A L'ENTENTE CORDIALE. Pour huit siècles nous faisions l'Histoire en opposition,

A l'avenir nous le ferons en union!

In putting forward the following plea for the preservation intact of the battlefield of Waterloo, I would premise that the proposal does not come under the head of an audacious novelty which might estrange the sympathy and support of many persons from a scheme that requires practical unanimity between men of different races to bring it to a successful issue. Russia has religiously preserved for two hundred years the field of Pultawa, as the scene that witnessed her birth as a World Power. Quite recently Canada has consecrated the Heights of Abraham for the veneration of coming generations, and this instance is especially applicable to the present subject, because Frenchmen and Englishmen there associated themselves in a common tribute to some of their many heroes. In demanding the preservation of the field of Waterloo as a campum sacrem the two precedents given provide good encouragement, and if the reader asks for the name of some prominent witness to show how the idea strikes the world at large, I will go to far-off Japan for one, and quote the words of General Baron Oku, who has written: "It is greatly to be desired that this ever-famous battlefield shall be saved from desecration and preserved in its present condition."

The question has to be considered under two aspects: first, as to the general principle involved in a decision by the Belgian Government to nationalize the battlefield; and secondly, as to British participation in the project.

I believe I am correct in saying that, while the Belgian Government is most

sympathetically disposed to the scheme, it is disinclined from a spirit of delicacy to take the first step. Not merely is Belgium a small country, but it is a neutral State, and it might seem hazardous for it to go beyond its province and set an example to the great Powers whose sentiments have to be mainly considered in any matter that involves the name of Waterloo. With perfect tact Belgium shrinks from taking upon herself too much in so delicate a question. She is perfectly willing to co-operate and give every assistance in her power, but the initiative lies with England and France. Her part will be to ratify and give a solemn sanction as the sovereign of the soil to an arrangement that can only be initiated in London and Paris. It must also be stated, as a recent official reply in the Belgian Chamber makes clear, that the Belgian Government is not prepared to bear the whole expense "of acquiring the area of land requisite for the preservation of the general physiognomy of the battlefield." That must be a joint work, and the success of the movement depends, practically speaking, on the action of this country. It is the main purpose of this article to show how very easy it would be for England to take a step that would at once ensure the co-operation of Belgium and preserve the battlefield of Waterloo from further risk of desecration and disappearance.

As neither the British Government nor the British people would act in this matter without the prior approbation of the French Government, which in turn would not commit itself unless it felt well assured of the acquiescence of the French army and people, I will not feign ignorance of the fact that in

principle the sympathy of our neighbor is known to be already gained for this pious manifestation. There are, therefore, no difficulties, either diplomatic or sentimental, in the way of our taking action inspired by the true spirit of respect and veneration for those who gave their lives for their respective countries on the field of Waterloo.

With these general remarks by way of introduction to the subject, we may now approach the consideration of some of the details, and this is the more necessary because there appears to be a good deal of ignorance about them. For instance, the several questions asked by Lord Charles Beresford in the House of Commons on June 15th last have no relation whatever to any facts or condition of things that ever existed. He seemed to think that the British Government had expended some money in the past on memorials to our fallen soldiers at Waterloo. Let me state positively that in the ninetysix years since the battle it has not spent sixpence in any shape or form. Not one of the memorials on the field is due to its action or support. It did not even give a contribution to the new memorial in the cemetery at Evère, near Brussels, about which Mr., now Viscount, Haldane was so hazy in his reply. Nor was the Secretary of State better informed than his interlocutor when he said that "the bodies of the men who fell at Hougoumont were removed many years ago to a cemetery near Brussels." The bodies of those who fell at Hougoumont became part of the dust and earth of the garden in which they were hurriedly interred, and the heedless tourist to-day tramples over their unmarked graves. The bodies removed to Evère, as mentioned by Mr. Haldane, were those of the of ficers who fought in the centre of the battle, and who, more fortunate than their comrades at Hougoumont, found formal burial and a memorial stone in

the little cemetery of the church in the village of Waterloo almost opposite the Duke of Wellington's quarters at the inn bearing the sign of “Jean de Nivelles." Among these officers was the gallant Sir William de Lancey, whose end was recorded by his widow, and above their remains, now deposited at Evère, was placed the fine and appealing memorial due to the chisel of Count Jacques de Lalaing and paid for by private subscribers, among whom was our late Queen Victoria of immortal memory.

I read Lord Charles Beresford's ques tions, not as a record of inexactitudes, but as a covert reproach on the indifference of the authorities in this matter, and above all towards the defenders of Hougoumont.

At this point it will be well to establish the facts. There is no British memorial on the battlefield of Waterloo, or anywhere near it. The memorials in their order of antiquity are (1) the monument to Major Gordon, erected in 1817 by the Earl of Aberdeen; (2) the monument to the King's German Legion, raised also in 1817 by subscriptions in Hanover, which stands on the opposite side of the Chaussée de Charleroi to the Gordon column; (3) the Lion Mound, erected by King William and the Netherlands States General in 1825-7; (4) the Prussian monument, a column surmounted by an iron cross, placed on an eminence to the north of the village of Planchenoit in 1887; and (5) the Wounded Eagle, by Gérôme, erected in 1903 by the French Sabretache Society in honor of the Imperial Guard. proposal for a monument to General Van Merlen, and the Belgians who fell with him in the battle, has been approved of in principle, but not yet executed.

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In addition to these five principal monuments, which will become six when the Belgian memorial has been

erected, there are some minor monuments which may be enumerated. On the heights of Lasne, near St. Lambert, is the fine monument to the Prussian Colonel Count Schwerin, a descendant of the Marshal killed at Prague in 1757. At Joli Bois is the monument to Colonel Stables, and a little distance away, nearer Mont St. Jean, is another to Major A. Rowley Heyland, both of the British army. In the garden of Hougoumont are two plain stone slabs recumbent on the grass, one to Captain John Lucius Blackman, of the Coldstreams, killed in the defence, the other to Sergeant-Major Cotton, of the 7th Hussars, who died many years later after founding the local museum and serving as guide to countless visitors. Against the south wall is a tomb to Captain Craufurd, who fell at this very spot. Two years ago a bronze tablet to the Guards was placed in the remaining wall of the old chapel. This completes the list. It proves the truth of the statement that there is no British monument or memorial. Nor is one wanted in the ordinary acceptance of the term. The intervention of the British Government should be of a nature to promote the attainment of the greater object, which is the preservation of the whole of the battlefield. This can only be done by the purchase of the farm and appurtenances of Hougoumont, and its preservation as "the" British memorial.

The defence of Hougoumont throughout the day by two companies of the Coldstreams, aided by three hundred men of the 2nd Nassau regiment under Captain Busgen, moved from the left wing at nine in the morning, and reinforced at a later hour by four light companies of the Guards, represents the central dramatic episode in the battle from the English point of view. Without disparaging the services of the Nassau riflemen, or of the Brunswick battalion co-operating on the northern

side near the Nivelles road, the defence was the achievement of part of our Brigade of Guards. The French attack under Napoleon's brother Jérome might have crumpled up Wellington's right wing, if it had not broken its force against the little château and walled garden of Hougoumont. Here I would interpolate as a piece of first-hand evidence a reminiscence of my first introduction to the details of Waterloo history.

A period of my childhood was passed in France, and our host was a Capitaine Le François, who had led a Voltigeur battalion in Jérome's attacks on Hougoumont. He recited the details of the attack many times for my benefit, but the striking feature of the story, and the one that is pertinent to the present matter, was the following: The front of Hougoumont was screened by a wood, not dense, but with scattered trees. Through the intervals could be seen at the other side of it a red line. "We," he added, "who had never seen English infantry in action knew of their red uniform, and had heard that, unlike ourselves, they fought in line and not in column. There could be no doubt, then, we thought, that this was the English infantry drawn up in line to receive us, and we fired at it for all we were worth to prepare the main attack. It was not till late in the afternoon that we discovered that we had been firing all the time, not at men, but at bricks."

The reader will see in this little anecdote from the mouth of a combatant at Waterloo the great part that Hougoumont played in deciding the victory. The red brick wall, no longer screened by the wood, exists today just as it did in 1815. Its outer face is scored from end to end by the bullets; its inner shows where the English troops had begun to make loopholes, which, with rare exceptions, were not completed. The story went

at the time that the English lost one thousand men in the defence, and the French ten thousand in the attack. It would be difficult to check the figures, but certainly Hougoumont kept Jérome's corps fully occupied throughout the day.

We come now to the sadder and more solemn part of the subject. During the afternoon the small chapel attached to the château was set on fire by a French shell or fire ball. The wounded had been placed there for safety. Many of them were burnt to death. This part of the yard became so incommoded by the quantity of dead bodies that many of them were thrown down the well which still stands there. After the conclusion of the battle it became necessary to bury the dead in the hasty and perfunctory fashion of the time. To bring out the horrors of such scenes, it may be mentioned that no attempt had been made to bury the ten thousand slain at Quatre Bras on June 16th, and many witnesses have testified to the awfulness of the scene under the light of the moon when, during the night of June 18-19th the French pursued and the Prussian pursuers passed along the road to Charleroi. A contemporary witness recorded in a Brussels paper as a remarkable fact that the Highlanders of Picton's Division (92nd and 79th regiments) had commenced burying their own dead in trenches alongside the main Brussels-Charleroi high-road before ten o'clock in the evening while the battle was still raging round La Belle Alliance and Rossomme, "for it is their practice," he added, "not to rest themselves until they have first put their fallen comrades in their place of repose."""

It was otherwise at Hougoumont. During the morning of June 19th a trench not more than three feet deep was dug in the garden, and three hundred of our men were laid therein in

a long row. It was considered that eighteen inches of earth above the bodies sufficed. At the same time as our men were buried, the bodies of three hundred French troops were burnt, and much of the wood that screened the buildings was cut down to make the funeral pyre. In Mudford's interesting "Campaign in the Netherlands," published in 1817, will be found some rather striking colored views of the respective scenes.

Few details are preserved as to what was done with the slain. In a field near the church of Waterloo three hundred English soldiers were buried together. These were men who died of their wounds in the main hospital in the Farm of Mont St. Jean or along the roadside. In the hollow east of the farm of La Haie Sainte a trench was sunk by the labor of the people of the neighborhood, and four thousand men and an immense number of horses were given common burial. No attempt was made here to distinguish between the nations, but their uniforms, weapons, and other personal possessions were taken by the peasants who buried them as the reward of their toil. We have excellent contemporary evidence as to how the dead were buried in the following passage taken from one of the letters of Sir Walter Scott, who visited the battlefield about five weeks after the event:

"This place (Hougoumont) was particularly interesting. It was a quietlooking gentleman's house, which had been burnt by the French shells. The defenders burnt out of the house itself betook themselves to the little garden, where, breaking loopholes through the brick walls, they kept up a most destructive fire on the assailants, who had possessed themselves of a little wood which surrounds the villa on one side. In this spot vast numbers had fallen, and being hastily buried the smell is most offensive at this moment.

Indeed, I felt the same annoyance in many parts of the field, and did I live near the spot I should be anxious about the diseases which this steaming carnage might occasion."

Mention of Scott will excuse the quotation from stanza 23 of his poem, "The Field of Waterloo":

But still in story and in song For many an age remembered long Shall live the towers of Hougoumont! The reader curious in such matters will find fuller details in the Memoirs of Major Pryse Gordon, who accompanied Scott on the occasion mentioned, and who also gives an account of an earlier visit to the battlefield, made only two days after the battle. In the same work, supplemented by that of the Count de St. Germain, will be found the best description of the scenes in Brussels during the three days following the Duchess of Richmond's ball, including the arrival, escorted by a troop of Scots Grays, of fifteen hundred French prisoners, whom the commissariat officer, Tupper Carey, took to be Belgian fugitives because they were talking French when he passed them near La Grande Espinette.

Many fantastic origins have been suggested for the name Hougoumont, but Brialmont solved the difficulty in his usual trenchant way by declaring that it was nothing more than the château of the Counts of Gomont. At the time of Waterloo it belonged to the Counts of Robiano, but with the destruction of the château it passed into humbler hands, and from a country residence it descended to an ordinary farmhouse, and probably the fees exacted from visitors exceed in value the return of the glebe. The following description of the place as it appeared on the day of the battle will interest the reader. Mudford said:

In front of the right center and near the Nivelles road was the château of Hougoumont (or Gomont), which cov

ered the return of that flank. The château, the residence of a Flemish nobleman, had on one side a large farmyard, and on the other a garden fenced by a brick wall. The whole was encircled by an open wood of tall trees, growing upon about three acres of ground.

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M. Navez, a Belgian writer, gives a more detailed account, of which the following is a translation:-"The demesne of Goumont consisted in 1815 of a château and farm buildings. large courtyard, almost rectangular in form, with a well in the centre, was bounded on the west by a barn, and on the north and east by stables and coach-houses. On the southern side was the massive building of the château itself, pierced with narrow windows, and ending in a chapel. One entrance to the courtyard was on the northern side near the stables, and gave access to the Nivelles road. A second gateway lying between the barn and the chapel led to a smaller court, flanked on the west by a second barn, and on the south by the farmer's residence. Out of this court was the passage to the gardens extending to the eastwards of the group of buildings. A small garden near the farmer's house formed a sort of inner enclosure in a much more extensive garden, the latter being bounded on its southern and eastern sides by a solidly built wall. A large orchard protected with hedges covered the gardens to the north and east. They, including the buildings, were further screened by a wood of trees not planted closely together. In front of the orchard stretched a field; a hedge surrounded this and also the wood."

Since 1815 this wood has been cut down and has totally disappeared. The little garden mentioned is now a kitchen garden, and the larger garden has been turned into an orchard.

Finally the description of General de Bas and Count T'Serclaes, in their