Battle of Waterloo

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in Belgium, part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. A French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition, a British-led coalition consisting of units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, referred to by many authors as the Anglo-allied army or Wellington's army, and a Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal von Blücher, referred to also as Blücher's army. The battle marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Scotland Forever!, the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo, painted by Elizabeth Thompson

Quotes

• At the battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon's cavalry had charged again and again upon the unbroken squares of British infantry, at last they were giving up the attempt, and going off in disorder, when some of the officers in mere vexation and complete despair fired their pistols at those solid squares.
  • Abraham Lincoln, speech at New Haven, Connecticut (6 March 1860)

• Waterloo: I was defeated, you won the war.
  • ABBA, "Waterloo"

• We wait, like war-horse chafing
    To burst the fetters through,
  The word—"Up guards and at them"
    Of the Duke at Waterloo.
  • John Nichol, "Mulholland", stanza 7, in The Death of Themistocles, and Other Poems (1881), p. 207

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Battle of Waterloo on Wikipedia