CRI听力:Enormous Waterloo Battle Model Celebrates 200th Anniversary

The model itself features more than 21-thousand intricately placed and painted soldiers, along with 10-thousand horses.

Christine Pullen, curator of the Royal Green Jackets Rifles Museum in the southern UK city of Winchester, is responsible for putting together the Waterloo exhibition.

"This particular year in 2015 is seeing the bi-centenary of the Battle of Waterloo and it's nice to see that our model - that we all love and cherish - coming back home, freshly restored to commemorate this particular occasion - the Battle of Waterloo."
The display was constructed years ago, but was later put aside.

However, with the approach of the 200th anniversary of the epic battle in Belgium, conservationists were tasked to clean up the display and make it ready again for public viewing.

The diorama is somewhat unique, in that it displays all the key moments in battle on the same scene, rather than depicting a snapshot of time.

Brigadier Vere Hayes, deputy chair of The Royal Green Jackets Rifles Museum, says the thousands of figures on the display represent just a fraction of those who actually died in the Battle of Waterloo.

"The Battle of Waterloo was certainly a very hard fought and bloody contest. In an area that was about two and a half miles by one and a half miles 54,000 horses and men were lying wounded on the battlefield, and some of them stayed out almost overnight. It's about the same number who were killed in the Battle of the Somme but in an area that's much, much smaller."

The Battle of Waterloo took place on June 18, 1815.

It pitted a coalition of British and Prussian forces battling the armies of French Emperor Napoleon, who had just returned to power 100 days before after being exiled.

Napoleon decided to take his outnumbered forces into battle as the troops of the British and Prussian coalition massed in neighboring Belgium in an attempt to invade France and once-again remove Napoleon from power.

However, his plan failed, as the combined allied forces nearly doubled that of France's.

Brigadier Vere Hayes says, though brutal, the Battle of Waterloo did bring an end to Napoleon's ambitions to once-again roll through Europe.

"The Battle of Waterloo was so important because it brought about a period of very nearly 100 years of peace and stability in Europe, right up to the start of the First World War."

Napoleon's time in power in France saw him take control of much of Europe, either through alliance or wars, now dubbed the Napoleanic Wars, which left hundreds-of-thousands dead.

His loss at the Battle of Waterloo led him to try to flee to the United States.

However, he was caught by British forces and was later sent into exile, for the 2nd time, on the British-controlled island of Saint Helena in the mid-Atlantic.

But unlike his previous exile on the Island of Elba, where he had escaped from just months before, Napoleon was unable to get off the island, and spent the rest of his life confined to Saint Helena under the watch of British forces.

Napoleon died in 1821 at the age of 51.

For CRI, I'm Xie Cheng.