30 kilometres from Brussels, the Belgian capital, is the town of Waterloo, which also identifies one of the largest and bloodiest battles of all time: it happened more than two centuries ago, on June 18, 1815.
After the corpses of tens of thousands of combatants were strewn over neighboring fields, while the survivors of Napoleon's army retreated to Paris, the supreme commander of the victors, Arthur Wellesley, who went down in history as the Duke of Wellington, famously said: "Nothing but a lost battle can be half as melancholy as a battle won."
The scribes who accompanied him, as well as those of the Allied armies in the Seventh Coalition, called the battle "The Belle Alliance." Others, like "the battle of La Haye Sainte" because that was the name of the place where the fighting was fought. But on the following night, Wellington rested at an inn in Waterloo, a town where no fighting was actually fought. And he decided for posterity: the Battle of Waterloo, where 74,68 French faced 45,<> British (and Dutch reinforcements) and <>,<> Prussians. There the fate of Europe and the end of Napoleon were sealed.
The Hundred Days
Now that the Grand Corso is back in fashion, because of Ridley Scott's film, his military exploits and collapses are also coming to light. When he resigned his imperial crown on April 6, 1814, after the disaster of the Russian campaign, he went into exile on the island of Elba in the Mediterranean. Surprisingly, six months later and at the head of the six hundred soldiers of his escort, he decided to return to Paris and regain the throne. "Napoleon's Hundred Days" is shrouded in legend – the guards sent to arrest him were paralyzed and placed under his orders – but the truth is that he did it, paying attention to his own motto ("Impossible is not French").
For Georges Blond, author of "The Hundred Days of Napoleon" it is the "most astonishing episode in the history of France. And perhaps nothing like it has been seen in any country."
Although he sent messages of peace to the other European kings, none of them believed him: they were not willing to make another imperialist advance and hastily organized a new coalition led by the British power, together with the Prussians, Austrians and Russians. They were going to stop Napoleon at any cost.
The devil is in the details
Napoleon decided to go ahead, rearmed his forces (his faithful Imperial Guard, his unbeatable artillery, Marshal Ney's cuirassiers) and marched into what is now Belgian territory. A military genius, he tried to attack the English and Prussians separately, the Austrians and Russians were much farther away.
In the battles of the previous days – Quatre Bas and Ligny – Napoleon dispersed the enemy outposts. Wellington encamped his forces in a hilly area and on the night of 17–18 June, Napoleon scheduled the attack. An imponderable: the deluge of that night left the whole area in mud, almost impossible for the passage of his cavalry and for the effectiveness of his artillerymen. The offensive order scheduled for dawn was delayed until almost noon.
Both the chronicles of the time – beyond the nationalist proclamations – and military scholars, consider that Napoleon's army had the same opportunity to destroy the English. But he failed at a key moment: he delayed the departure of his Imperial Guard. When he finally did, Wellington—a master of defense—had rearmed his men. And the unforeseen happened: the Prussian army arrived as reinforcement, commanded by Prince Gebhard von Blücher, who deceived the French forces destined to contain it. It was the end.
The death toll at Waterloo was never established, probably around 30,<>. Scenes of looting and pillaging, even among the Allies themselves, were the landscape of the following nights.
Exile
Unlike what happened two years ago in Russia, this time Napoleon's soldiers – retreating to Paris – did not understand that they had lost the war and assumed that they still had a chance. The emperor did not consider it so, while the Bourbon repression loomed. And on July 10 he surrendered to the British, was taken on a ship to Plymouth, and from there to an exile, far away, on a lost island in the Atlantic, St. Helena. They made sure he never came back. Napoleon died on 5 May 1821 of liver problems (although, for his family, he was the victim of poisoning)
The political consequences were immediate. The Congress of Vienna re-established the absolutist policies and the European map that had been in place until the end of the previous century. And he formed the Holy Alliance so that there would not be a line of "liberal ideas."
Abba
On April 6, 1974 in Brighton (England), a Swedish quartet – until then unknown outside the pubs of Stockholm – conquered the Eurovision Song Contest with their song "Waterloo". It is a love song ("Waterloo, I was defeated / You won the war / I promise to love you even more") where it barely alludes to the name of the famous battle.
But, for Abba, it was his own battle: from that Festival and the next album they became the most popular group in the world for almost a decade, until their dissolution. Abba's projection reaches almost to the present day and on the occasion of the half-century of the Contest, in Kiev, "Waterloo" was chosen as the best song among all the champions in the history of Eurovision.