WATERLOO
18 JUNE 1815
She’d been born on a battlefield; she’d lost her mother on another. Perhaps this would be the battlefield she died on.
Death crawled around her outside this small fort made of the piled bodies of French and English soldiers. A dozen living men perched their muskets on those who had once been their comrades to ward off attack.
Beyond the safety of her square, a thousand men, or ten thousand men, lay around her wounded or dead. Horsemen slashed at their enemies, though the main battlefront had moved hours before. The grey and yellow smoke made it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead.
The luckiest lay still. Other shattered bodies scrambled, struggled, men with legs blown off, some dragging their intestines as they vainly, briefly searched for aid.
Hen could not help them all.
She kept her eyes on the more superficial stomach wound she was stitching, glad her patient was unconscious, for she had neither the strength nor an orderly to keep him still. He was fifteen, perhaps, the same age as her, a smoke-black face seeping red from yet another wound, a scrape of shrapnel, perhaps, or a sword cut. Her father had ceased stitching altogether, taping wounds while their supplies held out. He and Hen had arrived in Brussels the day before, too late to acquire the horses, mules and panniers to which he was entitled. They had only the equipment they could carry.
Surgeon Gilbert’s orders had been to proceed immediately to the Mont-Saint-Jean farm house. He, Hen and Assistant Surgeon Thompson had set out on the Waterloo road at first light, Hen wrapped in an old greatcoat, for the dawn was chill, even in midsummer. They’d trudged through mud and mist, and then green fields, and finally a wheat field sloping gently to a ridge. Larks sang, the wheat rustled. A few carts trundled past. Now and then horses passed them at a gallop, the only sign of war.
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