Waterloo 200th - Battlefield meet-up, 19th June?

A view of La Haye Sainte, from the Lion Mound, Sept. 2014. 

Hello

My wife and I have just finished making our arrangements for a short stay in Belgium near Waterloo over the bicentennial period. We - or rather I - left it pretty late, but it's all sorted now... phew!

I noticed, thanks to a post over at TMP, that bloggers had met up at Salute 2015. I was miffed that I hadn't known about that, as I'm new to wargame blogging, having only stared last year, and would love to have met up with fellow bloggers at Salute.

A detail from Louis DuMoulin's superb Lion Mound

panorama painting.

A French cuirassier's cuirass, sword and scabbard; 

can't recall if this was at La Caillou or the Wellington

Museum now; can anyone else put me right?

Fantastic! Or perhaps I should say 'superbe'!?

So, I thought I'd tentatively extend the furry hand of friendship in relation to our Waterloo trip. My vague thoughts at this stage are to perhaps suggest a meeting somewhere the day after the battle, the 19th June, to chat about and compare notes re the 18th. Please contact me here via my blog if this would be of interest, or to let us know if something like this is already being arranged by someone else, so we don't miss out on this as well!

We visited Plancenoit. This is the church there.

I found this plaque on the wall of the above church.

We went to Waterloo and environs last year, as a kind of recce I guess. There is (or was?)* a pub/restaurant at the Lion Mound hamlet, and a café nearby. Mind you, they are neither the greatest of venues. At least the pub is quite large. The café is tiny! Does anyone with better local knowledge have any suggestions as to the best (nicest) potential site for a meet-up? My memory's hazy at this time of the morning, but isn't one of the buildings on the central road a café/restaurant now?

Anyhoo...I'd be interested to hear from anyone else who'll be making the pilgrimage, and I do hope some of us can meet and share our enthusiasm on the battlefield.

Regards

Sebastian

* The whole site's being redeveloped; I'm not sure what changes have been made, other than there being a new larger (underground!?) visitor centre.

UPDATE: Since first posting on this topic I found out, via a thread I'd started at TMP, that the re-enactment events at the Waterloo bicentenary were ticketed. After an initial panic I was able to book tickets - almost all of which had, by then, sold out. I think we probably would've been ok just being in the area at the time. But as I'd been intending to watch the battle it would've been disappointing not to have had access to the battlefield. As it turns out we'll have access to the 'bivouac' area on the evening of the 18th, after which there's an opening ceremony (a rather showbiz looking affair called 'inferno'!), and our tickets include that as well. They also include a 'French attack' re-enactment on the 19th, which I'm very much looking forward to.

PS - I thought I'd jazz up this post with a few pics from our September 2014 visit.

One of several small dioramas in the Waterloo battlefield area.

I forget where we saw this one. Probably at the Wellington

Museum in Waterloo itself. Can anyone confirm?

This is where we stayed (they advertise themselves as 'residence

Brussels South') on our 2014 visit. We would've stayed here

again, only we appear to have left it too late, as all the rooms

were already booked.

Waterloo: The Lion Mound Hamlet Panorama

If you look at the many photos of the Waterloo panorama similar to this one on the web, you'll note that at the bottom of the panorama - only a very tiny sliver is visible in this pic - there is a large scale diorama type element, an attempt to blend the painting into the 3-D world of the viewer.

As a child I used to occasionally draw, on long rolls of paper, imaginary battle scenes. Some were based on Waterloo. I also built tiny plasticene armies, one of which was eventually massacred by a pair of gigantic arms and hands descending from the skies, as it bivouacked on my windowsill! I'll return to this second theme later. But the drawings I did, which as far as I know haven't survived (if any did I might post some), were my own childish probes in the direction of something that was actually realised by the French painter Louis Dumoulin, on a vast panoramic canvas, circa 1912.

Louis Dumoulin was a French artist known largely for his travels in and paintings of the Orient (he founded the Société Coloniale des Artistes Français), who, together with assistants, created this monumental masterpiece. According to the website (linked to below) the painting depicts a key moment in the battle. But, if I recall correctly (and I may not), one of the many books I've read on Waterloo says that in fact the painting depicts a number of non-contiguous moments simultaneously. Can anyone add any more to clarify this?

Pictured above is, according to the Wikipedia page where I found it, a page from the original 1912 programme, printed for the opening of the panorama. This part of the artwork depicts the fabulously attired Guard Lancers (one of my favourite French units, for sartorial reasons, if nothing else!), behind whom are some Grenadiers a Cheval.

I have yet to visit the battlefield and its environs - it's a primary plan to get there on the next available holiday (I'm reading several books to prime myself for the visit [1]) - but when I do I intend to study this picture for some time. According to the info on the Waterloo Battlefield website, which has
a page dedicated to the panorama, it is huge artwork, measuring 110 meters width-wise, and 12 meters in height, and as well as the visual aspect there is a modern multimedia twist, with a sound-effects backdrop adding to the atmosphere.

The website's brief blurb also notes that the panorama, once a very widespread phenomenon, is now a rare thing, and that in 2008 this particular example underwent restoration. Whilst researching the panorama and Dumoulin online I found an artnet link (online auctioneers) which lead me to a couple of cuirassier studies by Dumoulin, pictured below.

[1] As well as reading Peter Hofschröer's two-volume Waterloo Campaign history, I'm part way through Uffindell and Corum's On The Fields Of Glory, which latter is as much battlefield guide as historical account.