I always have loved military history. For quite some time I was convinced that the soldiery of a nation or an empire were what made it great. The nuances of economic might or cultural power being too elusive for me to ponder overmuch, certainly before adulthood.

Thus,  I always have been appreciative of the huge battles, seen through an Anglo-American prism. Those That Changed History. Marathon and Salamis, Gaugamela and Zama, Actium and Adrianople, Tours and Hastings, of the Spanish Armada, Trenton, Yorktown, Trafalgar, etc.

And I came to memorize the dates of several of them, and I tend to think about them, when I hit those dates.

High on the list is Waterloo, June 18, 1815.

I have been in Europe itself on June 18 more than once, and at about 8 p.m. on this extraordinarily long day (in northwestern Euro) in mid-June I summon up a mental image of Napoleon sending in the Imperial Guard at the twilit end of a day of carnage on some green hills and fields of Belgium. I don’t think of the Little Emperor, presumably sitting astride his white horse. (Or do you think he was in a tent standing over a map and cursing an upset stomach?) I think of the Imperial Guard, Bonaparte’s final reserve, setting off across the field in their distinctive bearskin hats in an attempt to save the day for France  … only to be shattered and driven back by the indomitable and unbroken redcoats of the British infantry, and harried to destruction by the victorious British cavalry … and the final demise of Napoleon and revolutionary France, which either was a precursor to Hitler’s pan-European Third Reich or to the European Union or perhaps both.

It marked the end of the Hundred Days, that brief and probably pointless period of time after Napoleon had escaped his first exile, on Elba, to reclaim control of France, reassemble its army and hurry north into Belgium in an attempt to defeat the Anglo-Allied and Prussian armies in detail, before they could be joined by the additional armies of Austria and Russia, hastening from the east. And how it didn’t quite work out because Napoleon finally had just too many enemies, or because he had lost his edge through age and declining health and brought nothing innovative or clever to the sledgehammer tactics of what would become known as Waterloo. By the time nighttime finally fell on the carnage on those fields and farmhouses of Belgium, about 10 p.m., Napoleon and revolutionary France were spent forces and Europe was about to enter a century of something approaching peace, perhaps making the violent demise of tens of thousands of soldiers  worth the sacrifice — though the long peace would only better prepare the continent for the far deadlier agonies of World War I, when the peace ultimately unraveled, in 1914.

So, anyway, I remember the dates of a half-dozen battles, almost randomly.

June 18, 1815. The Battle of Waterloo.

July 3, 1863: The final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the “high-water mark” of the Confederacy.

Dec. 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor, not so much a battle as a calling out of the United States as a world power.

June 4, 1942: The Battle of Midway. The greatest moment in U.S. Navy history, the near destruction of a far stronger Japanese fleet and the turning point in the World War II Battle of the Pacific.

June 6, 1944. D-Day. The Invasion of Normandy.

Dec. 16,  1944: Day 1 of the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last gasp.

Others dates, I have a fairly good idea of, but won’t add to this list. Because if I am not sure of them without looking them up, they don’t really count.

So, yeah, June 18, 1815, 194 years ago. I wonder if there will be some additional scholarship on what already is probably the most studied and written about battle in human history, ahead of the its 200th anniversay, in 2015. Probably so.  I imagine I will read a lot of that, too.