The Battle of Waterloo

1. The Battle - 18th June 1815 Napoleon’s only chance at victory was to split the allied forces massing against him. He sent Marshal Ney to take the important crossroads at Quatre Bra, while he defeated the Prussians at Ligny. He then turned his attention to British and allied troops under the Duke of Wellington assembled near the villages of Waterloo and Mont Saint Jean. Wellington deployed his troops along a ridge bisecting the road to Brussels, on the reverse of the Slope. Throughout the day the British repulsed repeated attacks by the French. By the evening, Napoleon had captured La Haye Sainte, a farmhouse which protected the British centre, and ordered his elite imperial guard to attack. It is unclear whether disciplined British musketry or the well timed arrival of the Prussian’s 4th Corps caused the routing of the hitherto undefeated imperial guard, but a general French retreat followed swiftly. In the words of the Duke of Wellington the battle was ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.’ Napoleon subsequently surrendered to Britain and spent the rest of his life in exile. Europe – 1812 The French Emperor Napoleon had humbled all the main European powers save Great Britain, whose navy won a decisive victory at Trafalgar and put paid to any French ambitions of invasion. Instead Napoleon turned to dominating the mainland and thus denying the British their major markets for trade. To this end he occupied Spain and put his brother on the throne and forced the Austrians, Prussians as well as the Italian and German states into an unwilling alliance with France. Napoleon eventually overreached himself with the disastrous invasion of Russia that resulted in the deaths of half a million men. From this point on Europe united against France and even Napoleon’s tactical genius could not prevent invasion from the East and an British assault from a newly liberated Spain. Napoleon’s subsequent exile to Elba, brought a semblance of peace to the continent after years of bloodshed but he was not done yet. The Battle of Waterloo Build up to the Battle By 1815, Napoleon had had enough of his island prison and with just 600 men he returned to France. The French king Louis XVIII sent troops to intercept him but they promptly rejoined their former emperor. By Samuel Amis Acknowledgments http://www.historyofwar.org/Maps Battle: A Visual Journey Through 5,000 Years of Combat by R. G. Grant