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

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СКАЧАТЬ universe that Hutton’s geology and Herschel’s telescopes were conjuring into existence: ‘What clearer evidence could we have had of the different formations of these rocks, and the long interval which separated their formation, had we actually seen them emerging from the bosom of the deep? We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited … An epoch still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet disturbed by that unmeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe. Revolutions still more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.’

      For a young child of the Scottish Enlightenment schooled in the rigours of such a universe – the daughter of an atheist and the sister of two ‘idiot’ girls – it had been an improbably romantic path that had brought Magdalene Hall to Belgium. She had only met her husband for the first time a few months before, but six years earlier, her brother Basil, then a lieutenant with HMS Endymion taking part in the evacuation of Sir John Moore’s exhausted army from Corunna, had rescued and befriended a young, very tired, very dirty and unshaven army officer. ‘We divided the party among us,’ he later recalled, ‘and I was so much taken with one of these officers, that I urged him to accept such accommodation as my cabin and wardrobe afforded. He had come to us without one stitch of clothes beyond what he wore, and these, to say the truth, were not in the best condition, at the elbows and other angular points of his frame. Let that pass – he was as fine a fellow as ever stepped; and I had much pride and pleasure in taking care of him during the passage.’

      The threadbare army officer Basil Hall befriended was William Howe De Lancey, the twenty-seven-year-old, New York-born, English-educated scion of an American Huguenot family who had paid with their wealth and estates for their loyalty to the British crown during the American War of Independence. At the time of Corunna De Lancey was already a promising lieutenant colonel on the staff, and in the six years since he had consolidated his reputation as one of the most gifted of Wellington’s young officers, ending the war with the Talavera, Nive, Salamanca, St Sebastian and Vittoria clasps to his Peninsula Gold Cross and a KCB to underline the trust Wellington had in his abilities.

      In the inevitable way of war, sailor and soldier never met again, but the rising star of the army never forgot the naval lieutenant who had shared with him his cabin, linen and razor. On the abdication of Bonaparte in 1814, De Lancey had been appointed to a position on the staff in Scotland, and by the late spring of 1815 – Jane Austen’s Admiral Croft would have approved – had met, courted and wed the second of Sir James Hall’s three daughters, Basil’s sister Magdalene.

      Sir William and Lady De Lancey were at the Dunglass estate near Siccar Point on their ‘treaclemoon’ – as Byron, just escaped from his own honeymoon nightmare farther south on the bleak Durham coast would have it – when the news of Bonaparte’s escape and De Lancey’s recall reached them. On assuming command in Brussels, Wellington had wanted as many of his old Peninsula officers as he could muster, and high on his list to replace the wretched quartermaster-general the army had foisted on him was William De Lancey. ‘To tell you the truth, I am not well pleased with the manner in which the Horse Guards have conducted themselves towards me,’ Wellington had complained to Lord Bathurst, the Secretary for War; ‘It will be admitted that the army is not a very good one, and, being composed as it is, I might have expected that the Generals and Staff formed by me in the last war would have been allowed to come to me again; but instead of that, I am overloaded with people I have never seen before; and it appears to be purposely intended to keep those out of my way whom I wished to assist me.’

      The duke would not always get his way with appointments – and the newly married De Lancey was not at all sure he was ready to resume his career at his old rank – but Wellington was ready to fight for him and by 16 April, Major General Torrens was writing to reassure him that his new QMG was ‘on his way out … I told him the very handsome and complimentary manner in which you asked for his services, and assured him that nothing could be so gratifying, in my view of the case, to his military and professional feelings, as the desire you expressed to me of having him again with you.’

      The new Lady De Lancey had followed Sir William south to London and then, on 8 June, across to Brussels where for one brief week they were billeted on the fourth floor of Count de Lannoy’s house overlooking the Parc. De Lancey had been confident even then that it would be another month before there could be any fighting, but the newlyweds were taking no chances with the time they had together, cocooning themselves in a world of their own, walking out only when the rest of Brussels was dining, dining when the rest of Brussels was walking, utterly oblivious to the fears and rumours that filled the air or to the cavalry reviews, assignations and race meetings that made up the lives and the diaries of the rest of Brussels’ British population.

      It was not a regime to make a new bride much liked by fashionable Brussels – especially not the bride of a man as popular as Sir William De Lancey – but that was the last thing to worry Magdalene. In the months to come she would add a faintly pious gloss of gratitude for the memory of these few days together, but there was an unabashedly worldly joy in the way she seized her brief happiness, an implicit sense in everything she said and did that a whole lifetime had to be crushed into these few hours and an entire world into their Brussels rooms. ‘I never passed such a delightful time, for there was always enough of very pleasant society,’ she recalled, ‘I used to sit and think with astonishment of my being transported into such a scene of happiness, so perfect, so unalloyed! – feeling that I was entirely enjoying life – not a moment wasted. How active and how well I was! I scarcely knew what to do with all my health and spirits. Now and then a pang would cross my mind at the prospect of the approaching campaign, but I chased away the thought, resolving not to lose the present bliss by dwelling on the chances of future pain.’

      There had been a ‘small alarm’ on the afternoon of the 14th that had come to nothing, and even deep into the afternoon of Thursday 15th – ‘the happiest’ day of her life it had been until then – the only thing to disturb them was a three-line whip that would take him away from her for the early part of the evening. The De Lanceys had been invited to a ball that night at the Duchess of Richmond’s that they could safely miss, and as they dallied away the afternoon in their rooms overlooking the Parc, putting off the moment when he would have to dress for dinner with General Alava, there seemed no reason to think that that evening or that ball would be any different from any other that filled the aristocratic Brussels life that they had so determinedly avoided. ‘We little dreamt that Thursday was the last we were to pass together, and the storm would burst soon,’ she remembered, ‘Sir William had to dine at the Spanish Ambassador’s, the first invitation he had accepted from the time I went; he was unwilling to go, and delayed and still delayed, till at last when near six, I fastened all his medals and crosses on his coat, helped him to put it on, and he went. I watched at the window till he was out of sight, and then I continued musing on my happy fate; I thought over all that had passed, and how grateful I felt! I had no wish but that this might continue; I saw my husband loved and respected by everyone, my life gliding on, like a gay dream, in his care.’

      She was mistaken. While Wellington’s quartermaster-general idled away the afternoon with his young bride, and the commander of his 4th Division sat in the Richmonds’ garden assuring their daughters that nothing was in the offing, Bonaparte had crossed the border and Charleroi was in French hands. The duke had, in his own words, been ‘Humbugged’. Moving with all his old clandestine speed and decision – the borders had been sealed since 7 June, with coaches immobilised, fishing vessels held in port, letters intercepted – Bonaparte had spent just three days on the road from Paris and by the 14th was with his Army of the North concentrated around Beaumont. On the 15th, the anniversary of Marengo, he had issued his memorable orders of the day and by 11 a.m. was in Charleroi reviewing his advancing troops. Ahead of him, to his right, were the Prussians under Blücher. СКАЧАТЬ