Battle of Waterloo

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on 18th June 1815 near Brussels, ending the Hundred Days and Napoleon's rule. Napoleon with about seventy-two thousand men attacked the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-allied army of roughly sixty-eight thousand, hoping to destroy it before the Prussians under Blücher could arrive. All day French attacks on Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte and the allied centre were repelled. Late in the afternoon, Prussian corps appeared on the French right flank; when the Imperial Guard's final assault was thrown back around half past seven, the French army dissolved into rout. French losses were about twenty-five thousand killed, wounded and captured, allied about twenty-three thousand. Four days later Napoleon abdicated a second time. Waterloo entered the language as a byword for a decisive, career-ending defeat, and it closed twenty-three years of revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare in Europe. Wellington called it the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life, and the battlefield became a place of pilgrimage for generations afterwards.