________________________________________________
_ Hougomont,--this was a funereal spot, the beginning of the obstacle,
the first resistance, which that great wood-cutter of Europe,
called Napoleon, encountered at Waterloo, the first knot under the
blows of his axe.
It was a chateau; it is no longer anything but a farm. For the antiquary,
Hougomont is Hugomons. This manor was built by Hugo, Sire of Somerel,
the same who endowed the sixth chaplaincy of the Abbey of Villiers.
The traveller pushed open the door, elbowed an ancient calash
under the porch, and entered the courtyard.
The first thing which struck him in this paddock was a door of the
sixteenth century, which here simulates an arcade, everything else
having fallen prostrate around it. A monumental aspect often has its
birth in ruin. In a wall near the arcade opens another arched door,
of the time of Henry IV., permitting a glimpse of the trees
of an orchard; beside this door, a manure-hole, some pickaxes,
some shovels, some carts, an old well, with its flagstone and its
iron reel, a chicken jumping, and a turkey spreading its tail,
a chapel surmounted by a small bell-tower, a blossoming pear-tree
trained in espalier against the wall of the chapel--behold the court,
the conquest of which was one of Napoleon's dreams. This corner
of earth, could he but have seized it, would, perhaps, have given
him the world likewise. Chickens are scattering its dust abroad
with their beaks. A growl is audible; it is a huge dog, who shows
his teeth and replaces the English.
The English behaved admirably there. Cooke's four companies
of guards there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army.
Hougomont viewed on the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising
buildings and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle,
one angle of which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains
the southern door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only
a gun's length away. Hougomont has two doors,--the southern door,
that of the chateau; and the northern door, belonging to the farm.
Napoleon sent his brother Jerome against Hougomont; the divisions
of Foy, Guilleminot, and Bachelu hurled themselves against it;
nearly the entire corps of Reille was employed against it, and miscarried;
Kellermann's balls were exhausted on this heroic section of wall.
Bauduin's brigade was not strong enough to force Hougomont on the north,
and the brigade of Soye could not do more than effect the beginning
of a breach on the south, but without taking it.
The farm buildings border the courtyard on the south. A bit of the
north door, broken by the French, hangs suspended to the wall.
It consists of four planks nailed to two cross-beams, on which the
scars of the attack are visible.
The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has
had a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall,
stands half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely
in the wall, built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the
courtyard on the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist
in all farms, with the two large leaves made of rustic planks:
beyond lie the meadows. The dispute over this entrance was furious.
For a long time, all sorts of imprints of bloody hands were visible
on the door-posts. It was there that Bauduin was killed.
The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror
is visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there;
it lives and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls
are in the death agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud;
the holes are wounds; the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making
an effort to flee.
This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings
which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.
The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in,
but could not stand their ground. Beside the chapel, one wing of
the chateau, the only ruin now remaining of the manor of Hougomont,
rises in a crumbling state,--disembowelled, one might say.
The chateau served for a dungeon, the chapel for a block-house.
There men exterminated each other. The French, fired on from
every point,--from behind the walls, from the summits of the garrets,
from the depths of the cellars, through all the casements,
through all the air-holes, through every crack in the stones,--
fetched fagots and set fire to walls and men; the reply to the
grape-shot was a conflagration.
In the ruined wing, through windows garnished with bars of iron,
the dismantled chambers of the main building of brick are visible;
the English guards were in ambush in these rooms; the spiral
of the staircase, cracked from the ground floor to the very roof,
appears like the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two stories;
the English, besieged on the staircase, and massed on its upper steps,
had cut off the lower steps. These consisted of large slabs
of blue stone, which form a heap among the nettles. Half a score
of steps still cling to the wall; on the first is cut the figure
of a trident. These inaccessible steps are solid in their niches.
All the rest resembles a jaw which has been denuded of its teeth.
There are two old trees there: one is dead; the other is wounded
at its base, and is clothed with verdure in April. Since 1815 it has
taken to growing through the staircase.
A massacre took place in the chapel. The interior, which has
recovered its calm, is singular. The mass has not been said there
since the carnage. Nevertheless, the altar has been left there--
an altar of unpolished wood, placed against a background of
roughhewn stone. Four whitewashed walls, a door opposite the altar,
two small arched windows; over the door a large wooden crucifix,
below the crucifix a square air-hole stopped up with a bundle of hay;
on the ground, in one corner, an old window-frame with the glass
all broken to pieces--such is the chapel. Near the altar there is
nailed up a wooden statue of Saint Anne, of the fifteenth century;
the head of the infant Jesus has been carried off by a large ball.
The French, who were masters of the chapel for a moment, and were
then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames filled this building;
it was a perfect furnace; the door was burned, the floor was burned,
the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his feet,
of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen; then it stopped,--
a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of the neighborhood.
The infant Jesus, decapitated, was less fortunate than the Christ.
The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ
this name is to be read: Henquinez. Then these others:
Conde de Rio Maior Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana). There
are French names with exclamation points,--a sign of wrath.
The wall was freshly whitewashed in 1849. The nations insulted
each other there.
It was at the door of this chapel that the corpse was picked up
which held an axe in its hand; this corpse was Sub-Lieutenant Legros.
On emerging from the chapel, a well is visible on the left.
There are two in this courtyard. One inquires, Why is there no bucket
and pulley to this? It is because water is no longer drawn there.
Why is water not drawn there? Because it is full of skeletons.
The last person who drew water from the well was named
Guillaume van Kylsom. He was a peasant who lived at Hougomont,
and was gardener there. On the 18th of June, 1815, his family
fled and concealed themselves in the woods.
The forest surrounding the Abbey of Villiers sheltered these unfortunate
people who had been scattered abroad, for many days and nights.
There are at this day certain traces recognizable, such as old
boles of burned trees, which mark the site of these poor bivouacs
trembling in the depths of the thickets.
Guillaume van Kylsom remained at Hougomont, "to guard the chateau,"
and concealed himself in the cellar. The English discovered
him there. They tore him from his hiding-place, and the combatants
forced this frightened man to serve them, by administering blows
with the flats of their swords. They were thirsty; this Guillaume
brought them water. It was from this well that he drew it.
Many drank there their last draught. This well where drank so many
of the dead was destined to die itself.
After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies.
Death has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest
to follow glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph.
This well was deep, and it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred
dead bodies were cast into it. With too much haste perhaps.
Were they all dead? Legend says they were not. It seems that on
the night succeeding the interment, feeble voices were heard calling
from the well.
This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls,
part stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower,
and folded like the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides.
The fourth side is open. It is there that the water was drawn.
The wall at the bottom has a sort of shapeless loophole,
possibly the hole made by a shell. This little tower had a platform,
of which only the beams remain. The iron supports of the well on
the right form a cross. On leaning over, the eye is lost in a deep
cylinder of brick which is filled with a heaped-up mass of shadows.
The base of the walls all about the well is concealed in a growth
of nettles.
This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms
the table for all wells in Belgium. The slab has here been
replaced by a cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless
fragments of knotty and petrified wood which resemble huge bones.
There is no longer either pail, chain, or pulley; but there is
still the stone basin which served the overflow. The rain-water
collects there, and from time to time a bird of the neighboring
forests comes thither to drink, and then flies away. One house
in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited. The door of this
house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door, beside a pretty Gothic
lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed slanting.
At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped this
handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed
off his hand with an axe.
The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume
van Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since. A woman with gray
hair said to us: "I was there. I was three years old. My sister,
who was older, was terrified and wept. They carried us off to
the woods. I went there in my mother's arms. We glued our ears
to the earth to hear. I imitated the cannon, and went boum! boum!"
A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard,
so we were told. The orchard is terrible.
It is in three parts; one might almost say, in three acts.
The first part is a garden, the second is an orchard, the third
is a wood. These three parts have a common enclosure: on the
side of the entrance, the buildings of the chateau and the farm;
on the left, a hedge; on the right, a wall; and at the end, a wall.
The wall on the right is of brick, the wall at the bottom is of stone.
One enters the garden first. It slopes downwards, is planted
with gooseberry bushes, choked with a wild growth of vegetation,
and terminated by a monumental terrace of cut stone, with balustrade
with a double curve.
It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which
preceded Le Notre; to-day it is ruins and briars. The pilasters
are surmounted by globes which resemble cannon-balls of stone.
Forty-three balusters can still be counted on their sockets; the rest
lie prostrate in the grass. Almost all bear scratches of bullets.
One broken baluster is placed on the pediment like a fractured leg.
It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six
light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither,
and being unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears
in their dens, accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies,
one of which was armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined
this balustrade and fired from above. The infantry men,
replying from below, six against two hundred, intrepid and with
no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a quarter of an hour to die.
One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden into the orchard,
properly speaking. There, within the limits of those few
square fathoms, fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour.
The wall seems ready to renew the combat. Thirty-eight loopholes,
pierced by the English at irregular heights, are there still.
In front of the sixth are placed two English tombs of granite.
There are loopholes only in the south wall, as the principal attack came
from that quarter. The wall is hidden on the outside by a tall hedge;
the French came up, thinking that they had to deal only with a hedge,
crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle and an ambuscade,
with the English guards behind it, the thirty-eight loopholes firing
at once a shower of grape-shot and balls, and Soye's brigade was broken
against it. Thus Waterloo began.
Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders,
the French scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand
amid the trees. All this grass has been soaked in blood.
A battalion of Nassau, seven hundred strong, was overwhelmed there.
The outside of the wall, against which Kellermann's two batteries
were trained, is gnawed by grape-shot.
This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May.
It has its buttercups and its daisies; the grass is tall there;
the cart-horses browse there; cords of hair, on which linen
is drying, traverse the spaces between the trees and force the
passer-by to bend his head; one walks over this uncultivated land,
and one's foot dives into mole-holes. In the middle of the grass
one observes an uprooted tree-bole which lies there all verdant.
Major Blackmann leaned against it to die. Beneath a great tree
in the neighborhood fell the German general, Duplat, descended from
a French family which fled on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
An aged and falling apple-tree leans far over to one side,
its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and of clayey loam.
Nearly all the apple-trees are falling with age. There is not one
which has not had its bullet or its biscayan.[6] The skeletons of dead
trees abound in this orchard. Crows fly through their branches,
and at the end of it is a wood full of violets.
[6] A bullet as large as an egg.
Bauduin, killed, Foy wounded, conflagration, massacre, carnage,
a rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood
mingled in fury, a well crammed with corpses, the regiment of
Nassau and the regiment of Brunswick destroyed, Duplat killed,
Blackmann killed, the English Guards mutilated, twenty French battalions,
besides the forty from Reille's corps, decimated, three thousand
men in that hovel of Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces,
shot, burned, with their throats cut,--and all this so that a peasant
can say to-day to the traveller: Monsieur, give me three francs,
and if you like, I will explain to you the affair of Waterloo! _
Read next: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK FIRST - WATERLOO: CHAPTER III. The Eighteenth of June, 1815
Read previous: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK FIRST - WATERLOO: CHAPTER I. What is met with on the Way from Nivelles
Table of content of Les Miserables
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
