On 18 June 1815, south of the small Belgian hamlet Waterloo in what was then the Kingdom of the Netherlands, occurred one of the most decisive battles of history. Napoleon Bonaparte hoped to destroy the coalition armies arrayed against him by means of a quick, decisive campaign.  His plan was to defeat in detail each of his main antagonists, the Anglo-Allied army under Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, and the Prussians under Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht Fuerst Bluecher von Wahlstatt.  While this campaign encompassed several months of the spring and summer of 1815, and ranged all along the wide flung frontiers of France, the four days of the Waterloo campaign, from the crossing of the Netherlands border by Napoleon’s Armée du Nord on 15 June, the indecisive actions at Quatres Bras, Ligny and Wavre, and the disastrous French defeat at the hands of the combined Anglo-Allied and Prussian armies on 18 June, decided the fate of the emperor, and by implication, the Empire.