page_title: Hougoumont
section_title: Bodies in wells
hierarchical_section_title: Hougoumont / Bodies in wells
caption_attribution_description: English: "A view of the Chateau d'Hogoumont, workmen piling timber upon a pyre to burn the French dead". Engraver James Rouse
context_page_description: Château d'Hougoumont is a walled farm compound, situated at the bottom of an escarpment near the Nivelles road in the Braine-l'Alleud municipality, near Waterloo, Belgium. The site served as one of the advanced defensible positions of the Anglo-allied army under the Duke of Wellington, that faced Napoleon's Army at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815.
  Hougoumont, which had become dilapidated, was fully restored in time for the 200th anniversary of the battle and opened to the public on 18 June 2015.
context_section_description: In his novel Les Misérables, Victor Hugo describes how 300 bodies were thrown down a well at Hougoumont. Several historians have noted that an archaeological dig of the well by Derick Saunders in 1985 turned up no human remains in a well rediscovered at the site. In doing so, they state that it debunks a myth made popular by Hugo.
  A popular account of the battle by John Booth published in London shortly after the battle includes a diary entry by an early gentleman tourist to the site. The tourist records that he was shown around that battlefield by the well known guide, Jean-Baptiste Decoster, and that 16 July 1815 (one month after the battle) he saw two wells, one that contained eight men and another that contained 73 men. The first well was at La Belle Alliance "wherein we saw the bodies of eight men of the Imperial Guard of Napoleon; they had jumped down with their arms"; and the second probably at Hougoumont, "The French formed a battery by making holes in the garden-wall; here is another well, in which were found 73 men; the trees in the orchard were peppered very much; the ditch around this orchard was used as a battery, and hundreds killed; saw 84 other pieces of cannon taken from the enemy; they took home only 12 guns; counted 40 graves, containing English officers, in one acre of ground, resembling dung-heaps".
caption: A view of the Chateau d'Hogoumont, workmen piling timber upon a pyre to burn the French dead by: C. C. Hamilton engraved by James Rouse
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