Midnight, Sunday, June 18, 1815. Britain holds its breath. Since Napoleon’s escape from Elba in February, Europe has been jolted from eleven months of peace back into the frenzied panic of a war it believed had ended. “The whole complexion of the world is changed again,” writes George Ticknor, then a young American lawyer in Britain for the first time. “God only can forsee the consequences.” The nation is awash in reports and rumors. The Battle of Waterloo is close at hand.             Went the Day Well? is an astonishing hour-by-hour chronicle that starts the day before the battle that reset the course of world history and continues to its aftermath. Switching perspectives between Britain and Belgium, prison and palace, poet and pauper, lover and betrothed, husband and wife, David Crane paints a picture of Britain as it was that summer when everything changed.
