Waterloo is probably the most famous battle in British military history - and one with a fascinating link to Worthing.

On a summer's day in 1815, Napoleon was finally crushed by an Allied army led by the Duke of Wellington.

As night fell on Sunday, June 18, the scene on the battlefield was one of absolute horror.

A total of 45,000 men lay dead or dying in an area of just three square miles. The bloodstained and exhausted survivors tried to sleep on the battlefield, surrounded by the shattered bodies of their comrades.

One of those wandering among the piles of corpses was Sergeant Major John Levett, a 34-year-old cavalryman in the 1st Royal Dragoons. Remarkably, his wife Anne, 36, a camp follower, was also present on the battlefield, tending to the injured as best she could.

Ten hours earlier, Napoleon's army, numbering 74,000 men, had launched its attack on Wellington's positions, defended by 67,000 troops.

The time was 11.30am. The Anglo-Dutch army repeatedly repulsed French attacks and launched counter-thrusts.

Thousands of troopers cut and slashed their way through massed ranks of blue-coated infantrymen.

Highlanders grabbed on to their stirrups as they galloped into the melee, where bayonets and sabres flashed in lethal fashion during savage hand-to-hand fighting.

But the momentum of the charge took many cavalrymen too deep into French lines, where they were surrounded and slaughtered, with the Royal Dragoons suffering 97 dead and 97 wounded.

It is almost certain Levett took part in the action and probably cut down several enemy infantrymen. His wife may well have seen the Dragoons, wearing scarlet tunics, disappearing into the swirling clouds of musket smoke not knowing if she would see him alive again.

Each regiment took a small party of wives on campaign to do the cooking and washing but it was a precarious, unforgiving existence.

There was always the danger of defeat, resulting in capture, rape and murder by opposing troops. But many preferred life as a camp follower to staying in barracks back home, where poverty, hunger and disease were rife.

After Napoleon' s downfall, John and Ann settled in Worthing and went on to run the Wheatsheaf pub in Richmond Road.

On February 9, 1850, the Sussex Agricultural Express published an article stating Levett had died, less than a month after his wife.

It said: "It appears that her death produced a perceptible change in his health and intellect, his actions since having been singularly eccentric. Some distinguished officers resident in Worthing, who were with the deceased at Waterloo, administered much sympathy and attention to him during his suffering and bereavement."

Friends who went to Levett's home were astonished to find 125 gold sovereigns hidden away, possibly booty from the Napoleonic Wars. He was buried alongside his wife in the graveyard of Broadwater Church but today, there is no sign of the tomb.

Many of the inscriptions on the memorials have been obliterated by the passage of time. Other headstones were smashed by falling trees during the 1987 hurricane.

But somewhere in that leafy, shaded spot, lie the bones of John and Ann Levett, veterans of Waterloo.