Hougomont — Les Misérables

Hougomont was a funereal spot, the first knot under the axe of that wood-cutter of Europe called Napoleon. It was a château; it is no longer anything but a farm. The traveller pushes the door, elbows an ancient calash, and enters the courtyard. A sixteenth-century door simulates an arcade. Another arched door gives a glimpse of orchard trees. Beside it: a manure-hole, pickaxes, shovels, carts, an old well, a chicken jumping, a turkey spreading its tail, a chapel with a small bell-tower, a blossoming pear-tree trained against the wall. This corner of earth, could he but have seized it, would perhaps have given him the world. Chickens are scattering its dust. A huge dog shows his teeth and replaces the English. Cooke's four companies of guards held out there for seven hours. Hougomont has two doors. Napoleon sent his brother Jérôme; nearly the entire corps of Reille was employed against it and miscarried. Bauduin could not force the north. Soye could only begin a breach on the south. A bit of the north door, broken by the French, still hangs on the wall. For a long time, imprints of bloody hands were visible on the door-posts. It was there that Bauduin was killed.

The storm of the combat still lingers. The walls are in the death agony. The château served for a dungeon, the chapel for a block-house. The French, fired on from walls, garrets, cellars, every crack, fetched fagots and set fire to walls and men. On the cracked spiral staircase the English cut off the lower steps; half a score still cling to the wall; a wounded tree has grown through the staircase since 1815. A massacre took place in the chapel. The mass has not been said there since the carnage. The wooden Christ was not burned; the fire preyed upon his feet and stopped, a miracle according to the neighbourhood. The infant Jesus on the statue of Saint Anne was less fortunate; a ball carried off the head. On emerging, a well is visible. Why is there no bucket? Because water is no longer drawn there. Why? Because it is full of skeletons. Guillaume van Kylsom, the gardener, was forced by blows of the flat of swords to draw for thirsty combatants. After the engagement they were in haste to bury. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into the well. Legend says they were not all dead. On the night succeeding the interment, feeble voices were heard calling from the well. A grey-haired woman, the gardener's granddaughter, tells the traveller she was three: they glued their ears to the earth in the woods, and she went boum, boum.

The orchard is terrible. It is in three parts, almost three acts: garden, orchard, wood. In the garden, six light-infantry men, hunted like bears, accepted combat with two Hanoverian companies; six against two hundred, they took a quarter of an hour to die. One mounts a few steps into the orchard. Within a few square fathoms, fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. Thirty-eight loopholes are still in the south wall. The French came up thinking they had to deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall and the English guards. Soye's brigade was broken against it. Thus Waterloo began. Nevertheless the orchard was taken. The French scaled it with their nails. All this grass has been soaked in blood. An aged apple-tree leans with its wound dressed in straw. Nearly every tree has had its bullet. Bauduin killed, Foy wounded, a well crammed with corpses, three thousand men in that hovel alone cut down, slashed, shot, burned, with their throats cut, and all this so that a peasant can say today to the traveller: give me three francs, and if you like, I will explain to you the affair of Waterloo.