For ten hellish hours at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, on a battlefield measuring a mere two-and-a-half miles by three, 200,000 soldiers and 60,000 horses had engaged in what Wellington called “the most desperate business I ever was in.” “Never did I see such a pounding match.” The butcher’s bill came to some 50,000 dead and wounded: 15,000 were suffered by the Anglo-Allied force of Brits, Brunswickers, Hanoverians, and Dutch, 7,000 by the Prussians, and between 22,000 and 31,000 by the French. A number of the Duke’s closest associates were among the casualties, and only by a miracle had he escaped unscathed himself. “Thank God, I don’t know what it is to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends,” he noted when told that his favorite aide-de-camp Sir Alexander Gordon had not survived having his leg amputated. Consequently, Wellington’s Waterloo dispatch was so subdued a document that it took a while for his political masters in London to figure out whether Britain and her allies had won or lost.

In this bicentennial year, rather than refight the battle culminating in the retreat of Napoleon’s Old Guard, as most of his colleagues have chosen to do, Paul O’Keeffe in Waterloo: The Aftermath shrewdly concentrates on the less familiar story of what followed.1His stated aim was to write the kind of history book he himself enjoys reading, and, for sheer readability and