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An Infamous Army

Page 46

by Georgette Heyer


  SIBORNE, Capt. William. History of the War in France and Belgium in 1815. 2 vols. 1844.

  SIBORNE, Maj.-Gen. H. T. (Ed.) Waterloo Letters. 1891.

  SIDNEY, Rev. Edwin. Life of Lord Hill. G.C.B. 1845.

  SMITH, G. C. Moore. Life of John Colborne, Field-Marshal Lord Seaton. 1903.

  SMITH, Lieut.-Gen. Sir Harry. Autobiography. Vol. I. Ed., G. C. Moore Smith. 1901.

  STANHOPE, Earl of. Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington. 1888.

  SWINGTON, The Hon. Mrs J. R. A Sketch of the Life of Georgiana, Lady de Ros. 1893.

  WELLESLEY, Muriel. The Man Wellington Through the Eyes of Those Who Knew Him. 1937.

  WELLINGTON, 1st Duke of. Dispatches. Ed., Lieut.-Col. John Gurwood. 1939.—Supplementary Despatches. Vols. IX and X. Ed., Arthur, 2nd Duke of Wellington. 1863.

  WOOD, Sir Evelyn. Cavalry in the Waterloo Campaign. 1895.

  Afterword

  Waterloo was the last battle of the Napoleonic Wars and ended the Emperor’s reign in France. On February 26, 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba, where he had spent ten months in exile, and on March 20, 1815 he reclaimed the French throne. Marching northeast from Paris to retake the Netherlands, Napoleon’s army and the troops led by the Duke of Wellington met on June 18, 1815, some two miles south of the village of Waterloo, which was nine miles south of Brussels in Belgium.

  Napoleon’s French troops numbered around 74,000 and faced some 67,000 British, German, and Dutch troops under the command of the Duke of Wellington. The armies engaged at 11.30 am. At around 4 pm 45,000 Prussian soldiers led by Field Marshal Gebhard von Blucher joined Wellington’s men, and the battle ended around 9 pm, with Wellington victorious and the French in retreat. Over 25,000 French troops died at Waterloo, while allied deaths numbered some 22,000.

  Napoleon abdicated on June 22, 1815, and three weeks after Waterloo, on July 8, King Louis XVIII returned to Paris and the throne. This marked the end of the “Hundred Days” of Napoleon’s final reign. He was sentenced to a lifetime of exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, and died there in 1821.

  About the Author

  Author of over fifty books, Georgette Heyer is one of the best-known and best-loved of all historical novelists, making the Regency period her own. Her first novel, The Black Moth, published in 1921, was written at the age of fifteen to amuse her convalescent brother; her last was My Lord John. Although most famous for her historical novels, she also wrote twelve detective stories. Georgette Heyer died in 1974 at the age of seventy-one.

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