Free The Ghost of Waterloo by Robin Adair Page A

Certainly, he was somewhere else, in another time …

Chapter Fourteen
    St Helena – 6 May 1821
    There is no armour against Fate;
    Death lays his icy hand on kings:
    Sceptre and crown
    Must tumble down
    – James Shirley,
The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses
(1659)

 
    ‘To be killed at Waterloo would have been a good death,’ said Napoleon Bonaparte upon his arrival at St Helena in 1815. Now, six years later, the prison island lost in the Atlantic Ocean had become his watery Waterloo.
    After a painful decline, the man who swallowed Europe coughed a bloody froth and died at 5.49 on the evening of 5 May.
    Seventeen men were crowded into a room at Longwood House, solemnly gathered around the body, which was laid out on a table. This was far from a lying-in-state; the corpse was uncovered and naked. The Emperor was dead, at fifty-one.
    Those seventeen men included the doctors and witnesses required for a post mortem. Others were, of course, simply the morbidly curious, prepared to brave the gore and the sickly stink for the sake of a famous memory or even, if they were fortunate, a memento mori, perhaps a lock of hair or a nail clipping.
    Furious segar-smoking could not disguise the ripening stench of sweaty clothing and body odour, a term that took on new meaning as the growing corruption of the corpse cloyed the air and caught at throats, defying perfume-soaked kerchiefs. And the surroundings were depressing: the sharp claws of rats skittered behind the skirting boards and leprous wallpaper peeled off in damp strips.
    The final indignity, dissection, was unavoidable. The late General’s gaolers were keen to dispel charges that they had poisoned their celebrated charge. Napoleon himself had fuelled that rumour mill, telling his last doctor, ‘After my death, I want you to examine my stomach particularly carefully; make a precise, detailed report on it. I charge you to overlook nothing.’ Dr Antommarchi, a fellow Corsican, agreed. And so the stage was set.
    For the laymen present, the autopsy lived up to necropsy’s fearful reputation as the ‘beastly science’. The sturdy body’s distended abdomen had been ripped open and the organs brutally exposed. A blood-spattered Antommarchi examined evidence of corrosion and a lesion in the area of the pylorus, the opening between the stomach and the intestine, and hurriedly announced that the cause of death was cancer.
    While at least one important man, Napoleon’s chief gaoler, Sir Hudson Lowe, was pleased and in agreement with what the autopsy concluded, one witness was deeply puzzled.
    This worrier was Thomas Owens, who understood corpses. He had been an army surgeon during the last Iberian and Continental campaigns, both of which had been sparked by the ambitions of the man whose shell now lay before him.
    At the climax of the conflict – between 1810 and ’15 – the British Army numbered more than 300000. After Waterloo, its strength dropped by two-thirds.
    With fewer soldiers, few battles and, consequently, fewer wounds or illnesses, the army needed fewer doctors. Owens drifted onto the reserve lists, which paid less. But, money notwithstanding, his removal from the battlefield suited him. Doctoring under fire was generally less successful than the often hit-or-miss practices carried out in even the comparative calm of civilian peacetime. While all patients feared treatment, only soldiers had turned it into a grim prayer muttered before battle: ‘God save me from the surgeons!’
    Now – and this was one reason he had landed on St Helena – he was a ship’s surgeon. He had worked briefly in London at Guy’s Hospital, but a falling-out with the influential anatomist Dr Vyse had driven him out. He spoke the truth when he now told his hosts at the post mortem that his interest was, literally, a passing and professional one. In reality, it was also personal. Owens had served at Waterloo and had seen Napoleon Bonaparte during the battle (a thing that, oddly, relatively