The Sage of Waterloo

  The Sage of

  Waterloo

  A Tale

  Leona Francombe

  For Peter, my sage,

  and in honor of Mum and Dad

  Yea, the coneys are scared by the thud of hoofs, And their white scuts flash at their vanishing heels . . .

  —THOMAS HARDY,

  “The Field of Waterloo”

  The conflict is there petrified; it lives, it dies; it was but yesterday. The walls are still in their final throes; the holes are wounds; the breaches are howling; the trees bend and shudder, as if making an effort to escape.

  —VICTOR HUGO

  on visiting the site of

  Hougoumont Farm after

  the Battle of Waterloo

  Preface

  The ancient farmstead of Hougoumont sits beneath the ridge near Waterloo where, on June 17, 1815, the Duke of Wellington amassed his troops. He garrisoned the farm that evening and was determined to hold on to it, bringing in supplies and shoring up defenses throughout that rain-drenched night. The next day, French soldiers under the command of Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, mounted no fewer than seven attacks on the gates and walls of Hougoumont. What initially had been intended as a skirmish raged all day, sapping Napoleon of troops needed elsewhere.

  Combat was brutal, often hand-to-hand. The chateau and several outbuildings were set ablaze by French artillery; the North Gate was momentarily breached, then retaken; heavy wooden doors are, to this day, riddled with musket shot. The British Guards and their German allies in the woods eventually prevailed. But the cost in blood was staggering: within eight hours, six thousand men from both sides were either dead or wounded. This remote Belgian farm would turn out to be pivotal to the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo, and had the French taken it, history might have followed a very different route.

  Few had heard of Hougoumont before that tumultuous day. The estate was the seat of an obscure Belgian aristocrat and rather isolated, though it was prosperous, with a small chateau, formal walled garden in the French style, chapel, gardener’s house and various outbuildings for animals and grain. Fine dining had no doubt been a daily ritual. As recipes for rabbit and pigeon dishes were—and still are—numerous in Belgian cuisine, both species, along with a decent onion patch, would have been nurtured on the property with the dinner table in mind. So there were almost certainly rabbits at Hougoumont at the time of the Battle of Waterloo.

  L. Francombe

  Brussels, Belgium

  The Sage of

  Waterloo

  1

  All early memories are close-ups, aren’t they? A blade of grass; a clump of earth; the underside of someone’s tail. For me, it was Grandmother’s flank. My nose still seeks that smell: a sour-sweet, heady brew of hay, dung and humidity, all alchemized in the crucible of old age. There was a decaying floral note to her perfume, too, hence her name: Old Lavender. She was very large and of no particular color—a mix of dull grays and browns, I suppose, though I’d never really thought about it. One never really thinks about such things when it comes to close family members. All the qualities we criticize in others—fatness, dullness, ugliness, smell—somehow don’t matter so much in relatives.

  Old Lavender possessed a different set of attributes altogether, some of them as unpalatable as those listed above, but her temperament was such that, in view of the strength of her kick, no one dared to criticize anything about her. She spent her days crouched in a hollow against the wire fence, eyes half shut, contemplating the infinite. One ear would lie flat against her neck, the other pointing to the sky. She always sat like that. We suspected this was how she gathered her information: one ear searching the heavens for signals while the other acted as a sort of ground. The most interesting things in life cannot be seen, William, Grandmother often told me, which made her sky-combing all the more intriguing.

  No one could say how long Old Lavender had lived in the colony. She was grandmother to at least ten generations, and while other relatives disappeared over the years at the farmer’s whims, or those of Moon, the invisible arbiter of our kind, she had always been permitted to stay. No one dared to cross her. She was just too big, for one thing. And of course, there was that smell . . .

  But perhaps I ought to start at the beginning. Not out of any logic, but because, for some reason, the beginning is getting clearer and clearer all the time, as if I’m approaching the end of the route we rabbits call the Hollow Way: a delightfully sheltered avenue smelling of damp earth and rot. The route is wider at this point, as it happens. Trees overhead provide the perfect balance of light and shade. And you can see quite far in both directions from here (though forward motion is, of course, still the preferred kind). There are many soft hillocks and hollows along this part of the Way on which one can rest and look back, and I suggest that you do this, too, because the view behind is as clear as the view ahead, and offers some valuable lessons besides.

  Our route thus offers up a curious sort of map: a path forward, but only decrypted by the path behind. I imagine the landmarks along our Way are familiar to you, too—they’re more or less standard on your typical life journey, I think: odd family members; dubious trysts; providence; bliss; disaster. The Hollow Way of my story, however, is unique in that, along with a particularly odoriferous grandmother, it also takes in the Battle of Waterloo. If you think that such a tale is rather exceptional for a simple rodent, you’d be wrong. For in fact, strictly speaking I’m a lagomorph, not a rodent, and proud of it.

  Here I find myself, then, arrived at a pleasant, grassy knoll, and with your indulgence I shall look back and tell you what I see.

  We rabbits begin and end our lives in the earth, which may seem a vaguely circular progression, but I must hasten to say that we’re not chained to an endless wheel of existence the way certain human sects are. I’ve heard that some people keep going round and round until the end of time, reincarnated as a fly, a reptile, someone’s uncle, or, if you’re terribly unlucky and happen to find yourself at Waterloo, as Napoleon. Moon can be louche at times, but he would never preside over such a dreary worldview.

  Our philosophy is less hectic. We follow the Way at the speed it unfolds—no faster, no slower. This is very important. We are taught from infancy that any effort to adjust this speed is fruitless and can lead to ruin. Therefore we leap, graze, idle and cogitate according to a rhythm pulsing deep within us, like an essential organ. When things start to seem vaguely familiar, and then suddenly look very much like home, we take one, final step. And what a step it is! Take it, they say, and you enter the greenest, springiest, most sublime meadow of all. We know without question when we’re on the right road to this place.

  Waterloo is where I was born, and where I spent the first three years of my life. Well, technically it wasn’t Waterloo itself but the ancient Brabant farm of Hougoumont, one of the iconic battle sites situated in the fields a few kilometers farther up the Chaussée de Waterloo. In 1815, this long, forested avenue funneled weary streams of humanity back and forth between the battlefield and the city—between destiny and deliverance. Their passage was perilous, the thoroughfare often impassable. Where the city of Brussels has now expanded into tony suburbs, there were once deep woods, isolated hamlets and a pavement so rutted after heavy rains that wagons often remained stuck for days, or were simply abandoned by the side of the road. Thick undergrowth pressed in on both sides, and in the forest beyond, deserters from the battle found ample shelter . . . as did plunderers. Cottages and inns all along the chaussée stood empty in the face of a rumored French advance.

  Today the plunderers are gone, thank heavens. But go past the fast-food emporiums and supermarkets, cross over the Brussels ring road and suddenly, just beyond the elec
tronics store, all the clamor of traffic and shopping gives way to a zone of silence, as if 1815 were not so very long ago after all. No one can miss it, this invisible boundary. Commerce stops dead at its feet. Venture on: when you spot the curious, conical hill with a statue on top—the Lion’s Mound—you’ll know you’ve entered the great battlefield itself: a wide, windy vacuum; the “morne plaine” of Victor Hugo. And indeed, beneath the winter barley, the clover, and the lumpen celeriac heads shrunken like mummies, this dreary plain is at its heart a tomb.

  Cross the fields to your right and there, in a wooded valley, you’ll find the farm I knew as home. Outbuildings and a gardener’s house doze against a ragged hem of farmland. If you just stumble across Hougoumont, the scene is quite unremarkable: delapidated walls without ornament; encroaching weeds; the rusting remnants of farming life.

  Until you see the three chestnuts.

  At first you wonder why someone hasn’t taken them down. Two are dead, the third not far behind them. They look like freaks—like alien carcasses stripped of their skin. Then you realize that they’re over three hundred years old, and the only remaining witnesses to the fighting, and you understand. Place your hand on one of them—even on a dead one: you’ll detect a pulse.

  Hougoumont is . . . dear me, where are the words? It’s a mute place, you see, but with such startling eloquence. Perhaps the fact that few visitors to the battlefield even know it exists fosters the air of an unopened message. Physically speaking, it’s a ruin: a decaying farmstead of brick and sandstone in perfect complicity with the land. The other, less tangible things are far more difficult to describe. Go there yourself and you’ll feel it: the knowing wind; the trees scarred as leviathans; and a strange sort of peace that isn’t peaceful at all but alert with memory and other, less palatable phenomena. Sometimes, when the wind comes off the eastern fields, it’s as if a worn curtain is shifting, and through a tear in the fabric you can see something unimaginable for such a sleepy backwater.

  I was happy at Hougoumont. The last farmer to live there was not like the aristocrats who had once owned the chateau (there was no more chateau—­the French had shelled it). He raised cattle, and seemed far less interested in rabbit and pigeon dishes than his predecessors. He was, thank heavens, a frozen-food sort of man, and thus our existence was blissfully irrelevant.

  We were cared for by a local boy, Emmanuel, an oafish giant who neglected us mainly because he could never remember whether he had fed us or not. He also flatly refused to come to the farm after dark. If other chores kept him busy elsewhere and the twilight began to deepen, he would just toss a few grains over the fence to us and pedal off on his bicycle—and at an impressive speed, too, for such a pudgy fellow. Perhaps, like many simpletons, his raw senses made up for lack of brainpower; perhaps he could intuit the unrest at Hougoumont even better than we could, and felt it begin to stir at dusk.

  Emmanuel was too benign to cause any intentional harm. We even suspected that the only reason the farmer kept us on was to give him something to do. Maybe because the boy seemed so unloved, we developed a love for him ourselves, though I don’t think he ever noticed, to be honest. But as I learned only years later, such a thing should never play a role in the offering of love.

  My crèche was the humblest of rabbit pens. The run stood next to a dovecote—a hexagonal Victorian frippery abandoned years ago—and was enclosed by rusting chicken wire nailed to a fence and strung overhead in a roof of sorts, although any predator worthy of the name could probably have found a way in. Grass once grew in the enclosure, but so long ago that my grandmother was the only one who remembered it. For the rest of us, hard, unyielding earth was our world.

  The run was furnished with a makeshift hutch the farmer had cobbled together with fallen beams from the old granary. Whenever he remembered, Emmanuel herded us into this fetid abode before sundown; if he forgot, or the approaching darkness scared him off, most of us knew to go in by ourselves. The jaws and beaks of predators, real or imagined, loomed large in the country night.

  Beyond the dovecote we could glimpse the old, wounded Hougoumont: the original gardener’s house, stables, cobbled courtyard and battle-worn doors, all creeping with mold and cracking in the tight, dank grasp of time. Only the tiny chapel had been restored, its new roof sloping like a nun’s cap, a remnant of the vanished chateau still attached to one end. From our grandmother we’d learned where in the courtyard the famous haunted well had been. According to legend, three hundred corpses were thrown down it just after the fighting in an effort to ward off disease, and later, long after any poor, still-breathing soul could have uttered them, unearthly cries still issued from the depths.

  Hougoumont’s restless past was our only company. I’m not speaking of haunted wells here; or of trifling amusements to relieve boredom. You see, our pen overlooked what used to be the formal chateau gardens, witness to the slaughter of 1815. What lingered there was powerful enough even for human nerve endings to register. You would hardly believe it now, though, from the lush expanse of meadow where the gardens had been, and the cows serenely grazing there. We barely believed it ourselves.

  Until we were taught otherwise . . . until we could read the air.

  But what temptations drifted in from that paradise before we’d learned to read! Our young hearts overflowed with bounty. Poplar leaves flashed like coins in the breeze. Wood pigeons cooed from across the valley. On spring twilights, blackbirds staged their pearly evensong in trees tilted like wizards. We would press against the chicken wire and listen, staring out across the meadow all the way to the eastern wall where, through a breach, there stretched an ocean of space that used to be the old orchard but was now open farmland. Cloistered as we were, this green sea was our own Elysium—our Untried—and like anybody’s fantasy, made even more enchanting by the knowledge that we could never go there.

  Each fantasy carries a stain, however.

  Something other than enchantment dwelled beneath those lush grasses; something that made the tips of our ears go cold. Our senses, exquisitely tuned, could catch unearthly signals as easily as spiderwebs catch floating down, so it took very little effort for us to hear the Hougoumont meadow whispering in its sleep. Try as we might, we younger members of the colony couldn’t read those signals properly—not as Old Lavender could—though the whispering often kept us awake . . . that, and the insistent, rhythmic tapping of a beech branch against the south wall.

  “Don’t forget,” Grandmother cautioned. “Two hundred years ago, the meadow was hardly untried.” (She was generally considered to be an expert on Waterloo.) “It was a soaked, bloody sponge, and nobody’s fantasy. It wasn’t even a meadow back then, you know. It was a French garden: orange trees, roses, geraniums—everything was in full flower during the battle. Corpses were piled six high, over there, against the wall.” Out of politeness, we tried not to stare where she was indicating, though of course we threw avid glances that way.

  As you can imagine, Old Lavender’s comments cast a shadow over our Elysium. But it’s a curious thing about shadows: They’re not what you remember about a beloved place . . . about home. You remember the sweet smell of woodland decay; the tilled earth on the wind; the blackbirds’ cantata in the valley. You don’t remember stains. At least, you push them into a dark corner and rarely visit them there.

  It was clear that Hougoumont was coming to a sad, lingering end. It had reached a crossroads of sorts even before I’d left, its future as uncertain as our own. I’m not even sure how much longer the others in the colony stayed on after I was gone. One more crisp, silent winter, perhaps? A final, aromatic spring? The farmer might even have passed away by now, and the place gone to ruin. I can barely contemplate what the fate of my family would have been then, with the main gates locked and Emmanuel, even if he’d remembered, not being able to get in. (The French had had enough trouble, if you recall.) I can only hope that the blackbirds organized some kind of requiem.

  I am no longer young. I’ll be eleven in
a few months, which not only requires math well beyond my skills to calculate in human years, but also obliges me to press on with my storytelling. Those of you who are already experiencing the adventure of aging may have discovered that this part of the journey does not only entail unexpected dips and fissures in the road, aches in the limbs, problems reaching those hard-to-clean areas (Old Lavender gave them up early on) and so forth. No, there’s much more to it, as it turns out. One great plus is the subtle tuning that takes place, as if Moon—or whatever you prefer to call the tuner—were drawing gently tighter a hitherto merrily quivering string, with the perceptible and rather heady effect of purer tone and sweeter echo. (Other interesting effects, presumably, are to follow.) At the same time, one feels a certain lifting of the spirit and breadth of vision, as if—in my case, anyway—one were looking down at farm and family from the summit of the Lion’s Mound. It’s not surprising, therefore, that I can still picture fairly well the dramatis personae of my youth.

  Jonas, a distant cousin, was a rash, handsome buck infamous for his preening, scheming and disreputable tail-chasing. When she was angry with him, Old Lavender called him Marshal Ney after Napoleon’s hotheaded commander. It was meant as an insult. But what Grandmother didn’t realize was that Jonas had actually been listening on the day she’d given the lecture on Ney, and the heroic bits had sunk in. She respected accuracy even more than she disliked Ney, so she had to give the Marshal his due. For example, she couldn’t omit the fact that he’d been nicknamed “the bravest of the brave” for his cavalry charges, foolhardy though they’d been; or that five horses had been shot from under him and even that hadn’t stopped him. Jonas was rather pleased, therefore, with Grandmother’s insult.

  Boomerang, a slightly crazed uncle, had the obscure habit of throwing himself sideways against the barrier, bouncing off at ever-more-interesting angles. The gentle addling of the brain that resulted was part of his charm.