June 22.
This morning I went to visit the field of battle, which is a little beyond
the village of Waterloo, on the plateau of Mont St Jean; but on arrival
there the sight was too horrible to behold. I felt sick in the stomach and
was obliged to return. The multitude of carcases, the heaps of wounded men
with mangled limbs unable to move, and perishing from not having their
wounds dressed or from hunger, as the Allies were, of course, obliged to
take their surgeons and waggons with them, formed a spectacle I shall never
forget. The wounded, both of the Allies and the French, remain in an
equally deplorable state.
At Hougoumont, where there is an orchard, every tree is pierced with
bullets. The barns are all burned down, and in the court-yard it is said
they have been obliged to burn upwards of a thousand carcases, an awful
holocaust to the War-Demon.
As nothing is more distressing than the sight of human misery when we are
unable to silence it, I returned as speedily as possible to Bruxelles with
Cowper's lines in my head:
War is a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings should not play at.
I hope this battle will, at any rate, lead to a speedy peace.
June 28.
We have no other news from the Allied Army, except that they are moving
forward with all possible celerity in the direction of Paris. You may form
a guess of the slaughter and of the misery that the wounded must have
suffered, and the many that must have perished from hunger and thirst, when
I tell you that all the carriages in Bruxelles, even elegant private
equipages, landaulets, barouches and berlines, have been put in requisition
to remove the wounded men from the field of battle to the hospitals, and
that they are yet far from being all brought in. The medical practitioners
of the city have been put in requisition, and are ordered to make
domiciliary visits at every house (for each habitation has three or four
soldiers in it) in order to dress the wounds of the patients. The
Bruxellois, the women in particular, have testified the utmost humanity
towards the poor sufferers. It was suggested by some humane person that
they who went to see the field of battle from motives of curiosity would do
well to take with them bread, wine and other refreshments to distribute
among the wounded, and most people did so. For my part I shall not go a
second time. Napoleon, it is said, narrowly escaped being taken. His
carriage fell into the hands of the Allies, and was escorted in triumph
into Bruxelles by a detachment of dragoons. So confident was Napoleon of
success that printed proclamations were found in the carriage dated from
"Our Imperial Palace at Laecken," announcing his victory and the liberation
of Belgium from the insatiable coalition, and wherein he calls on the
Belgians to re-unite with their old companions in arms in order to reap the
fruits of their victory. This was certainly rather premature, and reminds
me of an anecdote of a Spanish officer at the siege of Gibraltar, related
by Drinkwater in his narrative of that siege.[17] When the British garrison
made a sortie, they carried the advanced Spanish lines and destroyed all
their preparations; the Spanish officer on guard at the outermost post was
killed, but on the table of his guard room was found his guard report
filled up and signed, stating that "nothing extraordinary had happened
since guard-mounting."
Mr L. of Northumberland, having proposed to me to make a tour with him to
Aix-la-Chapelle and the banks of the Rhine, I shall start with him in a day
or two.
[1] Sir Wiltshire Wilson (1762-1842), Commander of the Royal Artillery in
Ceylon, 1810-1815. - Ed.
[2] Pulci, Morgante, canto XVIII, ottava 114-115. The Giant Morgante
meets the villain Margutte and asks him if he be a Christian or a
Saracen. Margutte answers that he cares not, but only believes in
boiled or in roasted capon:
Rispose allor Margutte: A dirtel tosto
Io non credo pio al nero ch'all' azzurro.
Ma nel cappone, o lesso, o vuogll arrosto....
[3] Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, iv, 63, f. - ED.
[4] A work of H, Verbruggen of Antwerp (1677). - ED.
[5] Lord Bruce, Earl of Ailesbury, caused this fountain to be erected in
1751, as a token of gratitude to the town of Bruxelles where he had
lived in exile. - E.D.
[6] Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville (1741-1811), elevated to the peerage in
1802. - ED.
[7] Xenophon, Education of Cyrus, II, 4, 4. - ED.
[8] Astley's Amphitheatre, near Westminster Bridge. - ED.
[9] Uncle Toby, in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. - ED.
[10] Lieutenant R.P. Campbell, aide-de-camp to Major-General Adam. - ED.
[11] In May, 1815, the officer commanding-in-chief at Tournai was
General-Major A.C. Van Diermen. - ED.
[12] Karl Friedrich Ludwig Moritz, Fuerst zu Ysenburg-Bierstein (1766-1820),
took service with Austria (1784), with Prussia (1804), and later with
Napoleon (1806), who commissioned him as brigadier-general. The
shameless conduct of this officer is exposed by B. Poten, Allgemeine
Deutsche Biographie, vol. XLIV, p. 611. - ED.
[13] The battle at Ligny was fought on June 16. - ED.
[14] The facts and dates here given are of course inaccurate; but this
proves that Major Frye wrote his text in the very midst of the crisis,
and that his manuscript has not been tampered with. - ED.
[15] Baron van Capellen, a Dutch statesman, was governor-general of the
Belgian provinces, residing at Bruxelles. He was afterwards
governor-general of Dutch India. Born in 1778, he died in 1848. His
memoirs have been published in French by Baron Sirtema de Grovestins
(1852), and contain an interesting passage on that momentous day,
18th June, 1815.
