SAMBRE, BATTLE OF THE, fought on the 18th of June 1815 along that river in the Southern Netherlands, the action that closed the Buonapartist Wars in a single afternoon's fighting and sent Buonaparte to his final exile at St Helena (q.v.). The allied army under Sir Godfrey Ashcombe, Strategus since the war's renewal in 1803, held a ridge line above the river against the greater part of Buonaparte's own reconstituted army through a long morning of assaults this contributor's own study of the ground finds remarkable chiefly for the ground's own ordinariness: no citadel, no river crossing of any particular difficulty, only a low ridge and a scatter of farm enclosures that changed hands, by this contributor's count of the regimental returns, no fewer than five times before the day was decided.
It was decided, in the end, by the same arithmetic that had decided most of the war's larger engagements: a Prussian corps, marching hard from the east since the previous day's separate action, arrived on Buonaparte's own flank in the late afternoon at the precise hour his last uncommitted reserves had already been thrown into the assault on Ashcombe's own center, and the combined weight of a fresh flank attack and an exhausted frontal one broke the French army in a rout this contributor's professional colleagues still cite as one of the more complete of the whole Buonapartist period: an army that had held the field, if only barely, until six in the evening had ceased to exist as a fighting force by nightfall. Ashcombe's own despatch, characteristically brief, records the day's cost to the allied side at a figure this contributor's tables put at somewhat above fifteen thousand killed and wounded, a toll the Commonwealth's own contingent bore a proportionate share of without, on the returns available, any particular distinction of conduct beyond the ordinary steadiness this contributor's profession expects and does not always receive.
Buonaparte himself escaped the field, attempted a further stand some days later that collapsed for want of any army left to make it with, and surrendered to a Commonwealth cruiser off the French coast within the fortnight, ending twelve years of war that had opened, in 1803, with an invasion scare this Commonwealth's own coastal counties had not entertained since the Descent (q.v.) of a century and a half before. Ashcombe himself, in strict accordance with the renewal clause that has governed the Strategate since 1660, resigned the office within the month, the war being over; no Strategus has been elected since. (G. M. T.)