How a brief, bloody war let Britain rule the waves for a century
By C.R.
THIS WEEK 5,000 military re-enactors, 300 horses and 100 cannons will begin marching through muddy fields near the village of Waterloo in Belgium, firing blanks at each other. Exactly two hundred years ago, in June 1815, two British-led and French-led armies were fighting on the same site, and not with blanks. While the present-day battle is designed to entertain tourists, the original clash was no laughing matter: 50,000 soldiers were killed or injured in just one day (organisers of the re-enactment are hoping to improve on that health and safety record). Historians widely agree that the outcome of the battle set the course of European history for a century. What was the cause of all the fighting at Waterloo?
In 1814 Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, was defeated by a coalition of European nations. He was forced to abdicate and sent to become ruler of the small island of Elba, off the coast of Italy, with a personal guard of 600 men. He soon got bored, and in February 1815 returned to France to try and reclaim his prior, grander title. Upon his successful return to power the next month, many of the states that had previously opposed him began to mobilise armies, fearing that he was about to reconquer most of continental Europe. Two large anti-French forces assembled close to the north-eastern border of France against Napoleon. One was composed of 25,000 “very weak and ill-equipped” troops from the British army and 43,000 soldiers from the Netherlands and Germany, led by the Duke of Wellington, an Irish aristocrat. The second was composed of 50,000 Prussians, led by Gebhard von Blücher. Napoleon gathered 73,000 French troops and marched to attack them to prevent an invasion. He decided to attack and defeat each army separately in order to maximise his chances of destroying them.
The battle with the British-led army came to be known as the Battle of Waterloo. Wellington decided to place his army across the Brussels road on the Mont-Saint-Jean escarpment (a cliff of sorts). The plan was to withstand repeated attacks by the French and wait until the evening for the Prussians to arrive and destroy the French army in a pincer movement. That is more or less what happened, just about. No wonder that Wellington is said to have called the battle "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life". Waterloo was a clear victory for Britain and its allies. Wellington and Blücher’s armies both pursued Napoleon’s army back to Paris and restored King Louis XVIII to the French throne. Napoleon abdicated and the British exiled him to the tiny island of St Helena, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, where he died, it is said, of arsenic poisoning in 1821. Though British troops were a minority in the force mobilised against Napoleon, Britons consider it a great British victory; the period of relative peace that followed is heralded as the Pax Britannica: the period when Britain became the world’s foremost economic and military superpower.
In his lifetime Wellington became the British establishment’s favourite military hero, which he remained until the second world war (when Winston Churchill displaced him). Some in France, such as the actor playing Napoleon in the re-enactment, argue that Napoleon enjoyed a victory of sorts. They point to the gift shops around the battlefield, in which Napoleon memorabilia dominate. Wellington souvenirs are hard to find. Wellington may have won the military battle, but Napoleon's legacy—within France and on the maps of Europe—looms larger. Meanwhile Waterloo itself has secured a place in the popular imagination. The site gave its name to the hit song which won ABBA the Eurovision contest in 1974, and to the London train station which was, for a time, the final destination for travelers on the Eurostar train from Paris.
