The Duke of Wellington famously described his first and last battlefield confrontation with Napoleon as “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”
He was referring, of course, to the Battle of Waterloo, a bloody, furious one-day engagement in and around a village in northern Belgium of that name, fought 200 years ago today between France’s Army of the North and an allied army of British, Prussian, and Dutch troops under Wellington’s overall command.
About six hours into the desperate fighting, the French seized a strategically vital farmhouse, brought up their artillery, and came within a hair’s breadth of breaking through the center of Wellington’s defensive line. Had they succeeded, it would have forced a rapid allied retreat, leading to almost certain allied defeat, and yet another French advance on Brussels.