Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ allied force at Quatre Bras, the road to Brussels.

      In his anxiety to escape envelopment Wellington had guessed wrong. No British general likes being separated from the Channel and in his conviction that any attack would come from his western flank he had opened up a gap between the two allied armies. Now all he could do was plug that gap. At five in the afternoon orders were issued for his scattered army to prepare to march, and by seven, as Brussels rang to the first sounds of bugles, Magdalene De Lancey knew that her dream was over. ‘When I had remained at the window nearly an hour,’ she recalled, living again those last moments of happiness before the husband of two months metamorphosed into the soldier and another small, private life was swallowed up in the drama of war, ‘I saw an aide-de-camp ride under the gateway of our house. He sent to enquire where Sir William was dining. I wrote down the name; and soon after I saw him gallop off in that direction. I did not like this appearance, but I tried not to be afraid. A few minutes after, I saw Sir William on the same horse gallop past to the Duke’s, which was a few doors beyond ours. He dismounted and ran into the house, leaving his horse in the middle of the street. I must confess my courage failed me now, and the succeeding two hours formed a contrast to the happy forenoon.’

      At around nine, ‘Sir William came in; seeing my wretched face, he bade me not be foolish, for it would soon be all over now; they expected a great battle on the morrow … He said it would be a decisive battle, and a conclusion of the whole business … He said he should be writing all night, perhaps: he desired me to prepare some strong green tea in case he came in, as the violent exertion requisite to setting the whole army in motion quite stupefied him sometimes. He used sometimes to tell me that whenever operations began, if he thought for five minutes on any other subject, he was neglecting his duty. I therefore scrupulously avoided asking him any questions, or indeed speaking at all. I moved up and down like one stupefied myself.’

      For all Brussels it had been a long, sleepless night, punctuated by the endless reveilles echoing through the streets, by the sounds of aides coming and going, messengers galloping into the darkness, and of an army mustering for war. De Lancey had put in place plans for Magdalene to leave for the safety of Antwerp, but as dawn broke and they stood for the last time at their window together and the last plumed Highland bonnet disappeared through the Namur Gate, and the sound of the bagpipes and fifes finally melted away, Magdalene De Lancey did not need to have gone to school at Siccar Point to fear the worst.

      It would have been strange, in fact, if she had not wondered, as the carriage carrying her and her maid Emma rolled northwards towards Antwerp, whether the intense happiness of those few days in Brussels had only been given her to be snatched away again. Her husband had made her promise though that she would listen to nothing until she had heard directly from him, and for the next two days she was as good as her word, immuring herself in the rooms at the back of the Laboureur Inn, windows tight shut against the world, and telling herself that the sound of cannon was the distant roll of the sea on her family’s Dunglass estate.

      She had stayed up deep into the night on Friday, waiting to learn whether she was a widow or a wife, but no message had come. Through the Saturday, too, as the streets of Antwerp echoed to the ominous rumble of carts and rumours of war, she continued her vigil, her doors locked, her maid forbidden to go out into the town or repeat anything she had heard. She had told herself over and again that De Lancey would be safe – she had kept her word not to listen to any rumours, she had kept her side of the bargain – and exactly on the stroke of midnight, as the Sunday of 18 June dawned and the rain lashed against her window, she had her reward. It was only a few hurried lines that her husband had sent, written at Genappe on the Charleroi road south of Brussels. There had been a battle, fought on the 16th, he told her, and ‘he was safe, and in great spirits’; ‘they had given the French a tremendous beating’. Whether, though, Quatre Bras was to be the final battle, William De Lancey did not say. In Belgium the day of Waterloo had begun.

1 a.m.

      Cut

      It was raining in London too as a man in his early thirties, unshaved and wild looking, stumbled out through the wicket gate at the top of Inner Temple Lane, and turned down Fleet Street into the Strand.

      William Hazlitt was drunk and had every intention of staying drunk for as long as he could. For the best part of a year he had had to live with the humiliation of his hero Bonaparte, and he was not the man to sacrifice his moment of angry triumph now that the people’s time had come and the ‘Child Roland of the Revolution’ – ‘the Colossus of the age’, the ‘prostrate might and majesty of man’, as he saluted Bonaparte – had ‘risen from the dead’ to scatter the Bourbon ‘spiders and toads’ from beneath his giant shadow.

      There was an astonishing violence about Hazlitt’s anger – the violence of the boxing ring that he so much loved, the violence of a man jabbing and jabbing his opponent to a bloody pulp – that was part a matter of principle and part personality. There was no political writer in Regency England who was so honest in his hatred of tyranny, but in Hazlitt everything that was best and worst were inextricably mixed, the strong stems of English libertarianism hopelessly entangled with the weeds of anti-popery, the fine intelligence mired in an abject and humiliating sensuality, the blazing hatred of injustice rooted in an innately suspicious, misanthropic character that was as slow to forgive a kindness as it was a slight.

      Even at the best of times Hazlitt’s was a face you could watch for a month and not see smile – the lined, wary face of a man who expected to be dunned or robbed at every moment, the face of Caius Cassius who ‘quite saw through the deeds of men’ – and he had not had the best of evenings. It had been a long time since he and Charles Lamb had seen the world through the same eyes, and yet even now if there was one place where Hazlitt might hope to be welcome, where his anger might be dissolved in the alcoholic haze of his host’s good nature – one place, in his mind, where the only sensible woman in all London was to be found – it was at the Lambs’ chambers in Hare Court.

      He could hardly have been surprised that old James Burney had turned his back on him after the mauling he had given his sister Fanny’s novel in the Edinburgh, but what business a prosing turncoat like Robinson had cutting him was another matter. Hazlitt did not need lecturing on Wordsworth by anyone, and was there anything he had said in The Examiner that was not true? Would the ‘patriot’ Milton have written ‘paltry sonnets’ upon the ‘royal fortitude’ of the old mad king? Would Milton have suppressed his early anti-war poems to spare the sensibilities of a blood-besotted nation? Would Milton – to whom Wordsworth, ‘the God of his own idolatry’, so liked to compare himself – have traded in every principle of his youth to become a Tory Government’s Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland?

      Hazlitt hated the Tories and their placemen and their pensioners, hated the hired pens of the government-controlled press, hated the mental servitude into which the nation had sold itself, and above all he hated the renegade liberal with a violence that had all the bitterness of the disappointed acolyte behind it. It was absurd to expect anything more of some shuffling, tuft-hunter of a lawyer like Robinson, but it sickened him that the men who had taught the ‘dumb, inarticulate … lifeless’ child that he had once been to think and feel, the men who had once hailed the new dawn of freedom in France, were these same ‘Jacobin renegados’ – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – who now filled the niches of Robinson’s pantheon.

      He told himself he had ‘done’ with them, but he was fooling himself – he could no more have done without them than he could have done without oxygen – and the memory of what they had meant to him and the world their poetry had opened up only made their apostasy the more intolerable. Hazlitt had been scarcely more than a boy when he had first met Coleridge, but he could never forget the day he had got СКАЧАТЬ