Waterloo visit by royalty and military top brass to mark battle’s 200th anniversary
ROYALTY and military top brass will this week commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, a great victory which dealt a final, crushing blow to the French Emperor Napoleon.
The battle is seen as one of Britain’s greatest military triumphs, ending decades of war and establishing a century of relative peace in Europe.
But it came at a heavy price, and 47,000 men lay dead or wounded after the day’s bloodshed.
When the victorious British military commander the Duke of Wellington wrote home on the evening of the victory, he mourned: “My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers.
“Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Two centuries on and relatives of those who lost their lives at Waterloo will travel back to the field, in present-day Belgium, to lay wreaths in memory of their loved ones.
The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall will join descendants of Napoleon, Wellington and the other Allied military leader Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher on a tour of the historic battlefield this week.
Napoleon conquered large swathes of Europe after sweeping to power in 1799, and had only been defeated by Allied Forces in 1814 when he was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba.
But he escaped the following year, and on June 18, 1815 his troops again faced the combined strength of the Allied Forces in the muddy, rain-battered field at Waterloo.
The broadcaster and historian Peter Snow said it was hard to overplay its significance.
He said: “Waterloo is one of the very few battles in human history where you have a hugely decisive and final result that affects the way people live for the next century.
“Waterloo was the final climax of the Napoleonic Wars that had gone on for 25 years.
“Millions of people all over Europe had died and it had to be ended totally and decisively.”
He said victory at Waterloo “hammered Europe into a state of pretty effective peace for the next 100 years”.