On a cold, clear, windy afternoon earlier this month I visited the museum and battlefield of Waterloo, Belgium: the scene of the final defeat of the Napoleon and his army in 1815.
When I visit the scenes of great battles, I try to imagine myself as the 20-year-old I was when I first made sergeant, leading a squad of men in the face of thousands of enemy soldiers. Chances of me reaching my 21st birthday look very dim in those moments.
The fields of Waterloo are open, flat and a horrible place to be a soldier. At Gettysburg, I knew I wanted to be in the United States Army. To be in the rebel army, especially in Pickett's Charge, was to have run uphill into artillery behind stone walls.
At Waterloo, everyone was on rolling open ground, the difference was timing and maneuver. The French were out-flanked, out-maneuvered and finally defeated. Napoleon Bonaparte was neither the first nor the last general defeated in part by his own arrogance.
The museum is beautiful and is all underground:
A huge diorama places all of the armies on the field. A fixed model can only capture a moment, not the complex maneuvering that led to Napoleon's defeat, but it is nice to be able to look at the model then go out and scan the field.
And in the gift shop, there is a Napoleonic War chess set and the t-shirt I came home with:
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