WATERLOO AND WELLINGTON

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 48, 26 February 1937, Page 8

WATERLOO AND WELLINGTON

While the archaeologists have been excavating to re-discover the Trojan battlefield, modern development (reading and settlement) threatens to disfigure, disguise, and eventually cover up the field of Waterloo. For centuries after the period described by Homer, the traffic of Europe and Asia, re-set-tlement after re-settlement, piled up on ihe site of Troy, so that archaeological excavation became 1o this generation a formidable task. The lapse' of centuries could do much the same 'for Waterloo,' hence the

British Ambassador's appeal to Belgium to protect at least "one of the most interesting points on the battlefield." (An illustration in this issue depicts the famous mound.) Compared with the trench-lines of the Great War, 1914-18, Waterloo (1815) is a pocket-battlefield. Excavations indicate that Troy was in a still smaller sense a pocket-battle-field, not much more than an exaggerated Maori pa. Modern farstretching warfare and aerial combat have made Waterloo, Troy, and the Maori pa all obsolete and, in area, insignificant. But that is a virtue when it comes to a matter of landpurchase, reservation, and protection. Whether the British or the Prussians really won Waterloo is no longer discussed by the ex-Kaiser and his pre-War generals. Jutland has ousted Waterloo from its controversial position. But Waterloo, though militarily obsolete, remains famous as Napoleonls final defeat by Wellington. Cannot Belgian expansion go somewhere else?