It has been a damned nice thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw

With these words the Duke of Wellington summed up the fierce and bloody battle which on 18 June 1815 saw the final defeat of Napoleonic France near the village of Waterloo, ten miles south of Brussels. It was indeed a closely fought encounter; the French, whose forces outnumbered those of their coalition opponents, had victory within their grasp, but the timely arrival of Prussian reinforcements turned the tide in the direction of the Allied forces, and the day closed with Wellington and Blücher, the Prussian leader, meeting on the battlefield to offer mutual congratulations.  After two decades of European war, peace was at hand at last.

In this exhibition, conceived to mark the bicentenary of this momentous day in European history, we look at the course of the battle itself, the military tactics and techniques involved and the treatment afforded to those wounded on the battlefield.

Exhibits include a contemporary printed map of the battle, a manuscript register of correspondence kept by the Foreign Office during foreign secretary Castlereagh’s attendance at the Congress of Vienna and a surgeon’s amputation set of the period.

Most items in this exhibition are drawn from the holdings of the Foyle Special Collections Library. We are also pleased to display items from two other collections at King’s, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives and the Gordon Museum of Pathology.