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

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СКАЧАТЬ is hard to imagine that calculation ever entered into it.

      There was only one house of any size on Scalpaigh, the MacLennans’ house – where in the days when Donald Cameron had been tacksman, the Young Pretender had hidden for four days during his flight into exile – and it was near here, on either Friday 16th or the Friday before, that Eury MacLeod had crawled out of her brother-in-law’s house in the middle of the night and given birth to a stillborn baby boy. By the time the scattered remains were found on the 19th it was impossible to know how long they had been lying there, and long before Eury would be well enough to give any coherent account, exhaustion and fever had reduced her recollections to a blur from which only the barest facts ever emerged.

      ‘At the time the Declarant came to … her sister’s house,’ read the official statement taken down in English from Eury’s confession by the Rodel schoolmaster for the Sub-Sheriff, and read back to her in her native Gaelic, ‘her sister’s children [she said] were ill of a fever and that her sister attended them, that about twenty days after her going to her sister’s house the Declarant was herself attacked by the fever, which confined her to her bed.’ For four or five days Eury had been too ill to move, but ‘on a Friday evening’ – which Friday she could not say – she had ‘found herself very much pained’, and putting on her ‘cloaths’ and letting herself out of her sister’s house, had followed the track to near the MacLennans’ store house ‘where she was delivered of a male child’.

      The boy was stillborn, ‘not having come into its full time’, and ‘finding the child dead … and being unable to bring it home’, Eury had wrapped her petticoat about the body tying the string about the middle. ‘She had laid the child by the side of a stone on the road to the MacLennans’ well, and had then gone back to her sister’s, intending, she told the schoolmaster, to come back for the child’s body the next morning ‘but she was too ill to do so’.

      In these early hours of 18 June, as she lay beneath the heather thatch of her sister’s house, still too weak to recover her dead child, she will have known little of this. Nor would she know the charge hanging over her: ‘That albeit, by the laws of this and every other well governed Realm,’ read the preamble, ‘Murder, and more especially the Murder of a child by its own mother, is a Crime of an heinous nature, and severely punishable … the said Aurora MacLeod did in a field near to the stone house occupied by Murdoch MacLennan, Tacksman of Scalpay … and at or near to a cairn of stones in said field, bring forth a living and full term male child, and she did there immediately after the birth, wickedly and feloniously bereave of life and Murder the said child, by the Strangulation, or bruising the head and body thereof, or by other means … unknown, and she did thereafter expose the body of the said child … where it was afterwards found, much mangled and mutilated by dogs or other animals.’

      Already her distinct Gaelic identity, and even her name, were dissolving in the maw of British justice. The small child who had come down to Caolas Scalpaigh to carry peat and draw water for Malcolm MacLeod was now the declarant ‘Aurora’ MacLeod. She would never see either Caolas Scalpaigh or her Lewis birthplace of Balincoll again. In front of her lay the short boat ride to Rodel, the schoolmaster and Sheriff-Substitute, Stornoway, the Tolbooth gaol at Inverness and the September assizes. Even the concealment of a pregnancy was a crime in itself, and when her trial finally came round – a young, sick girl, saddled with a name that would have meant nothing to her, in a court whose language she did not speak and where her only Tolbooth companion was another Lewis girl who had strangled her baby and thrown it in a loch – all that remained was the sentencing. And even that she did not get. There is no record, in fact, of what happened to Eury – Aurora – MacLeod. For some reason Aurora’s sentencing was reserved to the High Court of Judiciary at Edinburgh. There seems no obvious explanation for this postponement, and somewhere between Inverness and Edinburgh – a final, gratuitously appropriate touch – she would simply disappear, leaving only an entry in the Discharge Book of the Inverness Tolbooth and a cancelled minute in the records of the Edinburgh High Court of Judiciary to mark the obscure end of her short, invisible life.

      All that, though, was still ahead of her. Behind her she would be leaving a dying world, caught up in its own inexorable, resistless tragedy of the Clearances, the death of the kelp trade, and emigrations. And beside the track up to the MacLennans’ well, this Sunday morning – tragedy and symbol rolled into one – lay the stillborn body of her child.1

4 a.m.

      I Wish It Was Fit

      There was no more sign of Hazlitt’s bright star of liberty, or any other star, rising over the sodden slopes of Flanders this Sunday morning than there was on the Isle of Scalpaigh. To the old Peninsula men who remembered the nights before Salamanca and Vittoria, the thunder and lightning were omens of victory, but for the exhausted young boys of the 14th of Foot, Buckinghamshire farm lads in the main and still mostly in their teens, hungry, soaked to the skin, caked in mud, and un-bloodied in war, there was only the cold, numbing rain and fear.

      ‘What a sight to we old campaigners, but more particularly to the young soldiers,’ wrote home one Peninsula veteran, William Wheeler, camped with the 51st of Foot in a cornfield just beyond the 14th at the far right of the allied line that stretched out along the defensive ridge nine miles to the south of Brussels; ‘being close to the enemy we could not use our blankets, the ground was too wet to lie down, we sat on our knapsacks until daylight without fires, there was no shelter against the weather: the water ran in streams from the cuffs of our Jackets, in short we were as wet as if we had been plunged over head in a river. We had one consolation, we knew the enemy were in the same plight.’

      Along the whole length of the line, officers and men were making the best of whatever shelter they could find, hunkering down under hedges or beneath cannon with only their pipes, brandy, gin and sheer exhaustion to anaesthetise the misery. ‘It was as bad a night as I ever witnessed,’ recalled another campaigner, a cavalryman from the 7th Hussars, who had already fought one bruising action against French lancers that day while covering the infantry withdrawal from Quatre Bras. ‘The uproar of the elements seemed to have been the harbinger of the bloody contest. We cloaked, throwing a part over the saddle, holding by the stirrup leather, to steady us if sleepy; to lie down with streams under us was not desirable, and to lie among the horses not altogether safe.’

      It ought to have been impossible to sleep in such conditions, but a public school was perhaps as good a training in discomfort as a Scottish glen, and sixteen-year-old Ensign George Keppel of the 3rd Battalion of the 14th of Foot could not have stayed awake to save his life. From the day he had disembarked at Ostend, Keppel seemed to have done nothing but march and counter-march across Belgium, and it was late in the afternoon of the 17th, after one last weary haul from Nivelles, that his colonel had pointed out to him ‘a spot in the distance’ that he had never heard of, called Waterloo.

      Had the young George Keppel been in any condition to take the long view of things, however, or just a fraction more self-important, he might have seen the hand of destiny at work in the bizarre chain of events that had brought him to an obscure Belgian village. His great-uncle Frederick had been a Bishop of Exeter and Dean of Windsor during the early years of George III’s reign, but with the exception of that genial, pluralist blot on the family honour, the Keppels had traditionally been courtier-warriors since they had arrived with ‘Dutch’ William in 1688, generals and admirals who had played their part in almost every British conflict from Oudenarde and Ramillies to Dettingen, Fontenoy, Culloden, Havana and Quiberon Bay.

      While his father, the fourth earl, was something of a disappointment – a Whig courtier and racing man destined to spend most of his life waiting for the return of the good days – the young СКАЧАТЬ