‘Me, sir? Good Lord, no, sir. Not a scratch. But I fear for Joseph.’
‘He has lost much blood. Get him to a surgeon, James.’
From the corner of his eye, Macdonell saw two figures emerge from the gardener’s house — a broad-shouldered man in a leather jerkin and a battered old hat and a blonde girl of about five in a dirty white smock. They were holding hands and, despite the failing light, were blinking as if they had emerged from a cave into bright sunlight. ‘Who the devil are you?’ he called out before collapsing into a fit of coughing. The two figures came towards him and the man held out a bottle. James took a mouthful and coughed again. It was brandy. He handed back the bottle. ‘Thank you. Merçi.’
‘Mon plaisir, monsieur. Je m’appelle van Cutsem, le jardinier. Voiçi ma fille.’ Macdonell shook his head. The man claimed to be the gardener and the little girl to be his daughter. Where had they come from?
With mounting astonishment, he discovered that Monsieur van Cutsem and his daughter had spent a night and a day in the cellar under the gardener’s house and had emerged only when the sounds of battle had died. They did not know which way the battle had gone until they climbed the stairs and saw red uniforms in the farm and the garden. The gardener did not trust the French and was relieved that they had been defeated. Best of all, he had food and wine in the cellar, and would be happy to share them with the British soldiers. Macdonell advised him not to visit the garden with his daughter until it had been cleared of bodies. He did not tell them that they were fortunate not to have been burnt alive or buried under a ton of rubble.
More than half the remaining Guards did not wait for the foraging party to return. They simply found a place to sleep and something with which to cover themselves and lay down. They lay in the gardener’s house and the shed, among horses burnt to skeletons by the fire and among their own dead comrades in the yards and the garden. Wagons trundled down the lane to take the wounded up to a dressing station or the makeshift hospital in the village.
When the last of the wounded had gone and such food and water as the foragers could find had been distributed, Macdonell went to the chapel and crept inside. The fire had destroyed the door, the walls were scorched and blackened. He looked up to where the wooden carving of Christ had hung over the door. It was still there. The flames had reached his feet and no further. The rest of the carving was intact.
Macdonell found a place in the gardener’s house, spread a filthy blanket on the stone floor, lay down and slept.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
19th June
It was an hour after dawn and the sun was rising into a cloudless sky. After the recent storms, it would be another scorching day.
The two men sat on their horses under the elm tree at the crossroads at Mont St Jean from which Wellington had conducted the battle. Behind the slope of the ridge to their right, where he had concealed the main body of his army, tired men lit fires, grubbed about looking for food and sipped tea or gin. There had been no issue of rations. Some nursed wounds, all were battered, numb, starving. They were the lucky ones.
In the valley below them, as far as the eye could see to their left, to the Château Hougoumont on their right and as far as the inn at La Belle Alliance on the far side of the valley, the fields were piled with the bodies of men and horses and the detritus of war. Some still lived, pleading pitifully for help but too weak to stand or walk unaided. Most were dead. Friend and foe together, they lay entwined, heaped one on top of another, under broken artillery pieces and beside upturned wagons. They lacked arms and legs and stomachs and heads.
Grotesquely injured horses wandered aimlessly, heads down, exhausted, dying. One by one the wretched beasts were put out of their misery with a single pistol shot. Some were hacked into bloody chunks and carted up the slope in carts. And while the butchers worked, so did the blacksmiths. The saddles and bridles of cavalry horses were valuable and horseshoes could be hammered back into shape and reused. The chipping of the smiths’ hammers rang out in the still air.
Clouds of carrion crows filled the sky above the fields, squawking their hateful warnings and swooping to fight over a scrap. Silent figures in peasants’ smocks and strange long-eared hats moved among the corpses, hands slipping under jackets and into packs in search of coins or tobacco or a silver watch. Grubby children crawled in the dirt, looking for treasures. Dogs sniffed and licked and lifted their legs. Muskets and swords and boots were loaded into handcarts. Earrings were ripped from the ears of the Emperor’s guards, gold buttons from officers’ uniforms. Bodies were stripped even of the uniforms themselves, leaving them cruelly naked and exposed. A coat or a shirt not too bloodstained might fetch a few pennies.
Among the women and children and dogs, soldiers too searched for plunder. As survivors they thought it their right and knew that their officers would turn a blind eye. Red uniforms rifling the packs and pockets of their comrades and enemies alike made a gruesome sight, but in the eyes of a soldier it was no more than justice. He had fought, he had won and he would take the spoils. The dead did not need them any more than dead Imperial Guardsmen needed their pigtails. They too were cut off and stuffed into packs.
Most shocking, perhaps, of all, a tall figure in morning coat and black top hat picked his way carefully among the bodies, a handkerchief pressed to his nose. Now and again he prodded a body with his cane. The first of the sightseers had arrived.
Outside the ruins of the farm at La Haye Sainte, a company of bare-chested pioneers hacked at the earth with picks and shovels. They were digging the first of the many huge graves that would be needed before the dead were finally put to rest. There would be no distinction — officers, private soldiers, cavalry, infantry and artillery, British, German, Dutch, French, Catholic, Protestant and heathen — all would share the same graves. There were too many of them to do otherwise.
Here and there a fight broke out. Wives and sweethearts who had been sent to the rear before the battle started were beginning to arrive. They too wandered among the dead, hoping to find a husband or a brother or a sweetheart. They waved their fists and shrieked insults at the looting Belgian women, who stood and stared dumbly back until they were shoved aside and forced to slouch off in search of easier pickings elsewhere.
Neither of the mounted men at the crossroads wore jackets or shakos. Their trousers and shirts were bloody and ragged. Their boots were streaked with mud and gore.
‘Is there an artist or author who could do justice to this?’ asked James Macdonell. He was dirty and unshaven and black rings drooped under his eyes.
‘There is not,’ replied Alexander Saltoun. ‘And even if there were, he would not be believed.’ A livid bruise from the hilt of a French sabre ran from his ear to his chin.
‘Yet it was a victory. Buonaparte was beaten.’
‘He was, and has fled to Paris, I hear, chased by the Prussians.’
‘So he lives. How many do not?’
‘Tens of thousands,’ said a quiet voice behind them. General Byng had ridden from the town of Waterloo and seen the two of them at the tree. ‘Can there be a more melancholy sight than a field of battle after the battle is done?’ He paused. ‘But you gentlemen are alive and I rejoice for it.’
‘We are obliged, General,’ replied Macdonell. ‘And rejoice also for you.’
‘The fortunes of war, James. Picton and Ponsonby are dead, Somerset may not live, Cooke is wounded, Uxbridge has lost a leg, Fitzroy and Harris have one pair of arms between them. Yet the Duke, astonishingly, is unharmed. He was seldom out of danger and four of his aides fell around him. At one time he found himself without an aide to hand and had to send a civilian down to General Kempt to warn him to form square. A button salesman who had come to watch the battle, the Duke says. The man got rather more than he had bargained for. The fortunes of war.’