Some of the women who followed the army of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington to Waterloo became victims of the fighting. A shell inflicted two wounds on the wife of an injured sergeant of the 28th Foot as she carried him from the field. Other British women were found dead after the battle; a cannonball killed one female, who lay with her child at her side.

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After the battle, scores of women searched among the ghastly clusters of corpses for their men, either to bandage their wounds of to bid farewell to their lifeless bodies. Even after all the dead were buried, many bereaved British women wandered over the battlefield in a distress that sometimes bordered on madness.

Most of the women with Wellington’s army at Waterloo are unknown to posterity, but some do figure in eyewitness accounts. The wife of Quartermaster Alexander Ross of the 14th Foot remained at his side for some time after the firing began. Her friends feared that she might be hit and urged her to quit the field, but she was reluctant to go, in case she could help the casualties. They then told her that a battlefield was not a suitable place for an officer’s wife, so she retired to the belfry of a church, where she enjoyed a fine view of the action.

The battle had been underway for some time when Captain William Verner of the 7th Hussars heard a rough voice deman: What’s the matter with you, are you afraid? It was a sergeant major addressing his wife, who was sitting on a small pony. Captain James Fraser asked the man if he expected his wife to go into action and sent then her to the rear. Another women at Waterloo was 26-year-old Jenny Jones. Her tombstone at Tau y Ilyn in Wales records that she was there with her husband of the 23rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers and remained on the field for three days.

Some of the female survivors lived to ripe old ages, including Elske van Aggelin, a sutleress with the Dutch army who celebrated her 95th birthday in perfect health in 1889. One of the last surviving witnesses of Waterloo was Mrs. Barbara Moon, who died in October 1903, 88 years after the battle. Born during the Peninsular War, she was a four-year-old child by the time of Waterloo and rode in a wagon over the battlefield in the evening of June 18. Her father, a color sergeant in the 95th Rifles, died of his wounds of few months later.

Surviving the battle took fortitude in adversity, but storied of women giving birth during the Waterloo campaign enter the realm of the incredible. Ensign Thomas Deacon of the 73rd Foot was wounded at the Battle of Quatre Bras on June 16 and his pregnant wife, Martha, searched in vain for him throughout the night. Then she heard that he had been taken to Brussels and set out for the Belgian capital on foot, accompanied by her three children. Torrential rain soon drenched them as they trudged warily along the 20 miles of road. Martha had only a black silk dress and a light shawl, but reached the city with her children, found her husband safe there,, and gave birth to a baby girl on June 19. The joyful parents christened her Waterloo Deacon, after the previous day’s victory.

Another couple had the same idea. When Private Peter McMullen of the 27th Foot fell severely wounded at Waterloo, his wife tried to carry him from the field, only to suffer a fractured leg from a musket-ball. Both ended up in a hospital in Antwerp, before they returned to England where the woman gave birth to a girl. His Royal Highness Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany, commander in chief of the British Army, stood godfather to the infant, who was christened Frederica McMullen Waterloo.

Local peasant women, not merely camp followers, were in the vicinity of the battle, Two civilians even became caught up in the ferocious fighting at Hougoumont Farm. Guillaume van Cutsem, the gardener there, and his 5-year-old daughter stayed at Hougoumont during the eary stages of the battle. Eventually, French howitzers set the château on fire and a British Guards sergeant led the little girl out of the dangerous farm. She reached safety in a nearby forest and in 1876 visited England for the first time in her life. According to the London Times, she had a very vivid recollection of the kindness of our soldiers, who treated her as a pet, and kept throwing her bits of biscuit out of their haversacks wherewith to amuse her.

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