..."
In order to give force to their threats, the allies rushed troops
toward France. Wellington assembled an army of more than 100,000
British, Dutch, and Germans, and planned to cooeperate with 120,000
Prussians under Bluecher near Brussels. The Austrian army under
Schwarzenberg neared the Rhine. Russia and Germany were alive with
marching columns. To oppose these forces Napoleon raised an army of
200,000 men, and on 12 June, 1815, quitted Paris for the Belgian
frontier. His plan was to separate his opponents and to overcome them
singly: it would be a repetition of the campaign of 1814, though on a
larger scale.
[Sidenote: Waterloo]
How Napoleon passed the border and forced the outposts of the enemy
back to Waterloo; how there, on 18 June, he fought the final great
battle of his remarkable career; how his troops were mowed down by the
fearful fire of his adversaries and how even his famous Old Guard
rallied gloriously but ineffectually to their last charge; how the
defeat administered by Wellington was turned at the close of the day
into a mad rout through the arrival of Bluecher's forces: all these
matters are commonplaces in the most elementary histories of military
science.
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