From the 140-foot-high Lion’s Mound, which was built in the 1820s on top of Wellington’s front line, one can see what Napoleon could not: the woods to the east from which 50,000 Prussians started to emerge at 1 p.m. Walking the battlefield today, it’s all too easy to understand why he lost. Within a month, the disaster cost Napoleon his throne. The losses for the Allies were severe, too-Wellington lost 17,200 men, the Prussian commander Marshal Gebhard von Blücher a further 7,000. Of Napoleon’s 64 most senior generals, no fewer than 26 were casualties. Between 25,000 and 31,000 Frenchmen were killed or wounded, and vast numbers more were captured. Except for the Battle of Borodino, which Napoleon had fought in Russia in his disastrous 1812 campaign, this was the costliest single day of the 23 years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. There was no denying that the Battle of Waterloo had been catastrophic. Helena while in exile there, he had said, "If I had gone to America, we might have founded a State there." As Napoleon warmed himself he said to one of his generals, “ Eh bien, monsieur, we have done a fine thing.” It’s a sign of his extraordinary sangfroid that even then, he was able to joke, however glumly. on June 19 they stopped by a fire some soldiers had made in a meadow. But the emperor was “so overcome by fatigue and the exertion of the preceding days that several times he was unable to resist the sleepiness which overcame him, and if I had not been there to uphold him, he would have fallen from his horse.” By 5 a.m. “Of personal fear there was not the slightest trace,” one of Napoleon’s entourage, the Comte de Flahaut, wrote later. In the crush of fugitives on the road outside the town of Genappe he had to abandon it for a horse once again, although there were so many people that he could hardly go at much more than a walking pace. Taking a few trusted aides with him, as well as a squadron of light cavalry for personal protection, Napoleon left the square on horseback for the farmhouse at Le Caillou where he had breakfasted that morning, full of hopes for victory. “The enemy was close at our heels,” wrote Petit, who commanded the squares, “and, fearing that he might penetrate the squares, we were obliged to fire at the men who were being pursued.” “Infantry, cavalry, artillery-everybody was fleeing in all directions.” Napoleon had ordered two squares of the Imperial Guard to form up on both sides of the highway to cover such a rout, and he took refuge within one of them as his army collapsed. “The whole army was in the most appalling disorder,” recalled Gen. In mid-June, darkness would not descend on that part of Europe for hours. Across the three-mile battlefront men threw down their muskets and fled, terrified of the Prussian lancers who were being ordered to pursue them with their eight-foot spears. The next cry spelled disaster for any hopes Napoleon might have had for an orderly retreat: " Sauve qui peut!" ("Save yourselves!"). A shocked-indeed, astounded-cry went up from the rest of the French Army, one unheard on any European battlefield in the unit's 16-year history: " La Garde recule!" ("The Guard recoils!") The guard stopped, staggered and fell back. "Bullets and grapeshot left the road strewn with dead and wounded," recalled a French eyewitness. But Wellington had repulsed the assault with a massive concentration of firepower. Less than an hour earlier, Napoleon had sent eight battalions of his elite Imperial Guard into the attack up the main Charleroi-to-Brussels road in a desperate attempt to break the line of the Anglo-Allied army commanded by the Duke of Wellington. By about 8 p.m., the emperor of France knew he had been decisively defeated at a village called Waterloo, and he was now keen to escape from his enemies, some of whom -such as the Prussians-had sworn to execute him. "Let us be off." The day was June 18, 1815. "Come general, the affair is over, we have lost the day," Napoleon told one of his officers.
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