In the ruined wing you can look through windows defended by iron bars,
into the dismantled rooms of a brick building; the English Guards were
ambuscaded in these rooms, and the spiral staircase, hollowed out from
ground-floor to roof, appears like the interior of a broken shell. The
staircase has two landings; the English, besieged on this landing and
massed on the upper stairs, broke away the lowest. They are large slabs
of blue stone which form a pile among the nettles. A dozen steps still
hold to the wall; on the first the image of a trident is carved, and
these inaccessible steps are solidly set in their bed. All the rest
resemble a toothless jaw. There are two trees here, one of them dead,
and the other, which was wounded at the root, grows green again in
April. Since 1815 it has taken to growing through the staircase.
Men massacred each other in the chapel, and the interior, which is
grown quiet again, is strange. Mass has not been said in it since
the carnage, but the altar has been left,--an altar of coarse wood
supported by a foundation of rough stone. Four whitewashed walls, a
door opposite the altar, two small arched windows, a large wooden
crucifix over the door, above the crucifix a square air-hole stopped
up with hay; in a corner, on the ground, an old window sash, with the
panes all broken,--such is the chapel. Near the altar is a wooden
statue of St. Anne, belonging to the 15th century; the head of the
infant Saviour has been carried away by a shot. The French, masters for
a moment of the chapel and then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames
filled the building, and it became a furnace; the door burned, the
flooring burned, but the wooden Christ was not burned; the fire nibbled
away the feet, of which only the blackened stumps can now be seen, and
then stopped. It was a miracle, say the country people. The walls are
covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ you read the name
Henquinez; then these others, Conde de Rio Maïor, Marquis y Marquisa
de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with marks of admiration,
signs of anger. The wall was whitewashed again in 1849, for the nations
insulted each other upon it. It was at the door of this chapel that
a body was picked up, holding an axe in its hand; it was the body of
Sub-lieutenant Legros.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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