"THE rain fell almost continually, with flashes of lightning and violent gusts of wind; the ground on which the men lay, drenched to the skin and shaking with cold, was sodden with wet crops, and a few old campaigners made themselves tolerably comfortable by smearing their blankets with clay and making pillows of straw."
Thus goes a contemporary account of conditions on the night of June 17th, 1815, the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. Earlier in the day, a small but very active depression had moved eastwards along the Channel and its heavy falls of thundery rain continued until 8 a.m. the following morning, turning the fields of Belgium into quagmire.
A little more than a year earlier, the Emperor Napoleon had been forced to abdicate. In March 1815, however, he escaped from Elba where he was in exile and re entered Paris to a rapturous welcome. By June 15th he was crossing into Belgium at the head of the Armee du Nord to fend off invasion by Blucher and the Duke of Wellington. On the 16th he routed Blucher's Prussian troops at Ligny, and on the morning 181 years ago only Wellington's army at the little town of Waterloo stood between Napoleon and a triumphal entry into Brussels.
The French attack had been planned for 8 a.m. Napoleon's success as a general rested largely on his being able to deal a crushing blow to the weakest spot when it was least, expected, re acting to the ebb and flow of fortune at different places on the battlefield. For these tactics, however, dry ground and a firm footing were essential, but with the fields a sea of mud after the heavy rain, it was apparent that the French would be unable to advance across the fields in any sort of order. Having surveyed the dismal scene, the Emperor postponed his move in the hope that the morning sun might dry the soil - sufficiently to tilt the balance in his favour: it was almost noon before Napoleon ordered an advance.
Until mid afternoon the battle went in favour of the French. But in the end the four hour delay turned out to be decisive: it allowed Blucher the time he needed to regroup from his defeat and when the Prussian reinforcements arrived in Waterloo at 4 p.m. they turned the tide of battle. Three weeks afterwards, with the cornfields of Waterloo still damp from the blood of the 40,000 men who perished in the battle, the Allied armies entered Paris - the English contingent being the first to do so since Agincourt, 400 years before.