“You expect to learn that,” I said, “here, now ... what is it? Nearly forty years after the event?”
“Ah, my boy, sometimes you can only smell out these things in person. When you walk the very ground of the history you’re investigating, when you sniff the air, check the light, glance sideways and over your shoulder, when you pick up a handful of the dirt and crumble it between your fingers, you can learn things that no history book can ever teach.” Besides, he pointed out, the English historians all want to celebrate Wellington, so they tell that version of the story, and the Prussians are touting Blücher, and the French are intent on selling everyone on either Napoleon’s grandeur or the legitimacy of Louis XVIII. The Old Man frankly didn’t care who or what was won or lost here. “I’m an American” he said. “I want only to know why he failed.”
“Yes,” I said, “but why do you need to know this? What’s it got to do with your plans?”
It was those one hundred days, he explained. One hundred days—from Napoleon’s unexpected departure with a half-dozen faithful lieutenants from the island of Elba, where he’d been exiled, to his arrival here at Waterloo three months later with a quarter-million armed men at his command. “That’s what it’s got to do with my plans,” he said, smiling, and he got up from our table and made for the door. “Let’s get going, son!” he called. “We don’t have a hundred days. As you said. We’ve only got this one!”
The battlefield was a huge, rolling, hillocky expanse of low grass, like an enormous cemetery without markers, criss-crossed by soft, overgrown ditches and low ridges and bordered in the distance by a dark line of yew trees, with squared-off, small fields beyond, where local farmers in blue smocks and short spades made the fall turning of their soil by hand. When we first arrived at the battlefield, the dew was barely off the grass, and I followed the Old Man from site to site, while he counted off steps, as if he were surveying the land and I were his assistant lugging the chain. Marking the advances and retreats, first of Wellington’s forces and the Flemish infantry, then those of his Prussian counterpart, General Blücher, and the several French armies, Father seemed to have memorized the battlemaps, for he knew the exact positions of all the armies that had met here that June day in 1815, and he walked straight to them and paced off the distances between their lines.
“The ground all along here” he said, “where it slopes down to the plain, there, was soppy and wet. Yes, yes,” he said, squinting down the field. On the night of the seventeenth, when Bonaparte arrived from Ligny, the Old Man explained, the ground was soft from two days and nights of rain, and then it stopped raining, and he waited until eleven the next morning. Up on the heights there, he said, pointing. Then, before marching against the Belgians and the Dutch, he waited for the ground to dry. That was important, the Old Man said—said to himself, actually, not to me. That was a crucial delay. It gave Wellington time to dig in on the opposite heights, Mont St. jean they called it, barely a hill, but a good redoubt, if Wellington was given the time to fortify it.
Father strode abruptly down the long, grassy slope, to check the soil, I assumed, so as to determine how muddy it must have been at eleven A.M. on June 18,1815, while I lagged behind and watched from the ridge. The sun had risen to above the hilltops behind us, and the day was growing hot, the air heavy with moisture. Making my way across the vast expanse of the battlefield, I came in a short while to a low grove of trees where a narrow stream wandered through. Here I took a seat in the shade beneath the trees, removed my hat, and leaned back against the friendly trunk of one and watched Father off in the distance, as he marched straight-legged uphill and down, counting out the paces, then stopped, peered around, touched the soil, scratched his chin, and, pondering for a moment, turned on his heels and marched off in a new direction, casting himself first as the entire army of one side and, a few minutes later, turning himself into the army of the other.
It was an amusing sight, and certainly he must have looked peculiar to the local farmers who were here and there working in the fields adjacent to the battleground—this lean, middle-aged man in a dark coat with flapping tails and a flat-brimmed hat set straight on his head, striding in geometrically precise lines beneath the hot, mid-morning sun over hill and dale, at meaningless points abruptly stopping and wheeling, pausing briefly with chin in hand, and suddenly putting himself on the march again. And while I myself was no more capable of actually seeing the things he saw out there than were those curious Flemish farmers who leaned on their spades and gazed after him, nonetheless I knew what he saw and heard and even smelled. I knew that he was deliberately, thoughtfully, with impressive, detailed knowledge, situating himself at the hundreds of points where the armies of six nations had met, and that he now walked in the midst of a thunderous battle, heard the angry shouts and pitiful cries of thousands of men falling face-first into the dirt and dying there straightway, saw the fire and smoke of long rows of cannon and the screaming horses going down and heard the crash of huge wagons and machines breaking apart, as wave upon wave of men marched suicidally against high walls of musketry, slashing sabers, blazing pistols, pikes, and daggers, until the lines broke and bloody hands reached out and grasped the throats of terrified, wild-eyed boys and men—farmers, artisans, and simple workmen fleeing for their lives, while all about the field human limbs were heaping up, arms and legs and heads severed brutally from the trunks, leaving howling, bloody mouths at the cut ends and the trunks cast down like so much meat, and the living, those who could still rise, staggering forward, covered with dirt, blood, feces, vomit, as behind them the corpses stiffened in the watery ditches and swelled and started to stink in the heat of the June day, and behind the corpses, up on the ridge, the generals plotted their next assault.
I sat on a hill in the shade of a tree, like one of the generals myself, and watched my father track and translate a series of elaborate, invisible runes in the distant fields. I watched a man controlled by a vision that I, his son, was too roughly finished to share, a vision that he would be obliged, therefore, to come back and report to me, just as he reported back to me his vision of the Lord. I believed in his visions, that they had occurred, and that they were of the truth—the truth of warfare, the truth of religion. This was what I had learned the night that I spoke with Miss Peabody aboard the Cumbria—her last night on earth and, in a sense, my first. I had changed my mind that night, as she had commanded, and forthwith had changed my self. In making my mind up, I had made my self up. And for the first time, the only necessary time, I had decided simply that my father’s visions were worthy of my belief. The rest was like day coming out of night. I would remain, of course, a man made of ordinary stuff, and on my own had nothing else to work with. My great good fortune, however, was that my father was more of a poet than I, was a seer, and was perhaps a prophet. He was a man who saw things that I knew must be there but could not see myself, and because I loved him and trusted him, and because of the power of his language and the consistency of his behavior, my belief had swiftly become as powerful and controlling, as much a determinant of my mind and actions, as Father’s belief was of his. In this refracted way—though I remained until the end his follower and continued to live with no clear plan of my own and no belief in God—I became during those days for the first time a man of action and a man of religion. The difference between us, between me and my father, is that I would inspire no one to follow me, either into battle or towards God, whereas he had me, and soon would have a dozen more, and finally whole legions and then half a nation, following him.
In the evening, after a supper of mutton that the Old Man much admired, we strolled until dark about the town of Brussels, and Father related to me his findings. We walked to the heart of the town and came out upon an ancient, cobblestoned market-square, where the town hall was located. There we admired for a while a large medieval statue of St. Michael trampling the devil under his feet. The statue had been placed on a spire atop the tall building, and to observe it we were obliged to
stand at the furthest point in the square, our backs to a stone wall, peering up, as if watching an eclipse. Pronouncing the statue useful, Father declared it the sort of thing we ought to have more of in American towns.
“It’s a Catholic statue, though” I pointed out.
“No, it’s older than that. You don’t have Catholics until you have Protestants. No, it’s a Christian statue.”
“And America is a Christian nation.”
“It is, indeed,” he said. “Or ought to be. It was surely meant to be.” We moved on then, and soon Father returned to the subject of Napoleon. All of Napoleon’s reasons for being defeated at Waterloo, he stated, came down to his having lost the element of surprise. For three straight months, up to and including the time he arrived with his armies at Ligny and drove Blücher’s Prussians from the field, Bonaparte had done the thing that was least expected of him. For that reason alone, all other things being equal or nearly so, he had come away victorious. But when he decamped at Ligny and moved on through the rain, he arrived at dawn at Waterloo, where he discovered that between his army and Wellington’s somewhat exposed and approximately equal force, there lay a half-mile of marshy meadowland. Here, for the first time, he did the expected thing. He pulled up and waited for the sun to dry the field. That gave Wellington time to dig in and, as it turned out, time for Blücher’s regrouped Prussians to arrive from Ligny. There was no way Napoleon could have defeated the Allies after that. For he had not done the unexpected thing. When Blücher arrived, it was nearly noon, and as the battle had just commenced, he was able to re-inforce Wellington’s army. That made all the difference. First, the element of surprise had been lost, and now things were no longer equal. Napoleon had to lose. Mathematics, simple numbers, had taken over. Certain victory was turned into a rout. For Napoleon, it was the end of his campaign, the end of his war, the end of his hundred days. There was nothing left for him now but retreat, eventual surrender, exile, the restoration of the monarchy in France, and a return to the status quo in the rest of Europe.
“What should he have done, then?”
“He should have done whatever Wellington least expected him to do. Which is, first of all, to attack. Attack at once.” And not only should he have attacked at once, Father went on, for the mud would have hampered Wellington’s army as much as his own, but he should have split his force into two equal-seeming parts. “Like Joab against the Syrians and the children of Ammon,” he explained. “One part would be made the superior, however, the way Joab secretly placed the best men of Israel under his command and placed the rest, an inferior lot, under his brother, Abishai.” Then Napoleon should have attacked from the two flanks, not to make a pincers, but to make two separate fronts, so as to force Wellington to divide his army into two parts also. Except that in Wellington’s case, the two would not have merely seemed equal, like Napoleon’s. They would in fact have been equal. Consequently, Napoleon’s secretly superior half would have quickly overrun the British half opposing it. And his inferior portion over on the other flank would have triumphed also, because Wellington’s side would have broken and run when they saw their opposite flank taken by a force apparently equal to the force facing them. “Just as the children of Ammon, when they saw the Syrians broken by Joab’s army of the best men of Israel, fled from the inferior force under his brother, Abishai. Napoleon’s greater false-half, in defeating Wellington’s actual half, would be handing victory like a gift to his lesser half. Thus his army as a whole would have defeated Wellington’s as a whole, and Blücher, arriving six hours later, would have been obliged to beat a hasty retreat back to Prussia. Napoleon would be emperor once again. He might still be emperor today.”
We turned off the square onto a wide avenue and walked on, and while I pondered Father’s findings and tried to apply them to his own planned campaign against the slaveholders of the American South, he whistled contentedly a favorite hymn and now and then paused to admire and comment upon the grand houses and impressive palaces of the town.
“It’s a valuable lesson, then?” I said.
“What is?”
“Your discoveries concerning Napoleon’s defeat.”
“Yes, of course. We mustn’t ever forget it. There will come a time, Owen, I promise you, when we will be cut down—unless we do the unexpected thing.”
“When will that be? When’s it coming?”
“Soon;’ he said. “Sooner than anyone thinks.” He seemed then to drift off, as if observing future events with as much clarity as earlier today he had viewed the past. But a moment later, he abruptly returned and said, “First, however, we’ve got some business in Liverpool to attend to! We’ve got to sell some Yankee wool to our British cousins, my boy, and at a price that’ll free us of debt, once and for all. I’m sick of living like a toad under a harrow!”
“Right!” I said, and laughed aloud. Not because of his figure of speech, but because it seemed so incongruous to be meditating one moment on warfare, ancient and modern, and the next to be planning strategy for the sale of wool. I could hardly wait for the day when we would no longer have to think about commerce and could bend all our energies and attention to war! War against the slavers! “I wish we could rush straight into battle now!” I exclaimed.
“Ah! So do I, son;’ he said, smiling. “So do I.” And he walked on, hands clasped behind his back, head slightly bowed, as if it were the Sabbath and he were on his way to church.
Two days later, we arrived back in Liverpool and at once made ready to show our wool to the Englishmen. The morning before the auction was to take place, we came down bright and early from our lodgings to the warehouse, so as to be on the scene when the agents for the cloth manufacturers examined all the sheepmen’s stock and set in their own minds how high they would bid later. This practice was a guard against being victimized by puffers, men who were sometimes secretly hired by the sheepmen to bid the prices up, and was, of course, when the prices for the various grades of wool were actually established and agreed upon among the buyers. It was no different here than in the United States, where there was a considerable amount of secret collusion between the buyers, most of whom had elaborate, long-term business dealings with one another, such as previous debts or deals, services owed or promised, goods with liens attached, and so on, often concerning some business quite other than that of purchasing wool and in some other city. Thus the auction itself was more or less a formality; there were seldom any surprises, and prices rarely moved up or down more than a fraction of a cent per pound.
In Springfield, for number 2 grade wool, before Father had withdrawn his entire stock from the marketplace to ship it abroad, Brown & Perkins had been offered, and had turned down, thirty-five cents a pound. Number I had been going for forty-one cents. The three higher grades, X, XX, and XXX, had been priced proportionally higher. Father’s plan was to obtain in Liverpool a price of forty-five to fifty cents per pound for the number 2, low enough to undercut slightly the current English price, and to scale the other grades accordingly. After subtracting shipping costs and tariffs, he figured that he would still come out ahead by at least ten cents per pound, a net gain of twenty thousand dollars over what he would have gotten for the same wool in Springfield. Furthermore, as he had explained to me numerous times, by withdrawing Brown & Perkins’s one hundred tons of wool from the domestic market, he had created an artificial shortage there, which would force the prices up for a time, and thus he would profit twice, here and now in England and next month in Springfield, when the fall fleeces arrived from the western sheepmen.
Father had me pull half-a-dozen bales of number 2 from different layers of our lot and haul them out onto the floor. This was normally a two-man job, but in those days, despite my crippled left arm, I was strong enough to handle a two-hundred-fifty-pound bale alone by grabbing it on top with my right hand and hooking the bale underneath with my left and slinging it up onto my right shoulder. If it was tied correctly and I had a strap, I could even lug it with one arm, like an
enormous burlap-wrapped satchel. “Stack them over here, son,” Father said, pointing to a place a short ways off from the others, so that our wool stood out from theirs.
I think that Father wished to make a bit of a show for the British gentlemen, who lounged about the cavernous space in several small groups, chattering idly amongst themselves, most of them in fine suits and silk cravats, affecting canes and wearing gloves and tall hats. We stood out anyway, due to our rough clothing and Yankee speech and manners, but the image of honest American yeomanry was perhaps what Father wanted to put on display, nearly as much as the wool from Brown & Perkins of Springfield, Massachusetts, and I wasn’t displeased to play my role, the tall, strapping lad who tosses around two-hundred-fifty pound bales by himself.
Our counterparts, the British sheepmen, stood by their sample bales with caps in hand, silent, eyes cast down, as if they believed they were in the presence of lofty personages, feudal lords and squires, instead of scheming merchants. Father, by way of contrast, leaned against his stack of bales almost casually and whittled with his pocketknife on a stick he’d cut from the hedge by our boarding house and had brought along, I now realized, for precisely this somewhat theatrical purpose.
Soon a group of four or five buyers with slight smiles on their faces had gathered near us, examining our persons more than our bales of wool, all the while continuing to talk amongst themselves, in their drawling, nasal, English way, of their club dinner the previous evening. Then several more of the sanguinarians sauntered over, their walking sticks clicking across the warehouse floor, and soon there was a crowd surrounding us, looking bemused and a little bored. If they were impressed by who or what we were, they disguised it.
The clerk of the works, Mr. Pickersgill, a small man with a malmsey nose and Dutch spectacles, whose task it was to organize the sale and with whom Father had dealt on our arrival, came quickly out of his office and joined the group and nervously began to speak for us, as if we were Iroquois Indians and could not speak to these fine gentlemen for ourselves. “This ’ere’s Mister John Brown from the firm of Brown and Perkins. It’s a big lot ’e’s got, sirs. Some seven ’undred bales at various grades. Hammericans he declared, as if it were the name of our tribe.