Waterloo

The battle nearly waited a day. Heavy overnight rain had turned the fields to mud, and Napoleon held back his attack for hours so the ground would dry enough to move his cannon — a delay that gave the Prussians precious time to march to Wellington's aid. Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, was a cautious Irish-born general who had never yet faced Napoleon in person; he picked a low ridge and told his men simply to hold it. He later called the day "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life."

Much of the fighting swirled around Hougoumont, a walled farm in front of the ridge, where a few hundred British guardsmen held the gate against wave after wave of French troops. Wellington believed the whole battle turned on keeping that gate shut. Late in the afternoon the Prussians under Gebhard von Blücher — a fierce old commander who had been thrown from his horse and trampled the day before — smashed into Napoleon's right flank. The French army broke and ran. Within weeks Napoleon surrendered to the British and was shipped to Saint Helena, a lonely island in the South Atlantic, where he died six years later.

The town still guards the memory. In its centre stands the inn where Wellington slept and wrote the dispatch announcing victory, now the Wellington Museum. Out on the field rises the Lion's Mound, a great cone of earth crowned by a cast-iron lion, built to mark where the young Prince of Orange was wounded — the soil carried up by hand, much of it by local women. Climb its 226 steps and the whole battlefield opens below you: quiet farmland that once decided the fate of Europe.