Fought by some 220,000 men on Sunday, June 18th, 1815, the Battle of Waterloo ended 23 years of near-continual warfare between imperial France and her enemies. This hard-won victory for the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-allied armies and the Prussian army of Marshal Blücher brought about Napoleon's final exile to St. Helena and heralded a century of British military dominance. With 16 pages of color illustrations, this history from the author of A Great and Glorious Adventure recounts how and why the battle occurred at a rain-sodden crossroads in what is now Belgium, and ponders how the world would have been different had Napoleon won.