Chapter Chapter 73 · HOUGOMONT

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 château; 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

château; and the northern door, belonging to the farm. Napoleon sent

his brother Jérôme 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

château, the only ruin now remaining of the manor of Hougomont, rises

in a crumbling state,—disembowelled, one might say. The château 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 château,” 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 château 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

Nôtre; 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.

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!_