The nineteenth century was not to see comparable slaughter until the American Civil War. Gettysburg was a battle as awful as Waterloo, with similar numbers and casualties. Both battles decided great questions, but at the price of great horror. What made Waterloo so horrid was the smallness of the area into which so many men and killing machines were crammed. Today, standing where the elm tree stood (its remains were reduced to furniture), you can see virtually the whole battlefield. A third of the men who fought in the valley became casualties. No wonder Wellington prayed afterwards that he had fought his last battle.
Not all of the men in the French and British armies fought at Waterloo. Napoleon had detached a whole corps to pursue the Prussians, which corps managed to pursue in the wrong direction and were thus absent from the battle. Their presence would undoubtedly have made a difference, but so would the presence of the 17,000 prime infantry that the Duke sent away to guard his expected line of retreat. Of course, if the French had won at Quatre Bras there would have been no battle at Waterloo and, extraordinarily, one French corps spent the whole of that day marching between Ligny and Quatre Bras. Just when they were about to be committed at Quatre Bras an order summoned them to return to Ligny, and just as they were about to fight at Ligny another order sent them marching back to Quatre Bras. If that Corps had gone into action against Wellington then I doubt we would have heard so much about the Emperor’s haemorrhoids over the last one hundred and seventy-five years.
But, whether because of an emperor’s piles or not, Europe’s long wars against Revolutionary and Imperial France were at last over. For the Peninsular veterans of the British army it had been a long road from Portugal to Belgium, and finally to Paris, and Sharpe and Harper have now marched its full and bloody length. Perhaps they will march again, but where, or when, neither they nor I yet know.
The End