Battle of WaterlooOn February 26th 1815, barely ten months after the end of the Peninsular War, Napoleon sailed from Elba to bring about the end of his brief period of exile. It was the beginning of the final, momentous chapter of the Napoleonic Wars that would culminate in the great battle of Waterloo and Napoleon's final downfall. The campaign was also to result in a head to head between the two great commanders of the age, Wellington and Napoleon, two men who had yet to face each other in battle.
Napoleon landed in France on March 1st and entered Paris on March 20th. He immediately set to work raising an army, the so-called Army of the North which, by the time of the Waterloo campaign consisted of 125,000 men. Facing Napoleon were the armies of the Seventh Coalition - it had declared Napoleon `an enemy and disturber of the world' - which numbered as many as 800,000 men. But of the various armies opposed to him it would be the Anglo-Dutch army, under Wellington, and Marshal Blucher's Army of the Lower Rhine that would be the object of Napoleon's thrust in June 1815.
Wellington's Anglo-Dutch army was a marked contrast to that which had triumphed in the Peninsula, that particular army having been dispersed and scattered around the world, mainly to America, and only a handful of his Peninsular regiments would be present with him at Waterloo. Many of these were already in Holland having served with Sir Thomas Graham's force which had taken part in the campaign against Bergen-op-Zoom in 1813 and 1814. In fact, only 34,000 of the 100,000 troops under Wellington were British, the rest being Germans, Hanoverians and Brunswickers, all good troops, and a large contingent of Nassauers, Dutch and Belgians. It was, as Wellington was moved to write, `an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped.' His staff was very inexperienced, although he did have several `old heads' from the Peninsula, such as Hill, Picton, Alten, Kempt, Pack and Somerset. He also had the services of the Earl of Uxbridge as commander of the Allied cavalry. Uxbridge had eloped with the latter's sister-in-law early on in the Peninsular campaign and following the Corunna campaign of 1808-09 saw no further service. As a result of this the British cavalry in the Peninsula was deprived of the only real cavalry commander the British Army possessed. Nevertheless, old differences having been settled, Uxbridge was to lead the cavalry with distinction during the Waterloo campaign.
On June 15th 1815 Napoleon's army crossed the Sambre, catching Wellington, who was dancing the night away with his officers at the now-famous ball, given by the Duchess of Richmond, by surprise. His army had concentrated to the south of Brussels with Blucher's Prussians on its left. Napoleon's plan was to drive a wedge between the two and fight each army separately. It was vital, therefore, to prevent co-operation between the two and on June 16th the two battles designed to ensure this were fought. At Ligny, Napoleon himself attacked Blucher and gave him a severe mauling while Ney, with about 42,000 men, attacked Wellington at the crossroads at Quatre Bras. The end result of a day of hard, confused fighting was that Blucher, having been forced to retreat north, in turn forced Wellington to withdraw in the same direction, marching parallel with the Prussians and keeping in close contact with them throughout.
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