You are about to enjoy the reproduction of a booklet that was originally printed in Waterloo, Belgium, approximately one hundred years after the Battle of Waterloo. The booklet bears no date of publication; however, because the author states in the preface, "A hundred years separate us from the memorable day of the 18th of June 1815..." and the photograph of Waterloo-Centre is dated 1915, I believe the booklet was published in 1915 to commemorate the centennial of the battle.

The booklet was given to me as a gift from my friend, George Balco. If the name sounds familiar to you but you can't place him, then you have probably visited the page in this website where I am assisting him to sell his Napoleonic book collection. George is from a foreign country: Cape Cod, and visits America now and then. Everyone who reads this electronic booklet is indebted to George Balco for his generosity. (And by the way: he didn't realize, until I informed him, just how old the booklet is.)

This reproduction includes all of the original text, maps, illustrations and photographs. The maps, illustrations and photographs are approximately the actual size of the originals. I apologize for the quality of the two maps; I have reproduced them as well as possible. Please note that all of the photographs were taken in 1915 or earlier; therefore, they are probably very representative of the scenes in 1815, since there was very little change to the buildings during that hundred-year period. The original booklet was translated by an Englishman and printed by a Belgian. There are numerous spelling errors and some words that just don't make sense in the booklet and I only attribute these to the Belgian printer as typesetting errors because he probably was not familiar enough with the English language to discern these errors. The are only two other possibilities: either the English translator gave the Belgian printer slopily written translations, or the printer was just careless. I really doubt that either alternative is the case. I have corrected all the typographical errors that I could detect. Footnotes and other text in red are mine and not part of the original text.

To assist you in navigating to the parts you may be most interested in, I have included an Table of Contents that is not part of the original booklet. This follows immediately after this Forword. To get back to the Table of Contents from any "page," click on the Table of Contents button, which you will find at the bottom of each page.

If you have read other accounts of Waterloo, I think you will find some information here that you didn't know before; information that seems to have been lost to history because you just don't see it anywhere else.

Regarding copyright. I do not believe that the original material is still under copyright. I have asked my Belgian friend, Fons Libert (The Napoleon Series), if he has ever seen such a booklet being sold at any of the Waterloo attractions and he asserted that he has not. Several friends of his also maintain that they have never seen such a thing either. Therefore, I believe this is an item that is out of publication, out of copyright, was probably produced as a commemorative item in limited quantity, and has been totally forgotten--until now. However, I will immediately remove it from my website if anyone contacts me and informs me that I am infringing upon his or her copyright.