2nd Cavalry Brigade (United Kingdom)
The 2nd Cavalry Brigade was a brigade of the British Army. It served in the Napoleonic Wars, the Boer War and in the First World War when it was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division.
The 2nd Cavalry Brigade at the Battle of Waterloo
1881 artist’s impression of the charge of the Royal Scots Greys at Waterloo in 1815.
A patrol of the 18th Hussars attempting to obtain information from the local population, 21 August 1914.
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815, near Waterloo, marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars. A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by two armies of the Seventh Coalition. One of these was a British-led force with units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington. The other comprised three corps of the Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher, a fourth corps of this army fought at the Battle of Wavre on the same day. The battle was known contemporarily as the Battle of Mont Saint-Jean in France or La Belle Alliance in Prussia.
The strategic situation in Western Europe in 1815: 250,000 Frenchmen faced about 850,000 allied soldiers on four fronts. In addition, Napoleon was forced to leave 20,000 men in Western France to reduce a royalist insurrection.
The resurgent Napoleon's strategy was to isolate the Anglo-allied and Prussian armies and annihilate each one separately.
Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher commanded the Prussian army, one of the Coalition armies that defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig
Marshal Michel Ney, who exercised tactical control of the greater part of the French forces for most of the battle
