At dawn on June 18th, the torrential rain which had soaked the Belgium countryside the previous day began tapering off. Seventy thousand French troops, constituting the bulk of Napoleon’s Armee du Nord, which two days earlier had vanquished the Prussian Army of the Rhine at Ligney, now expected to exploit their initial victory by destroying the unsupported and inexperienced Anglo-Dutch forces which the Duke of Wellington had deployed across the Brussels-Charleroi highway a few miles south of the inconsequential hamlet called Waterloo. That morning at his headquarters in…