Heavens! how unlike their Belgian sires of old,
Rough, poor, content, ungovernably bold,
War in each eye and freedom in each brow,
How much unlike the sons of Belgium now!
Having come by the railroad to Louvain, we hired a calèche to return across the country to Brussels by Terveuren. The drive is a very beautiful one, running along the slope of the gentle, wooded hills, at the foot of one of which Louvain is situated. Terveuren is a pretty village built down the glen between two hills, with a picturesque old church on the summit of one of them. It was formerly the seat of some manufactures, and in 1759, Prince Charles of Lorraine established in it works for printing calico, and took the utmost pains to bring artists from Switzerland and Alsace, but it has long since been utterly abandoned. The park, on the verge of which the village is built, has been for centuries the vice-regal residence for the Austrian governors of the Netherlands. It is beautifully wooded, and the irregularity of the grounds afford some exquisite landscapes. The present palace was erected by the nation, and presented along with that at Brussels to the Prince of Orange, as a recognition of his services at Waterloo. Like it, it has been waiting the fate of the final treaty of partition, and its gorgeous furniture, which has been undisturbed since 1830, is now in process of removal to the Hague. The building has no external beauty, a heavy solid edifice without decorations of any kind, and its grand charms, its paintings, and garniture, it derives from the truly princely taste of its owner. We drove home through the Forest of Soigné, and through the village of Ixelles to Brussels.
We left Brussels this morning for Namur through the forest of Soigné and across the field of Waterloo. The forest is thick with young straight trees; and any thing but picturesque. The timber is chiefly beech with oak and elm intermixed, and the trees are very densely planted, with a view, we were told, to render the wood loose and moist being withdrawn from the hardy action of the air, in order that when felled and cut into lengths it may the more readily split, which the beech does almost spontaneously. The foresters live in huts dispersed throughout the forest; and along the edge of the road were long piles of cleft wood ready for transport to Brussels. On the road we passed several waggons laden with coals from Charleroi, and after emerging from the forest we reached the village of Waterloo, which is situated almost upon its outskirts. We visited the church with its numerous monuments to the “unreturning brave,” and were solicited by some ecclesiastical official for a contribution to the fund for keeping them in order. At Mont St. Jean we had a most comfortable breakfast at the little inn, and being waited on by Sergeant Cotton of the 7th Hussars, the guide who seems to have most successfully taken the place of Da Costa, we walked with him to the various positions on the field. One has really no patience with the great hulking mountain of sand on which the Iron Lion is raised as a trophy of the valour of the “Braves Belges!” Some one has observed that the pretension of the monuments at Waterloo are precisely in the inverse ratio of the importance of the services they commemorate; the English have none, the Prussians a modest record, and the Belgians a pyramid! on which, as the Brussels guide book magniloquently points out “the Lion of Belgian proudly paws the bolt of war, with his head turned towards vanquished France, as if to menace her with vengeance and teach her the homage which is due to valour!” But it is not the gasconade of this ambitious trophy that irritates one so much as the fact, that in order to scrape the earth together, out of which it is heaped up, the whole surface of the field has been disturbed and its identity destroyed; and that, at the most interesting spot, where the British guards made their immoveable and immortal stand “from day-break till set of sun” against all the chivalry of France. The mischievous vanity, which has thus destroyed what it pretends to commemorate, has something very Irish in it, and is not altogether without a parallel. Some years since a remnant of a very ancient castle of the chiefs of the clan O’Neil, which stood upon the summit of the hill of Castlereagh in the estate of the late Marquis of Downshire, was fast crumbling away, owing to the injury which it received from the cattle who browsed about it, and his Lordship directed that a wall should be built round it to save it from utter destruction. The labourers, however, who were sent for the purpose, thinking it a pity to be at the trouble of drawing stones up to the top of such a mountain, where there were abundance close at hand, very naïvely pulled down what remained of the castle and built the wall round its site with its own materials!
By the way, whilst all justice has been done to the bravery of the English at Waterloo, and all the credit to which they were entitled, at least, claimed for the Scotch regiments—it is a fact that speaks, whole bulletins and gazettes for the gallantry of the Irish, that the regiment which had the greatest number killed of any on the field was the 27th foot, the Enniskillens, which lost one hundred and three men besides three hundred and sixty wounded.
The Château of Hougemont is undergoing a similar change, the wood which surrounded it has been all cut down, new buildings are erecting and the old ones fast passing into dust—the gate, however, still hangs upon its hinges with remnants of the old leaves that witnessed the great day, perforated by ten thousand bullets—the little chapel stands almost roofless in the ruinous court—and the guide points out “with bated breath,” the walls of the barn which was set on fire by the artillery and consumed the wounded and the dying who had been carried into it for shelter. Crossing the farm-yard a little postern leads to the
Copse where once the garden smiled