HOUGOMONT.
Hougomont was a mournful spot, the beginning of the obstacle, the
first resistance which that great woodman of Europe, called Napoleon,
encountered at Waterloo; the first knot under the axe-blade. It was
a château, and is now but a farm. For the antiquarian Hougomont is
Hugo-mons: it was built by Hugo, Sire de Sommeril, the same who endowed
the sixth chapelry of the Abbey of Villers. The wayfarer pushed open
the door, elbowed an old carriage under a porch, and entered the yard.
The first thing that struck him in this enclosure was a gate of the
16th century, which now resembles an arcade, as all has fallen around
it. A monumental aspect frequently springs up from ruins. Near the
arcade there is another gateway in the wall, with key-stones in the
style of Henri IV., through which can be seen the trees of an orchard.
By the side of this gateway a dung-hill, mattocks, and shovels, a few
carts, an old well with its stone slab and iron windlass, a frisking
colt, a turkey displaying its tail, a chapel surmounted by a little
belfry, and a blossoming pear-tree growing in _espalier_ along the
chapel wall,--such is this yard, the conquest of which was a dream
of Napoleon's. This nook of earth, had he been able to take it, would
probably have given him the world. Chickens are scattering the dust
there with their beaks, and you hear a growl,--it is a large dog, which
shows its teeth and fills the place of the English. The English did
wonders here; Cooke's four companies of Guards resisted at this spot
for seven hours the obstinate attack of an army.
Hougomont, seen on a map, buildings and enclosures included, presents
an irregular quadrangle, of which one angle has been broken off. In
this angle is the southern gate within point-blank range of this
wall. Hougomont has two gates,--the southern one which belongs to
the château, and the northern which belongs to the farm. Napoleon
sent against Hougomont his brother Jérôme; Guilleminot's, Foy's, and
Bachelie's divisions were hurled at it; nearly the whole of Reille's
corps was employed there and failed; and Kellermann's cannon-balls
rebounded from this heroic wall. Bauduin's brigade was not strong
enough to force Hougomont on the north, and Soye's brigade could only
attack it on the south without carrying it.
The farm-buildings border the court-yard on the south, and a piece
of the northern gate, broken by the French, hangs from the wall. It
consists of four planks nailed on two cross-beams, and the scars of the
attack may still be distinguished upon it. The northern gate, which
was broken down by the French, and in which a piece has been let in
to replace the panel hanging to the wall, stands, half open, at the
extremity of the yard; it is cut square in a wall which is stone at
the bottom, brick at the top, and which closes the yard on the north
side. It is a simple gate, such as may be seen in all farm-yards, with
two large folding-doors made of rustic planks; beyond it are fields.
The dispute for this entrance was furious; for a long time all sorts
of marks of bloody hands could be seen on the side-post of the gate,
and it was here that Bauduin fell. The storm of the fight still lurks
in the court-yard: horror is visible there; the incidents of the
fearful struggle are petrified in it; people are living and dying in
it,--it was only yesterday. The walls are in the pangs of death, the
stones fall, the breaches cry out, the holes are wounds, the bent and
quivering trees seem making an effort to fly.
This yard was more built upon in 1815 than it is now; buildings which
have since been removed, formed in it redans and angles. The English
barricaded themselves in it; the French penetrated, but could not hold
their ground there. By the side of the chapel stands a wing of the
château, the sole relic left of the Manor of Hougomont, in ruins; we
might almost say gutted. The château was employed as a keep, the chapel
served as a block-house. Men exterminated each other there. The French,
fired upon from all sides, from behind walls, from granaries, from
cellars, from every window, from every air-hole, from every crack in
the stone, brought up fascines, and set fire to the walls and men; the
musketry fire was replied to by arson.
In the ruined wing you can look through windows defended by iron bars,
into the dismantled rooms of a brick building; the English Guards were
ambuscaded in these rooms, and the spiral staircase, hollowed out from
ground-floor to roof, appears like the interior of a broken shell. The
staircase has two landings; the English, besieged on this landing and
massed on the upper stairs, broke away the lowest. They are large slabs
of blue stone which form a pile among the nettles. A dozen steps still
hold to the wall; on the first the image of a trident is carved, and
these inaccessible steps are solidly set in their bed. All the rest
resemble a toothless jaw. There are two trees here, one of them dead,
and the other, which was wounded at the root, grows green again in
April. Since 1815 it has taken to growing through the staircase.
Men massacred each other in the chapel, and the interior, which is
grown quiet again, is strange. Mass has not been said in it since
the carnage, but the altar has been left,--an altar of coarse wood
supported by a foundation of rough stone. Four whitewashed walls, a
door opposite the altar, two small arched windows, a large wooden
crucifix over the door, above the crucifix a square air-hole stopped
up with hay; in a corner, on the ground, an old window sash, with the
panes all broken,--such is the chapel. Near the altar is a wooden
statue of St. Anne, belonging to the 15th century; the head of the
infant Saviour has been carried away by a shot. The French, masters for
a moment of the chapel and then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames
filled the building, and it became a furnace; the door burned, the
flooring burned, but the wooden Christ was not burned; the fire nibbled
away the feet, of which only the blackened stumps can now be seen, and
then stopped. It was a miracle, say the country people. The walls are
covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ you read the name
Henquinez; then these others, Conde de Rio Maïor, Marquis y Marquisa
de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with marks of admiration,
signs of anger. The wall was whitewashed again in 1849, for the nations
insulted each other upon it. It was at the door of this chapel that
a body was picked up, holding an axe in its hand; it was the body of
Sub-lieutenant Legros.
On leaving the chapel you see a well on your left hand. As there are
two wells in this yard, you ask yourself why this one has no bucket
and windlass? Because water is no longer drawn from it. Why is it not
drawn? Because it is full of skeletons. The last man who drew water
from this well was a man called William van Kylsom: he was a peasant
who lived at Hougomont, and was gardener there. On June 18, 1815, his
family took to flight and concealed themselves in the woods. The forest
round the Abbey of Villers sheltered for several days and nights the
dispersed luckless country people. Even at the present day certain
vestiges, such as old burnt trunks of trees, mark the spot of these
poor encampments among the thickets. Van Kylsom remained at Hougomont
to "take care of the château," and concealed himself in a cellar. The
English discovered him there; he was dragged from his lurking-place,
and the frightened man was forced by blows with the flat of a sabre
to wait on the combatants. They were thirsty, and he brought them
drink, and it was from this well he drew the water. Many drank there
for the last time, and this well, from which so many dead men drank,
was destined to die too. After the action, the corpses were hastily
interred; death has a way of its own of harassing victory, and it
causes pestilence to follow glory. Typhus is an annex of triumph. This
well was deep and was converted into a tomb. Three hundred dead were
thrown into it, perhaps with too much haste. Were they all dead? The
legend says no. And it seems that, on the night following the burial,
weak voices were heard calling from the well.
This well is isolated in the centre of the yard; three walls, half of
brick, half of stone, folded like the leaves of a screen, and forming a
square tower, surround it on three sides, while the fourth is open. The
back wall has a sort of shapeless peep-hole, probably made by a shell.
This tower once had a roof of which only the beams remain, and the iron
braces of the right-hand wall form a cross. You bend over and look down
into a deep brick cylinder full of gloom. All round the well the lower
part of the wall is hidden by nettles. This well has not in front of it
the large blue slab usually seen at all Belgian wells. Instead of it,
there is a frame-work, supporting five or six shapeless logs of knotted
wood which resemble large bones. There is no bucket, chain, or windlass
remaining: but there is still the stone trough, which served to carry
off the water. The rain-water collects in it, and from time to time a
bird comes from the neighboring forest to drink from it and then fly
away.
One house in this ruin, the farm-house, is still inhabited, and the
door of this house opens on the yard. By the side of a pretty Gothic
lock on this gate there is an iron handle. At the moment when the
Hanoverian lieutenant Wilda seized this handle in order to take shelter
in the farm, a French sapper cut off his hand with a blow of his axe.
The old gardener Van Kylsom, who has long been dead, was grandfather
of the family which now occupies the house. A gray-headed woman said
to me: "I was here, I was three years old, and my sister, who was
older, felt frightened and cried. I was carried away to the woods in
my mother's arms, and people put their ears to the ground to listen. I
imitated the cannon and said, 'Boom, boom.'" A door on the left hand
of the yard, as we said, leads into the orchard, which is terrible. It
is in three parts, we might almost say, in three acts. The first part
is a garden, the second the orchard, the third a wood. These three
parts have one common _enceinte_; near the entrance, the buildings of
the château and the farm, on the left a hedge, on the right a wall,
and at the end a wall. The right-hand wall is of brick, the bottom
one of stone. You enter the garden first; it slopes, is planted with
gooseberry-bushes, is covered with wild vegetation, and is closed by a
monumental terrace of cut stones with balustrades. It was a Seigneurial
garden in the French style, that preceded Le Notre: now it is ruins
and briers. The pilasters are surmounted by globes that resemble stone
cannon-balls. Forty-three balustrades are still erect; the others are
lying in the grass, and nearly all have marks of musket-balls. One
fractured balustrade is laid upon the stem like a broken leg.
It was in this garden, which is lower than the orchard, that six
voltigeurs of the 1st light regiment, having got in and unable to
get out, and caught like bears in a trap, accepted combat with
two Hanoverian companies, one of which was armed with rifles. The
Hanoverians lined the balustrade and fired down: the voltigeurs, firing
up, six intrepid men against two hundred, and having no shelter but the
gooseberry-bushes, took a quarter of an hour in dying. You climb up a
few steps and reach the orchard, properly so called. Here, on these few
square yards, fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall
seems ready to recommence the fight, for the thirty-eight loop-holes
pierced by the English at irregular heights may still be seen. In front
of the wall are two English tombs made of granite. There are only
loop-holes in the south wall, for the principal attack was on that
side. This wall is concealed on the outside by a quickset hedge. The
French came up under the impression that they had only to carry this
hedge, and found the wall an obstacle and an ambuscade; the English
Guards, behind the thirty-eight loop-holes, firing at once a storm of
canister and bullets; and Soye's brigade was dashed to pieces against
it. Waterloo began thus.
The orchard, however, was taken; as the French had no ladders, they
climbed up with their nails. A hand-to-hand fight took place under the
trees, and all the grass was soaked with blood, and a battalion of
Nassau, 700 strong, was cut to pieces here. On the outside the wall,
against which Kellermann's two batteries were pointed, is pock-marked
with cannon-balls. This orchard is sensitive, like any other, to the
month of May; it has its buttercups and its daisies, the grass is tall
in it, the plough-horses browse in it, hair ropes on which linen is
hung to dry occupy the space between the trees, and make the visitor
bow his head, and as you walk along your foot sinks in mole-holes.
In the middle of the grass you notice an uprooted, outstretched, but
still flourishing tree. Major Blackman leaned against it to die. Under
another large tree close by fell the German General Duplat, a French
refugee belonging to a family that fled upon the revocation of the
edict of Nantes. Close at hand an old sickly apple-tree, poulticed with
a bandage of straw and clay, hangs its head. Nearly all the apple-trees
are dying of old age, and there is not one without its cannon-ball or
bullet. Skeletons of dead trees abound in this orchard, ravens fly
about in the branches, and at the end is a wood full of violets.
Bauduin killed; Foy wounded; arson, massacre, carnage, a stream
composed of English, French, and German blood furiously mingled;
a well filled with corpses; the Nassau regiment and the Brunswick
regiment destroyed; Duplat killed; Blackman killed; the English Guards
mutilated; twenty French battalions of the forty composing Reille's
corps decimated; three thousand men in this château of Hougomont
alone, sabred, gashed, butchered, shot, and burnt,--all this that a
peasant may say to a traveller at the present day, "If you like to
give me three francs, sir, I will tell you all about the battle of
Waterloo."