The Sage of Waterloo (8 page)

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; . . .

. . . But hark!—that heavy sound breaks in once more,

As if the clouds its echo would repeat;

And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before;

Arm! arm! it is—it is—the cannon's opening roar!

Some of you may have noticed that these are not, in fact, the words of Old Lavender, but those of Lord Byron, though one can hardly blame her for overlooking such a thing in the heat of storytelling. For our part, we couldn't have cared less. By the time Old Lavender was quoting Byron, we had long since left the hutch for the ball.

The evening's most eminent guests would miss their supper, alas. At around ten, a dispatch arrived for the Prince of Orange from Quatre Bras, announcing that the French had repulsed the Prussians northeast of Charleroi, a surprising skirmish, and far nearer than expected. The Prince slipped away from the party at once; Wellington continued to smile politely for another twenty minutes or so before slipping out himself.

A bugle sounded on the Place Royale before dawn, and then another: the unmistakable call to arms. Drums instantly set up their beating. Bagpipes blared the pibroch—the Highland martial summons. The commotion woke Charlotte Eaton and her sister in their hotel room overlooking the
place
. (They had not been invited to the ball.) They gazed out at the tumult and confusion of arms clanging, orders shouted, wagons rolling heavily by. Women could even be seen mounting their horses to follow their husbands into battle.

At the Richmonds', officers were asked to leave the ball quietly and rejoin their units. Soldiers hastened into the night, shuffling and unsure. They turned back to their loved ones many times, unable as they were to face the last, inevitable turn back. Musket butts rang on the cobbles. Chargers neighed and skittered over the slick stones, the clatter punctuated by loud, deep-toned commands. Some soldiers were still wearing their silk stockings and dancing pumps as they marched off to fight.

Quite a few would never go dancing again.

M
any conflicting accounts have been written about Quatre Bras.

“In my opinion” (Grandmother always ended her ball story with this comment), “it was Prince William of Orange who took the initiative and held off the French until reinforcements arrived. He doesn't get enough credit, I don't think. He made some ill-considered decisions on the battlefield, it's true. He was only twenty-three, after all. But he had guts, that boy. Napoleon said as much himself, during one of his many idle moments on St. Helena.”

I knew that Grandmother considered the Prince a foolish lad in many ways. But she also called him brave and impulsive, and that comment more than made up for any slight implied by naming me after him. She also said: “Nothing is worse than knowing you might have done something and didn't.”

She insisted that Wellington had gone to the ball uneasily, just to maintain public morale.
It was not a carefree affair, William.

Indeed.

But I never paid much attention whenever Old Lavender tried to dampen my pleasure in the ball. I just couldn't repress that image of the Duke, gazing mistily at the trellised wallpaper, his heart softening to some lady or other while of course in reality, as he was politely nodding and smiling at the ladies, he was busy evaluating, strategizing, galvanizing and postulating, among many other activities of four syllables or more with which inferior men have scant acquaintance.

When news reached the ball that Napoleon had crossed the frontier, Wellington and Richmond ducked into the latter's dressing room.

“Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!” Wellington declared. “He has gained twenty-four hours' march on me.”

The two men pored over a map. Wellington placed his thumbnail on a small village nine miles south of Brussels: Waterloo. “If we will not stop him at Quatre Bras, I must fight him here.”

You can see how, as a young romantic, I preferred a mistier version of the ball.

I
never much cared who won or lost, or who said what to whom, whenever I went to the Richmonds'. I never had trouble finding that soft, redolent, richly hued space in my head. Perhaps it was the proximity of family before falling asleep—the muffle of fur and gamey humidity that, together with Grandmother's soothing drone, somehow metamorphosed the hutch into a more exalted setting. Even now, when I have trouble falling asleep, I drift off to that splendid ballroom. I imagine the tap of dancing shoes against the wooden floor; the whoosh of silk; the murmuring elegance. And always, before sleep overtakes me, I can see the red-coated Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, taking a turn around the floor, his face set with deeper concerns. His boots made no sound, of course. He was above that sort of thing. He wasn't entirely in focus, either, but shimmered hazily, like the early autumn mists at the far end of the meadow. His high embroidered collar kept his chin aloft, and the golden braid over his shoulder swung as he moved. And in his eyes, the cool, even shine of duty . . .

“You mustn't idolize Wellington too much, William.” No one could spoil a good reverie like Grandmother. “There's nothing more boring than a fairy-tale hero. Did you know that his mother described him as ‘awkward,' and that he was an unremarkable student? He could be cold, aloof, controlling. And I bet you didn't know that his soldiers called him ‘Old Nosey' on account of that prominent feature of his.”

I wasn't sure what she was getting at with all this. I'd never met anyone as cold, aloof and controlling as Old Lavender could be, though I loved her dearly. We all have our faults, don't we? Maybe those “boring” heroes, so irritatingly glorious, have a special role to play in making up for all of our own shortcomings, even if in reality their exploits are far from perfect.

I rarely countered my grandmother to her face, on this or any other subject. But I must confess that Wellington's indifferent school performance, his coldness, his prominent nose . . . none of it tarnished the strapping, broad-shouldered Duke who glided across my imagination, and whom I would have happily called “Old Nosey” had I been fortunate enough to be born in his era, as something other than what I was, wearing a red uniform.

T
he fighting at Quatre Bras was so fierce that it could be heard in Brussels, almost eighty kilometers away. The cannonade continued unabated throughout the day of June 16, filling the population with terror and suspense. No one could be sure what was happening at the front. Rumors confirmed the worst—that the French would soon invade the town—only to be contradicted by stragglers from the battlefield, or citizens coming to their own, random conclusions.

On street corners, in shops, at pâtisseries and cafés, residents clapped their cheeks in despair.
The Belgians have abandoned their arms and fled! The French are advancing on Brussels
, nom de Dieu
!
Scuffles erupted on city squares.
Idiot, what are you saying? That old rascal Blücher has given the French a thrashing!

Nothing, and no one, could be believed.

People rushed home to gather their possessions for flight. The Parc de Bruxelles, so recently the scene of splendid uniforms and strolling ladies, was deserted. Charlotte Eaton wandered its paths and lingered on the city's boulevards and squares, hoping for news. By the end of the day, it seemed as if the cannons were growing ever louder and nearer. Towards nine in the evening, there was one tremendous, final burst, and at length the sound diminished and faded away.

What fine use Charlotte could have made of a lagomorph's intuition that day! Without it—without being able to discern the exact nature and location of hostilities, or evaluate the depth of anxiety and deception revealed through voice and body language, there was only one sensible thing to do: flee.

Every creature who was anywhere near Waterloo sensed what was going to happen. If they could, they got out . . .

Charlotte Eaton was no Old Lavender. But she knew, even without an accurate reading of the air, that it would have been madness to stay in Brussels any longer.

By the time she and her party had come to this conclusion, however, a stampede was heading for the exits. Not a single horse was available anywhere. Carriages were seized by force. On every corner, a frantic babble of languages lamented, squabbled, exclaimed, implored. No one doubted that evil lurked just outside the city limits, wearing a French uniform. The very idea threatened to shred public order entirely, though as the wagonloads of dead and wounded began to trickle into Brussels, many stoic hearts stayed behind to help.

At the Eatons' Hôtel de Flandre on the Place Royale, rooms were abandoned in haste, their doors gaping open, candles still burning inside. Below, noted Charlotte, the mistress of the hotel, “with a countenance dressed in woe, was carrying off her most valuable plate in order to secure it, ejaculating, as she went, the name of Jesus incessantly, and, I believe, unconsciously; while the master, with a red nightcap on his head, and the eternal pipe sticking mechanically out of one corner of his mouth, was standing with his hands in his pockets, a silent statue of despair.”

The first wounded stragglers appeared: Prussians and Belgians, each man bearing his own unique horror written in dirt and blood. For a soldier, the sight was as ordinary as a slaughtered ox to a farmer.

But not for an English lady.

“The moment in which I first saw some of these unfortunate people was, I think, one of the most painful I ever experienced,” Charlotte wrote, “and soon, very soon, they arrived in numbers. At every jolt of the slow wagons upon the rough pavement we seemed to feel the excruciating pain which they must suffer.”

The Eatons eventually secured a carriage, and on June 17 they became refugees along with thousands of others. Slowly, haltingly, they made their way to Antwerp, where they had a better chance of finding a boat back to England if things should come to that.

The day was sultry, the journey oppressive and fraught. Grim-faced, each traveler silently bore the weight of the reality unfolding just a few kilometers away, where the wounded lay helpless on the battlefield in the same, blazing heat, without shelter or water. Ladies whose lives had centered on drawing room comforts confronted horrors that would change them forever. For weeks, war to them had just been lively, colorful words. Now they knew the truth: that no civilized language could describe what was happening within earshot.

The amiable Duke of Brunswick was one of the first casualties of Quatre Bras.

The hearty, laughing Highlanders were felled almost to a man.

A stream of misery flooded Antwerp, clogging all available hospitals, hotels, private lodgings, hovels and tents. Wounded soldiers were billeted with ordinary citizens. Those without such luxury languished on doorsteps, under bridges, on open squares. Countless others, abandoned by providence, expired in the backs of the wagons that had dragged them from the field.