Facts Recalled.

Cromwell Argus, Volume LX, Issue 3111, 12 May 1930, Page 6

Facts Recalled.

BATTLE OF WATERLOO. Major-general .Sir Frederick Maurice retraced m a recent lecture the Battle of Waterloo; and for the first tune, perhaps, there were membcis of ills London audience wno found themselves face to lace With the question: Who won the battle? says an English paper.

I-or more than a hundred years, said the lecturer, we have taken it as an incontestable fact that we won the Battle of Waterloo. We have a Waterloo Station, a Waterloo place, a Waterloo Bridge, all within London. At Liverpool there was a Liverpool square; at Windsor a Waterloo Chamber. There might l>e many other memorials of the battle, but in none of them, so far as he was aware, was there any indication that it was won except by the might of Britain. A "Prussian memorial to the battle had merely evoked from a countryman < f his the comment: 'What a damned cheek !"

And yet Wellington had never said he thiashed Bonaparte or that the British won the Battle of Waterloo. He gave due recognition for the success of tne arduous day to the assistance of Blucher and the allies.

Having remarked that Wellington had not the remotest intention of standing at Waterloo unless he had Prussian support, he recalled that, whereas the Britislr losses were 0,730, the German losses were 0,482. and tiiat of this number 0.(>88 were >n Pilucher's army- Moreover, the actual finishing off of the Imperial Army, of Napoleon was consummated by the Prussians after the first- echelon had been broken by the troops and the second, third, and fourth by the British. "We are simply," he said, "making fools of our heroic forbears who fougiit in the battle and greater fools of ourselves if we pretend that our troops alone could have overthrown three and a-half times the number of the finest troops of France under the great master of the art of war. Let us therefore, leave such boastings, and let us give credit where credit is due.''