Explore "Waterloo" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
To understand the battle of Waterloo it is necessary, more perhaps than in / the case of any other great decisive action, to read it strategically: / that is, to regard the final struggle of Sunday the 18th of June as only / the climax of certain general movements, the first phase of which was the / concentration of the French Army of the North, and the second the passage / of the Sambre river and the attack. This second phase covered four days in / time, and in space an advance of nearly forty miles.
There is a sense, of course, in which it is true of every battle that its / result is closely connected with the strategy which led up to its tactical / features: how the opposing forces arrived upon the field, in what / condition, and in what disposition and at what time, with what advantage / or disadvantage, is always necessarily connected with the history of the / campaign rather than of the individual action; but, as we saw in the case / of Blenheim, and as might be exemplified from a hundred other cases, the / greater part of battles can be understood by following the tactical / dispositions upon the field. They are won or lost, in the main, according / to those dispositions.