting only with the bayonet, for when they came to load their firearms, oh, horror! the ammunition was found to be too large for the muskets, and was, therefore, useless. There the great Life Guard charge took place, there is the grave of the mighty Shaw, and on the skyline the several hedges and knolls that mark this and that, and where Napoleon took up his first position. And there lies La Belle Alliance where Wellington and Blücher did not meet—oh, Mr. Maclise!—and a hundred other landmarks, all pointed out by the notched stick of old Mundy. The stories attached to them were all clearly related to us. After standing a long time on the mound until the man of discipline had quite done his regulation story, with its stirring and amusing touches and its minute details, we descended and set off on our way to Hougoumont. What a walk was that! On that space raged most of the battle; it was a walk through ghosts with agonised faces and distorted bodies, crying noiselessly.

“Our guide stopped us very often as we reached certain spots of leading interest, one of them—the most important of all—being the place where the last fearful tussle was made and the Old Guard broke and ran. There was the field, planted with turnips, where our Guards lay down, and I could not believe that the seemingly insignificant little bank of the road, which sloped down to it, could have served to hide all those men until I went down and stooped, and then I understood, for only just the blades of the grass near me could I see against the sky. Our Guards must indeed have seemed to start out of the ground to the bewildered French, who were, by the by, just then deploying. That dreadful V formed by our soldiers, with its two sides and point pouring in volley after volley into the deploying Imperial Guard, must have indeed been a ‘staggerer,’ and so Napoleon’s best soldiers turned tail, yelling ‘Sauve qui peut!’ and ran down that now peaceful undulation on the other side of the road.

“Many another spot with its grim story attached did I gaze at, and my thoughts became more and more overpowering. And there stood a survivor before us, relating this tale of a battle which, to me, seems to belong to the olden time. But what made the deepest impression on my mind was the sergeant’s pointing out to us the place where he lay all night after the battle, wounded, ‘just a few yards from that hedge, there.’ I repeat this to myself often, and always wonder. We then left that historic rutted road and, following a little path, soon came, after many more stoppages, to the outer orchard of Hougoumont. Victor Hugo’s thoughts upon this awful place came crowding into my mind also. Yet the place did look so sweet and happy: the sun shining on the rich, velvety grass, chequered with the shade of the bare apple trees, and the contented cows grazing on the grass which, on the fearful day fifty years ago, was not green between the heaps of dead and dying wretches.

“Ah! the wall with the loopholes. I knew all about it and hastened to look at it. Again all the wonderful stratagems and deeds of valour, etc., etc., were related, and I have learnt the importance, not only of a little hedge, but of the slightest depression on a battlefield. Riddled with shot is this old brick wall and the walls of the farm, too. Oh! this place of slaughter, of burning, of burying alive, this place of concentrated horror! It was there that I most felt the sickening terror of war, and that I looked upon it from the dark side, a thing I have seldom had so strong an impulse to do before. The farm is peaceful again and the pigs and poultry grunt and cluck amongst the straw, but there are ruins inside. There’s the door so bravely defended by that British officer and sergeant, hanging on its hinges; there’s the well which served as a grave for living as well as dead, where Sergeant Mundy was the last to fill his canteen; and there’s the little chapel which served as an oven to roast a lot of poor fellows who were pent up there by the fire raging outside. We went into the terror-fraught inner orchard, heard more interesting and saddening talk from the old soldier who says there is nothing so nice as fighting one’s battles over again, and then we went out and returned to the inn and dined. After that we streamed after our mentor to the Charleroi road, just to glance at the left part of the field which the sergeant said he always liked going over the best. ‘Oh!’ he said, looking lovingly at his pet, ‘this was the strongest position, except Hougoumont.’ It was in this region that Wellington was moved to tears at the loss of so many of his friends as he rode off the field. Papa told me his memorable words on that occasion: ‘A defeat is the only thing sadder than a victory.’ What a scene of carnage it was! We looked at poor Gordon’s monument and then got into our carriage and left that great, immortal place, with the sun shedding its last gleams upon it. I feel virtuous in having written this much, seeing what I have done since. We drove back, in the clear night, I a wiser and a sadder girl.”

About this same Battle of Waterloo. Before the Great War it always loomed large to me, as it were from the very summit of military history, indeed of all history. During the terrible years of the late War I thought my Waterloo would diminish in grandeur by comparison, and that the awful glamour so peculiar to it would be obliterated in the fumes of a later terror. But no, there it remains, that lurid glamour glows around it as before, and for the writer and for the painter its colour, its great form, its deep tones, remain. We see through its blood-red veil of smoke Napoleon fall. There never will be a fall like that again: it is he who makes Waterloo colossal.