IV

THE curious came from Brussels and beyond to view the field, the beginning of a stream of tourists that would continue for the next two centuries. The first party appeared on the morning of the 19th while the battle-soiled men of ‘G’ Troop were sitting on stacked piles of French cuirasses to feed. Hands, face and clothes ‘begrimed and blackened with blood and smoke’, Captain Mercer rose and spoke to a middle-aged gentleman who ‘approached holding a delicately white perfumed handkerchief to his nose; stepping carefully [around] the bodies … to avoid polluting the glossy silken hose that clothed his nether limbs’.¹

Charlotte Waldie thought this impulse to view the scene so soon after the battle despicable. ‘There were those of my own country, and even of my own sex’, she exclaimed:

whom I heard express a longing wish to visit … the fatal field of Waterloo! If, by visiting the dreadful scene of glory and of death, I could have saved the life, or assuaged the pangs, of one single individual who had fallen for his country, gladly would I have braved its horrors; but for the gratification of an idle, a barbarous curiosity, to gaze upon the mangled corpses of thousands; to hear the deep groans of agony, and witness the last struggles of the departing spirit – No!²

Basil Jackson told of an excursion made from Brussels of a party of English ladies and gentlemen: ‘Not aware of the shocking sights offered by a battle-field … a single glance so shocked our fair countrywomen, as to make them fly away like scared doves.’³ By contrast, Mr Creevey, who visited on Tuesday 20 June, expressed ‘great surprise … at not being more horrified at the sight of such a mass of dead bodies’.⁴ The Scottish gentleman who had paid his respects to the field of Quatre Bras on 17 June had returned from Antwerp to Brussels with his ailing wife and lost no time in visiting the field of Waterloo on the Wednesday:

The first thing that struck him at a distance was the quantity of caps and hats strewed on the ground. It appeared as if the field had been covered with crows. When he came to the spot, the sight was truly shocking. At first there was a prodigious preponderance of British slain, which looked very ill; but more in advance, the revenge made itself dreadfully marked, for ten French lay dead for one British. The field was so much covered with blood that it appeared as if it had been completely flooded with it; dead horses seemed innumerable.

Major W. E. Frye, on extended furlough from his regiment in Ceylon and staying in Brussels as a tourist, visited on the 22nd. ‘The sight was too horrible to behold,’ he wrote. ‘I felt sick in the stomach and was obliged to return … For my part I shall not go a second time.’ It was suggested ‘that they who went to see the field of battle from motives of curiosity would do well to take with them bread, wine and other refreshments to distribute among the wounded, and most people did so’.⁵ Some ‘supplied them with spirits, or other strong fluids’, remarked the abstemious editor of the Champion, John Scott. Drunkenness was thereby added to the horrors of the field, and produced ‘exhibitions [compared] to which the mere heaps of the bodies … were pleasant sights … and what with pain, intoxication, and the recollections of the battle, these poor creatures displayed an extravagance in their wretchedness, which had a tremendous effect’.⁶

Tourists were sometimes exposed to more alarming encounters than with the drunken wounded. ‘Prussian stragglers robbed many persons on the field,’ reported James Simpson. On the Thursday after the battle, a party of four Belgian citizens was confronted by a mounted Prussian hussar with a drawn sabre. ‘Your watches, your money,’ he demanded, ‘or I will cut you down!’ Having surrendered their valuables, the quartet returned to Mont-Saint-Jean, where they met four Englishmen who reported ‘that they too had allowed this fortunate hussar to serve them in the same manner’. When he heard the story, Simpson was ashamed of his countrymen and remarked, ‘I do not think that every four Englishmen would have been robbed by one man, however completely armed or mounted.’⁷ Three weeks later, the dauntless Miss Waldie deprecated stories of ‘deserters’ and ‘armed desperadoes’ who ‘sometimes alone, and sometimes in a gang’ robbed civilians and plundered the locality. She believed that ‘most of the horrible stories … were entirely devoid of truth’, and for her part had ‘never heard of any well-authenticated murder that they committed’.⁸

*

The last of the wounded had been removed from the field by the time Lady Charlotte Uxbridge visited on 1 July. ‘Oh! What a sight,’ she wrote on her return, ‘& yet I would not have missed it for the world.’⁹ Only four days earlier, she had declined to join an excursion, thinking that she lacked ‘the courage to look if [she] went’.¹⁰ And even having at last decided to go, in the company of Lady Fitzroy Somerset, she still had misgivings: ‘We are both dying to see that fatal spot & yet we are both frightened to death at the thoughts of it.’¹¹ Travelling in a green barouche, drawn by four coach horses and driven by a postilion, the two ladies were accompanied by Lord and Lady Seymour and Captain Wildman – who had been ‘slightly [wounded] in the foot’.¹² They visited the houses in the village of Waterloo, ‘where [their husbands’] poor limbs were amputated’, Somerset’s arm and Uxbridge’s more celebrated leg. Charlotte was taken into the garden by Madame Paris, the farmer’s wife. ‘She … show[ed] me where his poor dear dear leg was buried, & she has promised me to plant a tree over the spot.’ The road from Waterloo to the battlefield was ‘dreadfully disgusting, the smell from the dead horses is so horrid’, wrote Charlotte, ‘but the field itself is perfectly sweet’. The sweetness of the field was perhaps only relative, because ‘in one part there was still a pile burning of dead bodies which were consuming by fire. There was nothing to be seen but straw & smoke!’ The heaps of earth, ‘where the poor dead bodies have been buried’, covered the area ‘as thick as mole hills’. Captain Wildman was able to show her the exact spot where Uxbridge had been hit, but ‘he could not satisfy [Lady Somerset’s] curiosity so well’. The battlefield litter, so fascinating to other visitors, seemed to hold no interest for Charlotte. ‘The whole ground … is covered with caps, helmets & different bits & scraps of all sorts but nothing worth picking up. It has been so completely searched that nothing remains.’¹³ Both ladies, however, brought home grapeshot. Charlotte’s was of the precise size that had wounded her husband and fitted exactly the hole made in his trousers. She kept the trousers as a relic, but yielded to the entreaties of Monsieur Paris, who had so reverently buried the leg, that he might be allowed to keep the boot. He offered her two guineas for it but she did not say whether she took his money.

Writing a fortnight later, on 15 July, Lady Charlotte’s niece, Georgy Capel, reported that the ‘pestilential air of Brussels [was] clarified’, many of the wounded being encamped outside the city, while the dead horses and 3,000 human corpses previously exposed on the ramparts had finally been disposed of. Her aunt had told her that ‘the Field of Battle is now quite sweetened’, but Georgy thought the hot weather would not allow it to remain so. She was right. That same day, Charlotte Waldie overcame her earlier qualms at gratifying ‘an idle, a barbarous curiosity’, in the company of her brother, her sister and other ladies and gentlemen. ‘The effluvia,’ she wrote, ‘even beneath the open canopy of heaven, was horrible; and the pure west wind of summer, as it passed us, seemed pestiferous, so deadly was the smell that in many places pervaded the field.’¹⁴ And yet a week later, when Lord Grantham and Sir Lowry Cole rode across it, no mention was made of the smell. ‘It was then so completely cleared of the dead, who had been buried or burnt, that nothing disgusting or unpleasant was to be seen.’¹⁵

Georgy Capel had been told about the battlefield, of the ‘thousands of the most moving English and French Letters … and caps pierced with Balls and all the inside filled with congealed Blood’.¹⁶ But it was not until the beginning of August, nearly seven weeks after the battle, that she saw the field for herself. She and her younger sister Muzzy were escorted by the Duke of Richmond, who was something of an authority: he had been a spectator at the battle until three o’clock in the afternoon of 18 June and had since made no fewer than three visits to the field – ‘and knew all the particulars’.¹⁷ Even so, Georgy would have preferred seeing it in the company of a military man like her uncle: ‘someone who would … explain all I wish to know in their own language, not womanised, for tho’ I do not pretend to understand their military terms it loses much of the effect when the same sense is conveyed in civil terms’. But Lord Uxbridge, newly created Marquis of Anglesey by the Prince Regent, had by then returned with his wife to England, inadvertently taking his niece’s two-volume Campaigns in Spain and Portugal – with which, perhaps, she had been trying to master military terms – in his baggage.

Georgy described the road through the forest of Soignes, the ‘mounds of earth covering dead horses … caps, broken swords and knapsacks stript of their contents’. She noticed incidental details, such as ‘damaged biscuit’ by the wayside and corn spilt from the commissary wagons, which had now begun to sprout in the wheel ruts.

In the village of Waterloo, where the Anglo-Allied army’s headquarters had been established on 17 June, the illustrious names were still to be seen chalked on the doors. Charlotte Waldie noticed those of ‘His Grace the Duke of Wellington’, ‘His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange’, and ‘other pompous titles’, contrasting strangely with the lowly habitations on which they were inscribed. She noted also:

the lamented names of Sir Thomas Picton, Sir Alexander Gordon, Sir William De Lancey, Sir William Ponsonby, and many others who now sleep in the bed of honour. Volumes of sermons and homilies upon the instability of human life could not have spoke such affecting and convincing eloquence … as the sight of these names, thus traced in chalk, which had been more durable than the lives of these gallant men.¹⁸

In fact the names had been rendered more durable still by the inhabitants, who had ‘been at pains to preserve the chalking on the doors’,¹⁹ probably re-chalking them following heavy rainfall. The names attracted tourists, eager to see the rooms where the great men had passed the night before the battle: the chairs they had sat on, the tables they had dined at, the beds they had slept in. Georgy and Muzzy were shown the room in which their uncle’s leg had been amputated, and the chair in which he had sat during the operation, ‘with blood upon it’. Madame Paris showed them the other prized relics of the house, ‘his boot which had been cut off, and the bedding, also covered with his blood’. They were taken to see the place where the leg was buried – ‘overgrown with weeds, which we cleared away’ – and told that a stone with an inscription had been ordered from Brussels to be laid above it. They visited the Duke of Wellington’s quarters and were shown the wounded Prince of Orange’s bed, ‘covered with blood’, and the door upon which he had been carried there.

‘I supposed Waterloo was close to the field,’ John Scott wrote, ‘but it was not.’ It was nevertheless doing a roaring trade as a stopping-off place for refreshment: ‘Every inn had chaises, gigs, fiacres, cabriolets and carriages crowded round its door, just as you see in the neighbourhood of a horse-race or boxing match. Luncheons, dinner, drinking, at every public-house.’²⁰

A mile beyond Waterloo, most tourists would leave their carriage at the village of Mont-Saint-Jean and perhaps engage a battlefield guide. A local man, whose house had been filled with wounded after the battle, found regular employment as such and professed a deep hatred of Napoleon. ‘And all for one man!’ he would say. ‘Ce coquin!’ He would tell his English clients of the sufferings he had witnessed, ‘nothing but sawing off legs, and sawing off arms’. Then he would repeat his refrain: ‘Oh mon Dieu! And all for one man!’ And, following Bonaparte’s capture and exile, he would add: ‘Why did you not put him to death?’²¹

From Mont-Saint-Jean, tourists would continue the short way to the battlefield on foot. The road climbed gradually until it passed through a cutting at the centre of the ridge along which the Anglo-Allied lines had deployed. In sight of the field for the first time, tourists became aware of ‘a long line of immense fresh-made graves’ in front of the hedge that was fancifully supposed to have given the farm of La Haye Sainte – ‘The Sacred Hedge’ – its name. Along the top of the ridge, to the left of the road, extended another long line of ‘tremendous graves’.²² Scrambling up the steep side of the cutting to the right of the road, tourists would reach the so-called ‘Wellington tree’, a solitary elm on the ridge overlooking La Haye Sainte, from the vicinity of which the Duke had watched the battle’s progress. Riddled though it was with lead musket balls and iron shot, ‘its branches and trunk … terribly splintered’, the tree lived, a symbol of nature’s endurance through adversity. Those wanting a memento cut out a musket ball or tore off a strip of bark. What the battle had failed to kill, the tourists’ penknives achieved, and the tree perished.* In front of Hougoumont, two centuries later, less iconic trees still stand, pitted with holes from the combat, although the musket balls themselves have long since been prised out by souvenir hunters.

The two Capel girls walked, with the Duke of Richmond, along the ridge, tracing the right wing of Wellington’s front line, towards the ruins of Hougoumont, disturbing ‘thousands of crows and ravens from their ungrateful office’ among the shallow graves. Like many a young person of the time with romantic sensibilities, Georgy was thinking of Ossian: ‘the leaves whirl round the wind and strew the graves of the dead – at times are seen the Ghosts of the departed when the musing hunter alone slowly stalks over the field’.²³

The chateau of Hougoumont was a major battlefield attraction. Visitors would be taken to see the chapel miraculously spared by the fire that swept through other parts of the building, leaving only the feet of the wooden crucifix scorched. Outside, the man-high splash of blood on a wall would be pointed out, where ‘some poor fellow must have been knocked to pieces against it by a cannon ball’.²⁴ At Hougoumont, the fighting had been particularly savage, the slaughter immense, the bonfires higher than elsewhere. The Reverend Rudge described an outbuilding in which many bodies had been burnt and where the ashes lay three feet deep. He took home ‘a small piece of a skull … found there, and upon which the suture of the skull was very perceptible’.²⁵ Tourists would be shown ‘a mound where the bodies of 600 Frenchmen had been burnt’. The guide would demonstrate the assertion by poking a stick into the base and scraping out ash and, perhaps, ‘the calcined bone of a finger’, while ‘a perceptible smell of ammonia’²⁶ escaped from inside. Charlotte Waldie was shown another pile where, the guide told her, the bodies of British Guardsmen had been consumed. She collected a handful of these ashes and folded them into one of the pieces of paper she found scattered about. Later she would write: ‘Perhaps those heaps that then blackened the surface of this scene of desolation are already scattered by the winds of winter, and mingled unnoticed with the dust of the field; perhaps the few sacred ashes which I then gathered … are all that is now to be found upon earth of the thousands who fell upon this fatal field!’²⁷ She refused, on principle, to look at the skeleton of a calf that had perished when one of the outhouses caught fire. Another lady of the party went into transports of sentimental grief: ‘it seemed to fill her mind with more concern than anything else’. But Charlotte, who had seen the ash remains of countless dead, and been told of the wounded men burned alive in the chateau, remained unmoved by the creature’s fate. The other lady – finding no melting fellow feeling from Charlotte – tried to engage Charlotte’s sister instead, ‘and began to bewail the calf anew’. Finally, Jane Waldie lost patience: ‘I don’t care if all the calves in the world have been burnt,’ she snapped, and they heard no more from the animal lover.²⁸

*

For the first month or so, mementoes could still be picked up off the battlefield by tourists. John Scott found a twelve-pound cannon ball and carried it ‘for five or six miles in a blazing day’, determined to take it home as a trophy ‘with the cuirass and other spoils of battle’²⁹ he had secured. Meanwhile, the commercial trade in ‘cap plates, cuirasses, &c.’ boomed. ‘At first these things were bought by the curious cheap enough,’ wrote John Wilson Croker in late July. ‘Now the purchasers are more numerous and the commodity rarer, and therefore their prices are much enhanced.’³⁰ The local peasants had collected ‘a vast booty’ from the field and ‘many of them [were said to have] made some hundred pounds’³¹ from it. James Simpson was one of a party of tourists who visited six weeks after the battle. In the village of Waterloo his friend bought a cuirass, and a brace of pistols purportedly ‘found in the cloak case of a French general’, from an old woman who was suspicious of the three guineas offered in payment. Despite assurances ‘that in Brussels she could … exchange them for twenty-six francs each’, she hesitated, pleading her poverty, afraid that she was being swindled. At last she took the money. ‘Vous êtes Anglais,’ she said, ‘et les Anglais ne trompent jamais.’ The English never deceive.³²

Visiting the field in the company of Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Richmond, Croker paid one napoleon for a cross of the Legion of Honour, ‘taken from a dead French officer’, as a present for his wife, and bought half a dozen broken eagle cap badges for one franc apiece. Peel paid two napoleons for ‘a very handsome cuirasse’.³³ The Duke of Richmond, as a frequent visitor, had already bought a dozen of them. In August, Walter Scott bought the back plate of a cuirass perforated by a musket ball. ‘From the edges of the hole being turned outwards, it appeared that the shot must have [passed through the breast plate and] the body of the unfortunate wearer.’³⁴ It cost Scott five francs, but he paid twenty for a more ornate inlaid specimen purchased later in Brussels.³⁵

La Belle Alliance – the inn at the centre of the French front line – was full of such merchandise, and ‘Cuirasses, helmets, swords, bayonets, feathers, brass eagles, and crosses of the Legion of Honour, were to be purchased here.’³⁶ Not content with the peasants’ battlefield gleanings, some people were attracted by the fabric of the iconic building itself, outside which Wellington and Blücher were supposed to have met after their victory on the night of 18 June. One tourist carried away a brick, while ‘a more wholesale amateur’³⁷ bought the door for two gold napoleons.

English visitors would be shown a straw-bottomed chair upon which the Duke of Wellington reportedly sat momentarily after the battle. The building was ‘of the poorest; consisting of two rooms, with two smaller back rooms, a passage, and some miserable holes up stairs’. The proprietor had painted above the door, ‘in very large and rude letters in black, on a white-wash ground, “Hotel de la Belle Alliance”’.³⁸ Soon it would be repainted ‘A la Belle Alliance & Wellington Hotel’, and the walls of its two main rooms covered with tourist graffiti. ‘John Todd’, one of them read, ‘came to the field of battle at Waterloo, the 10th of July, 1815.’ Another visitor had signed his name, ‘Thomas Jackson’, only to have it libelled by another hand: ‘he was hanged at the last assizes, for sheep-stealing!’ A portrait drawing had been attempted of ‘Thomas Sutcliffe, of the second Life Guards’, against which some wit had written ‘ugly theef’.³⁹

Typical of a class of English tourist, combining a foreign jaunt with patriotic fervour and flocking to Waterloo just as soon as their clerkships in London offices allowed, were the ‘Brentford lads’ who arrived in August. They hired a peasant guide in Mont-Saint-Jean, bought three pints of brandy to get them round the battlefield, and a plentiful supply of snuff to neutralise the ‘stench’ they had been warned of. They flirted with some girls bringing in the harvest near La Belle Alliance and were excited to see a man’s leg lying in the stubble, looking ‘very fresh’. They hated the food served at the inn – fatty yellow bacon and meat that was almost raw – and suspected it had been carved from dead men. Two of the ‘lads’ pulled off a finger each from a decomposing hand they saw sticking out of the ground. They assumed it to be a Frenchman’s hand and took the fingers back with them to England pickled in spirits.⁴⁰

*

Other tourists arrived – seeking sublimity rather than vulgar sensation. Walter Scott was the earliest of the poets. On 31 July, before he had even boarded the ferry at Harwich and not a word of it written, The Field of Waterloo, a poem, was reported as ‘In the Press, and speedily will be published’. He reached the battlefield on the ninth day of that hot month, when the still prevailing smell of putrefaction gave one verse of his epic the immediacy of heightened journalism:

And feel’st thou not the tainted steam,

That reeks against the sultry beam,

From yonder trenched mound?

The pestilential fumes declare

That Carnage has replenish’d there

Her garner-house profound.⁴¹

Published in late October, the poem carried a disclaimer: any imperfections resulted from it having been ‘composed hastily, during a short tour of the continent, when the Author’s labours were liable to frequent interruption’. Scott mentioned, in the poem’s defence, ‘that it was written for the purpose of assisting the Waterloo Subscription’ to relieve the suffering of the wounded and their families. This may have blunted the harsh critical reception, and the opinion that it fell far short of the battle of Flodden in the author’s earlier Marmion. His laudable motives, however, did not spare him from occasional anonymous squibs in the press:

How prostrate lie the heaps of slain

On Waterloo’s immortal plain!

But none by sabre or by shot,

Fell half so flat as WALTER SCOTT …⁴²

After Scott came Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, visiting the field on 3 October for a more considered, ambitious and pedestrian work befitting his office: The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo. The air was still foul, and, like Scott, Southey met the challenge of making poetry from stench:

And sometimes did the wind upon its breath

Bear from ill-covered graves a taint of death.⁴³

Each site and gruesome detail provided the content of a sonorous stanza – from La Haye Sainte …

Set where thou wilt thy foot, thou scarce canst tread

Here on a spot unhallowed by the dead.⁴⁴

… to the smeared wall at Hougoumont:

Of all the blood which on that day was shed

This mortal stain alone remained impressed,

The all-devouring earth had drunk the rest.⁴⁵

Even the local guide’s uncharitable views on the treatment of Napoleon were incorporated:

For him alone had all this blood been shed,

Why had not vengeance struck the guilty head?

… One man was cause of all this world of woe,

Ye had him, and ye did not strike the blow!⁴⁶

Lord Byron arrived in the spring of 1816, and if the place still smelt, he made no mention of it. He galloped across the field on a Cossack horse hired in Brussels, made ‘a tolerably minute investigation’ of the area, and ‘purchased a quantity of helmets [and] sabres’, but thought it ‘not much after Marathon & Troy – Chaeronea & Platea’, the classical battle grounds he had already visited. An admirer of Bonaparte, he conceded that he was prejudiced, despising, as he did, both ‘the cause & the victors’ – any victory, indeed, which included ‘Blucher & the Bourbons’.⁴⁷ And yet Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage contains some of the most resonant, and arresting, lines ever written on Waterloo:

Stop! – for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust!

An earthquake’s spoil is sepulchred below!

In the summer of 1817, J. M. W. Turner stopped to make studies for a large painting intended for the following year’s Royal Academy exhibition. In a little sketchbook he jotted down pencil drawings of La Haye Sainte and the ruins of Hougoumont, scribbling notes of what his guide told him: ‘4,000 killed here’ on one page; ‘Hollow where the great carnage took place of the Cuirassiers by the Guards’ on another. Back in London, he produced two watercolours, looking south from the British position on the ridge to the left of the road, close to the place where General Picton was killed. One shows the field much as he had seen it – albeit with the picturesque additions of a spurious flock of sheep and a horse skeleton in the foreground, while jagged lightning provided drama in the middle distance.⁴⁸ The other is closer – in subject matter at least – to the final oil painting. The bottom third of the composition is occupied by a dozen or so dead bodies: French infantrymen, Cuirassiers, Gordon Highlanders, horses. The limber box of a dismantled English cannon bears the initials ‘GR III’; a French saddle cloth the letter ‘N’. A litter of bodies cresting the ridge diminishes with distance, fading off the paper to the right. And yet, despite the dark, storm-laden clouds on the horizon and the customary lightning bolt, the scene is diminished in sunlight – the inexpressible scale of carnage rendered finite and inconsequential by its visibility.⁴⁹

Not so the brooding canvas exhibited in the Royal Academy’s Great Room at Somerset House during the spring of 1818. Despite three disparate light sources, little can be seen clearly. Off to the right, Hougoumont is on fire, shrouded in smoke, the flames only serving to throw the building into silhouette, any details noted in the pencil sketches the previous summer lost in darkness. The starkest illumination – shed by a flare or rocket supposedly fired to discourage looters – casts a silvery glow akin to moonlight across the distant rolling landscape, glimpsed between black banks of cloud. Finally, the light of a single flame – carried by a figure in the foreground – shows a densely packed mass of bodies. But in the profound shadow extending to either side of this sulphurous yellow oval, and in the intervening blackness of the middle ground separating it from the harsher light of the flare, countless more corpses are to be imagined than painted. There, unseen, are the sublime horrors that Edmund Burke ascribed to the domain of obscurity.⁵⁰ Attached to the painting’s catalogue entry was a verse from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage recalling the Duchess of Richmond’s ball and the brief chronology of slaughter:

Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,

Last eve in Beauty’s circle proudly gay,

The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,

The morn the marshalling in arms, – the day

Battle’s magnificently-stern array!

The thunder-clouds close o’er it, which when rent

The earth is covered thick with other clay,

Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,

Rider and horse, – friend, foe, – in one red burial blent!⁵¹

On 17 July 1820, the Wordsworths came: William, his wife Mary and sister Dorothy. By then, the ruined parts of Hougoumont had been ‘ridded away’, the damage done to La Haye Sainte repaired, ‘thus hastily removing from the spot all vestiges of so momentous an event’, which, Dorothy felt, lacked gratitude. She thought – as Byron, Southey and Scott had thought before her – of the bodies buried underfoot, and although the smell of decay no longer hung on the air, a miasma might still be fancied, providing the sublime frisson to those possessing the necessary poetic sensibility. William sensed it and sometime later – as was his custom – crafted part of his sister’s journal into a poem: ‘After Visiting the Field of Waterloo’. But Dorothy’s more immediate, plainer prose makes, perhaps, the greater impact across the centuries. ‘There was little to be seen,’ she wrote, ‘but much to be felt; – sorrow and sadness, and even something like horror breathed out of the ground as we stood upon it!’⁵²