Waterloo Trip: Day 2

 Supplementary Preamble: For our homework leading up to the trip, all three of us read Mark Adkin's The Waterloo Companion, much treasured here, with copious sections on the OOB and some decent maps. As a field guide, of course, it is a non-starter, since it is big and heavy and would almost certainly have required its own seat on the Ryanair flight.

I also got a lot of useful stuff out of the Osprey Waterloo 1815 book, which has nice 3D maps which I find understandable. I have always had difficulty with visualising battlefields; a nice flat map doesn't convey to me the lumpy reality, scattered with shrubs and so on. For an actual battlefield guide, I was happy with David Buttery's book, which is compact and seems to be recent.

To dwell for a moment on this topic of visualisation, my own mental picture of the size and appearance of the field at Waterloo has always been pretty much based on a number of famous paintings (yes, quite so), dioramas, and my many viewings of Bondarchuk's sacred movie (in which, I now understand, the linear distances were scaled down to fit the available number of soldiers, so the buildings were full size but the linear distances otherwise were between one half and one third of reality).

I'll come back to this.

For Day 2, the plan was to visit the Lion Mound, the main museum and the Rotunda, all close together on Wellington's ridge, between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. Thereafter, we hoped to walk past La Belle Alliance and to Plancenoit. At that point, the intention was to check how we were doing.

 

The museum is wonderful, and from a cynical old warhorse like me this is high praise. Here are a few views of the big model in the entrance hall; I feel I did well to move on from this quite early - I have been known to lose days of my life staring at this sort of thing

 

 

Now we are into the main museum displays...

 

 

I don't know what this is, but I like it. Random knick-knack in the entrance to one of the restaurants at the museum site

 

 

Demonstration of firing a cannon; this chap, who was the main presenter for the Anglophones, is dressed as a drummer in the Belgian light infantry, but he was very handy at firing a cannon, and certainly knew his stuff in the history department. I have to confess that I am still not absolutely certain which country the battlefield was in in June 1815, or why, but am happy to accept that it was a Belgian bit of Holland. There is a counter-theory that it might have been Sort-Of-France, but we dismissed this since Wellington was ordered to stay out of France

 

 

The Panorama in the Rotunda building is impressive, of course, but it doesn't photograph too well. Here is the best known bit, with Ney and his chums leading the Grand National

 

 

It goes without saying that we were obliged to climb up the Lion Mound, because we were British and it was there. Since my conversion to varifocals, I have significant vertigo problems in high places. The Lion is not so high, but the steps are dead straight, in one flight, and polished to a suitable military shine. I was tempted to bow out of the climb, but I would have been ashamed if I had done so, and so I whimpered my way up and down, and am very grateful to my colleagues for not pushing me over the bannister. From the top you can get a view of La Haye Sainte 

 

 

After lunch, we pushed on to the main Brussels-Charleroi road (which is very, very busy), and followed a concrete cycle track alongside the road, past La Haye Sainte, heading south towards La Belle Alliance. We were all struck by the extent to which the ridges and dips in the fields must have affected visibility. For a start, you cannot see La Haye Sainte at all from Hougoumont - it's beyond a low ridge - that was a surprise. Troops moving on the field within a short distance must often have been concealed from each other, which certainly explains a few of the mistakes which occurred. Another mild shock was the size of the field; it may be a small battlefield, considering the date and the number of troops involved, but it looks far larger than I expected 

 

When we got near to La Belle Alliance, we began to get uncertain just where the French grand battery was placed. It looks like a no-brainer when you are looking at it from the Allied lines, but we eventually decided it was one ridge further back than we expected - here you see a clue

 

 

Belle Alliance itself is a working night club, obviously maintained continuously since 1815, and thus not very interesting. Attached to the west wall is this little plaque to the French medical services

 

 

Then we headed east up the road to Plancenoit, which is a prosperous little town, obviously expensively rebuilt since 1815. Here's the church of St Catherine, which was rebuilt after the battle, using the original materials as much as possible. We thought the spire had been changed during the rebuild

 

 

Pretty town, Plancenoit - here's the square, looking across from the church

 

 

Although it is very close to the church, the Prussian monument took a little finding. It seems that, in the years around 1815, the place where it stands was a bald hill, on the northern edge of the village, from whence the Prussians made their repeated attacks against the church area

 

 

I thought this was interesting; this site must have been fields just north of Plancenoit village. If Milhaud's cuirassiers started their advance from here to fight the Allied squares, they came from a long way back

 

Here you see a sunset view of the Lion Mound as we passed by on our way back to Braine l'Alleud

The sun was starting to sink, and we had a lengthy march (for us, anyway) back across country to La Belle Alliance, and then along a diagonal track back up toward the Lion. We bought sandwiches from an Esso garage on the Chaussée de Nivelles in Braine l'Alleud, and discussed our plans for Day 3.