It rained without mercy through the night of 17 June 1815, and two armies lay soaked in the mud of a shallow valley south of Brussels. Napoleon Bonaparte, escaped from exile on Elba in February and restored to power for what history calls the Hundred Days, needed to destroy the Duke of Wellington's army before its Prussian allies could reach it. The irony of the next day's name is that the village of Waterloo saw no fighting at all: the battle raged around the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean, a few kilometres further south, and the Prussians wanted to call it La Belle Alliance, after the inn where the two victorious commanders met that evening. Waterloo was simply where Wellington had slept and where he wrote his victory dispatch — and the dispatch named the battle.
The mud set the timetable. Napoleon delayed his main attack until late morning to let the sodden ground firm up for his artillery, and every lost hour mattered, because Waterloo was above all a race. Wellington commanded a patchwork force of roughly 68,000 British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops, and he stood to fight only because Field Marshal Blücher, whose Prussians had been mauled at Ligny two days earlier, had promised to march to his aid rather than retreat towards home. The seventy-two-year-old Blücher, who had been ridden over by his own horse at Ligny, kept his word. Napoleon, meanwhile, had detached Marshal Grouchy with some 30,000 men to keep the Prussians away. Grouchy followed his orders, and the wrong road, and never fired a shot at Waterloo.
The day unfolded as a series of hammer blows against Wellington's ridge. The château of Hougoumont on the western flank became a battle within the battle, devouring French infantry from morning until nightfall. D'Erlon's massed infantry assault was broken by British heavy cavalry, including the Scots Greys, who then charged too far and were cut to pieces in their turn. Through the mid-afternoon Marshal Ney hurled thousands of horsemen against Allied infantry formed in hollow squares, which bent but never broke. Around six o'clock the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, the keystone of Wellington's centre, finally fell to the French, and for the next hour the Allied line stood one good push from collapse.
The lane that Hugo dug deeper
The most famous image of that afternoon is also the most doubtful. In Les Misérables, published in 1862, Victor Hugo described a hidden sunken lane — the chemin d'Ohain — swallowing whole squadrons of charging French cuirassiers, horses and riders piling in until the ravine was level with the plain. It is magnificent writing, but historians have found little to support it: the lane existed and some riders doubtless came to grief there, yet nothing like a cavalry-swallowing ravine appears in eyewitness accounts, and the episode is now regarded largely as Hugo's embellishment. The same caution applies to General Cambronne's legendary retort that "the Guard dies but does not surrender" — Cambronne himself denied saying it, and he was in fact captured alive.
Salvation came from the east. Blücher's Prussians began pressing into the village of Plancenoit on Napoleon's right flank from late afternoon, forcing him to feed in precious reserves, including Guard battalions, simply to protect his own rear. At about half past seven Napoleon gambled what remained, sending the Imperial Guard up the ridge against Wellington's centre. The British infantry rose from the trampled corn and shattered it with close-range volleys. The cry "La Garde recule!" — the Guard is retreating — ran down the French line, and the army dissolved into rout. Taking all armies together, somewhere in the region of 50,000 men were killed or wounded in roughly ten hours. Wellington called it "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life", and wrote afterwards that nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
A station, a song and a syndrome
Napoleon abdicated four days later and was shipped to Saint Helena, a remote rock in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821. On the field, scavengers pulled teeth from the dead by the sackful; sold on to dentists, "Waterloo teeth" filled fashionable British dentures for years afterwards. Victorious Britain then set about naming things: Waterloo Bridge opened in 1817, and the London railway terminus that followed in 1848 grew into the country's busiest station. In 1974, with cheerful irony, the Swedish group ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest — held that year in Brighton — with "Waterloo", a song about surrendering happily. And the battle gave English its shorthand for a final, career-ending defeat: to "meet your Waterloo". Napoleon fought some sixty battles and lost only a handful — but he lost the one that became the word for losing.
Quiz nuggets
- The Battle of Waterloo was fought on 18 June 1815 in present-day Belgium; the Prussians preferred to call it La Belle Alliance.
- Blücher's Prussian attack fell on the village of Plancenoit, while Marshal Grouchy's 30,000 detached troops never reached the field.
- Wellington described the battle as "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life".
- The "sunken lane" massacre of French cavalry is largely an embellishment from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862).
- ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, held in Brighton, with "Waterloo"; London Waterloo station opened in 1848.