When several French officers, embittered by their recent defeat at Waterloo, turned their backs on Wellington at the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic wars, King Louis (or, according to some accounts, an admirer) approached the duke to express his sympathies. Wellington thanked her, before wryly adding, "I have seen their backs before."
["I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy," Wellington once said of his own generals, "but they terrify me!"]
Sources
Nancy McPhee, The Book of Insults
