1815

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in Belgium, part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. A French army under the command of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition, a British-led coalition consisting of units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, referred to by many authors as the Anglo-allied army or Wellington's army, and a Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal von Blücher, referred also as Blücher's army. The battle marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

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Upon Napoleon's return to power in March 1815, many states that had opposed him formed the Seventh Coalition and began to mobilise armies. Wellington and Blücher's armies were positioned close to the north eastern border of France. Napoleon planned to attack them separately in the hope of destroying them before they could join in a coordinated invasion of France with other members of the coalition. On 16 June, Napoleon successfully attacked the bulk of the Prussian army at the Battle of Ligny with his main force, causing the Prussians to withdraw northwards on 17 June, but parallel to Wellington and in good order. Napoleon sent a third of his forces to pursue the Prussians, which resulted in the separate Battle of Wavre with the Prussian rear-guard on 18–19 June, and prevented that French force from participating at Waterloo. Also on 16 June, a small portion of the French army contested the Battle of Quatre Bras with the Anglo-allied army. The Anglo-allied army held their ground on 16 June, but the withdrawal of the Prussians caused Wellington to withdraw north to Waterloo on 17 June.

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Upon learning that the Prussian army was able to support him, Wellington decided to offer battle on the Mont-Saint-Jean escarpment across the Brussels road, near the village of Waterloo. Here he withstood repeated attacks by the French throughout the afternoon of 18 June, aided by the progressively arriving Prussians who attacked the French flank and inflicted heavy casualties. In the evening Napoleon assaulted the Anglo-allied line with his last reserves, the senior infantry battalions of the French Imperial Guard. With the Prussians breaking through on the French right flank, the Anglo-allied army repulsed the Imperial Guard, and the French army was routed.

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Waterloo was the decisive engagement of the Waterloo Campaign and Napoleon's last. According to Wellington, the battle was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life". Napoleon abdicated four days later, and coalition forces entered Paris on 7 July. The defeat at Waterloo ended Napoleon's rule as Emperor of the French and marked the end of his Hundred Days return from exile. This ended the First French Empire and set a chronological milestone between serial European wars and decades of relative peace, often referred to as the Pax Britannica. The battlefield is located in the Belgian municipalities of Braine-l'Alleud and Lasne, about 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) south of Brussels, and about 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the town of Waterloo. The site of the battlefield today is dominated by the monument of the Lion's Mound, a large artificial hill constructed from earth taken from the battlefield itself; the topography of the battlefield near the mound has not been preserved.

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Source: Wikipedia

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5 Grisly facts about Waterloo

1. THE LEGENDARY LEG

One of the great cavalry commanders on the British side was Lord Uxbridge, who was clearly unfazed by the carnage all around him - even when he was caught in the firing line of a cannon. On realising he was badly injured, he turned to the Duke of Wellington and reportedly said, "By God sir, I've lost my leg!". To which Wellington replied, "By God, sir, so you have!" Uxbridge's leg was amputated without anaesthetic. Instead of going mad from the pain, he simply observed that "the knives appear somewhat blunt". After it was removed, Uxbridge worried that he'd lost it unnecessarily, and asked a friend to go check its condition. The friend checked the shattered limb and reassured him it was "better off than on". The leg was buried in Waterloo and became a tourist attraction thanks to its very own tombstone, which read "Here lies the leg of the illustrious and valiant Earl Uxbridge".

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2. WATERLOO TEETH

The Battle of Waterloo left a sea of corpses. And for canny businessmen, corpses meant a bonanza of teeth. Dentistry was a booming trade in the 19th Century, with poor people even selling their teeth to be used in dentures for the rich. So it's not surprising that local scavengers knew there was easy money to be made from the killing fields of Waterloo, and used pliers to yank thousands of teeth from the dead bodies of British, French and Prussian soldiers. These were then carefully sorted according to shape and size to create full sets of teeth. The flood of dentures that resulted became known as "Waterloo teeth".

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3. LURID LOOTING

It wasn't just teeth that were taken from Waterloo. Looting was widespread and immediate. In the actual heat of battle, as shots from cannons whizzed lethally around them, soldiers would scramble to swipe whatever they could from men dying. To give just one example, when British officer General Picton (described as a "foul-mouthed devil" by Wellington) was shot from his horse, a member of his own infantry division quickly nabbed a purse and spectacles from his fresh corpse. There are even accounts of soldiers going so far as to steal the gold lacing from the uniforms of the dead.

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4. BURNING THE BODIES

The slow, gory task of disposing of thousands of dead bodies fell to surviving soldiers and local peasants, who dragged and dumped them into huge pits. Dead, horses had their metal shoes ripped off for re-selling before being arranged in vast pyres and set alight. The scene was made even more hellish by the stacks of unburied human bodies that lay around for days afterwards, literally going black in the scorching heat of the June sun. The only thing to do was burn the men just as they did the horses - according to one source, "they have been obliged to burn upwards of a thousand carcasses, an awful holocaust to the War-Demon".

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5. BONES FOR FERTILIZER

Human remains could still be seen at Waterloo a year after the battle. A company was contracted to collect the visible bones and grind them up for fertilizer. Other Napoleonic battlefields were also reportedly scoured for this purpose.

The 1st Duke of Wellington, commander

of the Anglo-allied Army

Napoleon Bonaparte by Jacques-Louis David

Map of the Waterloo campaign

Image: Ipankonin / Wikipedia • Licensed for reuse under CC BY-SA 3.0

The Battle of Waterloo by

Jan Willem Pieneman

The Lion's Mound at Waterloo

Image: Jean-Pol Grandmont / Wikipedia • Licensed for reuse under CC BY 3.0