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After losing 2,000 men and causing only 600 French casualties he was forced to raise the siege and retreat, calling it "the worst scrape I was ever in." [74] Retiring to winter quarters, where he received reinforcements that brought his regular army up to 75,000 men, [71] Wellington began his final offensive in June 1813.
The campaign in south-west France in late 1813 and early 1814 was the final campaign of the Peninsular War.An allied army of British, Portuguese and Spanish soldiers under the command of Arthur Wellesley, Marquess of Wellington fought a string of battles against French forces under the command of Marshal Jean de Dieu Soult, from the Iberian Peninsula across the Pyrenees and into south-west ...
What remained of the French army then abandoned the field in disorder. Wellington and Blücher met at the inn of La Belle Alliance, on the north–south road which bisected the battlefield, and it was agreed that the Prussians should pursue the retreating French army back to France. [168] The Treaty of Paris was signed on 20 November 1815. [170]
Three armies participated in the battle: Napoleon's Armée du Nord, a multinational army under Wellington, and a Prussian army under General Blücher. The French army of around 74,500 consisted of 54,014 infantry, 15,830 cavalry, and 8,775 artilleries with 254 guns.
Wellington's army had successfully pushed the French army out of Spain, over the Pyrenees, and into south-west France. After his defeat at Nivelle, Marshal Soult fell back to a defensive line south of the town of Bayonne along the Adour and Nive rivers. The rivers and the Bay of Biscay near Bayonne form a rough Greek letter Pi (π).
Aided by thunderstorms and torrential rain, Wellington's army successfully extricated itself from Quatre Bras and passed through the defile of Genappe. The infantry marched ahead and were screened by a large cavalry rearguard. The French harried Wellington's army, and there was a cavalry action at Genappe. However the French were unable to ...
The Battle of Quatre Bras was fought on 16 June 1815, as a preliminary engagement to the decisive Battle of Waterloo that occurred two days later. The battle took place near the strategic crossroads of Quatre Bras [a] and was contested between elements of the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-allied army and the left wing of Napoleon Bonaparte's French Armée du Nord under Marshal Michel Ney.
The French argued that they had achieved a strategic success, as Wellington failed to trap and defeat the French army, and Soult's intention was only to delay the British while planning to unite with Marshal Suchet's forces and launch a counterattack. From the French viewpoint, the capture of Toulouse was a hollow triumph, as their army ...