Battle of Waterloo
Napoleon lost his last battle on 18 June 1815 to an Anglo-Dutch army he had beaten in the morning and a Prussian one he thought was somewhere else. He had returned from Elba in March and had about three months to fight before the coalition assembled 600,000 men against him, so he attacked into Belgium to beat Wellington and Blücher separately. Ligny on 16 June beat the Prussians and did not destroy them, and they retreated north rather than east, which kept them in contact with Wellington and which Napoleon assumed they had not done. Grouchy was sent after them with a third of the army and never found them. Wellington took a position on a low ridge at Mont-Saint-Jean with a reverse slope to shelter his infantry, holding the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte as strongpoints in front. The ground was soaked from a night of rain, which delayed the French attack until nearly noon. The day was a sequence of French errors: an infantry assault in a formation too dense to deploy, a cavalry attack of some 9,000 horse sent without infantry or guns against squares that did not break, and La Haye Sainte taken only at six in the evening when it no longer mattered. The Prussians arrived on the right flank from about four and their weight told by seven. The Imperial Guard attacked and was repulsed, and the army dissolved. Some 50,000 men lay on about four square kilometres. Wellington's own verdict was that it had been the nearest-run thing he ever saw in his life, and that he hoped he had fought his last battle. The name is Wellington's choice; the French call it Mont-Saint-Jean and the Prussians called it Belle-Alliance.
- Year: 1815 CE
- Category: Military
