Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 306, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 December 1919 — Lion of Waterloo [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Lion of Waterloo

EVERY, visitor to the field of Waterloo knows the Lion Mound, but not one in a thousand is acquainted with its? true ristory. and the great majority of Brush touris'ts at least regard it as the British Lion. In 1829, shortly after ts erection, a French visitor named described it as “die Belgic Lion looking towards and apparently ■.hreatehlng France.”, That description seems not to have been forgotten, and trobabl-y* lies at the root of the suggestion just made'in Brussels to turn :he lion round so that" the threat —it feeds a very liyWy imagination to see my at all —in the pose may be diverted from France in the, direction of Holland, writes Demetrius C. Boylger n the Graphic. What was the origin of the mound ind the lion? in*'the first place, the inimal represented is neither a Britsh' nor a Belgic emblem ; it is the Dutch ijon, and. somewhere in a corner, if it has not been obliterated, will be found, I imagine, the motto ,of NassauDrange, “Je Maiutiendraj.” Whatever is done with it, then, the susceptibilities of neither Belgians nor British ire involved. The British government tiave certainly no inherited claim to a voice in whatever solution may be idopted. It is not their concern. How the Mound Was BuiltZ, . In 182 G William lof the Netherlands, the great-gbandfather of the present Queen Wilhelmina and one of the most obstinate personages to be found in the ivhole range of history, conceived that the field of Waterloo required a memorial tdf%tablish the heroism of hi,.s eldest sbn,*Mio had received a wound on the Occasion. The king was actuated entirely by dynastic considerations, unless he also wished to provide the foundries of Cockerill, in which he was the largest shareholder, with a profitable commission. At all events it is quite clear that- the Belgian people took no inteifgst or part in the matter, which was decided by a vote of the at The Hague. The yote being passed, the governments of Britain and Prussia were then invited to make a contribution .to the .memorial. They complied to a certain limited extent, the Britisli “consenting, for their part, to the removal ofAcertain French cannon in Wellington’s Belgian fortresses in order to provide the material for the proposed lion. ’ ’ By that time William had decided on the form of the memorial. It was to be the erection of an enormous mound soifie .200 feet above the crest of Mont St. Jean, ~at the spot where his son, the prince of Orange, had been'wounded, the mound to be crowned by the Lion of the Netherlands. The Play for the mound was brought from the steep sides of the famous “sunken road,” which disappeared in the process, by women of the district, who were paid at the rate of half a franc a basket, and the site marked by Wellington’s tree waajncluded within the radius of the elevation—so that when the duke revisited the scene in 1829 With his *daughter-in-law, Lady Douro, he made the expressive comment, “My battlefield has been spoilt.” Legend of the Lion's Tail. The memorial, completed •in 1828, had been in existence two years when the Belgian revolution broke out in August, is:A year litter a French army advanced to Louvain to repel a Dutch Invasion, It was said that some of the French Sfirps in that advance crossed the field and took offense, not at the mound or the lion, but at the shape of its tail, which, erect in the air, seemed to express defiance! The story went on to say that in their wrath they broke off the tail, and that the complaisant Belgians supplied the lion with a new,one, no longer erect, but made gracefully dependent. I went to considerable pains in 1901 to show that this legend could have no real basis, because the contemporary drawings in the Brussels Museum of Prints showed the lion being hoisted into its position with the tail in precisely the same form as it wears today. There is no evidence of any change having been made a< that time or any other. ,/ In December, 1832, the French army rendered a second signal service to the Belgian people by, the siege and capture. of the Antwerp citadel, and once more a French regiment traversed the scene without doing any damage. A proposal was then made in the Belgian chamber by a patriotic leader, M. Gendebien, to theL effect that the national gratitpde should be eVinc&iLby the remoyal of the lion monument altogether. He called it, and justly, as has been shown, “the hateful emblem of the despotism and violence which made us subject for 15 years to the humiliating yoke which we cast off ia

a more authoritative corroboration of my view that the Lion Mound is a monument to Dutch.megalomania without any reference to Britons or Belgians whatever. Certainly the Belgians would never have thought of erecting such a memorial to themselves, and as to this country, it is not its way. .. It is quite clear, then, that the mere reversal of the lion’s position affords no adequate solution to the problem of satisfying those French “■sentiments which M. Saintine expressed 90 years ago, and which I do not doubt are sfill entertained. Once the matter is taken into consideration, there can be no dispute that the position and ffie pose of the lion are offensive and provocative to the French people, who. on three historic occasions in less* than a century, have contributed of their best and bravest to the saving of Belgian Independence, ■