And still where many a garden flower grows wild.
The ruinous alcoves and grass grown walks serve to show what it had once been—and by its side is the orchard, the possession of which on that memorable day was to decide the freedom or the subjection of Europe. It was then piled with carnage, and strewn with “garments rolled in blood”—it is now encumbered with a bending crop of fruit, and one solitary grave over an English officer, who was buried where he fell, is the only memento of that fearful morning. In the field around it, three thousand French were slain by the well directed fire from within; we walked over it as it had been newly ploughed, and in the course of a few minutes picked up a handful of bullets, some fragments of shells and grape-shot, and a musket flint still clasped in its leaden envelope—what an iron shower must have rained upon it, that after so many years, the plough should still furrow up its deposits!
The Duke of Wellington has his estate between Nivelles and Quatre Bras. Why did not the King of Holland confer on him the field itself? Above all, why are there so many monuments to all the subalterns, and none to the great Captain? It would have been surely more just, as well as wiser, to have reared that vast pyramid to mark the spot where the conqueror stood, than to provoke the remembrance that those who intrude themselves upon our notice by it, four times turned to flight. It is even said that a party of the “braves Belges,” notwithstanding all the terror in which they were scampering back to Brussels, under the panic that the day was lost, overtook the Duke of Wellington’s baggage near the forest of Soigné, and coolly took time to plunder it—rather than let it fall into the hands of the enemy.
Lord Byron mentions his impression that Waterloo, as a plain, seems marked out for the scene of some great action. This is, of course, association in the imagination of the poet; but it is a curious coincidence that, in 1707, the Duke of Marlborough selected it as a desirable spot on which to encounter the French, and actually encamped, for many days, on the verge of the forest, in the hope of seducing Vendome to give him battle there.
At the little cabaret of La Belle Alliance, to which we had sent our carriage on from Mont St. Jean, to await our arrival from Hougemont, we got some excellent light wine: at Marengo, some years ago, I got an equally refreshing draught, after a sultry walk over the field of battle. Houses are building at this little spot; and, in short, in every direction trees are felled, ground levelled, walls fallen, and cottages constructed; so that in a few years the individual features of the scene will be changed; but that which even time cannot efface—its deathless renown—will still, like Marathon,
Preserve alike its bounds and boundless fame.
We took the usual route by Jemappe and Quatre Bras, through the Waloon country. The flax crop was abundantly spread over the fields, undergoing the process of “dew rating,” or dew riping, in which the operation of detaching the cuticle from the wood and pith, is performed by merely exposing it on the grass without steeping. At Quatre Bras the wood has been cut down from which the British, under the Duke of Wellington, repulsed Marshal Ney in the affair of the 16th of June, in which the gallant Duke of Brunswick fell. The hill is now a naked height, which is seen on the right of the road to Sombreffe.
The country, as we approach the banks of the Meuse and the Sambre, becomes at every step more and more picturesque, and the dull monotonous plains of Brabant are exchanged for the woody hills and precipitous valleys of Namur. I never saw a more charming prospect, nor one which is so truly refreshing to an eye ennuied with the tiresome monotony of Flemish scenery, than the first view which is obtained of the old town and fortress of Namur, from the heights above the Sambre, in coming from Temploux—a wide and winding valley, with the rapid river toiling below between towering cliffs of rugged rock upon the one hand, and steep banks covered with foliage, and occasionally crowned with old chateaux, upon the other; and in the distance, the bridges, towers, and steeples of the warlike old city, with its renowned, and once thought impregnable fortress, rising terrace upon terrace, and bristling with artillery above it.
We drove down the steep hill to the river under a glowing sunset, and having crossed the hollow drawbridge and traversed the tortuous passages that lead from the outward fortifications to the heart of the city, we took up our quarters for the night, at the Hotel de Harscamp, in a starved little square, that seemed to have been grudgingly crimped off the already pinched and narrowed streets. It was still light enough for a stroll round the fortifications, but we soon discovered that it required the acumen of some future Sir William Gell or Claudius Rich, to determine the precise spot, which we were in search of—namely, that at which my Uncle Toby received his memorable wound, in the attack made by the Dutch and English, “upon the point of the advanced counterscarp before the gate of St. Nicholas, which enclosed the great sluice or water-stop,” and which he himself declares to have been, “in one of the traverses about thirty toises from the returning angle of the trench opposite to the salient angle of the demi-bastion of Saint Roche.”
The citadel which stands directly above the town is constructed upon the shelves of a stupendous rocky escarpment, that rises almost perpendicularly from the banks of the river, and looks like the Gibraltar of the Meuse. It was accurately restored, and its works in some places extended, by the King of Holland, some few years before the revolution, but when that event arrived, Namur was amongst the first places that hoisted the standard of revolt. There seems, in fact, to have been something between treason and cowardice in the conduct of the garrisons, who occupied every fortress in Belgium, and who, with the single exception, I think, of Antwerp, surrendered them to the “patrioterie” without lighting a match.