Battle of Waterloo (1815): Elba escape — Section 930: Elba escape

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. When reading the “Elba escape” stage inside the Battle of Waterloo atlas entry, recording both the reference period and the operating boundary around figure 03 prevents common misinterpretations in real-world decisions.

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.

A ridge, a delay, and an ally who arrived Waterloo is a British national day that was an allied day -- and a French catastrophe that Vienna then locked in. Elba, the 7th Coalition, and Napoleon's strike into Belgium to smash Wellington and Blucher apart. Ligny hurt the Prussians; it did not destroy them.