y-eight loopholes, pierced by the English at
irregular heights, are there still. In front of the sixth are placed two
English tombs of granite. There are loopholes only in the south wall, as
the principal attack came from that quarter. The wall is hidden on the
outside by a tall hedge; the French came up, thinking that they had to
deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle
and an ambuscade, with the English guards behind it, the thirty-eight
loopholes firing at once a shower of grape-shot and balls, and Soye's
brigade was broken against it. Thus Waterloo began.

Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders, the French
scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand amid the trees.
All this grass has been soaked in blood. A battalion of Nassau, seven
hundred strong, was overwhelmed there. The outside of the wall, against
which Kellermann's two batteries were trained, is gnawed by grape-shot.

This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May. It has its
buttercups and its daisies; the grass is tall there; the cart-horses
browse there; cords of hair, on which linen is drying, traverse the
spaces between the trees and force the passer-by to bend his head; one
walks over this uncultivated land, and one's foot dives into mole-holes.
In the middle of the grass one observes an uprooted tree-bole which lies
there all verdant. Major Blackmann leaned against it to die. Beneath
a great tree in the neighborhood fell the German general, Duplat,
descended from a French family which fled on the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. An aged and falling apple-tree leans far over to one side,
its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and of clayey loam. Nearly all
the apple-trees are falling with age. There is not one which has not
had its bullet or its biscayan.[6] The skeletons of dead trees abound in
this orchard. Crows fly through their branches, and at the end of it is
a wood full of violets.

Bauduin, killed, Foy wounded, conflagration, massacre, carnage, a
rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled
in fury, a well crammed with corpses, the regiment of Nassau and the
regiment of Brunswick destroyed, Duplat killed, Blackmann killed, the
English Guards mutilated, twenty French battalions, besides the forty
from Reille's corps, decimated, three thousand men in that hovel of
Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned, with their
throats cut