Waterloo Days: The narrative of an Englishwoman resident at Brussels in June 1815

by Charlotte A. Eaton

The state of the wounded during this dreadful night may be conceived. Not even a drop of water was to be had on the field to relieve their thirst, and none was to be procured nearer than Waterloo. Late as it was, and exhausted as our officers must have been with the fatigue of such unremitting exertions, many of them mounted their horses, slung over their shoulders as many canteens as they could carry, galloped to Waterloo, a distance of more than two miles from almost every part of the field, filled them with water, and returned with it for the relief of the wounded men.

I did not leave a corner of La Belle Alliance unrummaged, but I cannot say that I saw anything particularly worthy of notice: I ate a bit of intolerably bad rye-cake, as sour as vinegar, and as black as the bread of Sparta, which nothing but the consideration of its having been in La Belle Alliance during the battle (which the woman assured me was the case) could have induced me to swallow:—but I need not stop to relate my own follies.

I bought from the people of the house the feather of a French officer, and a cuirass which had belonged to a French Cuirassier, who, they said, had died here the day after the battle. Loaded with my spoils, I traversed the whole extent of the field, thinking, as I toiled along beneath the burning sun, under the weight of the heavy cuirass, that the poor man to whom it had belonged, when he brought it into the field, in all the pride of martial ardour, and all the confidence of victory, little dreamed who would carry it off. If he had known that it was to be an English lady, he would have been more surprised than pleased.

I did not stop till I got to the old tree now known by the name of Lord Wellington's tree,[36] near which he stood for a length of time during the battle, and beneath which I now sat myself down to rest. Its massy trunk and broken branches were pierced with a number of cannon-balls, but its foliage still afforded me a grateful shade from the rays of the sun.

It was between this part of the field and Hougoumont that the lamented Sir William Ponsonby gloriously fell in the prime of life and honour, after repeatedly leading the most gallant and successful charges against the enemy, in which he took upwards of 2000 prisoners and two French eagles. The particulars of his death are well known. In the heat of the action he was unfortunately separated from his brigade, his horse stuck fast in the deep wet clay of some newly-ploughed land, and he saw a large body of Polish Lancers bearing down against him. In this dreadful situation he awaited the inevitable fate that approached him with the composure of a hero: he calmly turned to his aide-de-camp, who was still by his side, and it is said that he was in the act of giving him a picture and a last message to his wife, when he was pierced at once with the pikes of seven of the Polish Lancers, and fell covered with wounds. England never lost a better soldier, nor society a brighter ornament. He was deservedly beloved by his friends and companions, adored by his family, and lamented and honoured by his country.

Numbers of country-people were employed in what might be called the gleanings of the harvest of spoil. The muskets, the swords, the helmets, the cuirasses—all the large and unbroken arms had been immediately carried off; and now the eagles that had emblazoned the caps of the French infantry, the fragments of broken swords, &c., were rarely to be found, though there was great abundance upon sale. But there was still plenty of rubbish to be picked up upon the field, for those who had a taste for it like me—though the greatest part of it was in a most horrible state.

It was astonishing with what dreadful haste the bodies of the dead had been pillaged. The work of plunder was carried on even during the battle; and those hardened and abandoned wretches who follow the camp, like vultures, to prey upon the corpses of the dead, had the temerity to press forward beneath a heavy fire to rifle the pockets of the officers who fell of their watches and money. The most daring and atrocious of these marauders were women.[37]

The description I heard of the field the morning after the battle from those who had visited it, I cannot yet recal without horror. Horses were galloping about in every direction without their riders: some of them, bleeding with their wounds and frantic with pain, were tearing up the ground, and plunging over the bodies of the dead and the dying—and many of them were lying on the ground in the agonies of death.

Over the whole field the bodies of the innumerable dead, already stripped of every covering, were lying in heaps upon each other; the wounded in many instances beneath them. Some, faint and bleeding, were slowly attempting to make their way towards Brussels; others were crawling upon their hands and knees from this scene of misery; and many, unable to move, lay on the ground in agony.

For four days and nights some of these unfortunate men were exposed to the beams of the sun by day, and to the dews by night; for notwithstanding the most praiseworthy and indefatigable exertions, the last of the wounded were not removed from the field until the Thursday after the battle; and if we consider that there were at least 8000 British, besides the Belgic, Brunswick, and Prussian wounded soldiers, and an incalculable number of wounded French—we shall find cause for surprise and admiration, that they could be removed in so short a time. Their conveyance, too, was rendered extremely difficult, as well as inconceivably painful to the poor sufferers, by the dreadful and almost impassable state of the roads.