The Sage of Waterloo (17 page)

D
id the near-cataclysm in Normandy change me? Old Lavender was a great believer in cataclysms as long as they were near and not complete ones. I was reminded of something she had said to Jonas after he was lifted, half dead, off the fence, his innards swaying in the breeze:
Disasters are often good things, Jonas—unless you actually die during them, though that's often not the cataclysm it's made out to be.
In retrospect, maybe this piece of advice had not been quite as encouraging as Jonas would have liked. He did go through that odd transformation, though, so perhaps he had learned to look at life and death in a new way.

Disasters can even be entertaining. Oh, not really funny, per se, especially when the disaster is a complete one. Unless you're British, of course, in which case just about any sort of cataclysm can be rendered droll on the spot.

The battlefield of Waterloo offered some choice examples. Take the Earl of Uxbridge, for instance, Wellington's second-in-command and commander of the cavalry. Family scandal had prompted Wellington to treat Uxbridge with icy politeness, the latter having eloped with the former's sister-in-law. This painful personal history might have explained Wellington's laconic reaction to Uxbridge's predicament. When rusted grapeshot from French artillery struck the Earl's right leg, completely shattering it, he remarked to Wellington: “By God, sir, I've lost my leg!” Wellington replied: “By God, sir, so you have!”

The Earl was then taken to the village of Waterloo, where he underwent a gruesome amputation without anesthetic, but with a huge measure of bravery and good cheer. He complained only that “the knives seem rather blunt.”

Uxbridge's leg was buried in the garden of the house in which it had been cut off. A mock memorial was erected with the inscription: “Here lies the Leg of the illustrious and valiant Earl Uxbridge, Lieutenant-General of His Britannic Majesty, Commander in Chief of the English, Belgian and Dutch cavalry, wounded on the 18 June 1815 at the memorable battle of Waterloo, who, by his heroism, assisted in the triumph of the cause of mankind, gloriously decided by the resounding victory of the said day.”

Some years later, Uxbridge revisited Waterloo with two of his sons, found the table on which the operation had taken place and ate dinner off of it.

At least the Earl's chances of survival had been good—however dull the knives might have been. The stakes were far higher for me: four-legged creatures don't often lose a limb and survive, let alone go back and have a leisurely dinner at the same spot. I'm not sure I could have summoned Uxbridge's extraordinary good cheer if the falcon had actually grabbed me and lifted me high. All would have been over then—all good cheer in vain. The only remaining piece of agenda would have been the formal handing over of my essence to Moon, if that part is to be believed. But let's face it: if one has to cry out to something from the grip of imminent death, it may as well be to something rapturous, rather than (in my case) to an inebriated farmer unlikely to find you on his tractor.

After Normandy, I realized that perhaps I'd been too hasty in my judgment of Moon. Lately, I've even come to the conclusion that he is, on balance, a good-hearted individual, in spite of his flaws. Oh, I'd blamed him for what had happened to Caillou, all right (maybe to deflect blame from myself); I'd denounced him for letting me be taken away from Hougoumont and my family, and for giving me no sign that Old Lavender was all right. This is only natural for us: we don't hesitate to give our god a thorough scolding when life turns bleak. I only knew that I couldn't go on living in anger and remorse. That was no way to spend a single day—let alone the rest of your life. Nor was it any way to build a partnership with someone like Moon, whom you really don't want to scold
too
thoroughly.

Your god, it seems, gets credit for the good things but is never blamed for catastrophe. People assume there must be some deeper meaning in terrible events unfathomable to the human brain, and are content to leave it at that. Sterner cultures, I understand, have even sterner gods, who wreak vengeance at the slightest provocation. I certainly understand the deeper meaning part. But not vengeance. That seems to be a human invention, not a divine one, and not something we have ever experienced with our god.

W
ell, never did I think that a small white cage on a cold stone floor in a drafty French chateau would seem like heaven, but it most certainly did after that adventure. I tucked into my store-bought dinner with almost religious fervor. For the second time in my life, kindness had visited me in the form of a human hand. Maybe I'd been too young to truly appreciate it the first time; maybe I needed two interventions to finally realize that the best dreams must sometimes remain intangible. That maybe we are better off gazing appreciatively at a green field, than actually finding ourselves in the middle of one. Dampness, darkness, exposure, falcons . . . this is what can happen to the loveliest of dreams.

Perhaps it's better to live happily with the idea of a dandelion, than to die eating one.

11

E
very summer when I was growing up, on the weekend that fell closest to the eighteenth of June, an eager crush of reenactors would descend on the fields and lanes around Hougoumont. The original Battle of Waterloo occurred on a Sunday: an ecclesiastical paradox, you might say, as instead of praising their Prince of Peace, the assembled armies used the Sabbath for slaughter.

Picnickers, tourists, city folk and bemused locals would all crowd around the perimeter of the farm to soak up the reconstituted glory of Napoleonic times. Uniforms, horses, muskets, cannons . . . no detail was overlooked, except that there was not a drop of blood anywhere, or a gram of fear, which left us with the odd impression of watching a clawless, toothless lion fighting a similar adversary.

“Sanitized war, that's what it is,” Grandmother would sniff when the cannons started up, practically shattering our eardrums. “Oh, the colors and pageantry are nice. But it's meaningless without the hell that went with it. What's the point? Where's the smell of fear? Of death?”

We understood her perfectly, being creatures with supreme olfactory powers. It wasn't difficult to imagine, on watching the mock soldiers wander about the farm in their brand-new woolen uniforms, that during the actual battle even the human nose would have been capable of picking up the sour note of fear in the general perfume of unwashed, sweaty bodies—a note singularly lacking during the picnic-cum-war afternoons. While it's true that the reenactments gave a pretty good idea of how life was in the encampments—what the soldiers ate and wore, how they slept and passed their time and so forth—the attempt at actual warfare had a carnival feel to it.

“How realistic is it when people play dead, then get up at the end of the afternoon and drive themselves home?” Grandmother would mutter. “At least they could dump a few corpses here and there for effect.”

I never much liked that last quip of hers. For one thing, it reduced her in stature, making her seem more of a tabloid journalist than the high-minded thinker she was. For another, no casual Waterloo buff would want to spoil historical reconstitution with too much reality. Anyway, Old Lavender had described once too often the nightmare of corpses rotting in the June heat. She sometimes went into considerable detail before we slept, especially if we'd been troublesome that day, and believe me, it didn't make for a very pretty bedtime story. Nor was it something you wanted to confront on a picnic.

Every creature who was anywhere near Waterloo sensed what was going to happen.
That those animals would have been terrified by the smells and sounds of battle is obvious. But how, I'd always wondered, did they sense the cataclysm
before
it happened? I could only imagine that so much destructive human zeal, multiplied by the thousands in a relatively small arena, had sent tremors through the earth beforehand that had bruised it forever.

Even the reenactments were sheer hell for small animals. For our part, we would scrabble into one corner of the hutch, ears jammed into the huddle of fur in a vain attempt to dull the axe-blade of sound. Cannons, muskets, screams . . . it was excruciating. Some of us would even suffer a nervous tilt of the head for days afterwards. Nothing could dull the jarring thud of the explosions that hammered right through the floorboards into our sensitive feet, up our finely tuned digestive systems, and out through the teeth. It never even occurred to Emmanuel, poor dimwit that he was, to move our quarters for the event.

One such Sunday, I peeked out through the grille at the meadow, where, about halfway down the south wall, a British reenactor was just being “felled” after shooting blanks over the top of the wall. He landed gracefully—even artistically—in the plush grass (which would have been a formal garden in the original battle and a good deal harder). He lay still—very convincingly, I must say. I know this because I resolved to observe him until he got tired of the game. To his credit, this lasted quite some time, but in the end I outwitted him.

The Sunday soldier lifted his head, glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then crawled very slowly to the wall. There he opened a silver button of his uniform and pulled out a cell phone.

“Beth?” he yelled—he had to, as the din still raged all around, which meant that I could hear him quite well. “Beth? Oh, hi. I was just shot. Can you pick me up in the parking lot over by the café? Half an hour? Okay.”

W
ar should never be entertainment, William.”

We were back in our dusty hollow, Grandmother and I, the last reenactors having changed out of their uniforms and trundled off down the lane in their cars.

“What a sacrilege, playing dead in the very place where so many actually
did
die—and in such agony!” said Old Lavender.

The light was mellow, burnished. It would be one of those lingering summer twilights I so loved. The blackbirds, having retired sensibly to the woods across the valley during the theatricals, had already resumed their perches in the old beeches and chestnuts around the farm for evensong. There wasn't a single quaver in their voices, and it made me wonder whether their ancestors had been back on their perches on the morning of June 19, 1815, and if so, what they had found to sing about.

“It's amusing sometimes, though,” I said, thinking of Beth and the rendezvous at the café.

“Humans learn to do this to each other,” Old Lavender rejoined, ignoring my comment. “Therefore, one day they must unlearn it, before it's too late and all of them succumb to the same madness. It doesn't matter whether you're lagomorph or anthropoid: the crucial thing is to set an example. When is the last time anyone witnessed rabbits attacking each other en masse? Well, there you are, then. Lead by example, William. Lead by example. There's nothing glorious about war.”

Oh, but there must have been some glorious sites in 1815! An illicit thought, I knew, so I kept it to myself. That didn't stop me from fantasizing, though: the sullen sun had finally broken over the battlefield by afternoon, gleaming on isolated breastplates and helmets as if they'd been handpicked. The trumpets, the drums, the horses at full gallop . . . the distant staccato of “La Marseillaise” and shouts of “
Vive l'empereur!
” Now,
that
made for stirring bedtime stories!