Battle of Waterloo (1815): Hougoumont — Section 758: Hougoumont

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. Cross-checking field checklists against the comparison lab shows that metric 06 under “Hougoumont” for Battle of Waterloo never acts in isolation; it shifts alongside structural constraints and local standards.

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.