Upon this door, beside a pretty Gothic lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed slanting.
At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped this handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed off his hand with an axe.
The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume van Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since.
A woman with gray hair said to us:
“I was there.
I was three years old.
My sister, who was older, was terrified and wept.
They carried us off to the woods.
I went there in my mother’s arms.
We glued our ears to the earth to hear.
I imitated the cannon, and went boum! boum!”
A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard, so we were told.
The orchard is terrible.
It is in three parts; one might almost say, in three acts.
The first part is a garden, the second is an orchard, the third is a wood.
These three parts have a common enclosure: on the side of the entrance, the buildings of the chateau and the farm; on the left, a hedge; on the right, a wall; and at the end, a wall.
The wall on the right is of brick, the wall at the bottom is of stone.
One enters the garden first.
It slopes downwards, is planted with gooseberry bushes, choked with a wild growth of vegetation, and terminated by a monumental terrace of cut stone, with balustrade with a double curve.
It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which preceded Le Notre; to-day it is ruins and briars.
The pilasters are surmounted by globes which resemble cannon-balls of stone.
Forty-three balusters can still be counted on their sockets; the rest lie prostrate in the grass.
Almost all bear scratches of bullets.
One broken baluster is placed on the pediment like a fractured leg.
It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither, and being unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears in their dens, accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was armed with carbines.
The Hanoverians lined this balustrade and fired from above.
The infantry men, replying from below, six against two hundred, intrepid and with no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a quarter of an hour to die.
One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden into the orchard, properly speaking.
There, within the limits of those few square fathoms, fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour.
The wall seems ready to renew the combat.
Thirty-eight loopholes, pierced by the English at irregular heights, are there still.
In front of the sixth are placed two English tombs of granite.
There are loopholes only in the south wall, as the principal attack came from that quarter.
The wall is hidden on the outside by a tall hedge; the French came up, thinking that they had to deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle and an ambuscade, with the English guards behind it, the thirty-eight loopholes firing at once a shower of grape-shot and balls, and Soye’s brigade was broken against it.
Thus Waterloo began.
Nevertheless, the orchard was taken.
As they had no ladders, the French scaled it with their nails.
They fought hand to hand amid the trees.
All this grass has been soaked in blood.
A battalion of Nassau, seven hundred strong, was overwhelmed there.
The outside of the wall, against which Kellermann’s two batteries were trained, is gnawed by grape-shot.
This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May.
It has its buttercups and its daisies; the grass is tall there; the cart-horses browse there; cords of hair, on which linen is drying, traverse the spaces between the trees and force the passer-by to bend his head; one walks over this uncultivated land, and one’s foot dives into mole-holes.
In the middle of the grass one observes an uprooted tree-bole which lies there all verdant.
Major Blackmann leaned against it to die.
Beneath a great tree in the neighborhood fell the German general, Duplat, descended from a French family which fled on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
An aged and falling apple-tree leans far over to one side, its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and of clayey loam.
Nearly all the apple-trees are falling with age.
There is not one which has not had its bullet or its biscayan.6 The skeletons of dead trees abound in this orchard.
Crows fly through their branches, and at the end of it is a wood full of violets.