Pinnable

Few farmlands attract as many as 300,000 visitors per year, but the fields near Mont-Saint-Jean, south of Brussels, do. It is here that on 18 June 1815 the Battle of Waterloo was fought, when the Allied forces under the command of the Duke of Wellington & Field Marshal Blücher defeated the French army under Napoleon, who had been advancing on Brussels in an attempt to restore his empire but who ended up as Saint Helena’s most famous resident instead. Today, we take the Allied victory for granted, but on the morning of 18th June Napoleon had a fair chance of winning. His army of 73,000 was considered more experienced than the Allied forces, which consisted of 68,000 British, German & Dutch troops on Wellington’s side and 48,000 Prussian soldiers under Blücher. Napoleon’s plan was to defeat Wellington before Blücher arrived on scene, then take out the Prussians, and have dinner in Brussels, but the fierce opposition, especially at the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, prevented him from doing so, and at the end of the day, after his famed Imperial Guard had been vanquished, Napoleon & the remains of his army fled to Paris.

Today, visitors to the battlefield will first notice the Lion’s Mound, a large conical hill surmounted by a cast iron statue of a roaring lion, erected in 1826 to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo. The rotunda at the foot of the hill opened in 1912 and houses a 112-m-wide panoramic painting depicting the battle. Both the mound & the panorama are part of the museum that opened in the run-up to the battle’s bicentenary in 2015, the Waterloo Memorial, which receives many positive reviews by people who are easily excited. You have to get a ticket anyway, even though they are fairly expensive, because it wouldn’t do to travel all the way to Braine-l’Alleud and not climb the mound, but if you want to know what the Battle of Waterloo was all about & how it was fought, I would not rely on the museum but do some preliminary reading instead. (I myself liked the book Waterloo by Tim Clayton best; it provides an hour-by-hour account of the campaign, and the digital edition sells for just €4.) Locations on the battlefield not to be missed are Napoleon’s observation point near La Belle Alliance, the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, and Wellington’s defence line, the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean.

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