WATERLOO AND THROUGH BELGIUM.
To Waterloo.--Beggars and guides.--The
Mound.--Chateau Hougomont.--Victor Hugo's "sunken
road."--Antwerp.--A visit to the cathedral.--A
drive about the city.--An excursion to Ghent.--The
funeral services in the cathedral.--"Poisoned? Ah,
poor man!"--The watch-tower.--The Friday-market
square.--The nunnery.--Longfellow's pilgrims to
"the belfry of Bruges."
WE could not leave the city without driving out to the battle-field of
Waterloo. It is about a dozen miles to The Mound, and you may take the
public coach if you choose--it runs daily. Our party being large, we
preferred to engage a carriage.
We left the house after breakfast, and passed through the wide,
delightful avenues of the Foret de Soignes,--the Bois de Boulogne of
Brussels,--then across the peaceful country which seemed never to have
known anything so disturbing as war. Beyond the park lies the village
which gave its name to the battle-field though the thickest of the fight
was not there. In an old brick church, surmounted by a dome, lie
intombed many minor heroes of the conflict. But heroes soon pall upon
the taste, and nothing less than Wellington or Napoleon himself could
have awakened a spark of interest in us by this time. Then, too, the
vivid present blinded us to the past. The air was sweet with summer
scents. Mowers were busy in the hayfields. A swarm of little barefooted
beggars importuned us, turning dizzy somersaults until we could see only
a maze of flying, dusty feet on either side. One troop, satisfied or
despairing, gave way to another, and the guides were almost as annoying
as the beggars. They walk for miles out of their villages to forestall
each other, and meet the carriages that are sure to come from Brussels
on pleasant days. They drive sharp bargains. As you near the centre of
interest, competition is greater, and their demands proportionately
less. We refused the extortionate overtures of two or three, and finally
picked up a shrewd-faced young fellow in a blue blouse, who hung upon
the step of the carriage, or ran beside it for the last mile or two of
the distance. The village of Mont St. Jean follows that of Waterloo. It
is only a scant collection of whitewashed farm buildings of brick. We
rolled through it without stopping, and out again between the quiet,
smiling fields, our minds utterly refusing to grasp the idea that they
had swarmed once with an army; that in this little village we had just
left--dull, half asleep in the sunshine--dreadful slaughter had held
high carnival one July day, not many years before. Even when the guide,
clinging to the door of the carriage, rattled over the story of the
struggle in a _patois_ all his own, hardly a shadow of the scene was
presented to us.
As our horses slackened their pace, he stepped down from his perch to
gather a nosegay of the flowers by the road-side, making no pause in his
mechanical narrative--of how the Anglo-Belgian army were gathered upon
this road and the fields back to the wood, on the last day of the fight;
how many of the officers had been called at a moment's notice from the
gayeties at Brussels, and more than one was found dead upon the field
the next day, under the soaking rain, dressed as for a ball. He pushed
back his visorless cap, uttering an exclamation over the heat, and
adding, in the same breath, that just here, about Mont St. Jean, the
battle waged fiercely in the afternoon, when Ney, with his brave
cuirassiers, tried in vain to carry the position; and all the time, the
summer sounds of twittering birds and hum of locusts were in our ears;
the barefooted children still turned upon their axles beside the
carriage wheels as we rolled along, and that other day seemed so far
away, that we could neither bring it near nor realize it. One grim
reminder of the past rose in the distance, and, as we drew near, swelled
and grew before our eyes. It was the huge mound of earth raised two
hundred feet, to commemorate the victory of the allies. Hills were cut
down, the very face of nature changed for miles around, to rear this
monument to pride and vain-glory. Upon its summit crouches the Belgian
lion.
We turn from the paved road, when we have reached what seems to be a
mass of unsightly ruins, with only a tumbling outbuilding left here and
there. The whole is enclosed by a wall, which skirts also an orchard,
neglected, grown to weeds. The carriage stops before the great gates. It
is very cool and quiet in the shaded angle of the battered wall as we
step down. It has been broken and chipped as if by pick-axes. Ah! the
shot struck hardest here. The top of the low wall is irregular; the
bricks have been knocked out; the dust has sifted down; the mosses have
gathered, and a fringe of grass follows all its length. Even sweet wild
flowers blossom where the muskets rested in those dreadful days. At
intervals, half way up its height, a brick is missing. Accident? Ah, no;
hastily constructed loopholes, through which the English fired at first,
before the horrible time when they beat each other down with the butts
of their guns while they fought hand to hand here, like wild beasts.
We enter the court-yard. Only a roughly plastered room or two remain,
where the greed that gloats even over the field of blood offers
_souvenirs_ of the place importunately. In the centre of this court-yard
may still be seen the well that was filled with corpses. It must have
given out blood for many a day. Upon one side are the remains of the
building used for a hospital in the beginning of the fight, but where
the wounded and dying perished in torment, when the French succeeded in
firing the chateau; for this is _Hougomont_.
We came out at the gateway where we had entered; crossed the slope under
the shadow of the branches from the apple trees, and followed the road
winding through wheat-fields to The Mound. Breast-high on either side
rose the nodding crests; and among them wild flowers, purple, scarlet,
and blue, fairly dazzled our eyes, as they waved with the golden grain
in the sunshine. "O, smiling harvest-fields," we said, "you have been
sown with heroes; you have been enriched with blood!"
It was a long, dizzy climb up the face of The Mound to the narrow
foothold beside the platform where rests that grim, gigantic lion. Once
there, we held to every possible support in the hurricane of wind that
seized us, while the guide gave a name to each historic farm and village
spread out before our eyes. Only a couple of miles cover all the
battle-field--the smallest where grand armies ever met; but the
slaughter was the more terrible.
Connected with an inn at the foot of The Mound is a museum of
curiosities. Here are queer old helmets worn by the cuirassiers, hacked
and rust-stained; broken swords, and old-fashioned muskets; buttons, and
bullets even--everything that could be garnered after such a sowing of
the earth.
In unquestioning faith we bought buttons stained with mildew, and
bearing upon them, in raised letters, the number of a regiment. Alas!
reason told us, later, that the buttons disposed of annually here would
supply an ordinary army. And rumor added, that they are buried now in
quantities, to be exhumed as often as the supply fails.
I remembered Victor Hugo to have said in _Les Miserables_ something in
regard to a sunken road here, which proved a pitfall to the French, and
helped, in his judgment, to turn the fortunes of the day. But we had
seen no sunken road. I mentioned it to the guide, who said that Victor
Hugo spent a fortnight examining the ground before writing that
description of the battle. "He lodged at our house," he added. "My
father was his guide. What he wrote was all quite true. There is now no
road such as he described; that was all changed when the earth was
scraped together to form The Mound."
We lunched at the inn, surrounded by mementos and trophies, and served
by an elderly woman, whose father had been a sergeant in the Belgian
army, then late in the afternoon drove back to town.
The pleasant days at Brussels soon slipped by, and then we were off to
Antwerp--only an hour's ride. I will tell you nothing about the former
wealth and commercial activity of the city--that in the sixteenth
century it was the wealthiest city in Europe, &c, &c. For all these
interesting particulars, see Murray's Handbook of Northern Germany. As
soon as we had secured rooms at the hotel, dropped our satchels and
umbrellas, we followed the chimes to the cathedral. The houses of the
people have crept close to it, until many of them, old and gray, have
fairly grown to it, like barnacles to a ship; or it seemed as though
they had built their nests, like the rooks, under the moss-grown eaves.
The interior of the cathedral was singularly grand and open. As we threw
our shawls about us--a precaution never omitted--an old man shuffled out
from a dark corner to show the church, take our _francs_, and pull aside
the curtains from before the principal pictures, if so dignified a name
as curtain can be applied to the dusty, brown cambric that obstructed
our vision. Rubens's finest pictures are here, and indeed the city
abounds in all that is best of Flemish art,--most justly, since it was
the birthplace of its master. Rubens in the flesh we had seen at the
Louvre; the spiritual manifestation was reserved for Antwerp; and to
recall the city is to recall a series of visions of which one may not
speak lightly.
Across, from the cathedral, upon a wide wooden bench in the market-place
we sat a moment to consider our ways--the signal for the immediate
swooping down upon us of guides and carriages, and the result of which
was, our departure in a couple of dingy open vehicles to finish the
city. We crawled about the town like a diminutive funeral procession,
dismounting at the Church of St. Jacques to see the pictures, with which
it is filled. In one of the chapels was a young American artist, copying
Rubens's picture of "A Holy Family"--the one in which his two wives and
others of his family enact the part of Mary, Martha, St. Jerome, &c.
Behind the high altar is the tomb of Rubens, with an inscription of
sufficient length to extinguish an ordinary man. There was a museum,
too, in the city, rich in the works of Rubens and Vandyck, and the fine
park in the new part of the town, as well as the massive docks built by
the first Napoleon, were yet to be seen. The older members of the party
were in the first carriage, and received any amount of valuable
information, which was transmitted to us who followed in a succession of
shouts sounding as much like "fire!" as anything else, with all manner
of beckoning, and pointing, and wild throwing up of arms, that
undoubtedly gave vent to their feelings, but brought only confusion and
distraction to our minds. Not to be outdone, our driver began a series
of utterly unintelligible explanations, the only part of which we
understood in the least was, when pointing to the docks, he ejaculated,
"Napoleon!" At that we nodded our heads frantically, which only
encouraged him to go on. Pausing before a low, black house, exactly like
all the others, he pointed to it with his whip. It said "Hydraulics"
upon a rickety sign over the door. There were old casks, and anchors,
and ropes, and rotting wood all around, for it was down upon the
wharves. We tried to look enlightened, gratified even, and succeeded so
well that he entered upon an elaborate dissertation in an unknown
tongue. What do you suppose it was all about? Can it be that he was
explaining the principles of hydraulics?
We made, one clay, an excursion from Antwerp to Ghent and Bruges. We
left the train at Ghent to walk up through the narrow streets, that have
no sidewalks, to the cathedral. There was a funeral within. The driver
of the hearse profusely decorated with inverted feather dusters, was
comfortably smoking his pipe outside. A little hunchbacked guide, with
great, glassy eyes, and teeth like yellow fangs, led us up the aisle to
the screen beside the high altar, where we looked between the tombs and
the monuments, upon the long procession of men circling around the
coffin in the choir, each with a lighted candle in hand. As there were
only about a dozen candles in all, and each must hold one while he
passed the coffin, it was a piece of dexterity, at least, to manage
them, which so engrossed our attention, that we caught but an occasional
sentence from our guide's whispered story of the seventh bishop of
Ghent, who donated the pulpit to the cathedral, and around whose marble
feet we were trying to peep; of the ninth, who was poisoned as he went
upon some mission ("Poisoned? Ah, poor man!" we ejaculated, absently,
our eyes anxiously fixed upon one man to whom had been given no candle
as yet); of the tall brass candlesticks, supposed to have been brought
from England in the time of Cromwell, and a host more of fragmentary
information, forgotten now. The whole interior of the church is rich in
decoration, black and white marble predominating, with pictures of the
early Flemish school filling every available space. Once out of the
church, we climbed into an ark of a carriage, and drove about the city,
our little guide standing beside the driver, back to the horses most of
the time, to pour out a torrent of history and romance. A most edifying
spectacle it would have been anywhere else. Do read Henry Taylor's
"Philip von Artevelde" before going to Ghent: the mingled romance and
history throw a charm about the place and people which bare history can
never give. Veritable Yankees these old Flemish weavers seem to have
been, with a touch of the Irish in their composition--always up in arms
for their rights, and striking out wherever they saw a head. There is a
new part to the city, with a grand opera-house, shaded promenades and
palatial dwellings, but one cares only for the narrow, dingy streets,
and the old market squares, in which every stone could tell a story.
We saw the tall, brick watch-tower, where still hangs the bell that
tolled,--
"I am Roland, I am Roland! There is victory in the land,"
and the old Hotel de Ville, of conglomerate architecture, one side of
which, in the loveliest flamboyant Gothic imaginable, seems crumbling
away from its very richness. In the Friday-market square--it chancing to
be Friday--was a score of bustling busybodies, swarming like bees.
Here, in the old, quarrelsome times, battles were fought between the
different guilds. I say battles, because at one time fifteen hundred
were slain in this very square. Such a peaceful old square as it seemed
to be the day of our visit! the old gray houses, that have echoed to the
sound of strife, fairly smiling in the sunshine, and the market women
kneeling upon the stones which have run with blood. At one corner rose a
tower, and half way up its height may still be seen the iron rod, over
which was hung imperfect linen, to shame the weaver who had dared to
offer it in the market.
There is a great nunnery here in Ghent--a town of itself, surrounded by
a moat and a wall, where are six hundred or more sisters, from families
high and low, who tend the sick, weave lace, and mortify the flesh in
black robes and white veils. When they become weary of it, they may
return to the world, the flesh, and--their homes: no vows bind them. We
drove along the streets past the cell-like houses where they dwell. Over
the door of each was the name of her patron saint. It seemed a quiet
retreat, a noiseless city, notwithstanding the six hundred women! But by
far the most interesting sight, because the most ancient in the quaint
old city, was the archway and turret of the old royal castle, erected a
thousand years ago; only this gateway remains. Here John o' Gaunt was
born. Built all round, and joined to it, are houses of more recent date,
themselves old and tottering, and the arch beneath which kings and
queens rode once, is now the entrance to a cotton factory.
We had only a few hours at Bruges--the city once more powerful than
Antwerp even, but where not a house has been raised for a hundred years,
and where nearly a third of its inhabitants are paupers. But decay and
dilapidation are strong elements of the picturesque, and nothing seen
that day was more charming than a piece of wall, still standing,
belonging to the old Charles V.'s palace--honey-combed, black, of florid
Gothic architecture, rising from the quiet waters of the canal. At one
end it threw an arch over the street, with a latticed window above it,
beneath which we passed, after crossing the bridge. More than one
picture of Bruges rests within my memory--its canals spanned by the
picturesque bridges, and overhung with willows that dipped their long
branches into the water, and the quaint old houses with many-stepped
gables, rising sheer from the stream.
But with all its past grandeur, the old city is best known to us
Americans through the chimes from its belfry tower, and we were some of
Longfellow's pilgrims. We drove into the great paved Place under the
shadow of the belfry tower when its shadows were growing long, and
watched the stragglers across the square--women in queer black-hooded
cloaks; chubby little blue-eyed maidens with school-books in hand; a
party of tourists; and last, but by no means least, the ubiquitous
American girl, with an immense bow on the back of her dress, and her eye
fixed steadily upon the milliner's shop just visible around the corner.
Almost three hundred feet the dingy brick tower rose above us, with low
wings on either side, where were once the halls of some guilds, in the
days when the tower was a lookout to warn of coming foes,--when the
square was planned for defence. In a little court-yard, gained by
passing under its arch, we watched and listened, until at last the sweet
tinkle of the silver-toned bells broke the hush of waiting--so far away,
so heavenly, we held our breath, lest we should lose the sound that fell
"Like the psalms from some old cloister when the nuns sing in the choir,
And the great bell tolled among them like the chanting of a friar."
We came back to Antwerp that night, tired, but triumphant, feeling as
though we had read a page from an old book, or sung a strain from an old
song.