>From the DoD Newswire 12 June 1995
:BATTLE OF WATERLOO IS RE-ENACTED 180 YEARS ON
WATERLOO, Belgium, June 11 - The musket ball holes still
pepper the walls of the old Hougoumont farmhouse where on June 18
1815, British and allied troops held out against massed and repeated
attacks by elite French troops.
One hundred and eighty years later to the day, 3,000 military
enthusiasts from Europe and the United States will re-enact the battle
which changed the course of European history -- Waterloo.
Decked out in period uniform and with firearms and canon to
match, the aficionados will put on a 2 1/2 hour show for an
anticipated 200,000 visitors.
Exactly 180 years ago on Sunday, several hundred allied troops
under the command of the Duke of Wellington died holding the farmhouse
with its strategic position on the Duke's right flank. An unknown
number of French under Emperor Napoleon died there too.
The farm is still owned by descendants of the family who saw
their house reduced to ruins in the battle as the British 2nd Brigade
of Guards clung on against increasingly desperate French attacks.
Now, as then, the battle will begin at the farmhouse before
spreading out in front of specially-built grandstands with cavalry
charges involving 200 horses, cannonades and infantry skirmishes.
An estimated 40,000 soldiers -- one in five of those who fought
in the battle -- were slaughtered on that day as fighting swept across
the rolling farmland over roughly one square kilometre (mile).
As many as 10,000 horses died in repeated cavalry attacks on
allied infantry.
"Believe me, nothing except a battle lost, can be half so
melancholy as a battle won," Wellington wrote shortly after the epic
battle, "...to win such a battle as this of Waterloo, at the expense
of so many gallant friends, could only be termed a heavy misfortune
but for the result to the public."
The battle, one of the many fought over the centuries on Belgian
soil, was one of the few that can truly be said to have changed the
face of Europe.
It broke Napoleon's, and with it France's, domination of Europe,
ushered in decades of peace and consolidated British and Prussian sway
over the continent.
Wellington had some 67,000 British, German, Dutch and Belgian
troops under his command -- of whom about 24,000 were British --
facing Napoleon with about 71,000 seasoned soldiers.
The outcome could easily have been reversed if it had not been
for the arrival of the 80,000-strong Prussian army under Marshal
Blucher. It had struggled through 20 km (14 miles) of quagmire in
pouring rain following defeat at Ligny, 25 km (17 miles) to the south
three days earlier.
Waterloo may have broken Napoleon but to look at the site's
tourist centre now it would be easy to assume he had won.
Everywhere at the foot of Waterloo's giant Lion Mound, built
after the battle to commemorate the spot where the Dutch Prince of
Orange was killed, the memorabilia is French with barely a mention of
Wellington and even less of Blucher.
The battle is restaged every five years, and there is a running
joke that one day they will reverse the verdict of what the French
have always considered to have been a mistrial.
Up to 500,000 tourists visit the battlefield each year, some with
metal detectors searching for the military debris still regularly
turned up by ploughs each winter and spring.
In many respects the site's significance has been forgotten.
Today Napoleon's forward headquarters is a discotheque and many
of the battlefield monuments and commemorative plaques have been
defaced.
Cars race down the road from Charleroi to Brussels across the
middle of the battlefield -- the same road that Napoleon was following
when he ran into Wellington's army.
The fields where armies butchered each other are surrounded by
restaurants and the overriding scent in the air is of Belgium's staple
food -- fried potatoes.
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