The Sage of Waterloo (11 page)

M
y days began early. Just after dawn, when my hutch door was opened, I took my first constitutional. This involved a thorough sniffing of the air from the edge of the patio—an initial “study of circumstance,” as Old Lavender called it. This rather arcane habit has gone out of favor these days, especially among the young, but the sad truth is that if Jonas or Caillou had been at all adept at the skill, they might have avoided their fates.

We rabbits have mediocre eyesight. We can see greens and blues best, along with shapes and shadows, which just about summed up this garden whatever your eyesight happened to be: a weed-infested lawn; ferns drooping in dim reaches; two trees, their trunks darkened by ivy; and foliage that waved mysteriously, even without any wind. A peony of sickly mien sulked near the patio. There were holes in the wall here and there where bricks were missing, and in one corner, a discarded toilet awaited removal. The pile of cracked plant pots next to it looked, to my eyes, like the jagged end of the Hougoumont chapel.

The garden was uninhabited except by me, but not unvisited. So much of my day was spent taking careful note of the rustling in the trees (inept rustling meant pigeons; arrogant rustling, magpies, and so forth) and keeping an eye trained on the tops of the walls. The dark red capping tiles formed a handy walkway for neighborhood cats, who lounged like petty sultans in the ivy massing over one corner of the wall. I'd seen an occasional cat at the farm. But these city animals seemed to be the most distant of cousins. They were phony predators, overfed and bored, on the lookout for any sort of cruel amusement. I knew they could get into the garden if they wanted to—I'd seen one pad across the lawn one evening and exit by the back tree. Inevitably, my fear of these domestic hybrids soon supplanted my fear of hawks, a clear indication that the real natural order did not extend this far into town.

Without a colony to impose order or a grandmother to rein in idiocy, caution ruled my days. My route through the garden was thus carefully planned and rarely varied. If it did vary, then the variation became the new, planned route. And so it went. Each route—or its variation—took in a thorough examination of the peony, the ferns, both tree trunks and anything at all that was unfamiliar or misplaced. Should one of the cracked plant pots have been moved, for instance, an olfactory once-over of the pot's new location was required. If a dry leaf had blown in over the wall from a neighbor's tree, this single leaf would need further investigation. (Autumn was a particularly tiring time, as you can imagine.) Every route, no matter how it traversed the garden, was accorded that essential component of the rabbit universe: an escape plan. This might be a damp hollow behind the tree, or a concealed alley behind the begonias.

Such exacting habits also occur in humans, I believe. Wellington himself fussed for hours over his terrain. Not that I'm comparing myself in any way, but I do think that my hero and I would have sized up the same parcel of land with similar precision. The Duke rarely left the field during battle. He studied the topography closely—combed it with his spyglass, and spent long hours reconnoitering on horseback to assess the circumstances. He knew all the ridges and hidden dips, and the tall crops of rye and corn in which men could be shot without ever seeing their enemy, but which also provided excellent cover and the advantage of surprise.

Sometimes one can be too meticulous, however. The battle very nearly took a fateful turn when Wellington rode down from the ridge to the Hougoumont orchard early on the morning of June 18 for a final check. He wanted to make double sure that all his orders had been carried out and everything was in place.

He halted on the track . . . a mere ten yards or so from a French sniper.

The man, hidden in the undergrowth, didn't fire. Had he even recognized his target? one wonders. Wellington had been wearing a plain blue coat and cloak, after all. Perhaps, addled by circumstance, and suffering from a momentarily frozen trigger finger, the sniper had had a change of heart.

No amount of vigilance can wrest control from providence—or however you wish to call the powerful force that can, without notice, render even history just a featherweight on the wind. From the mighty Wellington to a humble rabbit, outcomes maddeningly, inescapably depend on myopic snipers or absent hawks; on the thickness of the mud or a hollow under the fence; on whether or not the corn—or begonias—hold up as escape routes.

I
was a lucky exile, I suppose. Many never know such havens as mine; many continue to wander in their hearts, even when the physical body has more or less come to a halt.

I have in mind a particular exile.

He's been lurking at the corners of these pages, and it's about time to bring him up, I think. He may not have troubled your reading so far, but he certainly haunts this story. He's never found his own, fragrant piece of earth anywhere. Oh, he tried to find it, all right. In every country he invaded. But you can't spend your youth at Hougoumont, as I did, and not grasp that bloodshed is no way to find a happy
chez soi
.

Napoleon.

The name will never have a neutral feel, will it? Somewhere in France at this very moment, someone is calling him a monster, while across the street they're toasting his deeds and singing “La Marseillaise.” Both extremes have a firm hold on the historical record, though paradoxically, both only give insipid impressions of the famous commander, and are about as cliché as the brooding countenance and hand tucked into the coat. Did you know, for instance, that Napoleon had a very keen sense of humor? Difficult to imagine in someone who felt that the world belonged to him, and then went doggedly out to prove it.

There's no shortage of speculation regarding Napoleon's legacy. I hasten to say that I'm no expert. But nothing is more satisfying than discussing a famous person who is maddeningly hard to pin down. Bonaparte's character, his marriages and affairs, his strategies, moods, illnesses and death all provoke the liveliest of debates, even now, though the subject was beyond the capacities of most of the lagomorph population at Hougoumont. Spode tackled it gamely. But his administrative bent narrowed his interests to dates, locations and names, which we all promptly forgot.
History is in the details
. . . Just not in Spode's, it seems. I'll try to recall Old Lavender's, therefore, as her lessons had that curious sticking power.

We'd all grown up in Napoleon's shadow as much as we'd grown up in Wellington's. The earth of our farm had received vast numbers of both armies into her bosom, after all. It seems simplistic to call one group of men good and the other bad, when they both ended up in the same spot, and in the same sorry state. The corpses of the French and British may have been burned in separate pits, but their ashes must have found each other on the wind eventually, and come to rest together. Now that I think of it, the tranquillity of our woods and meadows had an ambiguous feel: part victory, part defeat, the joy of one and bitterness of the other joined in common regret.

Grandmother liked to point out that the French and the British never fought each other again after Waterloo, and that the price for this might have been a reasonable one to pay. I'm quite certain she didn't believe it herself, though, but was just encouraging discussion, which was commendable. Because of all the occupants of our colony, she was the one who understood how high the price of Waterloo—and Hougoumont—had been.

Old Lavender loved military strategy, as I've mentioned. I even suspected that she deeply admired Napoleon's genius in that sphere, though she'd never admit it. But grand military design always paled before her little historical pearls.

“Napoleon was a wreck when he arrived in Belgium,” she said. “Oh, there were flashes of his old Austerlitz brilliance, certainly: he managed to humbug Wellington with that surprise attack on the Prussians near Charleroi. But the poor man was a digestive nightmare. He was ill, in pain. Imagine having to ride a horse with those terrible hemorrhoids—even a sweet-tempered mare like Desirée! He would explode at underlings, then sink into lethargy. That kind of thing.”

“Spode says he was a psychopath,” I ventured, pleased not only that I'd retained this bit of information, but that I'd found the opportune moment to disgorge it.

“It was not that straightforward!” Grandmother retorted. “Napoleon was a complex man. One shouldn't judge complex people.” She paused. “One should stand clear of judging complex rabbits altogether.”

Is she touchy because I'd mentioned Spode?
I wondered.
Or because she was being soft on Napoleon?
These were delicate questions. History favors the distinction between tyrants and heroes and one is expected to stick to them. Old Lavender, ever the contrarian, liked to toy with the boundaries.

“Labels never did anyone any good,” she went on. “They make life so anemic; they destroy so many intriguing paradoxes. Napoleon was voluble, moody, choleric. Everyone knows that. But all of a sudden, he could be tender. He talked with nonstop agitation. Then he'd sink into depression and not talk at all. He was a poor sleeper and tended to wander about at night, reading, catnapping, snacking.” Old Lavender continued with pride in her tone, as if she were the first historian to have come up with this particular observation: “He would have made a great creative artist, Bonaparte—a painter; or, being French, a chef—if he hadn't been so bent on creating war.”

“You said he could also be kind.”

“Of course! The worst tyrants can show kindness . . . even genuine kindness. Avoid labels, William!”

And with that she recounted a little tale:

At about two o'clock in the morning of June 18, Napoleon was sitting in an upper room of Le Caillou, his headquarters down the road from Waterloo. He was unwell. He'd been writing dispatches, and had ordered horses to be brought at seven o'clock. But his attitude was one of great physical and mental suffering.

At length he struggled down a steep ladder and ordered his page, Gudin, to help him into the saddle. The boy lifted the emperor's elbow too abruptly, and Napoleon pitched over to the off-side, almost falling to the ground. “
Allez à tous les diables!
” he hissed. “Go to the devil!” And with that he cantered off in a rage.

Gudin fought tears as he watched his master ride away with members of his staff. But to the page's surprise, the emperor had only gone a few hundred yards when he came riding back, alone.

He placed a hand tenderly on the lad's shoulder and whispered: “My child, when you assist a man of my girth to mount, it is necessary to proceed more carefully.”

The page became a general, and eventually fell during the Franco-Prussian war.

I wasn't sure what to make of the Napoleon of that story. In such a short space of time, the man demonstrated a full spectrum of emotion. I began to imagine that he might, indeed, have harbored different personalities in his short, squat frame. I think you call it schizophrenia. I don't know. If that were the case, then Boomerang would also have to be labeled schizophrenic, as one never knew when he was going to suddenly hurl himself against the barrier; or Jonas, for that matter, who could be wit and charm personified, and then stab someone from behind with an insult. I suppose that if behavior leads to serious death and destruction, then it needs to be given a serious name. And serious punishment. Though I do wonder if the British had gone a bit overboard after Waterloo, sending Napoleon to St. Helena.

The Royal Mail ship takes five days to get to St. Helena from Cape Town. Even today, not many people venture there. The island is a primeval remnant of basalt, shrouded in vapors and rising up from the sea like a jagged thought from sleep. “This cursed rock,” as Napoleon called it, was from all accounts as bleak a place of banishment as his captors could have wished. Longwood House, where the emperor lived out his days until he died there on May 5, 1821, at age fifty-one, sits on a damp plateau buffeted by trade winds and prone to smothering mists. Napoleon would pace the porch for endless hours, waiting for breaks in the fog and scanning the horizon for passing ships. To keep boredom at bay, he luxuriated in long, hot baths while reading, or dictating to a page. Formal dinners were staged in the cramped dining room. The meal was rather like an off-color operetta for an audience of sycophants, served on Sèvres porcelain by liveried butlers, candlelight glancing off the silverware, while the counterfeit court, shorn of all validity, still bowed allegiance to their castaway.