Battle of Waterloo (diary accounts)/Visit to the French hospitals

Visit to the French hospitals.

Beyond the citadel is the Corderie, a building constructed by Buonaparte, as a rope-work, 1300 feet long, to give space for a cable of a first-rate ship of war. It was fitted up as the hospital of about 1500 of his wounded soldiers, prisoners of war.

The whole immense length of this place was open, and the beds were arranged in four rows, from end to end. We walked generally unnoticed by their occupiers, up and down the lanes between; and equally disregarded, frequently stept over a bed, or passed between two, when going from one passage to another. It was impossible to imagine two aspects of human lot more strikingly contrasted, yet more forcibly associated, than the spectacle which these unfortunate enthusiasts presented now, and their confidence and fury but yesterday; their submissive tranquillity in their flannel gowns and caps in the hospital, and their noise and cuirasses in the field.

Death was at work here, more manifestly than we had observed among the English wounded. One man was pointed out who had tossed his amputated arm in the air, with a feeble shout of “vive l’Emperuer.” Another, at the moment of the preparations to take off his leg, declared that there was something he knew of that would cure him on the spot, and save his limb and the operators trouble. When asked to explain this strange remark, he said “a sight of the Emperorǃ" The indispensible amputation did not save him, he died in the surgeon’s hands; and his last words, stedfastly looking on his own blood, were, that he would cheerfully shed the last drop in his veins for the great Napoleon! A singularly wild, and almost poetic, fancy, was the form in which a third bore his testimony; he was undergoing, with great steadiness, the operation of the extraction of a ball from his side, and it happened to be the left; in the moment of his greatest suffering, he exclaimed, “an inch deeper, and you’ll find the Emperor.”

FINIS.