Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 99, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1920 — Lion of water too [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Lion of water too

EVERY visitor to the held of Waterloo knows the Lion Mound, hut not one in a thousand is acquainted with its true history, mid the great majority of British tourists at least regard it as the British Lion. In 1829, shortly after its erection, a French visitor named Saintine described it as “the Belgic Lion looking towards and apparently threatening France.” That description seelns not to have been forgotten, and probably lies at the root of the suggestion just made in Brussels to turn the lion round so that the threat —it needs a very lively imagination to see any at all—in the pose may be diverted from France in the direction of Holland, writes Demetrius C. Boulger In the Graphic. What was the origin of the mound and the lion? In the first place, the animal represented is neither a British nor a Belgic emblem; it is the Dutch lion, and somewhere in a corner, if it has not been obliterated, will be found, I Imagine, the motto of NassauOrange, “Je Maintiendrai.” Whatever is done with It, then, the susceptibilities of neither Belgians nor British are involved. The British government have certainly no inherited claim to a voice in whatever solution may be adopted. It is not their concern. How the Mound Was Built. In 182(5 William I of the Netherlands, the great-grandfather of the present Queen Wilhelmina and one of the most obstinate personages to be found in the whole range of history, conceived that the field of Waterloo required a memorial to establish the heroism of his eldest son, who 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 interest or part in the mutter, which was decided by a vote of the states-general at The Hague. The vote 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, tiie British consenting, for their part, to the re-

inoval of certain .French cannon in Wellington’s Belgian fortresses in order to provide the material for the proposed lion. By that time William had decided on jthe of the memorial. It was to be the erection of an enormous mound some 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 clay 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 was included 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, 1830. A year later a French army advanced to Louvain to repel a Dutch invasion. It was said that some of the French corps in that advance crossed the field and took offense, not at the ipound or the lion, but at the shape of its tail, which, erect in the aln, 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 coukpiave no real basis, because the contemporary drawings in the Brussels Museum of Prints showed the Hon being hoisted into its position with the tall In precisely the same form as it wears today. There is no evidence of any change having been made at 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 acene without doing any damage. A proposal was then made in the Belgian chamber by a patriotic leader, M. Gendebien, to the effect that the national gratitude should be evinced by the removal of the lion monument altogether. He called it, and justly, as has been shown, “the hateful emblem of the despotism and violence which made u» subject fo r 15 years to the humiliating yokewhlch we cast off in,

September, 1830.” I could not ask for a more authoritative corroboration of my view that the Lion 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 Fiench sentiments which M. Saintine expressed 90 years ago, and which I do not doubt are still entertained. Once the matter Is taken Into consideration, there can be no dispute that the position and the 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.