Napolean was crushed by the British at the Battle of Waterloo, south of Brussels.
Field Marshall Arthur Wellesey, the Duke of Wellington, took credit for the victory, but the true winner was the banker Nathan Rothschild, who did not fire a shot and was far from the scene.
Rothschild was commander in chief of a platoon of carrier pigeons. Quick and well trained they brought him the news in London. Before anyone else, he knew that Napoleon had lost, but he spread the word that the French victory had been overwhelming, and he fooled the market by selling off everything British: bonds, stocks, pounds. Before you could say amen, everyone followed the lead of the man who always knew what he was doing. The assets of the nation they believed had been defeated were sold off as junk. Then Rothschild bought, he bought everything for nothing.
Thus was England victorious on the battlefield and vanquished on the stock exchange.
The banker Rothschild multiplied his fortune twenty times and became the richest man in the world.
Several years later, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the first international news agencies were born: Havas, now called France Presse, Reuters, Associated Press…
They all used carrier pigeons.
Taken from Eduardo Galeano´s 2007 book Mirrors – Stories of Almost Everyone.
