Chapter 1 - Welcome to Brussels
“Hello, friends. My name is Thomas Hale, and if you had asked me why I came to Brussels, I would have given you a very boring answer.
I came to see Belgium.
Unfortunately, Napoleon came too.”
I wrote those words on the morning of June 15, 1815, while sitting beside an open window above a coffeehouse near the center of Brussels.
At the time, I thought they were funny.
Three days later, I would not.
I was twenty-seven years old, English by birth, a traveler by preference, and a writer mostly because I had discovered no respectable profession that paid me to walk into strange places and ask strangers questions.
My editor in London had sent me to the Low Countries with instructions to describe Europe after Napoleon.
That phrase—after Napoleon—had seemed wonderfully final.
The Emperor had been defeated.
He had been sent to Elba.
Kings had returned to their thrones.
Diplomats were rearranging borders.
Everyone in London spoke as though Europe had survived a storm and now needed only to sweep broken branches from the road.
Then Napoleon escaped.
By the time I reached Brussels, he was Emperor of France again.
The city did not look frightened.
That was the first thing that surprised me.
Brussels looked busy.
Carriages rattled across stone streets. Shopkeepers opened shutters. Bakers carried trays through narrow doors. Horses left steaming piles in inconvenient places. Children ran beneath the arms of soldiers. Bells rang from church towers. Women in pale dresses crossed squares holding parasols against a warm June sun.
The war was present, but it wore bright uniforms.
Red-coated British soldiers filled taverns.
Dutch-Belgian troops passed in blue.
German soldiers spoke in accents I could barely follow.
Officers seemed to be everywhere.
Some wore uniforms so elaborate that I wondered how they managed to fight without damaging them.
From my window I watched two young officers argue over a carriage.
Behind them a vegetable seller shouted at both because their horses blocked her stall.
That felt reassuring.
Cities where vegetable sellers still shouted at officers did not seem close to disaster.
I closed my notebook and went downstairs.
The owner of the coffeehouse, Monsieur Deleuze, had grown used to me asking questions.
“What should I see today?” I asked.
He placed coffee in front of me.
“The road home.”
“You said yesterday I should visit the park.”
“Yesterday Bonaparte was farther away.”
Around us conversations quieted.
A man at the next table turned.
“You heard something?”
Deleuze shrugged.
“I hear ten things before breakfast. Nine are lies.”
“What is the tenth?” I asked.
“That depends which nine you believed.”
This was Brussels in June 1815.
Everyone knew everything.
Napoleon was in Paris.
Napoleon was at the frontier.
Napoleon had been defeated.
Napoleon had crossed into Belgium.
Napoleon had two hundred thousand men.
Napoleon had fifty thousand.
The Prussians would stop him.
Wellington would stop him.
No battle would happen at all.
I filled pages with rumors.
Around noon, the rumors began growing legs.
Mounted couriers appeared.
Military traffic increased.
Wagons moved south.
Officers who had spent the morning drinking suddenly remembered appointments elsewhere.
Near the park I met Dr. Edmund Mercer.
Mercer was forty-two, broad-shouldered, gray beginning at his temples, and incapable of giving a short answer when a medical subject was involved.
We had met two days earlier when I sketched him treating a groom kicked by a horse.
He had looked at my drawing.
“You’ve made me too handsome.”
“I can correct it.”
He laughed.
Now he was loading boxes into a wagon.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Work.”
“That usually happens to other people when you say that.”
“French troops crossed the frontier.”
The sentence landed differently when spoken by a man packing bandages.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“And Wellington?”
“Moving.”
“Where?”
“South.”
I looked along the street.
Suddenly all those uniforms seemed less decorative.
“You’re going?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It is today.”
Mercer lifted another wooden case.
I helped him.
The box was heavier than expected.
“What’s in this?”
“Things I hope not to use.”
That was my first warning.
Not a trumpet.
Not a speech.
A box of surgical instruments.
That evening Brussels still looked beautiful.
Sunlight warmed the upper windows.
Cafés remained busy.
Music came from open doors.
Officers walked beside elegantly dressed women.
But something underneath the city had changed.
People looked toward the south more often.
Carriages moved faster.
Servants carried messages.
Near sunset I watched a regiment march along the road.
At first I noticed the uniforms.
Then the faces.
Some men were young enough that they should have been arguing with mothers about staying out too late.
One noticed my notebook.
“You writing about us?” he called.
“I might.”
“Make me taller.”
His friends laughed.
They marched away.
I did not know his name.
For years afterward, I wondered whether he survived the week.
That night I returned to my room and opened the window.
Brussels glowed beneath me.
Somewhere nearby, music played.
Somewhere farther south, Napoleon was coming.
I wrote:
Brussels tonight feels like a room where everyone has heard a knock at the door, but nobody wants to be the first person to answer.
May you like
Then I went to sleep.
By the following night, the city would stop pretending.
