The Battle of Waterloo
On a rainy Sunday morning in June 1815, two armies faced each other on the fields south of Waterloo. By the end of the day Napoleon was defeated, Europe was redrawn and tens of thousands of soldiers lay dead or wounded in the Brabant mud.
1 The Morning in the Mud
The night before the battle it rained without ceasing. The fields near Waterloo turned into a sea of mud. Napoleon waited for the ground to dry before committing his cavalry, but the delay would prove fatal.
Opposite him stood the Duke of Wellington with a mixed army of British, Dutch, Hanoverian and Nassau troops. They had entrenched themselves on the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean. The French guns opened fire around noon.
2 The Attack and the Turning Point
All afternoon the French stormed the allied positions. The farmhouse of Hougoumont burned, the crossroads of La Haie-Sainte fell, the infantry wavered. Wellington held on, but barely.
Towards evening the Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher arrived from the east. Napoleon saw his fortune turn. He sent the Imperial Guard forward — his finest troops, who had never been defeated. But even they broke against the allied line. Wellington gave the signal for a general counter-attack.
3 The Mound and the Memory
After the battle the landscape bore scars. In 1826 the Lion Mound was raised on the spot where the Prince of Orange had been wounded. Three hundred thousand cubic metres of earth were piled into a forty-metre mound crowned by a cast-iron lion of twenty-eight tonnes.
Today the battlefield is a memorial site that draws visitors from around the world. Beneath the Lion Mound lies the Mémorial, which tells the story of the day that changed the history of Europe — and of the tens of thousands who gave their lives there.
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Heimweer.be — Europees Erfgoed Bewaard
