Chapter 74 Diougoumont

Hougoumont is a sad place, the beginning of obstacles, the first resistance encountered by the great European woodcutter named Napoleon at Waterloo, and the first intertwined knots encountered in the sound of the great axe. It used to be an old castle, but now it is just a farmhouse.For ancient lovers, Wugoumont should be Hugomont.The house was built by the noble Sommeret Hugo, who is dedicated to the sixth altar of the Vilay Abbey. Passers-by pushed open the gate, walked past an old floppy bike parked in the gate opening, and came to the courtyard. In the courtyard, the first thing that catches the attention of passers-by is a sixteenth-century dome door, around which everything has collapsed.The grand weather still shows from the ruins.In the wall not far from the domed door, another door was cut, with a keystone of Henry IV's time, through which one could see the woods in the orchard.Beside the door was a manure pit, some picks and picks, and some carts, and an old well with a flagged mouth and an iron pulley, a pony prancing, a turkey spreading its tail, and There was a chapel with a small bell tower, and a peach tree, attached to the chapel wall, was in blossom.This was the situation in the courtyard that Napoleon tried to break into.If he breaks through this corner, the whole world may belong to him.A flock of hens was pecking the dust from the ground.He heard a barking sound, a big vicious dog baring its teeth in place of an Englishman.

The British were admirable in this place back then.Cook's four companies of guards held out for seven hours under the onslaught of an army. Hougoumont, including houses and gardens, on the map, viewed as a geometric figure, is an irregular rectangle with one corner missing.The south gate is at that corner, with a wall as its nearest barrier.Hougoumont has two gates: the south gate and the north gate, that is, the gate of the castle and the gate of the villa.Napoleon sent his brother Jérôme against Hougoumont; Guiamino, Foix, and Bachelu's divisions made an assault there; Reille's troops were almost entirely employed in that direction, but failed. Leman's shells are also consumed on that wall of heroes.It is not superfluous for Bodin's brigade to reinforce Hougoumont from the north, and Sawyer's brigade can only make a gap in the south, not occupy it.

The village house is on the south side of the yard.A door panel of the north gate that was broken by the French army is still hanging on the wall.Those were four planks nailed to two cross-bars, and the scars from the attack could still be seen. This north gate was breached by the French army at that time, and a door panel was replaced later to replace the one hanging on the wall; The one in the hole is blocked on the north side of the courtyard. The lower part of the wall is made of stones and the upper part is made of bricks.It is a simple small car door that is found in every owner's house. The two door panels are made of rough wood. A little further away is the grass.At that time, the two armies competed fiercely for this pass.The door frame was covered with bright red bloody handprints, which did not fade for a long time, and Bodan died here.

The turmoil of the fierce battle still exists in this courtyard. The tragic scene at that time is vivid, and the scene of the bloody corpse is just in front of my eyes; life and death are like yesterday; Trembling, as if trying to escape. The courtyard is not as complete as it was in 1815, and many of the undulating and jagged fortifications have been demolished. The British army set up a defense line here, and the French army broke through, but they couldn't hold it.The wings of the old castle still stand beside the chapel, but they have collapsed, so to speak, there are only four walls left, and there is nothing left. This is the only remnant of Hougoumont's house.At that time, the old castle was used as a watchtower and the chapel was used as a camp, and the two armies annihilated each other there.The French, being shot with muskets everywhere, from behind the walls, from the lofts, from the bottom of the cellar, from every window, from every ventilation hole, from every crevice in the stones, brought bundles of sticks to burn the neighborhood. Walls and people, shooting was answered by fire attack.

The wing was destroyed, and one could still see, through the cracks in the iron bars of the windows, the rooms where the bricks had collapsed, in which the British troops were lying in ambush, and a winding staircase, broken from bottom to top like the shell of a broken conch. offal.The staircase was divided into two floors. When the British troops were attacked on the stairs, they gathered on the upper steps and demolished the lower ones.Large blocks of bluestone slabs were piled up among the nettles like a hill, but there were still a dozen steps attached to the wall, and a three-pronged fork was left on the first step.Those unattainable stone steps, like the teeth on the gums, are still firmly embedded in the wall.The rest was like a jawbone that had lost its teeth.There are still two old trees there: one is dead, and the other is wounded at the root, which is still green every April.Since 1815, its foliage has grown across the stairs.

There was also a massacre in that chapel.It's surprisingly quiet now.Since that bloodshed, no one has come to Mass.But the altar still exists, a rough wooden altar against a rough stone wall.Four plastered walls, a door to the altar, two small domed windows, with a tall wooden cross over the door, with a square ventilation hole blocked by a bundle of hay, in a On the ground in the corner, there is the remains of an old glass window frame, which is the current state of the chapel.Next to the altar, a fifteenth-century wooden statue of the Virgin Anna was nailed; the head of Jesus in childhood, which unfortunately also suffered the same as Christ, was knocked off by a blunderbuss.The French, who had once mastered the chapel, were repulsed and set fire to it.The shabby house was full of flames, like a furnace, the door was on fire, the floor was on fire, but the wooden statue of Christ was not on fire.The flames scorched his feet, and then went out, leaving behind two black-charred stumps.Miraculous, so say the locals.Child Jesus lost his head, which shows that his luck is not as good as that of Christ.

The walls are covered with handwriting of tourists.At the feet of that Christ it is written: Angine.There are additional titles: Count Llor Mayo, Marquis de Habana de Almagro and Marquise de Habana.There are also some French names with exclamation points, which is a sign of anger.That wall had been repainted in 1849, because people from all over the world insulted each other on it. A body with a hatchet in its hand was found at the door of this chapel. It was the remains of Captain Le Gros. Coming out of the chapel, towards the left, we can see a well.There used to be two wells in the yard.We asked, "Why is there no bucket and block in that well?" Because no one went there to get water.Why did no one go there to fetch water?For the well is filled with dry bones.

The last person to get water from that well was named William Van Gilson.He was a farmer who was working as a gardener in Hougoumont at the time.On June 18, 1815, his family fled to the woods to hide. Those unfortunate displaced hid for days and nights in the woods near Vilay Abbey.Some traces of those days still remain today, such as some charred old tree trunks, which mark the places where the terrified refugees camped in the woods. William van Gilson remained at Hougoumont "Castle Keeper", huddled in a cellar.The British found him.They dragged the frightened man out of his hiding place, hacked him with the back of their swords, and forced him to serve the warriors.When they were thirsty, William gave them a drink.His water was drawn from that well.Many people drank their last sip of water there.The well that many dead men drank from should also be destroyed.

After the war, everyone was busy burying the dead.The Grim Reaper has a unique method of disrupting victory, which follows the plague after the glory.Typhoid fever is often a by-product of martial arts.The well was so deep that it became a mass grave.Three hundred corpses were thrown into it.Maybe lost too quickly.Were they really all dead?According to the legend, it is not necessarily true.It seems that on the night of the dumping of the body, someone still heard faint shouts coming from the bottom of the well. The well stood alone in the middle of the yard.Three walls of half stone and half brick, folded like the partitions of the screen, surrounded it on three sides like a small square tower.The fourth side is empty.That's where the water is drawn.There's a monstrous bull's-eye hole in the middle wall, maybe a bomb hole.The small tower used to have a roof, but now only the wooden frame remains.The iron parts of the parapet on the right are in the shape of a cross.We lowered our heads and looked down, only to see a round brick hole in the dark, bottomless.The walls by the well were buried in nettles.

In Belgium, every well has large slabs of bluestone on the ground around it, but this one did not.Instead of the bluestone slab, there is only a cross-bar, on which five or six sections of oddly shaped, knotty, stiff, long strips of dry bone are placed.It no longer has buckets, nor chains nor tackles; but the stone troughs for the water are still there.The rain collects inside, and often a small bird comes from the neighboring woods to drink, and then flies away. There is only one house in the ruins, that is the village house, and it is still inhabited.The door of the manor house opened to the courtyard.There is an exquisite Gothic lock on the door, and a clover-shaped iron door knob protrudes obliquely beside it.Lieutenant Vilda of Hanover was holding the door button and trying to hide in the farmhouse when a French death squad chopped off his hand with an axe.

The family who lived in this house had a grandfather named Van Gilson, who had been the gardener, long since dead.A gray-haired woman says to you: "I lived here, too. I was only three years old. My older sister was so frightened that she cried. They took us to the woods. I hid in my mother's arms. Everyone put their ears to the ground and listened, and I, like a cannon, yelled 'Boom, boom.'” The door on the left of the yard, as we have said, opened into the orchard. The orchard was in dire condition. It's in three parts, we could almost say three acts.The first part is the garden, the second is the orchard, and the third is the woods.These three parts have a general enclosure, on this side of the gate there are the castle and the manor house, there is a fence on the left, a wall on the right, and a wall behind it.The wall on the right is brick and the wall behind it is stone.We advanced the garden.The garden was lower than the house, with raspberries and weeds, and ended in a high ashlar platform with balustrades all in the shape of gourds.It was a nobleman's garden, in the original French style, predating the Le Notrere style, now deserted and overgrown with thorns.The top of the stone pillar is a round body, similar to a stone ball.Forty-three stone balustrades still stood at their bases, and the rest lay down in the grass.Almost every one bears bullet wounds.A broken stone railing stands at the front end of the platform, like a broken leg. The garden was lower than the orchard, and six soldiers of the 1st Light Regiment had stormed into this garden, and were trapped in it like a bear trap, unable to get out, and were attacked by two companies of Hanoverians, one of which was armed with muskets.The Hanoverian soldiers leaned on the stone railing and shot down.The soldiers of the light armored team shot back from a low place, six of them fought against two hundred, desperately, the only barrier was the grass, they persisted for a quarter of an hour, and the six of them died together. From the garden we enter the real orchard, up a few stone steps.Fifteen hundred people fell in less than an hour in an area the size of a few square feet.That wall still seems to have the air of Yu Yong Kejia.The thirty-eight gun holes of varying heights that the British soldiers punched in the wall are still there.In front of the sixteenth gun hole, there are two English graves of granite.Only the south wall had gun holes, and it was from this side that the general attack came.A tall ivy fence hid the outside of the wall, and the French soldiers arrived, thinking it was just a fence, but found the wall laying an ambush to prevent them from advancing.The British Guards hid behind the wall, thirty-eight gun holes fired at once, and a torrential rain of bullets swept towards them.Sawyer's traveler was lost there.This is how the Battle of Waterloo began. The orchard was finally taken.The French soldiers had no ladders, so they climbed up with their fingernails.The two armies fought hand to hand under the tree.The grass was all covered with blood.A battalion of Nassau's soldiers, seven hundred men, was annihilated there.Two battalions of Kellermann's artillery lined up outside the wall, which was riddled with open-shot wounds. This orchard, like any other, was susceptible to the May weather.It has its golden button flowers and feverfew, the weeds are luxuriant, the plow horses are gnawing greens, and some woolen ropes for drying clothes are tied between the trees, and visitors have to bow their heads. When we walked through the wasteland, our feet often got stuck in the voles. hole.Among the tangled grass, we saw an uprooted tree trunk, lying green on the ground.That was the tree that Staff Blackman leaned against when he was dying.The German General Deborah died under a nearby tree. He was originally a French citizen, and his family migrated to Germany when the Edict of Nantes was abolished.Nearby, a diseased apple tree grew obliquely, covered with straw and covered with slime. Almost all the apple trees were withered due to old age.There is not a single plant that has not been subjected to bullets and gunfire.The garden was filled with the carcasses of dead trees.A flock of crows was flying around the branches, and a little farther away, there was a forest full of violets. Baudin dead, Foix wounded, fire, corpses, and blood, the blood of England, Germany, and France poured into a stream, a well filled with corpses, and Nassau's troops and the undead The army of Lunswick was annihilated, Deborah was killed, Blackman was killed, the British Guards were badly wounded, and twenty of the forty battalions of the French Reille were annihilated. In the house, some of the 3,000 people were cut down, some were decapitated, some were strangled, some were shot to death, and some were burned to death; all these were just for a farmer today who said to a tourist: "Sir, Give me three francs, and if you like, I'll tell you about Waterloo."