The Battle of Waterloo, fought on 18 June 1815, has an enduring fascination – and so it should. After more than two decades of nearly uninterrupted conflict in Europe and across the world, in a single action lasting nine hours fewer than 200,000 men decided the fate of Europe – whether France would reassume the mantle as master of the continent or rejoin the community of nations and re-direct its martial power abroad in the drive for colonial expansion. Few battles in history are dubbed ‘decisive’ and many undeservedly carry that designation; not so Waterloo, which has to rank very high indeed on the scale of battles of great significance. Not only did it mark the final overthrow of a regime which constituted the greatest threat to European security since Louis XIV a century before – and, indeed, far outmatched any forces which the Bourbon kings put into the field against their neighbours – it signalled a hundred years of relative peace in Europe until the outbreak of the First World War. Little wonder that in Britain contemporaries referred to the Napoleonic Wars as ‘The Great War’, a century before the term was applied again in another, far more horrifying context.
Waterloo is not significant as representing a passing era of warfare and the beginning of a new phase, for the weaponry arrayed there bore a great deal in common with that deployed by the Duke of Marlborough’s army over a century earlier, and warfare on land would not undergo any genuinely significant change until the 1850s, with the application of rifling to small arms and, later, artillery, followed rapidly by the advent of breech-loading technology. But if the subtle difference between the weapons employed on either side at Waterloo did not palpably contribute to its outcome, the tactics employed there certainly did. In the absence of any great flanking movements on the field, the battle amounted to a great slogging match, with the balance between victory and defeat depending heavily upon the degree of French determination to press home the attack and the stubbornness with which the Anglo-Allies were prepared to meet that attack. The sheer scale of the fighting and the extraordinary spectacle of over 150,000 men fighting almost entirely within the confines of an area measuring approximately two and half miles square also strongly contributes to the compelling interest aroused by a battle which remains a great epic in the history of the British Army.
Contemporary accounts of Waterloo reveal consistent themes which explain the longevity of interest in the battle. A paragraph from a letter written by Colonel Colin Campbell, Commandant at Headquarters, refers to several such themes:
We have gained a great and most glorious victory yesterday evening and totally defeated Bonaparte’s army…it was the severest and most bloody action ever fought and the British infantry has surpassed anything ever before known…this victory has saved Europe, it was frequently all but lost; but the Duke alone, by his extraordinary perseverance and example, saved the day.
Therein lay a series of compelling points of interest: a dramatic, decisive event whose outcome hung in the balance throughout the day, with far-reaching political repercussions, only achieved after monumental exertion, determination and the costly expenditure of human life, with the leadership of a single man playing an instrumental role in the outcome of the contest.
It is for these reasons that Waterloo remains one of history’s greatest battles and the object of so much enduring interest.
Gregory Fremont-Barnes holds a doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford and serves as a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. A prolific author, his books on this period include Waterloo 1815: The British Army's Day of Destiny, The French Revolutionary Wars, The Peninsular War, 1807–14, The Fall of the French Empire, 1813–15, Nile 1798 and Trafalgar 1805. He also edited Armies of the Napoleonic Wars and the three-volume Encyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. As an academic advisor, Dr Fremont-Barnes has accompanied several groups of British Army officers and senior NCOs in their visits to the battlefields of the Peninsula and to Waterloo.