24 Hours at Waterloo: 18 June 1815

'One of the lancers rode by, and stabbed me in the back with his lance. I then turned, and lay with my face upward, and a foot soldier stabbed me with his sword as he walked by. Immediately after, another, with his firelock and bayonet, gave me a terrible plunge, and while doing it with all his might, exclaimed, "Sacre nom de Dieu!" ' 'Charge! Charge the guns!' shouted Colonel Hamilton, who was last seen galloping through the Grand Battery 'going at full speed, with the bridle-reins between his teeth', according to one witness, 'after he had lost his hands'. 'There was nothing to be heard but the clashing of swords and bayonets, and the cries of the dying and wounded.' The battle of Waterloo had all the drama and brutality of a nineteenth-century bare-knuckle prize fight. It was a vicious fight to the finish between two evenly matched opponents. In 24 Hours at Waterloo, using a plethora of previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, letters and diaries, Robert Kershaw reveals the soldier's view of this iconic battle: how they felt, what they saw, what they smelt and what they heard enduring this epic confrontation on Sunday 18 June 1815. Visceral and raw, this is Waterloo as you've never experienced it before.

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