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was La Haye Sainte, another well-defended farmhouse with stables, a barn and a piggery, all enclosed by high walls, which Wellington filled with the King’s German Legion, the émigré unit loyal to King George III which had demonstrated its first-class fighting abilities during the Peninsular War. The possession of these two strongholds, with their high brick walls, would prove invaluable in disrupting the French line of advance, because, as one historian put it, ‘no enemy could pass without being assailed in flank by musketry’.1

The two armies — separated by a shallow valley — were only a thousand yards or so apart as they cooked their breakfasts on the morning of the battle (Hougoumont was much closer, only 400 yards from the enemy front line). In the distance, behind the French lines, Wellington could make out the red-tiled, whitewalled farmhouse of La Belle Alliance, the appositely named inn that was to play a romantic role in the battle’s epilogue. On his far left were three more walled and well-defended buildings, the farms of Papelotte and La Haye and the château of Frischermont.

Howell Rees Gronow, a Welsh Old Etonian ensign who was on duty with the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards at St James’s Palace when the Waterloo campaign began, skipped his guard duty there hoping to see action at Waterloo and to return before anyone noticed he was missing. On the morning of the battle, he recalled:

We had not proceeded a quarter of a mile when we heard the trampling of horses’ feet, and on looking round perceived a large cavalcade of officers coming at full speed. In a moment we recognised the Duke himself at their head … The entire staff of the army was close at hand … They all seemed as gay and unconcerned as if they were riding to meet the hounds in some quiet English county.2

They had good reason to be confident, if not quite ‘gay and unconcerned’, because the topography across which Wellington had chosen to receive Napoleon’s attacks could hardly have been better suited for infantry, complete with folds and dips in the ground that could shelter defenders against the artillery bombardment of a far larger force of cannon — Napoleon had 246 to Wellington’s 157. Sergeant-Major Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars discoursed upon ‘the principal advantages’of Wellington’s position, which had much to recommend it besides the two defensible buildings, including factors that — due to the lie of the ground — would not have been visible to Napoleon:

The juncture of the two high-roads immediately in rear of our centre, from which branched off the paved road to Brussels, our main line of communication … added to the facility of communication, and enabled us to move ammunition, guns, troops, the wounded, etc, to or from any part of our main front line, as circumstances demanded … the continuous ridge from flank to flank towards which no hostile force could advance undiscovered, within range of our artillery upon the crest. Behind this ridge our troops could manoeuvre, or lie concealed from the enemy’s view, while they were in great measure protected from the fire of the hostile batteries … Our extreme left was strong by nature. The buildings, hollow-ways, enclosures, trees and brushwood, along the valley from Papelotte to Ohain, thickly peopled with light infantry, would have kept a strong force long at bay … Our extreme right was secured by numerous patches of brushwood, trees and ravines, and further protected by hamlets.3

Two other vital aspects to the battlefield need to be borne in mind: the corn that grew up to chest, and in some fields shoulder, height and which could hide bodies of troops and slow down advances; and the glutinous mud which also retarded movement.

The rain had cleared by about nine o’clock on the morning of Sunday the eighteenth, but the ground was still very muddy from the previous day and night’s downpours. Dennis Wheeler, a climatologist at the University of Sunderland, has recently recreated a weather map of the low-pressure ridge that moved over the battlefield for about forty-eight hours before the fighting