TAKING THE WELLINGTON OUT OF WATERLOO

Rachel Johnson reveals the secret plans that have been drawn up in Belgium to make Napoleon the victor in 1815

Waterloo IF you climb the lion mound — the conical, 100-metre monument built by local women to mark the spot where Prince William of Orange was hit in the arm by a musketball — you have a superb vista over the thrilling panorama of the battlefield at Waterloo.

As you rest your aching thighs at the top of the butte, you can gaze straight down on the teenagers on quad bikes tearing around a muddy circuit marked out with tyres, the roar of the bikes blending with the whine of next door's rival go-kart track. Look next on the visitors' centre, which hawks a wide range of trinkets and fig- urines depicting a scowling Frenchman in a grey coat and battered black bicorn hat, and an aftershave called Napoleon, but not a single souvenir of the Iron Duke.

Then, try to spot the key locations in this tiny hamlet 18 kilometres from Brussels, the site of one of the greatest bat- tles of the 19th century. No, not the famed redoubts of La Haye Sainte, Mont St Jean, Hougoumont or the inn of La Belle Affiance. These farms and inns are either derelict, inacces- sible to tourists, or in private hands. I am talking about the restaurants, the curio emporia and the private carparks, all slugging it out with each other to demon- strate their fealty to Napoleon and bring in the punters.

You can drink your biere Napoleon in either Le Cambronne, named after one of Boney's Imperial Guardsmen, Le Bivouac de L'Empereur, or Les Hussars. But even if you plump for Les Allies, you will still be fleeced by the innkeeper, who will race out for his 50 francs when you return to your car from the mound.

It was ever thus. As day dawned on 19 June, 1815, on the morning after the battle, to reveal 40,000 men lying dead or dying in only two square miles of bloodstained rye and mud, the Belgian peasants stole out to the battlefield to loot the dead, even wrenching out teeth to sell for dentures, known for years afterwards as 'Waterloos'. The locals are still turning a penny from the battle by exploiting the francophone world's yearning to bathe in the gloire that a Corsican genius brought to la patrie.

For the battle fought near Waterloo — the first French-speaking town south of bilingual Brussels — was the biggest thing, probably, that has ever happened to Belgium (which attained nationhood 15 years later). And Napoleon was the biggest thing, probably, that ever hap- pened to France.

Forget the inconvenient fact that Belgian troops fought for the Allies against Napoleon, who had ruled them vi et armis for the previous quarter-century. What matters here in Belgium, above all, is lan- guage, and Napoleon didn't speak English and he didn't speak Flemish. He spoke French. To the politicians up the road in Namur, the seat of the francophone region- al government, Napoleon represents a code of laws, social justice, the stirrings of self- government . . . and French-driven union of Europe's nation states. Kw l'Empereur!

It matters little, too, that Swedish pop- sters Abba were right (`At Waaaaaterloo . . . Napoleon did surrender . . . oh yeah!'). What matters here is that the greatest man in the history of the world wasn't himself — terrible piles — on 18 June. He was hav- ing an off-day.

So, at today's battlefield, the Napoleonic hegemony over Europe is still absolute. English-speaking tourists are guided dis- creetly to the Wellington Museum four kilometres away on the high street of Waterloo ville: to the inn where the Duke spent the eve of battle, and to the church of St Joseph opposite, which contains the 27 memorial plaques to the fallen and a gimlet-eyed but uninscribed bust of the Duke of Wellington.

Alas, the château Tremlant close to the church, the place where the Duke of Uxbridge's leg was amputated and buried under a stele in the garden, is derelict. The first resting place of the leg CI say, I've lost my leg!' By God, sir, so you have!') was once a top attraction for English tourists after the battle but, like many of the places sacred to the Allies' side, it is neglected.

The Germans have little to remember Waterloo by either — even though, according to the latest anatomy of the battle (The German Victory by Peter Hofschroer) the battle wasn't won by Wellington, but by Prince Blucher and the Prus- sians.

Mont St Jean, an Allied field hospital during the battle, is derelict. The farm of La Belle Alliance, scene of the leg- endary meeting between the Duke of Wellington and Prince Bliicher after the battle (`Quelk affaire!' says Blucher to Wellington) — a site so famous that the Prussians named the whole shooting-match after it — is now The American Bar, Grill and Disco.

That has been about the size of it at the protected battlefield of Waterloo — until now. But, if all goes according to the mas- terplan of a man named Serge Kubla, one- time mayor of Waterloo and now minister for tourism for the Walloon (i.e. franco- phone) regional government, all will change in time for the bicentenary hoop-la in 2015. The Spectator has seen the secret plans for Waterloo, plans over which the anglophile Waterloo Committee (estab- lished in 1973 to protect and restore the battlefield) and His Grace the Duke of Wellington, Prince of Waterloo, have been kept, so far, completely in the dark. They show a curved underground museum, with at least three shops (loads more Napoleon- ic souvenirs) hugging the circumference of the lion mound. Commissioned by Kubla, the plans have been drawn up by architects BEAT, together with the construction com- pany Tractebel and design firm Contour.

The existing visitors' centre will be turned into a restaurant. Out towards La Haye Sainte, site of the mass grave of 4,000 soldiers, will be a scalloped amphitheatre of parking for 1,000 cars. It will cost, the architects say, at least 500 million Belgian francs (£75 million), and building could start as soon as June.

Most people agree, however, that the present arrangements at the battlefield are inadequate. A new museum is needed; so is proper parking. But the Walloon plan to dig a huge new museum at the foot of the lion mound will, once again, pit the French-speaking world against the Allies. There is every danger that Mr Kubla, who becomes visibly upset when he visits the small rooms in the Wellington Museum devoted to Wellington (the largest room is tactfully devoted to Napoleon), will rein- force his revisionist preference at the new museum. To put it bluntly, on current form Mr Kubla is likely to decree a Napoleonic pleasure dome.

`In general,' he said, in response to my observation that one could leave the pre- sent museum thinking that Boney had won, `we find that visitors prefer Napoleon'. `Even les Britanniques want to buy sou- venirs of Napoleon, not Wellington.'

Leaving that wounding suggestion aside, there is a further, more insidious note to the plans of the Kubla-led Walloons, who will be in partnership with the company formed by the group of towns of Braine- L'Alleud, Genappe, Lasne and Waterloo and, it is hoped, will get a generous dollop from the private sector. The partnership has already approached the European Commission to subsidise the museum, claiming that Napoleon was a sort of founding father of European political union, and so the Commission — whose goal is to build Europe from its Brussels HQ — should help to pay for it. In return, the partnership will offer the EC a space or room devoted to Europe, which could be flagged with the Commission's imperial insignia of gold stars on a blue background.

`I think it is absolutely outrageous,' says Barbara Emerson, a historian who has served on the Waterloo Committee, 'to say that Napoleon sowed the seeds of a united Europe. The battle of Waterloo was fought to prevent Napoleon, a dictator, from domi- nating the mainland by force. It was the British who pushed Napoleon back and saved Europe from French hegemony.'

Moving on from the ideological objecti' zxe the real dangers to the battle- field posed by the construction work. 'The lion mound is already fragile, and to exca- vate a huge area at its base to construct a commercial, subterranean museum will undermine it further,' says Gregory Pedlow, the chief of the historical office at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. `And don't forget this will be a Bel- gian project. What if they run out of money in the middle? Whatever happens, the bat- tlefield could be a construction site for years. I cannot see why they can't buy La Belle Alliance or Mont St Jean and put the museum there at a fraction of the cost.'

So the battle lines are drawn. The fran- cophone regional government wants its goose, one of the most famous battles in world history, finally to start laying some golden eggs and to double tourist traffic to half a million a year. The Waterloo Com- mittee and the Wellington family are expected to resist any commercial over- development. But they don't, like Uxbridge, have a leg to stand on.

The Walloon plans cleverly get round the 1914 law that prohibits building or tearing down anything on (but not underneath) the battlefield. As Francoise Dupriez, presi- dent of the Wellington Museum, points out, `If Monsieur Kubla wants something, he will get it.'

The owners of the Bonapartist inns etc. around the lion mound are also likely to resist anyone else's efforts to exploit Water- loo commercially. 'If Monsieur Kubla he wants to buy me, he will have to find plenty of sous,' says Madame Brassin, proud owner of Le Bivouac, with its waxwork museum (check out the death-mask of the Emperor) and statue of Napoleon in the carpark.

This time the odds are stacked against the Allies. If Mr Kubla and his partnership can raise the money — and that is going to be the closest run thing in this affaire — there is no one to stop him; not even His Grace, whose presence can be guaranteed to get most Belgians' snobbish juices flowing. It is no coincidence that the Walloons have decided on the great leap forward now that the Duke — who has seen off similar efforts in the past — is in his eighties.

In any event, Mr Kubla is doing only what everyone else has done for the past 185 years: sculpting the topography of the battlefield to suit his own ends, a revision- ism that can be seen in paintings (there are at least 400 of the battle in museums), in books, on websites, and in countless Napoleonic, Prussian and Wellingtonian societies around the globe.

In constructing the lion mound in the 1820s, after all, the Belgians dug away and destroyed for posterity the south side of the famous sunken road, where the French cavalry suffered such terrible casualties as a consequence of Wellington's reverse-slope deployments. All for a chap who didn't even lose his arm, the great softie! The young Prince of Orange was fit enough, dispatches tell us, to sit down and write a letter to his Mama that very night.

If it is any consolation, the manipulation of the facts about the battle of Waterloo, and the desecration of the battlefield, is a tradition quite as old as the battle itself.