It was a defining moment in British history – a triumph that brought the crowning of a national hero and the end of a bitter foe.

And France is determined to ensure that it never happens again.

Almost two centuries after the Battle of Waterloo, senior army officers have been sent back to the scene of their predecessors’ humiliation. In all 38 spent a day analysing what went wrong for Napoleon in his bloody struggle with the Duke of Wellington.

Brigadier-General Vincent Desportes ordered strategists from France’s Armed Forces Employment Doctrine Centre to undertake the visit because “you learn more from your failures than from your successes”.

In the driving rain – as was the case on June 18, 1815 – the officers trod the flat Belgian fields where 15,000 British, 25,000 French and 8,000 Prussian soldiers were killed or wounded. Their aim was to understand why Napoleon’s acumen deserted him in what was to be his final conflict. They were told that he underestimated Wellington, made a series of tactical errors and confused an army that had relied on his military genius.

“We’re not here for an outing,” Brigadier-General Desportes told the officers. “It’s not a history lesson, either. We’re here to work together in an atmosphere conducive to free thought.”

General Jean-Claude Thomann told Le Monde: “By treading the ground you understand why it didn’t work.”

The tour was organised by Peter Herrly, a retired US army colonel who said that military planners needed to reflect on the past to prepare for the future. “This is designed to help them make better decisions,” he said.

The need for cohesion and communication in the stress of battle was as vital today as in 1815, he said. “If you get so many e-mail messages that you don’t pick out the key one, that’s the fog of war. And if your computer batteries run down and your charger doesn’t work, that’s friction.”

Although technology had transformed warfare, there were constants in human nature that did not change.

Before his confrontation with Wellington, Napoleon’s strategy was to “pick good people, let them know his intent and empower them to carry out it out. But at Waterloo, they didn’t know his intent. He was not in good form – he was exhausted and he was caught in the friction of battle.”

Orders got lost, intelligence was poor and underlings failed to take the initiative. As a result, Napoleon’s forces disintegrated as Field Marshall Gebhard von Blücher’s Prussian army rode to support Wellington’s troops.

He also made the critical mistake of dismissing Wellington as a “bad general”, Mr Herrly said. “I’m reluctant to admire Wellington because his style is not particularly to my liking as an American,” he said. “But I have to accept the excellence of his generalship at Waterloo. He did a good job.”

Although the British, US and German armies have long traditions of battlefield study tours, the concept is new to France. The first was last year, to the Marne in eastern France, where the French halted the German advance on Paris at the start of the First World War. The next will focus on Operation Dragoon, the Allied landings in Provence in August 1944 before the liberation of southern France.

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