On 18 June 1815, Napoleon was defeated by the British and Prussian armies on the fields near Waterloo in Belgium. That afternoon the French cuirassiers, charging the enemy line, tumbled with their horses into a sunken road running towards Ohain, and the horsemen behind them poured in on top. By evening the road was so filled with men and horses that it lay level with the fields. The British spent the night in the camp the French had abandoned, and Wellington rode to Waterloo village and wrote his report.
There was a full moon that night. After a battle, men came out onto the field to go through the pockets of the dead. They were the kind who followed armies without fighting and lived by selling what they stole. Wellington ordered that anyone caught at it be shot on the spot, but while men were being shot for it in one corner of the field, others were stealing in another.
Around midnight a man made his way, almost crawling, along the sunken road towards Ohain. Under a smock that was nearly a greatcoat he had large pockets, and as he went forward he kept looking back. Some way off, behind a ruined house beside the Nivelles road, stood a small peddler’s cart with a tarred wicker hood. A woman sat inside it on the bundles.