The Sage of Waterloo

by Leona Francombe

  Caillou was the runt (his name, fittingly, meant “pebble”). He was always underfoot, and a typical runt mainly because there was absolutely nothing of note to say about him.

  And then there was Berthe . . . poor, homely Berthe, a placid doe, and rather saintly in the respect that she vowed to reject all suitors until she found her true soul mate. To my great chagrin, her glance occasionally fell my way. I don’t mean any disrespect here. Berthe was sweet, and so earnestly eager to please. But she had no interest whatsoever in history. She could never be bothered to check her facts: she insisted, for example, that the Battle of Waterloo had occurred on June 15, 1818, and not on June 18, 1815. (Maybe she was dyslexic.) She didn’t even know what had happened at Hougoumont. So what would we talk about during those long winter nights?

  Spode was the elder statesman of the colony. He was an archivist par excellence, collecting tidbits of information from passing wildlife or tourists and codifying his findings one by one with little, officious sniffs. There were few topics about which he couldn’t—or didn’t—discourse, which was one of the reasons that he sought out my grandmother for conversation.

  Spode had escaped once, a feat that offset his general stuffiness somewhat. He was gone for three days, coming back to us in a porcelain soup tureen (alive, thank heavens), this being the only receptacle the farmer’s wife had handy to capture him among her cabbages. Perhaps because of this impressive episode, Old Lavender designated Spode the colony’s lookout. Whenever he wasn’t engaged in research, therefore, he would patrol the perimeter of the enclosure like some aging fusilier,

  thumping his hind foot at any sign of danger. When he was engaged in research—which was most of the time—we were on our own.

  Spode was fat and deliberate, with little brown spots on his jowls and a rather superior aspect that was tough to chew on, like dry corn husks. He occasionally embarked on philosophical discussions with Old Lavender, but she couldn’t abide his airs, promptly turning her rump to him whenever she’d had enough. He always deferred to her, however. She was older than he, and her knowledge of Waterloo more comprehensive, so he usually ambled away with a sniff rather than enter into a full-blown argument with a creature who could have felled him with a single kick. Grandmother often referred to Spode as Bonaparte behind his back, which was sad, really, considering the flame he carried for her. He wasn’t a bad sort. But we weren’t about to cry “Vive l’empereur!” whenever he walked by, either.

  Most of us followed the general rules that defined the Hollow Way. Yield. Bump ahead. No left turn. That sort of thing. It was a predictable sort of life, vigorously stamped with the colony’s imprimatur: milling, eating, nudging, nipping, dozing . . . milling, eating, nudging, nip . . . You get the idea. That said, we were a democratic lot, never according privileges based on birth; always allowing freedom of religion, including complete denial of Moon, should that be one’s bent; favoring merit-based opportunities (Jonas, for instance, with his natural zeal and superior shoulder muscles, was in charge of digging the hole under the hutch). I would venture to say that we were probably some of the first unsung proponents of the Napoleonic Code.

  Not all of us followed the rules, however. Jonas had written his own set and was determined to abide by them, no matter what the price. How I envied him! Even though envy is against our tenets. I was so dispiritingly hesitant and insecure. I never took the initiative, despite the little spasm of wildness that surfaced in me from time to time. My kick was weak and my shoulders lacked tone. It was impossible not to envy the impulsive, exuberant, good-looking Jonas. He was everything I wanted to be.

  He’d been working on a hole under the hutch for some months, even boasting that his tunnel would soon reach the south wall and he’d be remembered for generations to come as a great liberator and risk-taker, all the while avoiding (naturally!) the taint of infamy that still dogged Marshal Ney. Jonas occasionally dug up old lead musket balls as he worked, which further inflated his Napoleonic ardor. It’s said that approximately three and a half million bullets were fired during the Battle of Waterloo, which made it nigh impossible for an athletic rabbit like Jonas to dig a decent hole and not turn one up. According to the metal detector enthusiasts who regularly trawl the grounds of Hougoumont, you know which bullets are French and which are British by their weight: the former weigh twenty-two grams; the latter, thirty.

  One twilight, just as we were filing indoors for the evening, Jonas lingered at his digging. Something had taken hold of him: a stray signal from the fields, perhaps, or more specifically, the scent of a wild doe. Whatever the temptation, he suddenly flung himself into the air as if electrified and tried to leap over the barrier, getting fouled on a sharp wire at the top. There he hung, a pitiful sight, bleeding badly.

  We milled below in confusion, not knowing what to do. I milled the closest, awestruck by Jonas’s momentous deed—by the grandeur of his suffering, and the dark uncertainty of his fate. I thought of my own wild spasms and realized how puny they were in comparison to Jonas’s. I would never have the courage to act on them as he had.

  Emmanuel forgot us that evening, as it happened (though even if he had turned up, he probably wouldn’t have known what to do, either). Spode was not on lookout duty, having been engaged all day in an analysis of Marshal Grouchy’s suitability for leading Napoleon’s right wing during the Waterloo campaign, so it was Old Lavender who officiated. She delivered a thunderous thump against the packed earth and then, to our shock, nipped at our heels and ordered us all into the hutch posthaste, leaving Jonas to the predators. Was this his ultimate Ney lesson? I wondered. Had the spirit of the hotheaded commander at last come to rest at Hougoumont?

  Jonas hung there all night. His blood coursed down the chicken wire and left dark, spreading stains in the dust. Moon must not have been far away, however, because incredibly, come morning, my cousin hadn’t succumbed to his wounds, or been carried off by an owl as everyone had expected. He was even still able to tell a few jokes. But he paid for his rashness, just as Grandmother said he would (though not as heavily as Ney, who had lost the better part of a brigade).

  After the farmer had disentangled Jonas, and all the fur on his stomach had been shaved and the wound sewn up, he just wasn’t the same Jonas anymore. Some of the hot air had definitely leaked out.

  Then something strange happened. After his near-death experience, Jonas started going around doing uncharacteristically selfless deeds, as if he were trying to begin again as another rabbit. He let the others eat first instead of charging the dish—even giving priority to Caillou, who was universally tromped on; he didn’t push his way into the hutch at night to get the best patch of hay. That sort of thing. Was this some kind of latter-day saintliness?

  Grandmother didn’t think so. She’d never trusted Jonas, old or new. “He’s still the most unreliable scrap of fur I ever saw,” she huffed. She also said that to qualify for sainthood, you have to give up the best patch of hay from your earliest days. Our species has to hit the ground running and not change course, she said. Therefore, you generally are what you are from birth onward. (She was definitely old school, that one.) I’m not so sure, myself. I think that we all deserve a second chance. Even Jonas. It’s just that do-goodees have to realize that at least half of all do-gooding benefits the do-gooder, which was definitely the case with Jonas and certainly not a crime in itself, but also not, strictly speaking, a means to sainthood. I have to say that I missed the old Jonas—the incorrigible cad in the grand French tradition; the carefree spirit I so longed to be. The ladies missed him, too.

  2

  Visitors occasionally poked around the farm in those days looking for evidence of the famous battle. They would leave flowers against the chapel wall, and run their hands wonderingly over the pockmarks in the doors. Their pilgrimage invariably led them on a path from the courtyard to the meadow, passing by the dovecote along the way. Generally, we were overlooked, which was understandable. The atmosphere grows heavy in that part of t
he farm; history quickens. No one expects to see rabbits.

  I don’t remember when, exactly, I first set eyes on the two ladies. They’d been coming for years, according to Grandmother. One had snowy hair, the other silver, and from a distance they looked like winter by moonlight. They had a singular aura about them, as if they’d been charmed, and drifted so softly about the place that it seemed the air itself was dictating their movements. They wore rubber boots, even in summer, and I don’t think there was a bullet hole or boggy corner they didn’t know by heart.

  Armed with maps and guides, the ladies would wander around the farm for hours at a time, pausing frequently to consult their material and read each other passages aloud. Their preferred author was Charlotte Eaton, the Englishwoman who had found herself in Brussels on June 15, 1815—the eve of the Battle of Quatre Bras—and stayed abroad long enough to visit Hougoumont and other key sites a month later.

  Most striking of all was that our lady visitors seemed to have found that restless Hougoumont harmonic, and instinctively followed it to the lodes of greatest passion: the loopholes; the North Gate; the vanished well; the chestnuts. It was remarkable, really. We’d always been taught that our senses were far more finely tuned to the pulse of Hougoumont than those of people, but here they were, two human females who actually seemed to read the air. They would wander off, one without the other, and stand very still under some tree or other, simply looking up at the sky.

  “Thank heavens for the Eaton ladies!” Old Lavender said, and the moniker stuck. “War desperately needs a female perspective. Why is the scourge of the entire human race always recounted by only half of it—and the guilty half, at that?”

  The ladies sometimes lingered at the dovecote, where they could lean comfortably against the rail fence and peruse their guides. The sight of Old Lavender arrested them every time.

  “What a huge rabbit!” one would exclaim, as if Grandmother had grown since their last visit.

  “She looks like one of those rabbits in Oriental paintings,” the other offered. “You know: the matriarch brooding off in one corner.”

  I’ve never been to a museum myself, so I can’t say for sure if this description was accurate. But the idea haunted me. Doubtless an enigma cloaked Old Lavender, made weightier by certain events in her past that she kept to herself.

  Another thing Grandmother kept to herself was the business of my own bloodline. She implied vaguely that it had taken a more circuitous route than her own, but again, failed to elaborate. I was the only white rabbit in the enclosure . . . that much anyone could grasp. It was also clear that somehow, through some obscure event, I was connected to Hougoumont’s history in a way that others in the colony were not. I’d felt this distinction—or perhaps stigma is more accurate—for as long as I could remember.

  Every two or three generations, a white rabbit was born in the colony. Sometimes this creature was pure white; sometimes it had various splashes of black on its coat, like me. Mystery dogged the carriers of this gene. Some believed it could be traced back two hundred years, to the chevalier’s rabbits in the great barn. If this were true, one would naturally assume that there would have been at least one white rabbit that had survived the bombardment, though few small creatures could have made it through such a cataclysm. You would then have to take the scenario even further, and assume that at least one male and one female rabbit had been left in the Napoleonic hutch. And then the final supposition: that they had not been too traumatized to procreate.

  It is indeed a strange sort of upheaval, not knowing one’s origins, as if you’ve been cut loose from the natural order of things and left to float out of reach, and even simple givens, like day following night, cannot be relied upon.

  There must have been something worthwhile about my uniqueness, for I was the only one Old Lavender let sit beside her.

  Her favorite spot was a dusty hollow at the northeast corner of the pen. Her routine never varied: She would first groom herself (the places she could still reach, that is). Then she would settle into the hollow gradually, methodically, shifting her rump back and forth, lower and lower, until she found the heart of the spot. Finally, she would lay one ear flat against her neck, cock the other one straight up and narrow her eyes.

  Only then was I permitted to slink in.

  Mutely, I would press myself against the warm cave between her thighbone and belly, listening to the tuneful plumbing of her digestion and staring out through the chicken wire in the general direction she was staring.

  “You’re like a bowl of water with a calm surface, William,” Grandmother liked to say. “You can’t see to the bottom of it. But you know it’s deep.”

  Her description would sometimes come to mind as I sat beside her, pretending to feel watery and deep and naïvely trying to follow her thoughts. But as I looked out at the provocative, breezy wildness of the meadow, my bowl would invariably be far from calm, and a familiar restlessness would plague me that set up all sorts of ripples on the surface. Maybe Grandmother had noticed those ripples all along, and had named me William after Wellington’s inexperienced ally, the Prince of Orange, who was generally well liked, but whose heroics at the Battle of Quatre Bras were still open to interpretation. His bowl had definitely had a few ripples . . . if not some large waves.

  Sometimes Old Lavender would run her nose through my fur in the wrong direction, a gesture that usually infuriates a rabbit. But not me. I can still feel it to this day—the exciting novelty of it; the bracing discomfort. It took me ages to connect a curious lift in my thinking with this annoyance and grasp the underlying message: that too much comfort dampens the brain.

  Every once in a while, Grandmother would open her eyes fully and say: “Try to imagine the unimaginable, William.”

  You could interpret that many ways, I suppose. But back then, I knew of only one way, and would dutifully try to imagine that bucolic farm and all the fragrant fields around it, running with blood. And not just human blood, either, but the blood of every sort of wild creature who, until that terrible day two hundred years ago, had never questioned their rightful place in the universe.

  I’ve reflected all my life on that rightful place, and on how precarious it really is; how, for instance, my hero, the Duke of Wellington, managed to make it through the entire three days of the Battle of Waterloo without so much as a bullet grazing him. “The finger of Providence was upon me,” he was quoted as saying. That he could remain unscathed when practically all his personal staff were killed, wounded or had their horses shot from under them is one of history’s great sleights of hand.

  The question is: Whose hand?

  No one, to my knowledge, has had the indelicacy to dispute Wellington’s explanation of his good fortune. There he was, telescope in hand, riding back and forth for hours in the very thick of battle, encouraging, directing and animating, death ever at his elbow. His esteemed quartermaster-general, Sir William De Lancey, was blown from his horse by the wind of a cannonball en ricochet at the very moment when he was speaking to the Duke, suffering terrible injuries from which he would die a week later; the Earl of Uxbridge was shot in the leg in almost identical circumstances; Sir Alexander Gordon, a friend and aide-de-camp to the Duke, had a leg amputated and died in Wellington’s own camp bed. Even nonbelievers might make an exception and take Wellington at his word.

  After a period of reflection—several days or so—Old Lavender would lecture to the enclosure at large. The place was crowded: we were unable to eat, groom, fornicate or daydream more than about a foot away from someone else, so she had a decent captive audience. Not that we objected. She mined her Waterloo passion for treasures that were exclusively ours for the taking.

  It was a subject none of us could avoid, of course, living as we did against the very earth that had shook with the conflict, and breathing air still dense with souls. Like the rest of us, Old Lavender couldn’t escape her destiny as a small creature, so her brand of history had mainly to do with small things.


  “Our point of view is a gift,” she said. “We understand essential minutiae, in our species and in humans: unease in a voice or gesture; electricity sparked by panic or excitement; signals betraying doubt, joy, grief. And don’t forget the rich realm of smell. What an encyclopedia that is! Any one of you could have picked up Napoleon’s stress on the eve of battle.” Grandmother went on to say that Napoleon’s very pores had exuded the sort of anxiety that even the dullest animal wit can pick up. His human entourage, however, could only go by less subtle pointers: loud, agitated talking, and orders issued with great vehemence; constant snuff-taking, and the supreme confidence that he would be sleeping at the royal palace in Brussels after his victory.

  History is in the details . . . How many times we were reminded of that! Pick the details that move you, we were instructed—the ones that speak to you, and arrest you. Then build your idea of history around them, for only then will it come alive.

  My first lessons taught me the smallest pearls . . . so small that any serious pearl fisherman would have tossed them away. But through Old Lavender’s eyes, these tiny treasures were like pebbles viewed through a drop of rain: color, size and clarity were all enhanced, transforming an insignificant scrap of stone into a jewel.

  Observe closely, Grandmother said, adding: but with passion. And what a passionate stage she set! She was living proof that emotion can reside in the surliest, smelliest of vessels.

  Clouds, mists, driving rain . . . annoying details, perhaps, but on the eve of Waterloo, our countryside had become the twilight of some despairing god. Higher forces were clearly circling . . . circling . . .

  “It was peculiarly awful, that storm,” Old Lavender said. “An omen, surely. Soldiers fell up to their necks in mud. It was only logical that Napoleon had to wait for things to dry a bit before he could move his artillery. Cannonballs need to deflect, after all, and not get bogged down. It was a fateful waste of time, though. Napoleon was four hours late to his own battle.”