Brendan Simms, Professor of the History of International Relations at Cambridge, explains the vital role taken by four hundred men of the King’s German Legion at Waterloo, in relation to the University Library’s exhibition ‘A damned serious business: Waterloo 1815, the battle and its books’.

" It has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. The Duke of Wellington, 19 June 1815, quoted by Thomas Creevey.

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815, ten miles south of Brussels in what was then the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It was the climactic engagement of a campaign that pitted an invading French army under Napoleon Bonaparte against a combined force of Allied troops—chiefly British, Netherlandish and Hanoverian—commanded by the Duke of Wellington and a Prussian army led by Gebhard von Blücher. The French were routed, and the warfare that had plagued Europe for more than two decades was definitively ended: there were to be no hostilities on such a scale on the continent until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Through its impact on the politics and powerrelationships of a Europe approaching the height of its worldwide influence, the outcome of Waterloo remains significant to this day.

Although Cambridge University Library has never set out to assemble a specific, single collection relating to Waterloo, the strength and breadth of our accessioning activity mean that over the course of two hundred years we have amassed a rich and fascinating variety of written records, maps and book arts relating to the battle and the era in which it played so significant a part. To mark the bicentenary of Waterloo, this Digital Library collection presents a sample of such material, encompassing military drillbooks, manuscript letters, handcoloured engravings, battlefield plans, printed mementos and tourist reminiscences.

Virtual Exhibition
https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/wat...

Cambridge Digital Library
http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections...

Music: British Grenadiers Fife by Bryan Davis. Music ID#:27502885

Film made by: Blazej Mikula
http://www.bmikula.com/