rank-and-file soldiers also had permission to bring with them, and to maintain at the army's expense, their wives and children, who otherwise would have ended up on the street. When the Forty-second—the Black Watch—embarked in Ireland for the voyage to Ostend, every company was allowed to bring along four women, each of whom was entitled to half rations. Having arrived in Flanders, the regiment had to board barges to continue the voyage on the canal, and orders came down limiting each company to only two women. Without much ceremony, the others were returned weeping to a barracks, but they all managed to escape and quickly rejoined their husbands. If the proportions were the same in every regiment, many thousands of women must have followed Wellington's army to Belgium, and many more joined them after the troops disembarked. Jack Parsons, a grenadier in the Seventy-third Regiment, collected a Flemish girl and brought her with him all the way to Waterloo; at dawn on the day of battle, waking from a bad dream and afflicted by dire premonitions, he asked his captain to help him make a will in which he left the girl his back pay, all that he possessed in the world.
In the first days of the campaign, women and children had stayed close to their respective husbands and fathers, sometimes running the same risks as they did. During the retreat from Quatre Bras, some riflemen from the Ninety-fifth found a woman lying dead with a musket ball in her head and a living child in her arms; they gathered up the little boy and carried him along until they found his father and turned his son over to him. But the night before the Battle of Waterloo, the duke ordered all noncombatants sent back behind the lines so as not to interfere with the army's operations. Not everyone obeyed. Elizabeth Watkins, a five-year-old child, claimed to have remained on the field, together with her mother, throughout the battle, helping her tear cloth into strips for bandages; she was still alive, and she still remembered, in 1903. Most of the women and children, however—like most of the other civilians, servants, workmen, and peddlers— thronged the high road in the darkness, headed for the relative safety of Brussels.
In order to be rid of anything that might encumber his army's mobility the following day, Wellington also ordered that all baggage, whether conveyed in wagon trains for the regimental rank and file or privately transported for officers, was to be sent back to Brussels and from there directed to Antwerp. This multitude of vehicles and beasts of burden joined the crowd of refugees who were already packing the road, fleeing from the imminent devastation of what had been, until a few days ago, a tranquil stretch of countryside. Terrified by the soldiers' destructiveness, all the country people in the region had left their homes and hastened into the forest of Soignes, with their pitiful household goods piled on carts and whatever animals had escaped requisitioning. Numerous wagons loaded with bread, victuals, and rum for the troops tried to make their way to the front against the tide of refugees but had to be abandoned in the middle of the road; the horses pulling these wagons had been requisitioned by Wellington's officials from the local peasantry, and in the general confusion the owners of the beasts had managed to reclaim them and run off into the forest. This seems to have been the coup de grace as far as the road was concerned. Soon it was transformed into an immense jam, a mass in which it was almost impossible to move. That night, the men of Sir John Lambert's brigade, on the march from Brussels to Waterloo, had to clear a path for themselves by roughly dumping abandoned or stuck vehicles into the nearest ditches, thus preserving from total strangulation the only line of retreat available to Wellington's army.
ELEVEN
LETTERS IN THE NIGHT
T he fear that the enemy might resume his march and slip away in the night prevented
In the first days of the campaign, women and children had stayed close to their respective husbands and fathers, sometimes running the same risks as they did. During the retreat from Quatre Bras, some riflemen from the Ninety-fifth found a woman lying dead with a musket ball in her head and a living child in her arms; they gathered up the little boy and carried him along until they found his father and turned his son over to him. But the night before the Battle of Waterloo, the duke ordered all noncombatants sent back behind the lines so as not to interfere with the army's operations. Not everyone obeyed. Elizabeth Watkins, a five-year-old child, claimed to have remained on the field, together with her mother, throughout the battle, helping her tear cloth into strips for bandages; she was still alive, and she still remembered, in 1903. Most of the women and children, however—like most of the other civilians, servants, workmen, and peddlers— thronged the high road in the darkness, headed for the relative safety of Brussels.
In order to be rid of anything that might encumber his army's mobility the following day, Wellington also ordered that all baggage, whether conveyed in wagon trains for the regimental rank and file or privately transported for officers, was to be sent back to Brussels and from there directed to Antwerp. This multitude of vehicles and beasts of burden joined the crowd of refugees who were already packing the road, fleeing from the imminent devastation of what had been, until a few days ago, a tranquil stretch of countryside. Terrified by the soldiers' destructiveness, all the country people in the region had left their homes and hastened into the forest of Soignes, with their pitiful household goods piled on carts and whatever animals had escaped requisitioning. Numerous wagons loaded with bread, victuals, and rum for the troops tried to make their way to the front against the tide of refugees but had to be abandoned in the middle of the road; the horses pulling these wagons had been requisitioned by Wellington's officials from the local peasantry, and in the general confusion the owners of the beasts had managed to reclaim them and run off into the forest. This seems to have been the coup de grace as far as the road was concerned. Soon it was transformed into an immense jam, a mass in which it was almost impossible to move. That night, the men of Sir John Lambert's brigade, on the march from Brussels to Waterloo, had to clear a path for themselves by roughly dumping abandoned or stuck vehicles into the nearest ditches, thus preserving from total strangulation the only line of retreat available to Wellington's army.
ELEVEN
LETTERS IN THE NIGHT
T he fear that the enemy might resume his march and slip away in the night prevented
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