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

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СКАЧАТЬ filles de chambre; all crowded together, jostling, crying, scolding, squabbling, lamenting, exclaiming, whipping, swearing and vociferating’.

      It had been a day of mayhem and fear, of crowded roads, of rumour and counter-rumour, of victory and defeat – the Prussians had held the French, the French had destroyed the Prussians, Wellington was wounded and the British defeated, the French were in retreat, Brussels was in French hands – and now, twenty-four hours later, as the sound of hammering ceased and the Laboureur Inn fell silent, Charlotte Waldie slipped out of her room and down the stairs to see for herself the other side of war. ‘It was a solemn and affecting scene,’ she recalled as she entered the same small chamber where Magdalene De Lancey had rested for an hour and which now contained ‘the last narrow mansion of a brave and unfortunate prince’. Tapers were burning at the head and foot of the coffin, and the room was now empty except for ‘two Brunswick officers who were watching over it, and whose pale, mournful countenances, sable uniforms, and nodding black plumes, well accorded with the gloomy chamber. It was but yesterday that this prince, in the flower of life and fortune, went out into the field of military ardour, and gloriously fell in battle, leading on his soldiers to the charge. He was the first of the noble warriors who fell on the memorable field of Quatre Bras. But he has lived long enough who has lived to acquire glory.’

      The coffin was that of Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick, the cousin of the Prince Regent, the brother of Queen Caroline, a favourite uncle of the Princess Charlotte, and one of the first casualties of Hazlitt’s battle between liberty and legitimacy. For the last six years the duke had held the rank of lieutenant general in the British Army, but it was as a hero of the German struggle against Bonaparte that he had made his name, raising, equipping and commanding his famous force of ‘Black Brunswickers’ in a quixotic and doomed bid to reclaim the duchy lost after the death of his father at Jena in 1806.

      With his flat, coarse potato of a face, his great side-whiskers and a nose that would have graced a Hanseatic merchant, it would be difficult to imagine a less romantic-looking figure than the duke. And yet in spite of everything that his sister Caroline could do to taint it, romance still clung to the Brunswick name. ‘The Brunswickers are all in black,’ the engagingly uxorious Sir Augustus Frazer, in command of Wellington’s horse artillery, had written home to his wife, after admiring the duke’s hussars at the great review in May, ‘the Duke having, in 1809, when the Duchess died, paid this tribute of respect to his wife. There is something romantic in this. They are to change their uniform when they shall have avenged themselves on the French for an insult offered to the remains of the Duke’s father. Is this chivalry, or barbarity?’

      It was a wonderfully nineteenth-century thought that the two things might be opposites – another prince dressed in black had very little trouble squaring them – and Wellington for one would have settled for something more barbarous than the army of young boys that Brunswick had brought with him. In the weeks since arriving in the Belgian capital, Wellington had complained endlessly of the ‘infamous army’ he had been given to do the job, but by the time it had at last become clear that the French advance towards Quatre Bras and Brussels was not a feint, he was in no position to pick and choose whether it was his old Peninsula veterans or the raw and untested Brunswickers who would get him out of the fix he had got himself into.

      That had been late on Thursday 15th, and that night anyway the duke had other things to do. He must have known as well as anyone that Bonaparte’s brilliant advance had not shown him at his best, but he had promised the Duchess of Richmond she could have her ball (‘Duchess, you may give your ball with the greatest safety, without fear of interruption,’ he had superbly told her) and he was damned if anything the French did now was going to show him up for a fool.

      He had his other reasons for going to the Richmond ball that night, or would find them with hindsight – morale, psychology, a show of British sang-froid, a ‘marker’ for wavering Belgians – but the answer was probably no more complicated than pride. Throughout his career he had had to live with the carping of opposition politicians who hated the Wellesleys, and yet it was a very long time – probably the Siege of Seringapatam in the spring of 1799 and his first major battle – since he had had to justify or explain himself to his own officers and he had no intention of doing anything to undermine the extraordinary hold he had over them now.

      ‘Nobody can guess Lord Wellington’s intentions,’ Uxbridge’s sister Lady Caroline Capel had written just a week earlier, ‘& I dare say Nobody will know he is going till he is actually gone.’ If the women of Brussels did not know what he was doing then certainly no one else was going to. For an old Peninsula-hand like Sir Augustus Frazer there was nothing new in this, but for those who had never been around the duke before, there was something almost shocking in the dominance he exerted over officers who in any other situation and under anyone else were figures of substance in their own right. ‘Our movements are kept in the greatest secrecy. We know nothing that is going on,’ the Reverend George Stonestreet, the most unmilitary of Guards’ chaplains, wrote from 1st Division Headquarters to his brother-in-law, a broker in the City always keen for his own reasons to know what was happening in Belgium. ‘General Officers, even those commanding divisions are kept in ignorance by the great Duke … I am astonished to find the fear which exists, of at all offending the Duke; and the implicit submission and humility with which Men of talent courage and character shrink before his abrupt, hurried and testy manner.’

      If anyone knew what was on his mind it was likely to be his latest dalliance, the pale and anorexically thin Byron cast-off, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, but it would have taken a brave man to have asked the duke what he was doing at the ball. Lord Fitzroy Somerset, Wellington’s secretary, had not understood why the army had not marched immediately that Thursday afternoon, but when it came to the point he was no bolder than the rest, tamely conceding that ‘as it was the place where every British officer of rank was likely to be found, perhaps for that reason the Duke dressed & went there’.

      He was right in that at least, almost everyone but the De Lanceys was there. And if it might have been argued – and it was in angry Whig and opposition circles – that Wellington’s officers might have been better off with their regiment, nothing so vividly encapsulates the strange air of unreality that marked these last days before Waterloo. It was here at a rented house in the rue de Blanchisserie in the early hours of the 16th, as Wellington sat on a sofa and talked with Lady Dalrymple Hamilton, and the Duke of Brunswick gave a sudden, violent shudder of premonition, and Gordon Highlanders demonstrated their reels to the duchess’s guests, that the cumulative oddity of what would soon be dubbed ‘the 100 Days’ took on the surreal, climactic air of a macabre Regency Dance of Death. ‘There was the sound of revelry by night,’ Byron famously would write,

      And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then

      Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright

      The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

      A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

      Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

      Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spoke again,

      And all went merry as a Marriage bell;

      But hush! Hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell.

      Within a window’s niche in that high hall

      Sate Brunswick’s fated chieftain; he did hear

      That sound the first amidst the festival,

      And caught its tone with Death’s prophetic ear;

      And when they smiled because he deem’d it near,

      His heart more truly knew that peal too СКАЧАТЬ