Battle of Waterloo

At four in the evening, the French’s artillery stopped firing all of a sudden in order to lead way for a massive cavalry attack with many Cuirassiers. However, Ney realised that the cavalry alone were not doing much damage, and so he sent around 6500 infantrymen and all the remaining cavalry to attack. Seeing this, Uxbridge sent his horsemen to attack the infantrymen but the French infantry were too good and so they killed all the horsemen with their muskets. Uxbridge decided to send the Dutch-Belgian heavy cavalry to attack the French infantry but seeing how quickly they had killed the Uxbridge’s cavalry, they refused to attack fearing their lives. But Adam’s infantry brigade managed to kill the French infantry. Whilst the French cavalry were struggling to kill many men from Wellington’s centre, the French artillery created so many casualties that the Hanoverian cavalry fled and Wellington suffered a very big number of losses.

Just when the French were defeating a massive number of Wellington’s men … the Prussians arrived. Worst still, they arrived from Plancenoit, which was just behind the French armies. Therefore, the French found themselves being attacked from behind and in front of them. Napoleon had been keeping some men behind if anything happened and when he realised Marshal Grouchy had not followed his last orders he sent Lobau to keep the Prussians back. The Prussians pushed Lobau back to the French right flank, which was the only way for the French to retreat if they needed to. Napoleon saw this and sent 20 000 men to attack the Prussians and defend the French. The French were losing men and Napoleon had only one option left to do … send the Imperial Guards who had never seen defeat. However, the French were outnumbered badly and so they started to retreat but having two enemies at each side, the Prussians and Anglo-allied forces threw themselves at the French to stop them from retreating. Whilst all of the French were retreating, the Imperial Guard showed the most bravery of the battle, by not running away but by attacking the enemies directly but it had no success. Napoleon fled leaving his men behind to return to Paris where he had to give up his throne.

I believe that if Napoleon had sent the imperial Guards before he would have beaten the English before the Prussians came and so when the Prussians arrived, they would have fled from the battlefield.