“The Memory of Hougoumont”

“The Memory Of Hougoumont”

by Hannah Linder

Sunday June 18, 1815
Belgium 

How green and rich the orchards,
With a dazzling touch of dew,
Yet before the first of canon blast,
Undoubtably, she knew.

She faced the north as always,
In the quiet hollow-way,
As the Anglo-Allied army,
Behind the ridge did stay.

Her windows sort of trembled,
Like never in the past,
For Napoleon’s army waited,
For the mud to leave the grass.

Then the sun began to heighten, 
The time was near at hand,
The flashing blue-clad soldiers,
Came near at their command. 

Though garrisoned she was, 
More regiments than one,
The air still ringed of fire,
From every soldier’s gun. 

They pinged upon her brick,
And made her windows quake,
As Legros with his swinging axe,
Broke the northern gate. 

The pushing and the shoving,
The red against the blue,
Her core began to weep,
As thirty-some squeezed through. 

By some small form of wonder,
She watched the gate slam closed,
Legros and his thirty men, 
Were suddenly enclosed!

Oh, the sound of bloodshed,
As their slaughtered bodies fell,
The only of them left alive,
A drummer boy of twelve. 

And as the hours lengthened,
She watched in silent dread,
As the battlefield to her left,
Was covered with the dead. 

She was only but a farmhouse,
They called her Hougoumont,
But cries and strangled breaths,
Her walls would ever haunt. 

And even when the blood,
Was replaced with sparkling dew,
She would not forget the terrors,
Of the battle of Waterloo. 

IMAGE FROM: Zen3500
LICENSE: Creative Commons
CHANGES: None