An Infamous Army (Alastair-Audley Tetralogy 4)

Afterword

Waterloo was the last battle of the Napoleonic Wars and ended the Emperor’s reign in France. On February 26, 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba, where he had spent ten months in exile, and on March 20, 1815 he reclaimed the French throne. Marching northeast from Paris to retake the Netherlands, Napoleon’s army and the troops led by the Duke of Wellington met on June 18, 1815, some two miles south of the village of Waterloo, which was nine miles south of Brussels in Belgium.

Napoleon’s French troops numbered around 74,000 and faced some 67,000 British, German, and Dutch troops under the command of the Duke of Wellington. The armies engaged at 11.30 am. At around 4 pm 45,000 Prussian soldiers led by Field Marshal Gebhard von Blucher joined Wellington’s men, and the battle ended around 9 pm, with Wellington victorious and the French in retreat. Over 25,000 French troops died at Waterloo, while allied deaths numbered some 22,000.

Napoleon abdicated on June 22, 1815, and three weeks after Waterloo, on July 8, King Louis XVIII returned to Paris and the throne. This marked the end of the “Hundred Days” of Napoleon’s final reign. He was sentenced to a lifetime of exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, and died there in 1821.