After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death
has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow
glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and
it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast
into it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says
they were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment,
feeble voices were heard calling from the well.
This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, part
stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower, and folded
like the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides. The fourth side
is open. It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom
has a sort of shapeless loophole, possibly the hole made by a shell.
This little tower had a platform, of which only the beams remain. The
iron supports of the well on the right form a cross. On leaning over,
the eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a
heaped-up mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is
concealed in a growth of nettles.
This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms the
table for all wells in Belgium. The slab has here been replaced by a
cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of
knotty and petrified wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer
either pail, chain, or pulley; but there is still the stone basin which
served the overflow. The rain-water collects there, and from time to
time a bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink, and then
flies away. One house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited.
The door of this house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door, beside a
pretty Gothic lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed
slanting. At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped
this handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed
off his hand with an axe.
The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume van
Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since. A woman with gray hair said
to us: “I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older,
was terrified and wept. They carried us off to the woods. I went there
in my mother’s arms. We glued our ears to the earth to hear. I imitated
the cannon, and went _boum! boum!_”
A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard, so
we were told. The orchard is terrible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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