Battle of Waterloo (1815): Late start

The 18 June 1815 allied victory that ended the Hundred Days and Napoleon's return -- Wellington, Blucher, and a muddy ridge. Waterloo was fought on 18 June 1815 on a shallow ridge south of Brussels, after Napoleon's escape from Elba and the 16 June battles at Ligny and Quatre Bras. Wellington's Anglo-Allied army held the ridge; Blucher's Prussians arrived in the afternoon on the French right. Napoleon's last throw ended in a general rout toward Paris.

About 40,000-50,000 men were killed or wounded in a day of artillery, cavalry, and infantry -- a Napoleonic butcher's bill, not a twentieth-century one. Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, and the misjudged midday start (mud, or waiting for the ground to dry) structure every English account.

The battle closed the Napoleonic Wars in the English schoolroom more than Leipzig had. Belgian tourism, British "nearest-run thing" prose, and Prussian insistence on being in the picture are the memory war that never ended. For this atlas it is the low-scale, high-memory end of an era -- and a rhyme with later "one-day" myths (Midway, Tsushima) that should not be equated.