The region around this Belgian city is busily preparing to commemorate the 200th anniversary in 2015 of one of the major battles in European military history. But weaving a path through the preparations is proving almost as tricky as making one’s way across the battlefield was back then, when the Duke of Wellington, as commander of an international alliance of forces, crushed Napoleon. A rambling though dilapidated farmstead called Hougoumont, which was crucial to the battle’s outcome, is being painstakingly restored as an educational center. Nearby, an underground visitor center is under construction, and roads and monuments throughout the rolling farmland where once the sides fought are being refurbished. More than 6,000 military buffs are expected to re-enact individual skirmishes. While the battle ended two centuries ago, however, hard feelings have endured. Memories are long here, and not everyone here shares Britain’s enthusiasm for celebrating Napoleon’s defeat. Every year, in districts of Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, there are fetes to honor Napoleon, according to Count Georges Jacobs de Hagen, a prominent Belgian industrialist and chairman of a committee responsible for restoring Hougoumont. “Napoleon, for these people, was very popular,” Jacobs, 73, said over coffee. “That is why, still today, there are some enemies of the project.” Belgium, of course, did not exist in 1815. Its Dutch-speaking regions were part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, while the French-speaking portion had been incorporated into the French Empire. Among French speakers, Jacobs said, Napoleon had a “huge influence — the administration, the Code Napoléon,” or reform of the legal system. While Dutch-speaking Belgians fought under Wellington, French speakers fought with Napoleon. That distaste on the part of modern-day French speakers crystallized in resistance to a British proposal that, as part of the restoration of Hougoumont, a memorial be raised to the British soldiers who died defending its narrow North Gate at a critical moment on June 18, 1815, when Wellington carried the day. “Every discussion in the committee was filled with high sensitivity,” Jacobs recalled. “I said, ‘This is a condition for the help of the British,’ so the North Gate won the battle, and we got the monument.” If Belgium was reluctant to get involved, France was at first totally uninterested. “They told us, ‘We don’t want to take part in this British triumphalism,’” said Countess Nathalie du Parc Locmaria, a writer and publicist who is president of a committee representing four townships that own the land where the battle raged.