Chapter 5 - Quatre Bras
I saw Quatre Bras after the worst of the fighting.
That was enough.
The crossroads had been ordinary the day before.
Now every field seemed trampled.
Rye lay flattened.
Fences were broken.
Smoke lingered.
Abandoned equipment covered the ground.
Men moved among the wounded.
The smell reached me before the details did.
Gunpowder.
Mud.
Sweat.
Blood.
Horse.
Smoke.
I had spent years describing markets, inns, ports, mountains.
Nothing had prepared me for how difficult a battlefield was to describe without turning people into objects.
Mercer worked.
I helped.
No one asked whether I was qualified.
There were too many wounded for qualifications to matter.
Water.
Bandages.
Blankets.
Names.
Always names.
I began writing them whenever possible.
Peter Moss.
Nineteen.
Nottingham.
Karl Reuter.
Twenty-six.
Hanover.
Jean Van Acker.
Belgian.
Married.
Two children.
Some survived the night.
Some did not.
History would say Wellington held Quatre Bras.
History would say Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Ligny.
Those were true statements.
They were also too clean.
For the men lying around me, the day had not been a sentence in a book.
It had been hours.
William found me near dusk.
I almost failed to recognize him beneath mud.
“You look terrible,” I said.
“So do you.”
“You’re alive.”
“Disappointing, isn’t it?”
I grabbed his shoulder.
That surprised him.
Perhaps me too.
He had been in the fighting.
His regiment had moved, waited, fired, moved again.
“What was it like?” I asked.
He stared at the field.
“You heard it.”
“Yes.”
“Louder.”
That was all he wanted to say.
We sat beside a hedge.
He removed one boot.
Water poured out.
“I told you,” he said.
“Told me what?”
“My boots.”
I laughed.
He smiled weakly.
For ten minutes we were two young men complaining about footwear.
Then an artillery team passed carrying a wounded gunner.
War returned.
News arrived during the evening.
The Prussians had been beaten at Ligny.
Not destroyed, people said.
But forced away.
That meant Wellington could not stay where he was.
If Napoleon turned against us while the Prussians were separated—
The officers understood.
Soon orders came.
Retreat north.
William groaned.
“We just walked here.”
“You can file a complaint.”
“To Napoleon?”
“I suspect he receives many.”
Night fell with distant fires glowing beyond the fields.
I climbed a small rise and looked south.
Somewhere beyond darkness stood the French army.
Napoleon had fought wars from Egypt to Russia.
Now he was here.
A day or two from Brussels.
I felt the scale of that for the first time.
Not intellectually.
Physically.
If Wellington failed, the roads behind us led directly to the city I had been drinking coffee in only days before.
Brussels no longer felt safely behind us.
It felt exposed.
The retreat began the next day.
Soldiers moved north.
Wagons creaked.
Wounded men were loaded wherever space could be found.
Clouds gathered.
Mercer looked at the sky.
“That will help.”
“The rain?”
“The retreat.”
May you like
It helped us escape pursuit.
It also nearly drowned us.
