Locality La Marzelle

While Napoleon slept in downtown Beaumont, troops bivouacked at the edge of town, towards Charleroi, at a place called La Marzelle. This place is now a field like any other but it is said that this is where some deserters exchanged their uniforms for civilian clothes. The uniforms that were left behind were subsequently used by the locals in local processions and gave birth to Military Marches of the Entre-Sambre and Meuse. As is often the case along the Napoleon Trail, the official history feeds popular legend; interpretive levels overlap and feed remembrance and the memory of the passage of the Napoleonic armies.