Free The Battle by Alessandro Barbero Page B

first light of dawn, he sat down and wrote a long letter to his wife, in which he gave her an account of what had happened at Quatre Bras and tried to imagine what would take place later that day. Occasionally, his distress at the losses recently suffered by his troops broke through his confiding, serene tone: "Our own wounded we brought off on cavalry horses, except such as could not be found in the standing corn, poor fellows! In these scenes, not in the actual rencontre, one sees the miseries of war. I saw Henry Macleod last night, free from fever and pain, and doing well. He has three pike stabs in the side, a graze in the head, and a contusion on the shoulder. Poor Cameron I hear is dead, but I am unwilling to believe it.—Adieu. In all these strange scenes, my mind is with you, but it is tranquil and composed, nor is there reason why it should be otherwise. All will be very well. God bless you."
    In Captain Mercer's troop, a corporal sent in search of ammunition returned instead with a cart full of food and drink. After distributing and consuming the rum on the spot, the gunners put some oatmeal on the boil and improvised a porridge they called "stirabout." When Mercer saw that the cart contained meat as well, he refused to eat the gunners' pap and gave orders to prepare a soup. As Mercer's officers waited for their meal, they too speculated about what would happen that morning. No one could exclude the possibility that the Allied troops would continue their retreat in a little while, heading north along the main road to Brussels just as they had done the previous day, with the French hard on their heels. Since he had nothing to do, Mercer took a walk around the cavalry bivouacs, listening to the soldiers' chatter: "Some thought the French were afraid to attack us, others that they would do so soon, others that the Duke would not wait for it, others that he would, as he certainly would not allow them to go to Brussels." After a while, the captain returned to his battery, hoping that the soup would be ready, only to learn that the order to stand to arms had been given and the soldiers had thrown everything away.
    A little to the rear of Mercer's position were the fusiliers of the Second Battalion of the Ninety-fifth Regiment. Having received permission to plunder the surrounding farms, they broke up whatever wood they found and built a fire that would serve to dry their clothes and cook the few farm animals the peasants had left behind. Upon entering a farmyard, a group of fusiliers found the body of one of their comrades and immediately concluded that he had been poisoned, although it is much more probable that he had simply drunk himself to death. Beside themselves with rage, the fusiliers began systematically to destroy everything on the farm. They went down into the cellar, broke open the casks, and filled their canteens with wine. Then, since the dead man belonged to a company just arrived from England and fitted out with new uniforms, while their company had been in Flanders for more than a year and their uniforms were reduced to tatters, the soldiers agreed to strip the corpse and divide the deceased's clothing.
    In the fields near La Belle Alliance, the soldiers of the Twenty-eighth Ligne, having disassembled, dried, and oiled their muskets and changed their flintlocks, were preparing a meal. The previous evening, as they scoured the area, they had seized a sheep, which they prudently decided to keep in reserve for the following day. A corporal who had been an apprentice butcher before enlisting slaughtered the animal, skinned it, and chopped it into pieces. Then the meat was put on the boil, together with a certain amount of flour, which another corporal, Canler, had found who knows where. Barely eighteen years old, Canler had known no other life except the army: The son of a soldier, he had lived with his father in the field, and at fourteen he had signed up as a drummer boy. Although a survivor of many bad