100 Days Campaign Field Trip III

^{View from the Butte de Lion across the western half of the battlefield towards Hougoumont .}

La Ferme d’Hougoumont is one of the places I have yet to visit on my previous visits to the Waterloo battlefield. The farmstead is about 1100 metres from the Butte de Lion and marks the right flank of the British defence line. Of interest lies mainly in the site itself, as the museum is of little importance given the other sites nearby.

100 Days Campaign Field Trip II

Visiting the Waterloo campaign area turned out to be quite time-consuming. On Saturday we visited Ligny with its museum and touched on Quatre Bras. We reserved the entire Sunday for the Waterloo battlefield and museum. There is so much to discover, so much to see, that in the end we even had to hurry to get into the Wellington Museum before it closed.

^{Butte de Lion at the Waterloo battlefield}

100 Days Campaign Field Trip

Living close to Belgium has the advantage of easy access to the battlefields of Flanders and Wallonia. On one of the last weekends, my wife and I went on a tour of the region between Charleroi and Brussels. Besides a good dinner in Mons, we focused on Napoleon’s 100-day campaign. In preparation for our field trip, we watched the 1970 film Waterloo. It tells in sufficient detail the story of Napoleon’s return from his exile on Elba and the campaign that followed. At least it helped to give my wife some historical context for our trip.

^{French artillery pieces in the courtyard of the Ligny 1815 Museum}

Fleurus 1794

^{General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan at the Battle of Fleurus 1794}

The Battle of Fleurus 1794 is one of the few battles included by OSG’s The Library of Napoleonic Battles from the period of the French Revolutionary Wars. It is set on the southernmost maps of the Waterloo campaign (Napoleon’s last Gamble S and SX) and has a surprisingly large footprint. The battlefield stretches from Monceau sur Sombre to Fleurus, places that are about 14 km apart. It is not the narrow battlefield of Waterloo, but an area of operations where many interconnected battles took place on 26 June 1794.