Happy Waterloo Day!! It’s 210 years tonight since that little skirmish on the outskirts of Brussels occurred and Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to drive a wedge between Wellington’s Allied army and the Prussians under Field Marshall Blucher and capture Antwerp failed miserably!
Now it’s 2025 and there are some pretty rotten things going on in Europe (again!) and the Middle East (again!) so it does seem a little distasteful to remember the anniversary of a hard fought and bloody battle which most people today know nothing about. The Battle of Waterloo was however an inflection point of history. It heralded the end of the Napoleonic wars and ushered in a period of peace in Europe which was quite unprecedented. And the fact that it seems like half the places in the western world have been named after the battle or the man who won it (the Duke of Wellington) should be enough to tell you how important it seemed at the time. Europe wouldn’t see another war until the 1850’s in the Crimea and 1870 when the Prussians cleaned up the French again and in fact the British army wouldn’t fight a another European enemy (excepting the Russians in Crimea) until 1914 when ironically they took on the heirs of the Prussian Empire in Germany and helped the French avoid defeat again!
Of course this blog isn’t the forum for a history lesson or to ruminate on what we should learn from the past but the day piqued my interest as I visited the battlefield in 2019 with Linda and my sister Susan. They were fascinated (I’m sure, hehe) at walking the ground of one of the great battlefields of history and it was a place I had always wanted to see so we managed to fit in a short tour of Waterloo and it’s environs after spending a few days in Brussels watching the Grand Depart of the Tour de France.
Unfortunately as a species we are prone to aggression. Throw in envy, naivety and a lust for power and weak leadership and things can turn into a powder keg pretty quickly when the conditions are right. Let’s hope the world rights itself again soon and the fields of Belgium never again have to see the horrors of war.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 