On our return we entered the farm-house where Major L. had been conveyed when wounded. The farm-house and offices enclose a court into which the windows of the house look. It is only one story high, and consists of three rooms, one through another. Not only these rooms, but the barns, out-houses, and byres were filled with wounded British officers, many of whom died here before morning.
In that last tremendous attack which took place towards the close of the day, before the arrival of the Prussians (but which, thanks to British valour, was wholly unsuccessful), the battle extended even here. The French suddenly turned the fire of nearly the whole of their artillery against this part of our position, in front of Mont St. Jean, and a general charge of their infantry and cavalry advanced, under cover of this tremendous cannonade, to the attack. Weakened as our army had been in this quarter with the immense loss it had sustained, they expected it to give way instantly, and that they should be able to force their way to Brussels. The Belgians fled at this tremendous onset. The British stood firm and undaunted, contesting every inch of ground. Every little rise was taken and retaken. The French and English, intermingled with each other, fought man to man, and sword to sword, around these walls, and in this court, while cannon-shot thundered against the walls of the house, and shells broke in at the windows of the rooms crowded with wounded. Such of the officers as it was possible to remove were carried out beneath a shower of musketry. But our troops maintained their ground in spite of the immense numbers of the enemy, and of a most tremendous and incessant fire; and after a long and desperate contest, the French were completely repulsed and driven back. They never for a moment gained possession even of this farm-house, much less of the village of Mont St. Jean, to which indeed the battle never extended. Some cannon-balls indeed were lodged in the walls of the cottages, but the action took place entirely in front of the village, and its possession was never therefore disputed.
The farmer's wife had actually remained in this farm-house during the whole of this tremendous battle, quite alone, shut up in her own room, or rather garret. There she sat the whole day, listening to the roar of the cannon, in solitude and silence, unable to see anything, or to hear any account of what was passing. It seemed to me that the utmost ingenuity of man could not have devised a more terrible punishment than this woman voluntarily inflicted upon herself. When I asked her what could have been her motives for remaining in such a dreadful situation, she said that she stayed to take care of her property—that all she had in the world consisted in cows and calves, in poultry and pigs—and she thought if she went away and left them, she should lose them all—and perhaps have her house and furniture burnt. She seemed to applaud herself not a little for her foresight. If the French, however, had been victorious instead of the English, the woman, as well as her hens and chickens, would have been in rather an awkward predicament.
Her husband first told me this story, which I could scarcely credit till she herself confirmed it. But he, honest man! had wisely run away before the battle had begun, leaving his wife, his pigs, and poultry to take care of themselves. She said she stayed in her room all that night, and never came down till the following morning, when all the surviving wounded officers had been removed, but the bodies of those who had expired during the night still remained, and the floors of all the rooms were stained with blood. She seemed very callous to their fate, and to the sufferings of the wounded; and very indifferent about everything except her hens and chickens. She led me to a little miserable dark cow-house, where General Cooke (or Cock, as she called him) had remained a considerable time when wounded, and it seemed to be a sort of gratification to her, that a British general had been in her cow-house.
Leaving this farm-house, we walked through the village of Mont St. Jean, and stopped at the little inn, where we found the rest of the party busily employed upon every kind of eatable the house afforded, which consisted of brown bread, and butter and cheese—small beer, and still smaller wine. Although I had rejected with abhorrence at Château Hougoumont a proposal of eating, which some one had ventured unadvisedly to make; and though it did seem to me upon the field of battle that I should never think of eating again, yet no sooner did I cast my eyes upon these viands than I pounced upon them, as a falcon does upon its prey, and devoured them with nearly as much voracity. They seemed to me to be delicious; and the brown bread and butter, especially, were incomparable.
The woman of the house and her two daughters, who were industriously employed in plain needlework, related to us with great naïveté all the terrors they had suffered, and all the horrors they had seen. Like all the other inhabitants of the village, they had fled the day before the battle—not into the woods, but to a place, the name of which I do not remember, but which they said was very far off ("bien loin").
Several cannon-balls had lodged in the walls about this house, although it was at the extremity of the village, farthest from the field. Having finished our frugal repast, for which these kind and simple people asked a most trifling recompense, we left Mont St. Jean, passed through the village of Waterloo for the last time, and returned to Brussels with an impression on our minds, from our visit to the field of Waterloo, which no time can efface.
It was on Wednesday, the 19th of July, that we learnt the astonishing news that Napoleon Buonaparte had surrendered himself to the British, and was actually a prisoner on board the Bellerophon. An aide-de-camp of the King of France, going express to the King of Holland at the Hague, was the bearer of this important intelligence. It was communicated to us by General Murray, who came in with a countenance radiant with joy, and scarcely could my sister and I, in our transports, refrain from embracing the good old general. He had himself seen the aide-de-camp of Louis XVIII.; yet this news was so unexpected, so wonderful—and above all so good; that scarcely could it be credited. Could it indeed be possible that Napoleon—the dreaded Napoleon—was really a prisoner to the English! All ranks of people were breathless with expectation, and with trembling eagerness and anxious inquiries awaited further intelligence. In a few hours it was confirmed beyond a possibility of doubt.—"Buonaparte est pris!—il est pris!—c'est vrai—c'est bien vrai!" cried M. Weerid, the Belgic gentleman in whose house Major L. was an inmate, bursting into his room with a turbulence of joy ill-suited to the suffering state of our poor wounded friend. The loud acclamations of the populace—the ejaculations of thanksgiving and tears of joy which burst from the women—and the curses which were freely bestowed on him by the men—proved the strength of their terror, and the bitterness of their detestation.
It was our fate to be the bearers of this intelligence almost the whole way through Belgium. So slowly does news travel in this country, that although it had arrived in Brussels at five o'clock in the afternoon, and we did not set off till eight the following morning, no rumours of it had been received in any of the towns or villages through which we passed; and we even found the good people of Ghent in profound ignorance of it. But the Belgians were slow of belief, and the transport and the vociferous joy with which it was uniformly received at first, were generally followed by doubts and fears, and fervent wishes for its truth.
At the inn at Alost we found a party comfortably sitting down to dinner at twelve o'clock, at the well-spread Table d'Hôte. No sooner had I mentioned this news than knives and forks were thrown down, plates and dishes abandoned. An old fat Belgic gentleman, overturning his soup plate, literally jumped for joy; another, more nimble, began to caper up and down the room. A corpulent lady, in attempting to articulate her transport, was nearly choked, like little Hunchback, with a fish-bone; and the demonstrations of joy shown by the rest of the party were not less extravagant. One old man, however, shook his head in sign of incredulity, and said with fervour, when I assured him that Buonaparte was really a prisoner to the English, "that he should have lived long enough if he ever lived to see that day." Nothing amused me more, however, than the squall set up by an old country-woman, who shook my hand till she nearly wrung it off, and then, shocked at what she had done, burst forth into apologies to me, exclamations of joy, and abuse of Buonaparte, all in a breath.