FACTS RECALLED.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21018, 6 May 1930, Page 11

FACTS RECALLED.

BATTLE OP WATERLOO. Major-general Sir Frederick Maurice retraced in a recent lecture the battle of Waterloo, and for the first time, per* haps, there were members of hia London audience who found themselves face V th the question; Who won the battler (says an English paper). For more than 100 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 wl rlr in on^on - At Liverpool there was a Waterloo square; at Windsor a Waterloo Chamber, There might be 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 of bis the comment: “What a damned cheek! ” And yet Wellington had never said he thrashed Bonaparte or that the British won the battle of Waterloo. He gave due recognition for the success of the arduous day to the assistance of Bluchcr 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 British losses were 6736, the German losses were 0482. and that of this number 6988 were in BJucher'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 Belgian troops, and the second, third, and fourth by the British “We are simply,” he said, “making fools of our heroic forbears who fought 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 duo.”