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Were you at Waterloo?
I have been at Waterloo.
‘Tis no matter what you do,
If you were at Waterloo.
Thus a little ditty that appeared in the United Service Gazette, thirty years after the Battle of Waterloo was fought on June 18, 1815. It was the third day of a series of battles fought between the Emperor Napoleon of France, newly returned from exile, and an Allied Coalition led by Britain’s Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, and Prussia’s Gebhard von Blücher, Prince von Wahlstatt.
Today on Historically Thinking, Al Zambone re-fights the Battle of Waterloo with Gareth Glover, a retired naval officer dedicated to the study of the land campaigns of the British Army in the Napoleonic Wars.
Glover is the author of Waterloo: Myth and Reality, a meticulous reappraisal of the momentous battle that discovers that many of the things that historians, writers, and even veterans of the battle thought they knew about Waterloo just aren’t so.
For Further Reading
Gareth Glover, Waterloo: Myth and Reality
The Gareth Glover Collection: Original Source Material from the Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815
Addenda
Some listeners have complained that they couldn’t follow along with the rapid-fire description of the Waterloo campaign, and the eponymous battle that concluded it. Therefore we’ve added some links to maps
The strategic situation facing Napoleon (at Wikipedia)
The Waterloo Campaign (at Wikipedia)
