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TO BELGIUM 211
On the left we first pass fort No. 4, the repairs to which have
now been practically completed. The high road is in excellent
condition, and there is a little traffic in the shady avenues.
Life seems slowly to be returning to its old grooves. In front
of farms and houses by the roadside we notice German soldiers
engaged in more or less laborious but always friendly and often
jocular conversation with Belgian women, or playing with
their children after the fashion of uncles. The country is flat,
with hardly noticeable undulations. In the fields, which make
a pleasing picture with the farm hands busily at work, the
crop has been piled up in enormous cylindrical stacks crowned
with shallow conical hoods intended to keep the water off the
corn. At Gembloux—with its memories of 1815—a Red Cross
flag almost fills the entire street, with the armed Landsturm
men keeping watch below in their shining helmets.
The stone houses in the villages look very substantial, but
are far less picturesque and pretty than our own red cottages
with the dark pine forest as background. At Wawre a house
has been wrecked here and there. By the roadside is the lonely
grave of a dead soldier. In front of it, on the road, an old
woman is driving a barrow drawn by a dog. And so one
impression succeeds the other.
After Overyssche the road turns off sharp to the left and
runs through La Hulpe and a number of other villages, until
at last we reach the famous battlefield of Belle Alliance.^
This spot is one of the sights for those who visit Brussels.
In peace time there are on an average 450 visitors a day to
the great hall erected outside Waterloo, in which a gigantic
panorama, measuring no metres in circumference, gives an
excellent idea of one of the most dramatic moments of the
battle. Attention is especially directed to the group repre-
senting Marshal Ney’s furious onslaught with the French
Guards against Wellington’s artillery and infantry positions
south-west of Mont St. Jean. The foreground is strewn with
soldiers and horses lying dead amongst the grass and lumber,
and the whole has been carried out in natural size, with de-
tached life-size figures gradually merging with bewilderingly
telling effect into the painted canvas and» its excellent per-
spective. Some way off one sees Napoleon on his white
charger, attended by his Staff, and in the far distance the old
Hussar General Bliicher with his Prussians, who on that day
^ The German name for the battle of Waterloo (Translator).
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