Mrs. E. Stanley to Lady Maria J. Stanley.
Brussels, June 18, 1816.
On the 18th of June, how can I begin with any other subject than Waterloo?... At 8 this morning we mounted our Cabriolets for Waterloo. Donald put on his Waterloo medal for the first time, and a French shirt he got in the spoils, and a cravat of an officer who was killed, and I wrapped myself in his Waterloo cloak, and we all felt the additional sensation which the anniversary of the day produced on everybody. It brought the comparison of the past and present day more perfectly home. Donald was[261] ready with his recollections every minute of the day, what had been his occupation or his feeling. The forest of Soignies is a fine approach to the field of battle—dark, damp, and melancholy. If you had heard nothing about it, you could hardly help feeling, in passing through it, that you would not like to cross it alone. There are no fine trees, but the extent and depth of wood gives it all the effect of a fine one, and an effect particularly suited to the associations connected with it. The road—a narrow pavement in the middle with black mud on each side—looks as if it had never felt a ray of sun, and from its state to-day gave me a good idea of what it must have been. Sometimes the road is raised thro' a deep hollow, and it was not possible to look down without shuddering at the idea of the horses and carriages and men which had been overturned one upon another; in some parts the trees are à la Ralph Leycester, and you see the dark black of shade of the distant wood through them; but in other parts it is so choked with brushwood and inequalities of ground, that you could not see two yards before you, and no gorge was ever so good a cover for foxes as this for all evil-disposed persons. At Waterloo we stopped to see the Church, or rather the monuments in it, put up by the different regiments over their fallen officers. They are all badly designed and executed but one Latin one—not half so good as the epitaph on Lord Anglesey's leg which the man had buried with the utmost veneration in his garden and planted a tree[262] over it; and he shows as a relic almost as precious as a Catholic bit of bone or blood, the blood upon a chair in the room when the leg was cut off, which he had promised my lord "de ne jamais effacer".
At Mont St. Jean Donald began to know where he was. Here he found the well where he had got some water for his horse; here the green pond he had fixed upon as the last resource for his troop; here the cottage where he had slept on the 17th; here the breach he had made in the hedge for his horses to get into the field to bivouac; here the spot where he had fired the first gun; here the hole in which he sat for the surgeon to dress his wound. He had never been on the field since the day of the battle, and his interest in seeing it again and discovering every spot under its altered circumstances was fully as great as ours.
After all that John Scott[109] or Walter Scott or anybody can describe or even draw, how much more clear and satisfactory is the conception which one single glance over the reality gives you in an instant, than any you can form from the best and most elaborate description that can be given! To see it in perfection would be to have an officer of every regiment to give you an account just of everything he saw and did on the particular spot where he was stationed.
Donald scarcely knew as much as Edward did or as the people about of what passed anywhere but just at his own station. But at every place it was[263] sufficient to ask the inhabitants where they were and what they saw, to obtain interesting information.
