Posted on 06/18/2015 6:24:09 AM PDT by C19fan
The Duke of Wellington famously described his first and last battlefield confrontation with Napoleon as a “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”
He was referring, of course, to the Battle of Waterloo, a bloody, furious one-day engagement in and around a village in northern Belgium of that name, fought 200 years ago today between France’s Army of the North and an allied army of British, Prussian, and Dutch troops under Wellington’s overall command.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Wellington made extensive use of the “reverse slope defense”. I suggest that it would be a good idea to become familiar with that strategy.
The age of Monarchs and Kings and their empires died that day.
And the GERMANS saved the BRITISH!
I may have to get that book mentioned in the article. I've got a ton of Napoleonic books. Haven't seen a good new one for awhile. "The Pursuit of Glory" might be a tad similar to the excellent "The Age of Battles" which covered the same period, so I think I'll get it.
“The Pursuit of Glory” is organized around themes so there is a chapter on the steady improvement in transportation, another on scientific revolution, culture, politics, and the last deal with international relations and warfare. A much more broader range of topics than “The Age of Battles”.
Certainly the British and Dutch troops were under Wellington's command. But the Prussians?
Wellington’s army actually had slightly more Germans, from various states, than Brits.
Wellington did an amazing job, considering his polyglot army and being slightly outnumbered. He might very well have been screwed had the Prussians not showed up and piled into the French flank.
A fine epic film is WATERLOO. Rod Steiger and Christopher Plumber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_%281970_film%29
Great movie. More accurate than most historical epics. They did a great job of recreating famous paintings of the battle, such as Lady Butler's "Scotland Forever!":
Ney's cavalry charges are shot from a crane:
then a helicopter:
then even higher from the copter to show the British infantry squares under attack:
Incredible visuals!
Interesting bit of trivia: When Wellington was returning to Britain in 1804 after service in India his ship stopped briefly at the island of St. Helena. Wellington spent the night in the same building that Napoleon would later use temporarily during his exile to St. Helena until his permanent house was ready.
Ordered. We will be in Waterloo in August.
Little known facts:
On the one hand, Wellington properly received credit for his use of the battlefield, but he had spent time in the area and was intimately familiar with it.
On the other hand, Wellington received credit for the win that was produced by a bit of spite. Napoleon had more troops than the British, and than the Prussians, but fewer than their combined forces; so Napoleon decided to take them on one at a time. When Wellington detected the coming attack, he sent word to the Prussians, and their commander ordered his chief of staff to march to aid the British.
The chief of staff did not want to aid the British, so he ordered the far right units to lead the march across the entire length of the battle line. Instead of taking 3 hours, the march required over 6 hours, arriving just after Napoleon had committed his last reserves against the British; Napoleon had no reserves to stop the Prussians. Had the Prussians arrived 3 hours earlier, Napoleon could have retreated in an orderly fashion; so it was spite that won the day.
The victory at Waterloo of the British and their allies thus marked not just Napoleon's final defeat, but also a victory against the destructive energies unleashed throughout Europe by the French Revolution. In the ensuing decades, Europe's best minds and statesmen restored and renovated traditional political structures and practices. They turned away from revolutionary agitation and pursued practical reforms and innovations. The result was almost a century of peace and prosperity, coupled with increasing freedom and dramatic advances in science, technology, and the arts.
Waterloo thus marked the beginning for Europe of a long Burkean era of peace and conservative reform and progress. So celebrate Waterloo as being a conservative victory, just as, in the long sweep of history, the American and Allied landing at D-Day was the beginning of the recovery and restoration of European peace and freedom.
Hmm. That's one way of putting it. Another way would be that the reactionary forces of the old aristocracy reestablished themselves, then created a fairly repressive regime to stamp out the ideas of "liberty, fraternity, equality," even as a middle class began to emerge who wanted some voice in their government, leading to the Revolutions of 1848.
I listed to a BBC History Podcast a while back interviewing the author of "The Phantom Terror" a book about that period. Here's a Wall Street Journal review of the book.
One of the things he talked about was that in Austria censorship was so severe--with all foreign mail opened and read by government agents--along with banning of foreign books and travel restrictions, along with a massive network of spies and informers and secret police, that a part of Europe that had been among the most enlightened and advanced became a backwater, a status it more or less retains to this day.
As for "reactionary forces of the old aristocracy," I trust that you do not include the titled ancestors of "Phantom Terror" author Adam Zamoyski. They were long prominent in Polish politics as aristocratic advocates of reform and national independence. Indeed, many European aristocrats were advocates for liberty.
In any event, the proximate cause of Europe's decline was not the relatively benign Revolutions of 1848 but the massive destruction of WW I and WW II and the ensuing rise of the United States as a world power, with Europe divided by the Cold War and the free half reliant on the United States for its security.
Waterloo ping.
This topic was posted , thanks C19fan.
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