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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Waterloo, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Waterloo
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: May 11, 2010 [EBook #32332]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WATERLOO ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WATERLOO
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+  WATERLOO
+
+
+  By HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+
+  LONDON
+  STEPHEN SWIFT AND CO., LTD.
+  16 KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN
+  WEST CENTRAL
+  MCMXII
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                     PAGE
+
+    I. THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT OF THE
+       WATERLOO CAMPAIGN                                9
+
+   II. THE PRELIMINARIES: NAPOLEON'S ADVANCE
+       ACROSS THE SAMBRE                               24
+
+  III. THE DECISIVE DAY: FRIDAY, THE 16TH OF JUNE--
+
+       LIGNY                                           63
+
+       QUATRE-BRAS                                     84
+
+   IV. THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH ADVANCE UPON
+       WATERLOO AND WAVRE                             129
+
+    V. THE ACTION                                     158
+
+
+
+
+WATERLOO
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT OF THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN
+
+
+It must continually be insisted upon in military history, that general
+actions, however decisive, are but the functions of campaigns; and that
+campaigns, in their turn, are but the functions of the political energies
+of the governments whose armies are engaged.
+
+The object of a campaign is invariably a political object, and all its
+military effort is, or should be, subsidiary to that political object.
+
+One human community desires to impose upon the future a political
+condition which another human community rejects; or each is attempting to
+impose upon the future, conditions irreconcilable one with the other.
+Until we know what those conditions are, or what is the political
+objective of each opponent, we cannot decide upon the success of a
+campaign, nor give it its true position in history.
+
+Thus, to take the simplest and crudest case, a nation or its government
+determines to annex the territory of a neighbour; that is, to subject a
+neighbouring community to the laws of the conqueror. That neighbouring
+community and its government, if they are so old-fashioned as to prefer
+freedom, will resist by force of arms, and there will follow what is
+called a "campaign" (a term derived from the French, and signifying a
+countryside: for countrysides are the theatres of wars). In this campaign
+the political object of the attempted conquest on the one hand, and of
+resistance to it on the other, are the issue. The military aspect of the
+campaign is subsidiary to its political objects, and we judge of its
+success or failure not in military but in political terms.
+
+The prime military object of a general is to "annihilate" the armed force
+of his opponents. He may do this by breaking up their organisation and
+dispersing them, or by compelling the surrender of their arms. He may
+achieve success in this purely military object in any degree. But if, as
+an end and consequence of his military success, the political object be
+not achieved--if, for instance, in the particular case we are considering,
+the neighbouring community does not in the future obey laws dictated to it
+by the conqueror, but remains autonomous--then the campaign has failed.
+
+Such considerations are, I repeat, the very foundation of military
+history; and throughout this Series they will be insisted upon as the
+light in which alone military history can be understood.
+
+It is further true that not only may a campaign be successful in the
+military sense, and yet in the largest historical sense be a failure, but,
+quite evidently, the actions in a campaign may each be successful and yet
+the campaign a failure; or each action may, on the whole, fail, and yet
+that campaign be a success. As the old formulae go, "You can win every
+battle and lose your campaign." And, again, "A great general does not aim
+at winning battles, but at winning his campaign." An action results from
+the contact of the opposing forces, and from the necessity in which they
+find themselves, after such contact, of attempting the one to disorganise
+or to capture the other. And in the greater part actions are only
+"accepted," as the phrase goes, by either party, because each party
+regards the action as presenting opportunities for his own success.
+
+A campaign can perfectly well be conceived in which an opponent,
+consciously inferior in the field, will avoid action throughout, and by
+such a plan can actually win the campaign in the end. Historical instances
+of this, though rare, exist. And there have even been campaigns where,
+after a great action disastrous to one side, that side has yet been able
+to keep up a broken resistance sufficiently lengthy and exhausting to
+baulk the conqueror of his political object in the end.
+
+In a word, it is the business of the serious student in military history
+to reverse the popular and dramatic conception of war, to neglect the
+brilliance and local interest of a battle for the larger view of the whole
+operations; and, again, to remember that these operations are not an end
+in themselves, but are only designed to serve the political plan of the
+government which has commanded them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Judged in this true light, we may establish the following conclusions
+with regard to the battle of Waterloo.
+
+First, the battle of Waterloo was a decisive action, the result of which
+was a complete military success for the Allies in the campaign they had
+undertaken, and a complete military defeat for Napoleon, who had opposed
+them.
+
+This complete military success of the Allies' campaign was, again,
+equivalent to a success in their immediate political object, which was the
+overthrow of Napoleon's personal power, the re-establishment of the
+Bourbons upon the French throne, and the restoration of those traditions
+and ideals of government which had been common to Europe before the
+outbreak of the French Revolution twenty-four years before.
+
+Had the effect of this battle and that campaign been permanent, one could
+speak of their success as complete; but when we discuss that largest issue
+of all, to wit, whether the short campaign which Waterloo so decisively
+concluded really effected its object, considering that that object was the
+permanent destruction of the revolutionary effort and the permanent
+re-establishment of the old state of affairs in Europe, we are compelled
+to arrive at a very different conclusion: a conclusion which will vary
+with the varying judgment of men, and one which cannot be final, because
+the drama is not yet played out; but a conclusion which, in the eyes of
+all, singularly modifies the effect of the campaign of Waterloo.
+
+It is obvious, at the first glance we take of European history during,
+say, the lifetime of a man who should have been a boy in Waterloo year,
+that the general political object of the revolutionary and Napoleonic
+armies was not reversed at Waterloo. It was ultimately established. The
+war had been successfully maintained during too long a period for the
+uprooting of the political conditions which the French had attempted to
+impose upon Europe. Again, those conditions were sufficiently sympathetic
+to the European mind at the time to develop generously, and to grow in
+spite of all attempted restriction. And we discover, as a fact, democratic
+institutions, democratic machinery at least, spreading rapidly again after
+their defeat at Waterloo, and partially victorious, first in France and
+later elsewhere, within a very few years of that action.
+
+The same is true of certain secondary results of the prolonged
+revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. Nationality predominated over the
+old idea of a monarch governing his various "peoples," and the whole
+history of the nineteenth century was a gradual vindication of the
+principle of nationality. A similar fate awaited institutions bound up
+with the French revolutionary effort: a wide and continually expressed
+suffrage, the arming of whole nations in defence of their independence,
+the ordering of political life upon the new plan, down even to the details
+of the revolutionary weights and measures (the metre, the gramme,
+etc.)--these succeeded and in effect triumphed over the arrangements which
+that older society had fought to restore.
+
+On the other hand, the advance of all this was much slower, much more
+disturbed, much less complete, than it would have been had Napoleon not
+failed in Russia, suffered his decisive defeat at Leipzig, and fallen for
+ever upon that famous field of Waterloo; and one particular
+characteristic, namely, the imposition of all these things upon Europe by
+the will of a government at Paris, wholly disappeared.
+
+We may sum up, then, and say that the political effect of the battle of
+Waterloo and its campaign was an immediate success for the Allies: that
+their ultimate success the history of the nineteenth century has reversed;
+but that the victory of Waterloo modified, retarded, and perhaps distorted
+in a permanent fashion the establishment of those conceptions of society
+and government which the Revolution, and Napoleon as its soldier, had set
+out to establish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a side question attached to all this, with which I shall
+conclude, because it forms the best introduction to what is to follow:
+that question is,--"Would Napoleon have ultimately succeeded even if he
+had triumphed instead of fallen upon the 18th of June 1815?" In other
+words, was Waterloo one of these battles the winning or losing of which by
+_either_ side, meant a corresponding decisive result to that side? Had
+Wellington's command broken at Waterloo before the arrival of Blucher,
+would Napoleon's consequent victory have meant as much to _him_ as his
+defeat actually meant to the allies?
+
+The answer of history to this question is, No. Even had Napoleon won on
+that day he would have lost in the long run.
+
+The date to which we must affix the reverse of Napoleon's effort is not
+the 18th of June 1815, but the 19th of October 1812, when the Grand Army
+began its retreat from Moscow; and the political decision, his failure in
+which was the origin of his fall, was not the decision taken in June 1815
+to advance against the Allies in Belgium, but the decision taken in May
+1812 to advance into the vast spaces of Russia. The decisive action which
+the largest view of history will record in centuries to come as the defeat
+which ruined Napoleon took place, not south of Brussels, but near the town
+of Leipzig, two years before. From the last moment of that three days'
+battle (again the 19th of October, precisely a twelvemonth after the
+retreat from Moscow had begun), Napoleon and the French armies are
+continually falling back. Upon the 4th of April in the following year
+Napoleon abdicated; and exactly a month later, on the 4th of May, he was
+imprisoned, under the show of local sovereignty, in the island of Elba.
+
+It was upon the 1st of March 1815 that, having escaped from that island,
+he landed upon the southern coast of France. There followed the doomed
+attempt to save somewhat of the Revolution and the Napoleonic scheme,
+which is known to history as the "hundred days." Even that attempt would
+have been impossible had not the greater part of the commanders of units
+in the French army, that is, of the colonels of regiments, abandoned the
+Bourbon government, which had been restored at Paris, and decided to
+support Napoleon.
+
+But even so, the experiment was hazardous in the extreme. Had the
+surrounding governments which had witnessed and triumphed over his fall
+permitted him, as he desired, to govern France in peace, and France alone,
+this small part of the revolutionary plan might have been saved from the
+general wreck of its fortunes and of his. But such an hypothesis is
+fantastic. There could be and there was no chance that these great
+governments, now fully armed, and with all their organised hosts prepared
+and filled with the memory of recent victory, would permit the restoration
+of democratic government in that France which had been the centre and
+outset of the vast movement they had determined to destroy. Further,
+though Napoleon had behind him the majority, he had not the united mass of
+the French people. An ordered peace following upon victory would have
+given him such a support; after his recent crushing defeat it was lacking.
+It was especially true that the great chiefs of the army were doubtful.
+His own generals rejoined him, some with enthusiasm, more with doubt,
+while a few betrayed him early in the process of his attempted
+restoration.
+
+It is impossible to believe that under such circumstances Napoleon could
+have successfully met Europe in arms. The military resources of the French
+people, though not exhausted, were reaching their term. New levies of men
+yielded a material far inferior to the conscripts of earlier years; and
+when the Emperor estimated 800,000 men as the force which he required for
+his effort, it was but the calculation of despair. Eight hundred thousand
+men: even had they been the harvest of a long peace, the whole armed
+nation, vigorous in health and fresh for a prolonged contest, would not
+have been sufficient. The combined Powers had actually under arms a number
+as great as that, and inexhaustible reserves upon which to draw. A quarter
+of a million stood ready in the Netherlands, another quarter of a million
+could march from Austria to cross the Rhine. North Italy had actually
+present against him 70,000 men; and Russia, which had a similarly active
+and ready force of 170,000, could increase that host almost indefinitely
+from her enormous body of population.
+
+But, so far from 800,000 men, Napoleon found to his command not one
+quarter of that number armed and ready for war. Though Napoleon fell back
+upon that desperate resource of a starved army, the inclusion of militia;
+though he swept into his net the whole youth of that year, and accepted
+conscripts almost without regard to physical capacity; though he went so
+far as to put the sailors upon shore to help him in his effort, and
+counted in his effectives the police, the customs officials, and, as one
+may say, every uniformed man, he was compelled, even after two and a half
+months of effort, to consider his ready force as less than 300,000, indeed
+only just over 290,000.
+
+There was behind this, it is true, a reserve of irregulars such as I have
+described, but the spirit furnishing those irregulars was uncertain, and
+the yield of them patchy and heterogeneous. Perhaps a quarter of the
+country responded readily to the appeal which was to call up a national
+militia. But even upon the eve of the Waterloo campaign there were
+departments, such as the Orne, which had not compelled five per cent. of
+those called to join the colours, such as the Pas de Calais and the Gers,
+which had not furnished eight per cent., and at the very last moment, of
+every twenty-five men called, not fifteen had come.
+
+Add to this that Napoleon must strike at once or not at all, and it will
+readily be seen how desperate his situation was. His great chiefs of the
+higher command were not united in his service, the issue was doubtful, and
+to join Napoleon was to be a rebel should he fail,--was to be a rebel,
+that is, in case of a very probable event. The marvel is that so many of
+the leading men who had anything to lose undertook the chances at all.
+Finally, even of the total force available to him at that early moment
+when he was compelled to strike, Napoleon could strike with but a
+fraction. Less than half of the men available could he gather to deliver
+this decisive blow; and that blow, be it remembered, he could deliver at
+but one of the various hosts which were preparing to advance against him.
+
+He was thus handicapped by two things: first, the necessity under which he
+believed himself to be of leaving considerable numbers to watch the
+frontiers. Secondly, and most important, the limitations imposed upon him
+by his lack of provision. With every effort, he could not fully arm and
+equip and munition a larger force than that which he gathered in early
+June for his last desperate throw; and the body upon the immediate and
+decisive success of which everything depended numbered but 124,000 men.
+
+With this force Napoleon proceeded to attack the Allies in the
+Netherlands. _There_ was a belt of French-speaking population. _There_ was
+that body of the Allies which lay nearest to his hand, and over which, if
+he were but victorious, his victory would have its fullest effect. _There_
+were the troops under Wellington, a defeat of which would mean the cutting
+off of England, the financier of the Allies, from the Continent. _There_
+was present a population many elements of which sympathised with him and
+with the French revolutionary effort. Finally, the allied force in Belgium
+was the least homogeneous of the forces with which he would have to deal
+in the long succession of struggle from which even a success at this
+moment would not spare him.
+
+From all these causes combined, and for the further reason that Paris was
+most immediately threatened from this neighbouring Belgian frontier, it
+was upon that frontier that Napoleon determined to cast his spear. It was
+upon the 5th of June that the first order was sent out for the
+concentration of this army for the invasion of Belgium.
+
+In ten days the 124,000 men, with their 370 guns, were massed upon the
+line between Maubeuge and Philippeville, immediately upon the frontier,
+and ready to cross it. The way in which the frontier was passed and the
+river Sambre crossed before the first actions took place form between them
+the preliminaries of the campaign, and must be the subject of my next
+section.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE PRELIMINARIES: NAPOLEON'S ADVANCE ACROSS THE SAMBRE
+
+
+To understand the battle of Waterloo it is necessary, more perhaps than in
+the case of any other great decisive action, to read it strategically:
+that is, to regard the final struggle of Sunday the 18th of June as only
+the climax of certain general movements, the first phase of which was the
+concentration of the French Army of the North, and the second the passage
+of the Sambre river and the attack. This second phase covered four days in
+time, and in space an advance of nearly forty miles.
+
+There is a sense, of course, in which it is true of every battle that its
+result is closely connected with the strategy which led up to its tactical
+features: how the opposing forces arrived upon the field, in what
+condition, and in what disposition and at what time, with what advantage
+or disadvantage, is always necessarily connected with the history of the
+campaign rather than of the individual action; but, as we saw in the case
+of Blenheim, and as might be exemplified from a hundred other cases, the
+greater part of battles can be understood by following the tactical
+dispositions upon the field. They are won or lost, in the main, according
+to those dispositions.
+
+With Waterloo it was not so. Waterloo was lost by Napoleon, won by the
+Allies, _not_ mainly on account of tactical movements upon the field
+itself, but mainly on account of what had happened in the course of the
+advance of the French army to that field. In other words, the military
+character of that great decisive action is always missed by those who have
+read it isolated from the movements immediately preceding it.
+
+Napoleon, determining to strike at Belgium under the political
+circumstances we have already seen, was attacking forces about double his
+own.
+
+He was like one man coming up rapidly and almost unexpectedly to attack
+two: but hoping if possible to deal successively and singly with either
+opponent.
+
+His doubtful chance of success in such a hazard obviously lay in his being
+able to attack each enemy separately: that is, to engage first one before
+the second came to his aid; then the second; and thus to defeat each in
+turn. The chance of victory under such circumstances is slight. It
+presupposes the surprise of the two allied adversaries by their single
+opponent, and the defeat of one so quickly that the other cannot come to
+his aid till all is over. But no other avenue of victory is open to a man
+fighting enemies of double his numerical strength; at least under
+conditions where armament, material, and racial type are much the same
+upon either side.
+
+The possibility of dealing thus with his enemy Napoleon thought possible,
+and thought it possible from two factors in the situation before him.
+
+The first factor was that the allied army, seeing its great numbers, the
+comparatively small accumulation of supplies which it could yet command,
+the great length of frontier which it had to watch, was spread out in a
+great number of cantonments, the whole stretch of which was no less than
+one hundred miles in length, from Liege upon the east or left to Tournay
+upon the west or right.
+
+The second factor which gave Napoleon his chance was that this long line
+depended for its supply, its orders, its line of retreat upon two separate
+and opposite bases.
+
+The left or eastern half, formed mainly of Prussian subjects, and acting
+under BLUCHER, had arrived from the east, looked for safety in case of
+defeat to a retreat towards the Rhine, obtained its supplies from that
+direction, and in general was fed from the _east_ along those
+communications, continual activity along which are as necessary to the
+life of an army as the uninterrupted working of the air-tube is necessary
+to the life of a diver.
+
+The western or right-hand part of the line, Dutch, German, Belgian, and
+British, acting under WELLINGTON, depended, upon the contrary, upon the
+North Sea, and upon communication across that sea with England. That is,
+it drew its supplies and the necessaries of its existence from the _west_,
+the opposite and contrary direction from that to which the Prussian half
+of the Allies were looking for theirs. The effect of this upon the
+campaign is at once simple to perceive and of capital importance in
+Napoleon's plan.
+
+Wellington and Blucher did not, under the circumstances, oppose to
+Napoleon a single body drawing its life from one stream of communications.
+They did not in combination command a force defending one goal; they
+commanded two forces defending two goals. The thorough defeat of one
+would throw it back away from the other if the attack were delivered at
+the point where the two just joined hands; and the English[1] or western
+half under Wellington was bound to movements actually contrary to the
+Prussian or eastern half under Blucher in case either were defeated before
+the other could come to its aid.
+
+Napoleon, then, in his rapid advance upon Belgium, was a man conducting a
+column against a line. He was conducting that column against one special
+point, the point of junction between two disparate halves of an opposing
+line. He advanced therefore upon a narrow front perpendicular to, and
+aimed at the centre of, the long scattered cordon of his double enemy,
+which cordon it was his business if possible to divide just where the
+western end of one half touched the eastern end of the other. He designed
+to fight in detail the first portion he could engage, then to turn upon
+the other, and thus to defeat both singly and in turn.
+
+I will put this strategical position before the reader in the shape of an
+English parallel in order to make it the plainer, and I will then, by the
+aid of sketch maps, show how the Allies actually lay upon the Belgian
+frontier at the moment when Napoleon delivered his attack upon it.
+
+Imagine near a quarter million of men spread out in a line of separate
+cantonments from Windsor at one extremity to Bristol at the other; and
+suppose that the eastern half of this line from Windsor to as far west as
+Wallingford is depending for its supplies and its communications upon the
+river Thames and its road system, and is prepared in case of defeat to
+fall back, down the valley of that stream towards London.
+
+On the other hand, imagine that the western half from Swindon to Bristol
+is receiving its supplies from the Severn and the Bristol Channel, and
+must in case of defeat fall back westward upon that line.
+
+Now, suppose an invading column rather more than 120,000 strong to be
+advancing from the south against this line, but prepared to strike up from
+almost any point on the Channel. It strikes, as a fact, from Southampton,
+and marches rapidly north by Winchester and Newbury. By the time it has
+reached Newbury, the eastern half of the opposing line, that between
+Wallingford and Windsor, has concentrated to meet it, but is defeated in
+the neighbourhood of that town.
+
+Such a battle at Newbury would correspond to the battle at Ligny (let it
+be fought upon a Friday). Meanwhile, the western half, hurrying up in aid,
+has failed to effect a junction before the eastern half was defeated,
+comes up too late above Newbury, and finding it is too late, retires upon
+Abingdon. The victorious invader pursues them, and at noon on the second
+day engages them in a long line which they hold in front of Abingdon.
+
+If he has only to deal in front of Abingdon with this second or western
+half, which hurried up too late to help the defeated eastern half, he has
+very fair chances of success. He is slightly superior numerically; he has,
+upon the whole, better troops and he has more guns. But the eastern half
+of the defending army, which has been beaten at Newbury, though beaten,
+was neither destroyed nor dispersed, nor thrust very far back from the
+line of operations. It has retreated to Wallingford, that is towards the
+north, parallel to the retreat of the western half; and a few hours after
+this western half is engaged in battle with the invader in front of
+Abingdon, the eastern half appears upon that invader's right flank, joins
+forces with the line of the defenders at Abingdon, and thus brings not
+only a crushing superiority of numbers upon the field against the invader,
+but also brings it up in such a manner that he is compelled to fight upon
+two fronts at once. He is, of course, destroyed by such a combination, and
+his army routed and dispersed. An action of this sort fought at Abingdon
+would correspond to the action which was fought upon the field of
+Waterloo, supposing, of course, for the purpose of this rough parallel, an
+open countryside without the obstacle of the river.
+
+The actual positions of the two combined commands, the command of Blucher
+and the command of Wellington, which between them held the long line
+between Tournay and Liege, will be grasped from the sketch map upon the
+next page.
+
+The reader who would grasp the campaign in the short compass of such an
+essay as this had best consider the numbers and the positions in a form
+not too detailed, and busy himself with a picture which, though accurate,
+shall be general.
+
+Let him, then, consider the whole line between Liege and Tournay to
+consist of the two halves already presented: a western half, which we
+will call the Duke of Wellington's, and an eastern half, which we will
+call Blucher's: of these two the Duke of Wellington was
+Commander-in-chief.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Next, note the numbers of each and their disposition. The mixed force
+under the Duke of Wellington was somewhat over 100,000 men, with just over
+200 guns.[2] They consisted in two corps and a reserve. The first corps
+was under the Prince of Orange, and was mainly composed of men from the
+Netherlands. Its headquarters were at Braine le Comte. The second corps
+was under Lord Hill, and contained the mass of the British troops present.
+Its headquarters were at Ath. These two between them amounted to about
+half of Wellington's command, and we find them scattered in cantonments at
+Oudenarde, at Ath, at Enghien, at Soignies, at Nivelles, at Roeulx, at
+Braine le Comte, at Hal. A reserve corps under the Duke's own command was
+stationed at Brussels, and amounted to more than one-fifth, but less than
+one-quarter, of the whole force. The remaining quarter and a little more
+is accounted for by scattered cavalry (mainly in posts upon the river
+Dender), by the learned arms, gunners and sappers, distributed throughout
+the army, and by troops which were occupying garrisons--in numbers
+amounting to rather more than ten per cent. of the force.
+
+The eastern Prussian or left half of the line was, as is apparent in the
+preceding map, somewhat larger. It had a quarter more men and half as many
+guns again as that under the Duke of Wellington, and it was organised into
+four army corps, whose headquarters were respectively Charleroi, Namur,
+Ciney, and Liege.
+
+The whole line, therefore, which was waiting the advance of Napoleon, was
+not quite two and a third hundred thousand men, with rather more than 500
+guns. Of this grand total of the two halves, Wellington's and Blucher's
+combined, about eighteen per cent. came from the British Islands, and of
+that eighteen per cent., again, a very large proportion--exactly how large
+it is impossible to determine--were Irish.
+
+Now let us turn to the army which Napoleon was leading against this line
+of Wellington and Blucher. It was just under one hundred and a quarter
+thousand men strong, that is, just over half the total number of its
+opponents. It had, however, a heavier proportion of guns, which were
+two-thirds as numerous as those it had to meet.
+
+This "Army of the North" was organised in seven great bodies, unequal in
+size, but each a unit averaging seventeen odd thousand men. These seven
+great bodies were the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Army Corps, the 6th Army Corps,
+the Imperial Guard, and the reserve cavalry under Grouchy.
+
+The concentration of this army began, as I said in a previous section,
+upon the 5th of June, and was effected with a rapidity and order which are
+rightly regarded as a model by all writers upon military science.
+
+The French troops, when the order for concentration was given, stretched
+westward as far as Lille, eastward as far as Metz, southward as far as
+Paris, in the neighbourhood of which town was the Imperial Guard. The
+actual marching of the various units occupied a week. Napoleon was at the
+front on the night of the 13th of June; the whole army was upon the 14th
+drawn up upon a line stretched from Maubeuge to Philippeville, and the
+attack was ready to begin.
+
+The concentration had been effected with singular secrecy, as well as
+with the promptitude and accuracy we have noted; and though the common
+opinion of Wellington and Blucher, that Napoleon had no intention of
+attacking, reposed upon sound general judgment--for the hazard Napoleon
+was playing in this game of one against two was extreme,--nevertheless it
+is remarkable that both of these great commanders should have been so
+singularly ignorant of the impending blow. Napoleon himself was actually
+over the frontier at the moment when Wellington was writing at his ease
+that he intended to take the offensive at the end of the month, and
+Blucher, a few days earlier, had expressed the opinion that he might be
+kept inactive for a whole year, since Bonaparte had no intention of
+attacking.
+
+By the evening of Wednesday, June the 14th, all was ready for the advance,
+which was ordered for the next morning.
+
+It would but confuse the general reader to attempt to carry with him
+through this short account the name and character of each commander, but
+it is essential to remember one at least--the name of _Erlon_; and he
+should also remember that the corps which Erlon commanded was the _First_
+Corps; for, as we shall see, upon Erlon's wanderings with this First
+Corps depended the unsatisfactory termination of Ligny, and the subsequent
+intervention of the Prussians at Waterloo, which decided that action.
+
+It is also of little moment for the purpose of this to retain the names of
+the places which were the headquarters of each of these corps before the
+advance began. It is alone important to the reader that he should have a
+clear picture of the order in which this advance took place, for thus only
+will he understand both where it struck, and why, with all its rapidity,
+it suffered from certain shocks or jerks.
+
+Napoleon's advance was upon three parallel lines and in three main bodies.
+
+The left or westernmost consisted of the First and Second Corps d'Armee;
+the centre, of the Imperial Guard, together with the Third and Sixth
+Corps. The third or right consisted of the Fourth Corps alone, with a
+division of cavalry. These three bodies, when the night of Wednesday the
+14th of June fell, lay, the first at Sorle and Leer; the second at
+Beaumont, and upon the road that runs through it to Charleroi; the third
+at Philippeville.
+
+It is at this stage advisable to consider why Napoleon had chosen the
+crossing of the Sambre at Charleroi and the sites immediately to the north
+on the left bank of that river as the point where he would strike at the
+long line of the Allies.
+
+Many considerations converged to impose this line of advance upon
+Napoleon. In the first place, it was his task to cut the line of the
+Allies in two at the point where the extremity of one army, the Prussian,
+touched upon the extremity of the other, that of the Duke of Wellington.
+This point lay due north of the river-crossing he had chosen.
+
+Again, the main road to Brussels was barred by the fortress of Mons,
+which, though not formidable, had been put in some sort of state of
+defence.
+
+Again, as a glance at the accompanying map will show, the Prussian half of
+the allied line was drawn somewhat in front of the other half; and if
+Napoleon were to attack the enemy in detail, he must strike at the
+Prussians first. Finally, the line Maubeuge-Philippeville, upon which he
+concentrated his front, was, upon the whole, the most central position in
+the long line of his frontier troops, which stretched from Metz to the
+neighbourhood of the Straits of Dover. Being the most central point, not
+only with regard to these two extremities, but also with regard to
+distant Paris, it was the point upon which his concentration could most
+rapidly be effected.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+This, then, was the position upon the night of the 14th. The three great
+bodies of French troops (much the largest of which was that in the centre)
+to march at dawn, the light cavalry moving as early as half past two,
+ahead of the centre, the whole body of which was to march on Charleroi.
+
+The left, that is the First and Second Corps, to cross the Sambre at
+Thuin, the Abbaye d'Aulne, and Marchiennes. (There were bridges at all
+three places.) The right or Fourth Corps was also to march on
+Charleroi.[3]
+
+Napoleon intended to be over the river with all his men by the afternoon
+of the 15th, but, as we shall see, this "bunching" of fully half the
+advance upon one crossing place caused, not a fatal, but a prejudicial
+delay. Among other elements in this false calculation was an apparent
+error on the part of Soult, who blundered in some way which kept the
+Third Corps with the centre instead of relieving the pressure by sending
+it over with the Fourth to cross, under the revised instructions, by
+Chatelet.
+
+
+[Illustration: Disposition of the Four Prussian Corps on June 15th, 1815.]
+
+
+At dawn, then, the whole front of the French army was moving. It was the
+dawn of Thursday the 15th of June. By sunset of Sunday all was to be
+decided.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At this point it is essential to grasp the general scheme of the
+operations which are about to follow.
+
+Put in its simplest elements and graphically, the whole business began in
+some such form as is presented in the accompanying sketch map.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Napoleon's advancing army X Y Z, marching on Thursday, June 15th, strikes
+at O (which is Charleroi), the centre of the hundred-mile-long line of
+cantonments A B C----D E F, which form the two armies of the Allies, twice
+as numerous as his own, but thus dispersed. Just behind Charleroi (O) are
+a hamlet and a village, called respectively Quatre Bras (Q) and Ligny (P).
+
+Napoleon succeeds in bringing the eastern or Prussian half of this long
+line D E F to battle and defeating it at Ligny (P) upon the next day,
+Friday, June 16th, before the western half, or Wellington's A B C, can
+come up in aid; and on the same day a portion of his forces, X, under his
+lieutenant, Marshal Ney, holds up that western half, just as it is
+attempting to effect its junction with the eastern half at Quatre Bras
+(Q), a few miles off from Ligny (P). The situation on the night of Friday,
+June 16th, at the end of this second step, is that represented in this
+second sketch map.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Believing the Prussians (D E F) to be retreating from Ligny towards their
+base eastward, and not northwards, Napoleon more or less neglects them and
+concentrates his main body in order to follow up Wellington's western half
+(A B C), and in the hope of defeating _that_ in its turn, as he has
+already defeated the eastern or Prussian half (D E F) at Ligny (P). With
+this object Napoleon advances northward during all the third day,
+Saturday, June 17th. Wellington (A B C) retreats north before him during
+that same day, and then, on the morrow, the 18th, Sunday, turns to give
+battle at Waterloo (W). Napoleon engages him with fair chances of success,
+and the situation as the battle begins at midday on the 18th is that
+sketched in this third map.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+But unexpectedly, and against what Napoleon had imagined possible, the
+Prussians (D E F), when defeated at Ligny (P), did not retreat upon their
+base, and have not so suffered from their defeat as to be incapable of
+further action. They have marched northward parallel to the retreat of
+Wellington; and while Napoleon (X Y Z) is at the hottest of his struggle
+with Wellington (A B C) at Waterloo (W), this eastern or Prussian half (D
+E F) comes down upon his flank at (R) in the middle of the afternoon, and
+by the combined numbers and disposition of this double attack Napoleon's
+army is crushed before darkness sets in.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Such, in its briefest graphic elements, is the story of the four days.
+
+It will be observed from what we have said that the whole thing turns upon
+the incompleteness of Napoleon's success at Ligny, and the power of
+_retreating northward_ left to the Prussians after that defeat.
+
+When we come to study the details of the story, we shall see that this,
+the Prussian defeat at Ligny, was thus incomplete because one of
+Napoleon's subordinates, Erlon, with the First French Army Corps, received
+contradictory orders and did not come up as he should have done to turn
+the battle of Ligny into a decisive victory for Napoleon. A part of
+Napoleon's forces being thus neutralised and held useless during the fight
+at Ligny, the Prussian army escaped, still formed as a fighting force, and
+still capable of reappearing, as it did reappear, at the critical moment,
+two days later, upon the field of Waterloo.
+
+
+THE ADVANCE
+
+The rapidity of Napoleon's stroke was marred at its very outset by certain
+misfortunes as well as certain miscalculations. His left, which was
+composed of the First and Second Corps d'Armee, did indeed reach the river
+Sambre in the morning, and had carried the bridge of Marchiennes by noon,
+but the First Corps, under Erlon, were not across--that is, the whole left
+had not negotiated the river--until nearly five o'clock in the afternoon.
+
+Next, the general in command of the leading division of the right-hand
+body--the Fourth Corps--gave the first example of that of which the whole
+Napoleonic organisation was then in such terror, I mean the mistrust in
+the fortunes of the Emperor, and the tendency to revert to the old social
+conditions, which for a moment the Bourbons had brought back, and which so
+soon they might bring back again--he deserted. The order was thereupon
+given for the Fourth Corps or right wing to cross at Chatelet, but it came
+late (as late as half-past three in the afternoon), and did but cause
+delay. At this eastern end of Napoleon's front the last men were not over
+the river until the next day.
+
+As to the centre (the main body of the army), its cavalry reached
+Charleroi before ten o'clock in the morning, but an unfortunate and
+exasperating accident befallen a messenger left the infantry immediately
+behind without instructions. The cavalry were impotent to force the bridge
+crossing the river Sambre, which runs through the town, until the main
+body should appear, and it was not until past noon that the main body
+began crossing the Sambre by the Charleroi bridge. The Emperor had
+probably intended to fight immediately after having crossed the river.
+Gosselies, to the north, was strongly held; and had all his men been over
+the Sambre in the early afternoon as he had intended, an action fought
+suddenly, by surprise as it were, against the advance bodies of the First
+Prussian Corps, would have given the first example of that destruction of
+the enemy in detail which Napoleon intended. But the delays in the
+advance, rapid as it had been, now forbade any such good fortune. The end
+of the daylight was spent in pushing back the head of the First Prussian
+Corps (with a loss of somewhat over 1000 men), and when night fell upon
+that Thursday evening, the 15th of June, the French held Charleroi and all
+the crossings of the Sambre, but were not yet in a position to attack in
+force. Of the left, the First Corps were but just over the Sambre; on the
+right, that is, of the Fourth Corps, some units were still upon the other
+side of the river; while, of the centre, the _whole_ of the Sixth Corps,
+and a certain proportion of cavalry as well, had still to cross!
+
+Napoleon had failed to bring the enemy to action; that enemy had fallen
+back upon Fleurus, pretty nearly intact.[4] All the real work had
+evidently to be put off, not only until the morrow, but until a fairly
+late hour upon the morrow, for it would take some time to get all the
+French forces on to the Belgian side of the river.
+
+When this should have been accomplished, however, the task of the next
+day, the Friday, was clear.
+
+It was Napoleon's business to fall upon whatever Prussian force might be
+concentrated before him and upon his right and to destroy it, meanwhile
+holding back, by a force sent up the Brussels road to Quatre Bras, any
+attempt Wellington and his western army might make to join the Prussians
+and save them.
+
+That night the Duke of Wellington's army lay in its cantonments without
+concentration and without alarm, guessing nothing. The head of
+Wellington's First Corps, the young Prince of Orange, who commanded the
+Netherlanders, had left his headquarters to go and dine with the Duke in
+Brussels.
+
+Wellington, we may believe if we choose (the point is by no means
+certain), knew as early as three o'clock in the afternoon that the French
+had moved. It may have been as late as five, it may even have been six.
+But whatever the hour in which he received his information, it is quite
+certain that he had no conception of the gravity of the moment. As late as
+ten o'clock at night the Duke issued certain after-orders. He had
+previously given general orders (which presupposed no immediate attack),
+commanding movements which would in the long-run have produced a
+concentration, but though these orders were ordered to be executed "with
+as little delay as possible," there was no hint of immediate duty
+required, nor do the posts indicated betray in any way the urgent need
+there was to push men south and east at the top of their speed, and
+relieve the Prussians from the shock they were to receive on the morrow.
+
+These general orders given--orders that betray no grasp of the nearness of
+the issue--Wellington went off to the Duchess of Richmond's ball in what
+the impartial historian cannot doubt to be ignorance of the great stroke
+which Napoleon had so nearly brought off upon that very day, and would
+certainly attempt to bring off upon the next.
+
+In the midst of the ball, or rather during the supper, definite news came
+in that the French army had crossed the river Sambre, and had even pushed
+its cavalry as far up the Brussels road as Quatre Bras.
+
+The Duke does not seem to have appreciated even then what that should mean
+in the way of danger to the Prussians, and indeed of the breaking of the
+whole line. He left the dance at about two in the morning and went to
+bed.
+
+He was not long left in repose. In the bright morning sunlight, four hours
+afterwards, he was roused by a visitor from the frontier, and we have it
+upon his evidence that the Duke at last understood what was before him,
+and said that the concentration of his forces must be at Quatre Bras.
+
+In other words, Wellington knew or appreciated extremely tardily on that
+_Friday_ morning about six that the blow was about to fall upon his
+Prussian allies to the south and east, and that it was the business of his
+army upon the west to come up rapidly in succour.
+
+As will be seen in a moment, he failed; but it would be a very puerile
+judgment of this great man and superb defensive General to belittle his
+place in the history of war upon the basis of even such errors as these.
+
+True, the error and the delay were prodigious and, in a fashion, comic;
+and had Napoleon delivered upon the _Thursday_ afternoon, as he had
+intended, an attack which should have defeated the Prussians before him,
+Wellington's error and delay would have paid a very heavy price.
+
+As it was, Napoleon's own delay in crossing the Sambre made Wellington's
+mistake and tardiness bear no disastrous fruit. The Duke failed to succour
+the Prussians. His troops, scattered all over Western Belgium, did not
+come up in time to prevent the defeat of his allies at Ligny. But he held
+his own at Quatre Bras; and in the final battle, forty-eight hours later,
+the genius with which he handled his raw troops upon the ridge of Mont St
+Jean wiped out and negatived all his strategical misconceptions of the
+previous days.
+
+From this confusion, this partial delay and error upon Napoleon's part,
+this ignorance upon Wellington's of what was toward, both of which marked
+Thursday the 15th, we must turn to a detailed description of that morrow,
+Friday the 16th, which, though it is less remembered in history than the
+crowning day of Waterloo, was, in every military sense, the decisive day
+of the campaign.
+
+We shall see that it was Napoleon's failure upon that Friday completely to
+defeat, or rather to destroy, the Prussian force at Ligny--a failure
+largely due to Wellington's neighbouring resistance at Quatre Bras--which
+determined the Emperor's final defeat upon the Sunday at Waterloo.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE DECISIVE DAY
+
+FRIDAY THE 16TH OF JUNE
+
+QUATRE BRAS AND LIGNY
+
+
+We have seen what the 15th of June was in those four short days of which
+Waterloo was to be the climax. That Thursday was filled with an advance,
+rapid and unexpected, against the centre of the allied line, and therefore
+against that weak point where the two halves of the allied line joined, to
+wit, Charleroi and the country immediately to the north of that town and
+bridge.
+
+We have further seen that while the unexpectedness of the blow was almost
+as thorough as Napoleon could have wished, the rapidity of its delivery,
+though considerable, had been less than he had anticipated. He had got by
+the evening of the day not much more than three-quarters of his forces
+across the river Sambre, and this passage, which was mapped out for
+completion before nightfall, straggled on through the whole morning of the
+morrow,--a tardiness the effects of which we shall clearly see in the next
+few pages.
+
+Napoleon's intention, once the Sambre was crossed, was to divide his army
+into two bodies: one, on the left, was to be entrusted to Ney; one, on the
+right, to Grouchy. A reserve, which the Emperor would command in person,
+was to consist in the main of the Imperial Guard.
+
+The left-hand body, under Ney, was to go straight north up the great
+Brussels road.
+
+Napoleon rightly estimated that he had surprised the foe, though he
+exaggerated the extent of that surprise. He thought it possible that this
+body to the left, under Ney, might push on to Brussels itself, and in any
+case could easily deal with the small and unprepared forces which it might
+meet upon the way. Its function in any case, whether resistance proved
+slight or formidable, was to hold the forces of Wellington back from
+effecting a junction with Blucher and the Prussians.
+
+Meanwhile, the right-hand body, under Grouchy, was to fall upon the
+extremity of the Prussian line and overwhelm it.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Such an action against the head of the long Prussian cordon could lead, as
+the Emperor thought, to but one of two results: either the great majority
+of the Prussian force, coming up to retrieve this first disaster, would be
+defeated in detail as it came; or, more probably, finding itself cut off
+from all aid on the part of Wellington's forces to the west and its head
+crushed, the long Prussian line would roll up backwards upon its
+communications towards the east, whence it had come.
+
+In either case the prime object of Napoleon's sudden move would have been
+achieved; and, with the body upon the left, under Ney, pushing up the
+Brussels road, the body upon the right, under Grouchy, pushing back the
+head of the Prussian line eastward, the two halves of the Allies would be
+separated altogether, and could later be dealt with, each in turn. The
+capital disadvantage under which Napoleon suffered--the fact that he had
+little more than half as many men as his combined enemies--would be
+neutralised, because he would, after the separation of those enemies into
+two bodies, be free to deal with either at his choice. Their
+communications came from diametrically opposite directions,[5] and, as the
+plan of each depended upon the co-operation of the other, their separation
+would leave them confused and without a scheme.
+
+Napoleon in all this exaggerated the facility of the task before him; but
+before we go into that, it is essential that the reader should grasp a
+certain character in all military affairs, to misunderstand which is to
+misread the history of armies.
+
+_This characteristic is the necessary uncertainty under which every
+commander lies as to the disposition, the number, the order, and the
+information of his opponents._
+
+It is a _necessary_ characteristic in all warfare, because it is a prime
+duty in the conduct of war to conceal from your enemy your numbers, your
+dispositions, and the extent of your information. It is a duty which every
+commander will always fulfil to his best ability.
+
+It is therefore a characteristic, be it noted, which no development of
+human science can conceivably destroy, for with every advance in our means
+of communicating information we advance also in our knowledge of the means
+whereby the new means of communication may be interrupted. An advantage
+over the enemy in the means one has of acquiring knowledge with regard to
+him must, of course, always be of supreme importance, and when those means
+are novel, one side or the other is often beforehand for some years with
+the new science of their use. When such is the case, science appears to
+uninstructed opinion to have changed this ancient and fixed characteristic
+which is in the very nature of war. But in fact there has been no such
+change. Under the most primitive conditions an advantage of this type was
+of supreme importance; under conditions the most scientific and refined it
+is an advantage that may still be neutralised if the enemy has learnt
+means of screening himself as excellent as our means of discovering him.
+Even the aeroplane, whose development in the modern French service has so
+vastly changed the character of information, and therefore of war, can
+never eliminate the factor of which I speak. A service possessed of a
+great superiority in this new arm will, of course, be the master of its
+foe; but when the use of the new arm is spread and equalised among all
+European forces so that two opposing forces are equally matched even in
+this new discovery, then the old element of move and countermove, feint,
+secrecy, and calculated confusion of an adversary, will reappear.[6]
+
+In general, then, to point out the ignorance and the misconceptions of one
+commander is no criticism of a campaign until we have appreciated the
+corresponding ignorance and misconceptions of the other. We have already
+seen Wellington taken almost wholly by surprise on the French advance; we
+shall see him, even when he appreciated its existence, imagining it to be
+directed principally against himself. We shall similarly see Napoleon
+underestimating the Prussian force in front of him, and underestimating
+even that tardy information which had reached Wellington in time for him
+to send troops up the Brussels road, and to check the French advance along
+it. But we must judge either of the two great opponents not by a single
+picture of his own misconceptions alone, but by the combined picture of
+the misconceptions of both, and especially by a consideration of the way
+in which each retrieved or attempted to retrieve the results of those
+misconceptions when a true idea of the enemy's dispositions was conveyed
+to him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here, then, we have Napoleon on the morning of Friday the 16th of June
+prepared to deal with the Prussians. It is his right-hand body, under
+Grouchy, which is deputed to do this, while he sends up the left-hand
+body, under Ney, northwards to brush aside, or, at the worst, at least to
+hold off whatever of the Duke of Wellington's command may be found upon
+the Brussels road attempting to join the Prussians.
+
+The general plan of what happened upon that decisive 16th is simple
+enough.
+
+The left-hand body, under Ney, goes forward up the Brussels road, finds
+more resistance than it expected, but on the whole performs its task and
+prevents any effective help being given by the western half of the
+Allies--Wellington's half--to the eastern half--the Prussian half. But it
+only prevents that task with difficulty and at the expense of a tactical
+defeat. This action is called Quatre Bras.
+
+Meanwhile, the right-hand body equally accomplishes the elements of its
+task, engages the head of the Prussian line and defeats it, with extreme
+difficulty, just before dark. This action is called Ligny.
+
+But the minor business conducted by the left, under Ney, is only just
+successful, and successful only in the sense that it does, at vast
+expense, prevent a junction of Wellington with Blucher. The major business
+conducted on the right, by Napoleon himself, in support of Grouchy, is
+disappointing. The head of the Prussian line is not destroyed; the
+Prussian army, though beaten, is free to retreat in fair order, and almost
+in what direction it chooses.
+
+The ultimate result is that Wellington and Blucher do manage to effect
+their junction on the day after the morrow of Ligny and Quatre Bras, and
+thus defeat Napoleon at Waterloo.
+
+Now, why were both these operations, Quatre Bras and Ligny, incompletely
+successful? Partly because there was more resistance along the Brussels
+road than Napoleon had expected, and a far larger body of Prussians in
+front of him than he had expected either; _but much more because a whole
+French army corps, which, had it been in action, could have added a third
+to the force of either the right or the left wing, was out of action all
+day; and wandered aimlessly over the empty zone which separated Ney from
+Grouchy, Quatre Bras from Ligny, the left half of Napoleon's divided army
+from its right half_.
+
+This it was which prevented what might have been possible--the thrusting
+back of Wellington along the Brussels road, and even perhaps the
+disorganisation of his forces. This it was which missed what was otherwise
+certainly possible--the total ruin of the Prussian army.
+
+This army corps thus thrown away unused in hours of aimless marching and
+countermarching was the First Army Corps. Its commander was Erlon; and the
+enormous blunder or fatality which permitted Erlon and his 20,000 to be as
+useless upon the 16th of June as though they had been wiped out in some
+defeat is what makes of the 16th of June the decisive day of the campaign.
+
+It was Erlon's failure to be present _either_ with Ney _or_ with Grouchy,
+either upon the left or upon the right, either at Quatre Bras or at Ligny,
+while each of those two actions were in doubt, which made it possible for
+Wellington's troops to stand undefeated in the west, for the Prussians to
+retire--not intact, but still an army--from the east, and for both to
+unite upon the day after the morrow, the Sunday, and destroy the French
+army at Waterloo.
+
+It is upon Erlon's blunder or misfortune that the whole issue turns, and
+upon the Friday, the 16th of June, in the empty fields between Quatre-Bras
+and Ligny, much more than upon the famous Sunday at Waterloo, that the
+fate of Napoleon's army was decided.
+
+In order to make this clear, let us first follow what happened in the
+operations of Napoleon's right wing against the Prussians opposed to
+it,--operations which bear in history the name of "the Battle of Ligny."
+
+
+LIGNY
+
+     "_If they fight here they will be damnably mauled._"
+
+     (Wellington's words on seeing the defensive positions chosen by the
+     Prussians at Ligny.)
+
+Napoleon imagined that when he had crossed the Sambre with the bulk of his
+force, the suddenness of his attack (for, though retarded as we have seen,
+and though leaving troops upon the wrong bank of the river, it was sudden)
+would find the Prussian forces in the original positions wherein he knew
+them to have lain before he marched. He did not think that they would yet
+have had the time, still less the intention, to concentrate. Those
+original positions the map upon p. 41 makes plain.
+
+The 124,000 men and more, which lay under the supreme command of Blucher,
+had been spread before the attack began along the whole extended line from
+Liege to Charleroi, and had been disposed regularly from left to right in
+four corps d'armee.
+
+The first of these had its headquarters in Charleroi itself, its furthest
+outpost was but five miles east of the town, its three brigades had
+Charleroi for their centre; its reserve cavalry was at Sombreffe, its
+reserve artillery at Gembloux. The Second Corps had its headquarters
+twenty miles away east, at Namur, and occupied posts in the country as far
+off as Hannut (thirty miles away from Charleroi).
+
+The Third Corps had its headquarters at Ciney in the Ardennes, and was
+scattered in various posts throughout that forest, its furthest cantonment
+being no nearer than Dinant, which, by the only good road available, was
+nearer forty than thirty miles from Napoleon's point of attack.
+
+Finally, the Fourth Corps was as far away as Liege (nearer fifty than
+forty miles by road from the last cantonment of the First Corps), and
+having its various units scattered round the neighbourhood of that town.
+
+Napoleon, therefore, attacking Charleroi suddenly, imagined that he would
+have to deal only with the First Corps at Charleroi and its neighbourhood.
+He did not think that the other three corps had information in time to
+enable them to come up westward towards the end of the line and meet him.
+The outposts of the First Corps had, of course, fallen back before the
+advance of the Emperor's great army; the mass of that First Corps was, he
+knew, upon this morning of the 16th, some mile or two north and east of
+Fleurus, astraddle of the great road which leads from Charleroi to
+Gembloux. At the very most, and supposing this First Corps (which was of
+33,000 men, under Ziethen) had received reinforcements from the nearest
+posts of the Second and the Third Corps, Napoleon did not think that he
+could have in front of him more than some 40,000 men at the most.
+
+He was in error. It had been arranged among the Prussian leaders that
+resistance to Napoleon, when occasion might come for it, should be offered
+in the neighbourhood of the cross-roads where the route from Charleroi to
+Gembloux crosses that from Nivelles to Namur. In other words, they were
+prepared to stand and fight between Sombreffe and the village of Ligny.
+The plan had been prepared long beforehand. The whole of the First Corps
+was in position with the morning, awaiting the Emperor's attack. The
+Second Corps had been in motion for hours, and was marching up during all
+that morning. So was the Third Corps behind it. Blucher himself had
+arrived upon the field of battle the day before (the 15th), and had
+written thence to his sovereign to say that he was fully prepared for
+action the next day.
+
+Indeed, Blucher on the 15th confidently expected victory, and the end of
+the campaign then and there. He had a right to do so, for Napoleon's
+advance had been met by so rapid a concentration that, a little after noon
+on that Friday the 16th, and before the first shots were fired, well over
+80,000 men were drawn up to receive the shock of Napoleon's right wing.
+But that right wing all told, even when the belated French troops beyond
+the Sambre had finally crossed that river, and even when the Emperor had
+brought up the Guard and the reserve, numbered but 63,000. Supposing the
+French had been able to use every man, which they were not, they counted
+but seven to nine of their opponents. And the nine were upon the
+defensive; the seven had to undertake the task of an assault.
+
+It was late in the day before battle was joined. Napoleon had reached
+Fleurus at about ten o'clock in the morning, but it was four hours more
+before he had brought all his troops across the river, and by the time he
+had done so two things had happened. First, the Duke of Wellington (who,
+as we shall see later, had come to Quatre Bras that morning, and had
+written to Blucher telling him of his arrival) rode off in person to the
+Prussian positions and discussed affairs near the windmill of Bussy with
+the Prussian Commander-in-chief. In this conversation, Wellington
+undoubtedly promised to effect, if he could, a junction with the Prussians
+in the course of the afternoon. Even without that aid Blucher felt fairly
+sure of victory; with it, he could be perfectly confident.
+
+
+[Illustration: The Prussian concentration before Ligny, showing the
+junction of the First, Second, and Third Corps on the morning of June
+16th, and the inability of the Fourth Corps to come up in time.]
+
+
+As matters turned out, Wellington found himself unable to effect his
+junction with Blucher. Ney, as we shall see later, found in front of him
+on the Brussels road much heavier opposition than he had imagined, but
+Wellington was also surprised to find to what strength the French force
+under Ney was at Quatre Bras. Wellington, as we shall see, held his own on
+that 16th of June, but was quite unable to come up in succour of Blucher
+when the expected victory of that general turned to a defeat.
+
+The second thing that happened in those hours was Napoleon's discovery
+that the Prussian troops massing to oppose him before Ligny were going to
+be much more than a single corps. It looked to him more like the whole
+Prussian army. It was, indeed, three-quarters of that army, for it
+consisted of the First, the Second, and the Third Corps. Only the Fourth,
+with its headquarters at distant Liege, had not been able to arrive in
+time. This Fourth Corps would also have been present, and would probably
+have turned the scale in favour of the Prussians, had the staff orders
+been sent out promptly and conveyed with sufficient rapidity. As it was,
+its most advanced units got no further west, during the course of the
+action, than about halfway between Liege and the battlefield.
+
+Napoleon was enabled to discover with some ease the great numbers which
+had concentrated to oppose him from the fact that these numbers had
+concentrated upon a defective position. Wellington, the greatest defensive
+general of his time, at once discovered this weakness in Blucher's chosen
+battlefield, and was provoked by the discovery to the exclamation which
+stands at the head of this section. The rolling land occupied by the
+Prussian army lay exposed in a regular sweep downwards towards the heights
+upon which lay the French, and the Prussian army as it deployed came
+wholly under the view of its enemy. Nothing was hidden; and a further
+effect was that, as Napoleon himself remarked, all the artillery work
+of the French side went home. If a round missed the foremost positions of
+the Prussian army, it would necessarily fall within the ranks behind them.
+
+This discovery, that there lay before him not one corps but a whole army,
+seemed to Napoleon, upon one condition, an advantage. The new development
+would, upon that one condition, give him, if his troops were of the
+quality he estimated them to be, a complete victory over the united
+Prussian force, and might well terminate the campaign on that afternoon
+and in that place. That one condition was the possibility of getting Ney
+upon the left, or some part at least of Ney's force, to leave the task of
+holding off Wellington, to come down upon the flank of the Prussians from
+the north and west, to envelop them, and thus, in company with the troops
+of Napoleon himself, to destroy the three Prussian Army Corps altogether.
+
+Had that condition been fulfilled, the campaign would indeed have come to
+an end decisively in Napoleon's favour, and, as he put it in a famous
+phrase, "not a gun" of the army opposing him "should escape."
+
+Unfortunately for the Emperor, that one condition was not fulfilled. The
+63,000 Frenchmen of the right wing, under Napoleon, did indeed defeat and
+drive off the 80,000 men opposed to them. But that opposing army was not
+destroyed; it was not contained; it remained organised for further
+fighting, and it survived to decide Waterloo.
+
+In order to appreciate Napoleon's idea and how it might have succeeded,
+let the reader consider the dispositions of the battle of Ligny.
+
+The battlefield named in history after the village of Ligny consists of a
+number of communes, of which that village is the central one. The Prussian
+army held the villages marked on the map by the names of Tongrinelle and
+Tongrinne, to the east of Ligny; it held Brye, St Amand, and Wagnelee to
+the east. It held also the heights behind upon the great road leading from
+Nivelles to Namur. When Napoleon had at last got his latest troops over
+from beyond the Sambre on to the field of battle, which was not until just
+on two o'clock in the afternoon, the plan he formed was to hold the
+Prussian left and centre by a vigorous attack, that is, to pin the
+Prussians down to Tongrinne, Tongrinelle, and Ligny, while, on the other
+front, the east and south front of the Prussians, another vigorous attack
+should be driving them back out of Wagnelee and St Amand.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+The plan can be further elucidated by considering the elements of the
+battle as they are sketched in the map over leaf. Napoleon's troops at C C
+C were to hold the Prussian left at H, to attack the Prussian right at D,
+with the Guard at E left in reserve for the final effort.
+
+By thus holding the Prussians at H and pushing them in at D, he would here
+begin to pen them back, and it needed but the arrival on the field of a
+fresh French force attacking the Prussians along A B to destroy the force
+so contained and hemmed in. For that fresh force Napoleon depended upon
+new and changed instructions which he despatched to Ney when he saw the
+size of the Prussian force before him. During Napoleon's main attack, some
+portion of Ney's force, and if possible the whole of it, should appear
+unexpectedly from the north and west, marching down across the fields
+between Wagnelee and the Nivelles-Namur road, and coming on the north of
+the enemy at A B, so as to attack him not only in the flank but in the
+rear. He would then be unable to retreat in the direction of _Wavre_
+(W)--a broken remnant might escape towards Namur (N). But it was more
+likely that the whole force would be held and destroyed.
+
+
+[Illustration: Elements of Ligny.]
+
+
+Supposing that Napoleon's 63,000 showed themselves capable of holding, let
+alone partially driving in, the 80,000 in front of them, the sudden and
+unexpected appearance of a new force in the height of the action, adding
+another twenty or thirty thousand to the French troops already engaged,
+coming upon the flank and spreading to the rear of the Prussian host,
+would inevitably have destroyed that host, and, to repeat Napoleon's
+famous exclamation, "not a gun would have escaped."
+
+The reader may ask: "If this plan of victory be so obvious, why did
+Napoleon send Ney off with a separate left wing of forty to fifty thousand
+men towards Quatre Bras?"
+
+The answer is: that when, upon the day before, the Thursday, Napoleon had
+made this disposition, and given it as the general orders for that Friday,
+he had imagined only one corps of Prussians to be before him.
+
+The right wing, with which the Emperor himself stayed, numbering, as we
+have seen, about 63,000 men, would have been quite enough to deal with
+that one Prussian corps; and he had sent so large a force, under Ney, up
+the Brussels road, not because he believed it would meet with serious
+opposition, but because this was to be the line of his principal advance,
+and it was his intention to occupy the town of Brussels at the very first
+opportunity. Having dealt with the single Prussian corps, as he had first
+believed it would be, in front of Fleurus, he meant that same evening to
+come back in person to the Brussels road and, in company with Ney, to
+conduct decisive operations against Wellington's half of the Allies, which
+would then, of course, be hopelessly outnumbered.
+
+But when Napoleon saw, a little after midday of the Friday, that he had to
+deal with nearly the whole of the Prussian army, he perceived that the
+great force under Ney would be wasted out there on the west--supposing it
+to be meeting with little opposition--and had far better be used in
+deciding a crushing victory over the Prussians. To secure such a victory
+would, without bothering about the Duke of Wellington's forces to the
+westward, be quite enough to determine the campaign in favour of the
+French.
+
+As early as two o'clock a note was sent to Ney urging him, when he had
+brushed aside such slight resistance as the Emperor expected him to find
+upon the Brussels road, to return and help to envelop the Prussian forces,
+which the Emperor was about to attack. At that hour it was not yet quite
+clear to Napoleon how large the Prussian force really was. This first note
+to Ney, therefore, was unfortunately not as vigorous as it might have
+been; though, even if it had been as vigorous as possible, Ney, who had
+found unexpected resistance upon the Brussels road, could certainly not
+have come up to help Napoleon with his whole force. He might, however,
+have spared a portion of it, and that portion, as we shall see later,
+would have been most obviously Erlon's corps--the First. Rather more than
+an hour later, at about a quarter-past three, when Napoleon had just
+joined battle with the Prussians, he got a note from Ney informing him
+that the left wing was meeting with considerable resistance, and could
+hardly abandon the place where it was engaged before Quatre Bras to come
+up against the Prussian flank at Ligny. Napoleon sent a note back to say
+that, none the less, an effort must be made at all costs to send Ney's
+forces to come over to him to attack the Prussian flank, for such an
+attack would mean the winning of a great decisive battle.
+
+The distance over which these notes had to be carried to and fro, from
+Napoleon to Ney, was not quite five miles. The Emperor might therefore
+fairly expect after his last message that in the late middle of the
+afternoon--say half-past five or six--troops would appear upon his
+north-west horizon and march down to his aid. In good time such troops did
+appear; how inconclusively it will be my business to record.
+
+Meanwhile, Napoleon had begun the fight at Ligny with his usual signal of
+three cannonshots, and between three and four o'clock the front of the
+whole army was engaged. It was for many hours mere hammer-and-tongs
+fighting, the French making little impression upon their right against
+Ligny or the villages to the east of it, but fighting desperately for St
+Amand and for Wagnelee. Such a course was part of Napoleon's plan, for he
+had decided, as I have said, only to hold the Prussian left, to strike
+hardest at their right, and, when his reinforcement should come from Ney,
+to turn that right, envelop it, and so destroy the whole Prussian army.
+
+These villages upon the Prussian right were taken and retaken in a series
+of furious attacks and counter-attacks, which it would be as tedious to
+detail as it must have been intolerable to endure.
+
+All this indecisive but furious struggle for the line of villages (not one
+of which was as yet carried and held permanently by the French) lasted
+over two hours. It was well after five o'clock when there appeared, far
+off, under the westering sun, a new and large body of troops advancing
+eastward as though to reach that point between Wagnelee and St Amand where
+the left of the French force was struggling for mastery with the right of
+the Prussians. For a moment there was no certitude as to what this distant
+advancing force might be. But soon, and just when fortune appeared for a
+moment to be favouring Blucher's superior numbers and the French line was
+losing ground, the Emperor learned that it was his First Army Corps, under
+the command of Erlon which was thus approaching.
+
+At that moment--in the neighbourhood of six o'clock in the
+evening--Napoleon must have believed that his new and rapidly formed plan
+of that afternoon, with its urgent notes to Quatre Bras and its appeal for
+reinforcement, had borne fruit; a portion at least of Ney's command had
+been detached, as it seemed, to deliver that final and unexpected attack
+upon the Prussian flank which was the keystone of the whole scheme.
+
+Coincidently with the news that those distant advancing thousands were his
+own men and would turn this doubtful struggle into a decisive victory for
+the Emperor came the news--unexplained, inexplicable--that Erlon's troops
+would advance no further! That huge distant body of men, isolated in the
+empty fields to the westward; that reinforcement upon which the fate of
+Napoleon and of the French army hung, drew no nearer. Watched from such a
+distance, they might seem for a short time to be only halted. Soon it was
+apparent that they were actually retiring. They passed back again,
+retracing their steps beyond the western horizon, and were lost to the
+great struggle against the Prussians. Why this amazing countermarch, with
+all its catastrophic consequences was made will be discussed later. It is
+sufficient to note that it rendered impossible that decisive victory which
+Napoleon had held for a moment within his grasp. His resource under such a
+disappointment singularly illustrates the nature of his mind.
+
+Already the Emperor had determined, before any sign of advancing aid had
+appeared, that if he were left alone to complete the decision, if he was
+not to be allowed by fate to surround and destroy the Prussian force, he
+might at least drive it from the field with heavy loss, and, as far as
+possible, demoralised. In the long struggle of the afternoon he had meant
+but to press the Prussian line, while awaiting forces that should complete
+its envelopment; these forces being now denied him, he determined to
+change his plan, to use his reserves, the Guard, and to drive the best
+fighting material he had, like a spearhead, at the centre of the Prussian
+positions. Since he could not capture, he would try and break.
+
+As the hope of aid from Erlon's First Corps gradually disappeared, he
+decided upon this course. It was insufficient. He could not hope by it to
+destroy his enemy wholly. But he could drive him from the field and
+perhaps demoralise him, or so weaken him with loss as to leave him
+crippled.
+
+Just at the time when Napoleon had determined thus to strike at the centre
+of the Prussian fine, Blucher, full of his recent successes upon his right
+and the partial recapture of the village of St Amand, had withdrawn
+troops from that centre to pursue his advantage. It was the wrong moment.
+While Blucher was thus off with the bulk of his men towards St Amand, the
+Old Guard, with the heavy cavalry of the Guard, and Milhaud's cavalry as
+well--all Napoleon's reserve--drew up opposite Ligny village for a final
+assault.
+
+Nearly all the guns of the Guard and all those of the Fourth Corps crashed
+against the village to prepare the assault, and at this crisis of the
+battle, as though to emphasise its character, a heavy thunderstorm broke
+over the combatants, and at that late hour (it was near seven) darkened
+the evening sky.
+
+It was to the noise and downpour of that storm that the assault was
+delivered, the Prussian centre forced, and Ligny taken.
+
+When the clouds cleared, a little before sunset, this strongest veteran
+corps of Napoleon's army had done the business. Ligny was carried and
+held. The Prussian formation, from a convex line, was now a line bent
+inwards at its centre and all but broken.
+
+Blucher had rapidly returned from the right to meet the peril. He charged
+at the head of his Uhlans. The head of the French column of Guards
+reserved their fire until the horse was almost upon them; then, in volley
+after volley at a stone's-throw range, they broke that cavalry, which, in
+their turn, the French cuirassiers charged as it fled and destroyed it.
+Blucher's own horse was shot under him, the colonel of the Uhlans
+captured, the whole of the Prussian centre fell into disorder and was
+crushed confusedly back towards the Nivelles-Namur road.
+
+Darkness fell, and nothing more could be accomplished. The field was won,
+indeed, but the Prussian army was still an organisation and a power. It
+had lost heavily in surrenders, flight, and fallen, but its main part was
+still organised. It was driven to retreat in the darkness, but remained
+ready, when time should serve, to reappear. It kept its order against the
+end of the French pressure throughout the last glimmer of twilight; and
+when darkness fell, the troops of Blucher, though in retreat, were in a
+retreat compact and orderly, and the bulk of his command was saved from
+the enemy and available for further action.
+
+Thus ended the battle of Ligny, glorious for the Emperor, who had achieved
+so much success against great odds and after the hottest combat; but a
+failure of his full plan, for the host before him was still in existence:
+it was free to retreat in what direction, east or north, it might choose.
+The choice was made with immediate and conquering decision: the order
+passed in the darkness, "By Tilly on Wavre." The Prussian staff had not
+lost its head under the blow of its defeat. It preserved a clear view of
+the campaign, with its remaining chances, and the then beaten army corps
+were concentrated upon a movement northwards. Word was sent to the fresh
+and unused Fourth Corps to join the other three at _Wavre_, and the march
+was begun which permitted Blucher, forty hours later, to come up on the
+flank of the French at Waterloo and destroy them.
+
+
+QUATRE BRAS
+
+Such had been the result of the long afternoon's work upon the right-hand
+or eastern battlefield, that of Ligny, where Napoleon had been in personal
+command.
+
+In spite of his appeals, no one had reached him from the western field,
+and the First Corps had only appeared in Napoleon's neighbourhood to
+disappear again.
+
+What had been happening on that western battlefield, three to four miles
+away, which had thus prevented some part at least of Ney's army coming up
+upon the flank of the Prussians at Ligny, towards the end of the day, and
+inflicting upon Blucher a complete disaster?
+
+What had happened was the slow, confused action known to history as the
+battle of Quatre Bras.
+
+It will be remembered that Ney had been entrusted by Napoleon with the
+absolute and independent command of something less than half of his whole
+army.[7]
+
+He had put at his disposal the First and the Second Army Corps, under
+Erlon and Reille respectively--nearly 46,000 men; and to these he had
+added, by an afterthought, eight regiments of heavy cavalry, commanded by
+Kellerman.
+
+The role of this force, in Napoleon's intention, was simply to advance up
+the Brussels road, brushing before it towards the left or west, away from
+the Prussians, as it went, the outposts of that western half of the allied
+army, which Wellington commanded.
+
+We have seen that Napoleon, who had certainly arrived quickly and
+half-unexpectedly at the point of junction between Wellington's scattered
+forces and those of the Prussians, when he crossed the Sambre at
+Charleroi, overestimated his success. He thought his enemy had even less
+notice of his advance than that enemy really had; he thought that enemy
+had had less time to concentrate than he had really had. Napoleon
+therefore necessarily concluded that his enemy had concentrated to a less
+extent than he actually had.
+
+That mistake had the effect, in the case of the army of the right, which
+he himself commanded, of bringing him up against not one Prussian army
+corps but three. This accident had not disconcerted him, for he hoped to
+turn it into a general disaster for the Prussians, and to take advantage
+of their unexpected concentration to accomplish their total ruin. But such
+a plan was dependent upon the left-hand or western army, that upon the
+Brussels road under Ney, not finding anything serious in front of it. Ney
+could spare men less easily if the Emperor's calculation of the resistance
+likely to be found on the Brussels road should be wrong. It was wrong.
+That resistance was not slight but considerable, and Ney was not free to
+come to Napoleon's aid. Tardy as had been the information conveyed to the
+Duke of Wellington, and grievously as the Duke of Wellington had
+misunderstood its importance, there was more in front of Ney upon the
+Brussels road than the Emperor had expected. What there was, however,
+might have been pushed back--after fairly heavy fighting it is true, but
+without any risk of failure--but for another factor in the situation,
+which was Ney's own misjudgment and inertia.
+
+Napoleon himself said later that his marshal was no longer the same man
+since the disasters of two years before; but even if Ney had been as alert
+as ever, misjudgment quite as much as lack of will must have entered into
+what he did. He had thought, as the Emperor had, that there would be
+hardly anything in front of him upon the Brussels road. But there was this
+difference between the two errors: Ney was on the spot, and could have
+found out with his cavalry scouts quite early on the morning of Friday the
+16th what he really had to face. He preferred to take matters for granted,
+and he paid a heavy price. He thought that there was plenty of time for
+him to advance at his leisure; and, thinking this, he must have further
+concluded that to linger upon that part of the Brussels road which was
+nearest the Emperor's forthcoming action to the east by Ligny would be
+good policy in case the Emperor should have need of him there.
+
+On the night of the 15th Ney himself was at Frasnes, while the furthest of
+his detachments was no nearer than the bridge of Thuin over the Sambre,
+sixteen miles away. The rough sketch printed opposite will show how very
+long that line was, considering the nearness of the strategical point
+Quatre Bras, which it was his next business to occupy. The Second Army
+Corps under Reille was indeed fairly well moved up, and all in the
+neighbourhood of Gosselies by the night between Thursday 15th and Friday
+16th of June. But the other half of the force, the First Army Corps under
+Erlon, was strung out over miles of road behind.
+
+To concentrate all those 50,000 men, half of them spread out over so much
+space, meant a day's ordinary marching; and one would have thought that
+Ney should have begun to concentrate before night fell upon the 15th. He
+remembered, however, that the men were fatigued, he thought he had plenty
+of time before him, and he did not effect their concentration. The mass of
+the Second Army Corps (Reille's) was, as I have said, near Gosselies on
+the Friday dawn; but Erlon, with the First Army Corps, was not in
+disposition to bring the bulk of it up by the same time. He could not
+expect to be near Quatre Bras till noon or one o'clock. But even to this
+element of delay, due to his lack of precision, Ney added further delay,
+due to slackness in orders.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+It was eleven o'clock on the morning of that Friday the 16th before Ney
+sent a definite order to Reille to march; it was _twelve_ before the head
+of that Second Army Corps set out up the great road to cover the four or
+five miles that separated them from Ney's headquarters at Frasnes. Erlon,
+lying next behind Reille, could not advance until Reille's last division
+had taken the road. So Erlon, with the First Army Corps, was not in column
+and beginning his advance with his head troops until after one o'clock.
+
+At about half-past one, then, we have the first troops of Reille's army
+corps reaching Ney at Frasnes, its tail-end some little way out of
+Gosselies; while at the same hour we have Erlon's First Army Corps
+marching in column through Gosselies.
+
+It would have been perfectly possible, at the expense of a little fatigue
+to the men, to have had the Second Army Corps right up at Frasnes and in
+front of it and deployed for action by nine o'clock, while Erlon's army
+corps, the First, coming behind it as a reserve, an equal body in numbers,
+excellence, and order, would have taken the morning to come up. In other
+words, Ney could have had more than 20,000 men ready for the attack on
+Quatre Bras by mid-morning, with as many men an hour or two behind them,
+and ready on their arrival to act as a reserve. As a matter of fact, he
+waited with his single battalion and a few horsemen at his headquarters at
+Frasnes, only giving the orders we have seen, which did not bring Reille's
+head columns up to him till as late as half-past one. It was well after
+two o'clock before Reille's troops had deployed in front of Frasnes and
+this Second Army Corps were ready to attack the position at Quatre Bras,
+which Ney still believed to be very feebly held. The other half of Ney's
+command, the First Army Corps, under Erlon, was still far away down the
+road.
+
+This said, it behoves us to consider the strategical value of the Quatre
+Bras position, and later to see how far Ney was right in thinking that it
+was still quite insufficiently furnished with defenders, even at that late
+hour in the day.
+
+Armies must march by roads. At any rate, the army marching by road has a
+vast advantage over one attempting an advance across country; and the
+better kept-up the road the greater advantage, other things being equal,
+has the army using it over another army debarred from its use.
+
+Quatre Bras is the cross-way of two great roads. The first road is that
+main road from north to south, leading from the frontier and Charleroi to
+Brussels; along this road, it was Napoleon's ultimate intention to sweep,
+and up this road he was on that morning of the 16th sending Ney to clear
+the way for him. The second road is the great road east and west from
+Nivelles to Namur, which was in June 1815 the main line of communication
+along which the two halves of the Allies could effect their junction.
+
+The invader, then, when he held Quatre Bras, could hold up troops coming
+against him from the north, troops coming against him from the east, or
+troops coming against him from the west. He could prevent, or rather
+delay, their junction. He would have stepped in between.
+
+But Quatre Bras has advantages greater than this plain and elementary
+strategical advantage. In the first place, it dominates the whole
+countryside. A patch or knoll, 520 feet above the sea, the culminating
+point of the plateau, is within a few yards of the cross-roads. Standing
+there, a few steps to the west of the highway, you look in every direction
+over a rolling plain, of which you occupy the highest point for some miles
+around.
+
+Now, this position of the "Quatre Bras" or "Cross Roads" can be easily
+defended against a foe coming from the south, as were the two corps under
+Ney. In 1815 its defence was easier still.
+
+A large patch of undergrowth, cut in rotation, called the Wood of Bossu,
+ran along the high road from Frasnes and Charleroi, flanking that road to
+the west, and forming cover for troops that might wish to forbid access
+along it. The ground falls somewhat rapidly in front of the cross-roads to
+a little stream, and just where the stream crosses the road is the walled
+farm of Gemioncourt, which can be held as an advanced position, while in
+front of the fields where the Wood of Bossu once stood is the group of
+farm buildings called Pierrepont. Finally, that arm of the cross-roads
+which overlooks the slope down to Gemioncourt ran partly on an embankment
+which could be used for defence as a ready-made earthwork.
+
+Now, let us see what troops were actually present that Friday morning upon
+the allied side to defend this position against Ney's advance, and what
+others were near enough in the neighbourhood to come up in defence of the
+position during the struggle.
+
+There was but one division of the Allies actually on the spot. This was
+the Netherlands division, commanded by Perponcher; and the whole of it,
+including gunners and sappers (it had hardly any cavalry[8] with it), was
+less than 8000 strong. It was a very small number to hold the extended
+position which the division at once proceeded to occupy. They had to cover
+a front of over 3000 yards, not far short of two miles.
+
+They did not know, indeed, what Ney was bringing up against them;
+Wellington himself, later on, greatly underestimated the French forces on
+that day. Now even if Ney had had far less men than he had, it was none
+the less a very risky thing to disperse the division as Perponcher did,
+especially with no more than fourteen guns to support him,[9] but under
+the circumstances it turned out to be a wise risk to have taken. Ney had
+hesitated already, and was in a mood to be surprised at any serious
+resistance. The more extended the veil that was drawn before him, the
+better for the Allies and their card of delay. For everything depended
+upon time. Ney, as will be seen, had thrown away his chance of victory by
+his extreme dilatoriness, and during the day the Allies were to bring up
+unit after unit, until by nightfall nearly 40,000 men not only held Quatre
+Bras successfully, but pushed the French back from their attack upon it.
+
+Perponcher, then, put a battalion and five guns in front of Gemioncourt,
+another battalion inside the walls of the farm, four battalions and a
+mounted battery before the Wood of Bossu and the farm of Pierrepont. Most
+of his battalions were thus stretched in front of the position of Quatre
+Bras, the actual Cross Roads where he left only two as a reserve.
+
+Against the Dutchmen, thus extended, the French order to advance was
+given, and somewhere between half-past two and a quarter to three the
+French attack began. It was delivered upon Gemioncourt and the fields to
+the right or east of the Brussels road.
+
+The action that followed is one simple enough to understand by
+description, but difficult to express upon a map. It is difficult to
+express upon a map because it consisted in the repeated attack of one
+fixed number of men against an increasing number of men.
+
+Ney was hammering all that afternoon with a French force which soon
+reached its maximum. The position against which he was hammering, though
+held at first by a force greatly inferior to his own, began immediately
+afterwards to receive reinforcement after reinforcement, until at the
+close of the action the defenders were vastly superior in numbers to the
+attackers.
+
+I have attempted in the rough pen sketch opposite this page to express
+this state of affairs on the allied side during the battle by marking in
+successive degrees of shading the bodies of the defence in the order in
+which they came up, but the reader must remember the factor of time, and
+how all day long Wellington's command at Quatre Bras kept on swelling and
+swelling by driblets, as the units marched in at a hurried summons from
+various points behind the battlefield. This gradual reinforcement of the
+defence gives all its character to the action.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+The French, then, began the assault by an advance to the right or east of
+the Brussels road. They cleared out the defenders from Gemioncourt; they
+occupied that walled position; they poured across the stream, and were
+beginning to take the rise up to Quatre Bras when, at about three o'clock,
+Wellington, who had been over at Ligny discussing the position with
+Blucher, rode up and saw how critical the moment was.
+
+In a few minutes the first French division might be up to the cross-roads
+at Q.
+
+Bossu Wood, with the four battalions holding it, had not yet been attacked
+by the French, because their second division of Reille's Second Corps
+(under Napoleon's brother Jerome), had not yet come up; Erlon's First
+Corps was still far off, down the road. The men in the Bossu Wood came out
+to try and stop the French advance. They were thrown back by French
+cavalry, and even as this was proceeding Jerome's division arrived,
+attacked the south of Bossu Wood, and brought up the whole of Ney's forces
+to some 19,000 or 20,000 men.
+
+The French advance, so continued, would now undoubtedly have succeeded
+against the 8000 Dutch at this moment of three o'clock (and Wellington's
+judgment that the situation was critical at that same moment was only too
+sound) had there not arrived precisely at that moment the first of his
+reinforcements.
+
+A brigade of Dutch cavalry came up from the west along the Nivelles road,
+and three brigades of infantry appeared marching hurriedly in from the
+north, along the Brussels road; two of these brigades were British, under
+the command of Kemp and of Pack, and they formed Picton's division. The
+third were a brigade of Hanoverians, under Best. The British and the
+Hanoverians formed along the Namur road at M N, protected by its
+embankment, kneeling in the high wheat, and ready to fire when the enemy's
+attacking line should come within close range of their muskets.
+
+The newly arrived Dutch cavalry, on the other side of the road, charged
+the advancing French, but were charged themselves in turn by French
+cavalry, overthrown, and in their stampede carried Wellington and his
+staff in a surge past the cross-roads; but the French cavalry, in its
+turn, was compelled to retire by the infantry fire it met when it had
+ridden too far. Immediately afterwards the French infantry as they reached
+the Namur road came unexpectedly upon the just-arrived British and
+Hanoverians, and were driven back in disorder by heavy volleying at close
+range from the embankment and the deep cover beyond.
+
+The cavalry charge and countercharge (Jerome beginning to clear the south
+of the Bossu Wood), the check received by the French on the right from
+Picton's brigade and the Hanoverians occupied nearly an hour. It was not
+far short of four o'clock when Ney received that first urgent dispatch
+from Napoleon which told him to despatch the enemy's resistance at Quatre
+Bras, and then to come over eastward to Ligny and help against the
+Prussians.
+
+Ney could not obey. He had wasted the whole of a precious morning, and by
+now, close on four o'clock in the afternoon, yet another unit came up to
+increase the power of the defence, and to make his chance of carrying the
+Quatre Bras cross-roads, of pushing back Wellington's command, of finding
+himself free to send men to Napoleon increasingly doubtful.
+
+The new unit which had come up was the corps under the Duke of Brunswick,
+and when this arrived Wellington had for the first time a superiority of
+numbers over Ney's single corps (there was still no sign of Erlon) though
+he was still slightly inferior in guns.
+
+However, the French advance was vigorously conducted. Nearly the whole of
+the Wood of Bossu was cleared. The Brunswickers, who had been sent forward
+along the road between Quatre Bras and Gemioncourt, were pushed back as to
+their infantry; their cavalry broke itself against a French battalion.
+
+It was in this doubly unsuccessful effort that the Duke of Brunswick, son
+of the famous General of the earlier Revolutionary wars, fell, shot in the
+stomach. He died that night in the village.
+
+The check to this general advance of the French all along the line was
+again given by the English troops along the Namur road. Picton seized the
+moment, ordered a bayonet charge, and drove the French right down the
+valley. His men were in turn driven back by the time they had cleared the
+slope, but the check was given and the French never recovered it. Two
+fierce cavalry charges by the French failed to break the English line,
+though the Highlanders upon Pack's extreme right, close against Quatre
+Bras itself, were caught before they could form square, and the second
+phase of the battle ended in a draw.
+
+Ney had missed the opportunity when the enemy in front of him were in
+numbers less than half his own; he had failed to pierce their line when
+reinforcements had brought up their numbers to a superiority over his own.
+He must now set about a far more serious business, for there was every
+prospect, as the afternoon advanced, that Wellington would be still
+further reinforced, while Ney had nothing but his original 20,000--half
+his command; of Erlon's coming there was not a sign! Yet another hour had
+been consumed in the general French advance and its repulse, which I have
+just described. It was five o'clock.
+
+I beg the reader to concentrate his attention upon this point of the
+action--the few minutes before and after the hour of five. A number of
+critical things occurred in that short space of time, all of which must be
+kept in mind.
+
+The first was this: A couple of brigades came in at that moment to
+reinforce Wellington. They gave him a 25 per cent. superiority in men, and
+an appreciable superiority in guns as well.
+
+In the second place, Ney was keeping the action at a standstill, waiting
+until his own forces should be doubled by the arrival of Erlon's force.
+Ney had been fighting all this while, as I have said, with only half his
+command--the Second Army Corps of Reille. Erlon's First Army Corps formed
+the second half, and when it came up--as Ney confidently expected it to do
+immediately--it would double his numbers, and raise them from 20,000 to
+40,000 men. With this superiority he could be sure of success, even if, as
+was probable, further reinforcements should reach the enemy's line. It is
+to be noted that it was due to Ney's own tardiness in giving orders that
+Erlon was coming up so late, but by now, five o'clock, the head of his
+columns might at any moment be seen debouching from Frasnes.
+
+In the third place, while Ney was thus anxiously waiting for Erlon, and
+seeing the forces in front of him swelling to be more and more superior to
+his own, there came yet another message from Napoleon telling Ney how
+matters stood in the great action that was proceeding five miles away,
+urging him again with the utmost energy to have done at Quatre Bras, to
+come back over eastward upon the flank of the Prussians at Ligny, and so
+to destroy their army utterly and "to save France."
+
+To have done with the action of Quatre Bras! But there were already
+superior forces before Ney! And they were increasing! If he dreamt of
+turning, it would be annihilation for his troops, or at the least the
+catching of his army's and Napoleon's between two fires. He _might_ just
+manage when Erlon came up--and surely Erlon must appear from one moment to
+another--he _might_ just manage to overthrow the enemy in front of him so
+rapidly as to have time to turn and appear at Ligny before darkness should
+fall, from three to four hours later.
+
+It all hung on Erlon:--He _might_! and at that precise moment, with his
+impatience strained to breaking-point, and all his expectation turned on
+Frasnes, whence the head of Erlon's column should appear, there rode up to
+Ney a general officer, Delcambre by name. He came with a message. It was
+from Erlon.... Erlon had abandoned the road to Quatre Bras; had understood
+that he was not to join Ney after all, but to go east and help Napoleon!
+He had turned off eastward to the right two and a half miles back, and was
+by this time far off in the direction which would lead him to take part in
+the battle of Ligny!
+
+Under the staggering blow of this news Ney broke into a fury. It meant
+possibly the annihilation of his body, certainly its defeat. He did two
+things, both unwise from the point of view of his own battle, and one
+fatal from the point of view of the whole campaign.
+
+First, he launched his reserve cavalry, grossly insufficient in numbers
+for such a mad attempt, right at the English line, in a despairing effort
+to pierce such superior numbers by one desperate charge. Secondly, he sent
+Delcambre back--not calculating distance or time--with peremptory orders
+to Erlon, as his subordinate, to come back at once to the battlefield of
+Quatre Bras.
+
+There was, as commander to lead that cavalry charge, Kellerman. He had but
+one brigade of cuirassiers: two regiments of horse against 25,000 men! It
+was an amazing ride, but it could accomplish nothing of purport. It
+thundered down the slope, breaking through the advancing English troops
+(confused by a mistaken order, and not yet formed in square), cut to
+pieces the gunners of a battery, broke a regiment of Brunswickers near the
+top of the hill, and reached at last the cross-roads of Quatre Bras. Five
+hundred men still sat their horses as the summit of the slope was reached.
+The brigade had cut a lane right through the mass of the defence; it had
+not pierced it altogether.
+
+Some have imagined that if at that moment the cavalry of the Guard, which
+was still in reserve, had followed this first charge by a second, Ney
+might have effected his object and broken Wellington's line. It is
+extremely doubtful, the numbers were so wholly out of proportion to such a
+task. At any rate, the order for the second charge, when it came, came
+somewhat late. The five hundred as they reined up on the summit of the
+hill were met and broken by a furious cross-fire from the Namur road upon
+the right, from the head of Bossu Wood upon the left, while yet another
+unit, come up in this long succession to reinforce the defence--a battery
+of the King's German Legion--opened upon them with grape. The poor remnant
+of Kellerman's Horse turned and galloped back in confusion.
+
+The second cavalry charge attempted by the French reserve, coming just too
+late, necessarily failed, and at the same moment yet another
+reinforcement--the first British division of the Guards, and a body of
+Nassauers, with a number of guns--came up to increase the now overwhelming
+superiority of Wellington's line.[10]
+
+There was even an attempt at advance upon the part of Wellington.
+
+As the evening turned to sunset, and the sunset to night, that advance was
+made very slowly and with increasing difficulty--and all the while Ney's
+embarrassed force, now confronted by something like double its own
+numbers, and contesting the ground yard by yard as it yielded, received no
+word of Erlon.
+
+The clearing of the Wood of Bossu by the right wing of Wellington's army,
+reinforced by the newly arrived Guards, took more than an hour. It took as
+long to push the French centre back to Gemioncourt, and all through the
+last of the sunlight the walls of the farm were desperately held. On the
+left, Pierrepont was similarly held for close upon an hour. The sun had
+already set when the Guards debouched from the Wood of Bossu, only to be
+met and checked by a violent artillery fire from Pierrepont, while at the
+same time the remnant of the cuirassiers charged again, and broke a
+Belgian battalion at the edge of the wood.
+
+By nine o'clock it was dark and the action ceased. Just as it ceased, and
+while, in the last glimmerings of the light, the major objects of the
+landscape, groups of wood and distant villages, could still be faintly
+distinguished against the background of the gloom, one such object seemed
+slowly to approach and move. It was first guessed and then perceived to be
+a body of men: the head of a column began to debouch from Frasnes. It was
+Erlon and his 20,000 returned an hour too late.
+
+All that critical day had passed with the First Corps out of action. It
+had _neither_ come up to Napoleon to wipe out the Prussians at Ligny,
+_nor_ come back in its countermarch in time to save Ney and drive back
+Wellington at Quatre Bras. It might as well not have existed so far as the
+fortunes of the French were concerned, and its absence from either field
+upon that day made defeat certain in the future, as the rest of these
+pages will show.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two things impress themselves upon us as we consider the total result of
+that critical day, the 16th of June, which saw Ney fail to hold the
+Brussels road at Quatre Bras, and there to push away from the advance on
+Brussels Wellington's opposing force, and which also saw the successful
+escape of the Prussians from Ligny, an escape which was to permit them to
+join Wellington forty-eight hours later and to decide Waterloo.
+
+The first is the capital importance, disastrous to the French fortunes, of
+Erlon's having been kept out of both fights by his useless march and
+countermarch.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE ELEMENTS OF QUATRE BRAS.]
+
+
+The second is the extraordinary way in which Wellington's command came up
+haphazard, dribbling in by units all day long, and how that command owed
+to Ney's caution and tardiness, much more than to its own General's
+arrangements, the superiority in numbers which it began to enjoy from an
+early phase in the battle.
+
+I will deal with these two points in their order.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As to the first:--
+
+The whole of the four days of 1815, and the issue of Waterloo itself,
+turned upon Erlon's disastrous counter-marching between Quatre Bras and
+Ligny upon this Friday, the 16th of June, which was the decisive day of
+the war.
+
+What actually _happened_ has been sufficiently described. The useless
+advance of Erlon's corps d'armee towards Napoleon and the right--useless
+because it was not completed; the useless turning back of that corps
+d'armee towards Ney and the left--useless because it could not reach Ney
+in time,--these were the determining factors of that critical moment in
+the campaign.
+
+In other words, Erlon's zigzag kept the 20,000 of the First Corps out of
+action all day. Had they been with Ney, the Allies under Wellington at
+Quatre Bras would have suffered a disaster. Had they been with Napoleon,
+the Prussians at Ligny would have been destroyed. As it was, the First
+Army Corps managed to appear on _neither_ field. Wellington more than held
+his own; the Prussians at Ligny escaped, to fight two days later at
+Waterloo.
+
+Such are the facts, and they explain all that followed (see Map, next
+page).
+
+But it has rightly proved of considerable interest to historians to
+attempt to discover the human motives and the personal accidents of
+temperament and misunderstanding which led to so extraordinary a blunder
+as the utter waste of a whole army corps during a whole day, within an
+area not five miles by four.
+
+It is for the purpose of considering these human motives and personal
+accidents that I offer these pages; for if we can comprehend Erlon's
+error, we shall fill the only remaining historical gap in the story of
+Waterloo, and determine the true causes of that action's result.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+There are two ways of appreciating historical evidence. The first is the
+lawyer's way: to establish the pieces of evidence as a series of
+disconnected units, to docket them, and then to see that they are
+mechanically pieced together; admitting, the while, only such evidence as
+would pass the strict and fossil rules of our particular procedure in the
+courts. This way, as might be inferred from its forensic origin, is
+particularly adapted to arriving at a foregone conclusion. It is useless
+or worse in an attempt to establish a doubtful truth.
+
+The second way is that by which we continually judge all real evidence
+upon matters that are of importance to us in our ordinary lives: the way
+in which we invest money, defend our reputation, and judge of personal
+risk or personal advantage in every grave case.
+
+This fashion consists in admitting every kind of evidence, first hand,
+second hand, third hand, documentary, verbal, traditional, and judging the
+general effect of the whole, not according to set legal categories, but
+according to our general experience of life, and in particular of human
+psychology. We chiefly depend upon the way in which we know that men
+conduct themselves under the influence of such and such emotions, of the
+kind of truth and untruth which we know they will tell; and to this we add
+a consideration of physical circumstance, of the laws of nature, and hence
+of the degrees of probability attaching to the events which all this mass
+of evidence relates.
+
+It is only by this second method, which is the method of common-sense,
+that anything can be made of a doubtful historical point. The legal method
+would make of history what it makes of justice. Which God forbid!
+
+Historical points are doubtful precisely because there is conflict of
+evidence; and conflict of evidence is only properly resolved by a
+consideration of the psychology of witnesses, coupled with a consideration
+of the physical circumstances which limited the matter of their testimony.
+
+Judged by these standards, the fatal march and countermarch of Erlon
+become plain enough.
+
+His failure to help either Ney or Napoleon was not treason, simply because
+the man was not a traitor. It proceeded solely from obedience to orders;
+but these orders were fatal because Ney made an error of judgment both as
+to the real state of the double struggle--Quatre Bras, Ligny--and as to
+the time required for the countermarch. This I shall now show.
+
+Briefly, then:--
+
+Erlon, as he was leading his army corps up to help Ney, his immediate
+superior, turned it off the road before he reached Ney and led it away
+towards Napoleon.
+
+Why did he do this?
+
+It was because he had received, not indeed from his immediate superior,
+Ney himself, _but through a command of Napoleon's, which he knew to be
+addressed to Ney_, the order to do so.
+
+When Erlon had almost reached Napoleon he turned his army corps right
+about face and led it off back again towards Ney.
+
+Why did he do that?
+
+It was because he had received at that moment _a further peremptory order
+from Ney, his direct superior, to act in this fashion_.
+
+Such is the simple and common-sense explanation of the motives under which
+this fatal move and countermove, with its futile going and coming, with
+its apparent indecision, with its real strictness of military discipline,
+was conducted. As far as Erlon is concerned, it was no more than the
+continual obedience of orders, or supposed orders, to which a soldier is
+bound. With Ney's responsibility I shall deal in a moment.
+
+Let me first make the matter plainer, if I can, by an illustration.
+
+Fire breaks out in a rick near a farmer's house and at the same time in a
+barn half a mile away. The farmer sends ten men with water-buckets and an
+engine to put out the fire at the barn, while he himself, with another ten
+men, but without an engine, attends to the rick. He gives to his foreman,
+who is looking after the barn fire, the task of giving orders to the
+engine, and the man at the engine is told to look to the foreman and no
+one else for his orders. The foreman is known to be of the greatest
+authority with his master. Hardly has the farmer given all these
+instructions when he finds that the fire in the rick has spread to his
+house. He lets the barn go hang, and sends a messenger to the foreman with
+an urgent note to send back the engine at once to the house and rick. The
+messenger finds the man with the engine on his way to the barn, intercepts
+him, and tells him that the farmer has sent orders to the foreman that the
+engine is to go back at once to the house. The fellow turns round with his
+engine and is making his way towards the house when another messenger
+comes posthaste _from the foreman direct_, telling him at all costs to
+bring the engine back to the barn. The man with the engine turns once
+more, abandons the house, but cannot reach the barn in time to save it.
+The result of the shilly-shally is that the barn is burnt down, and the
+fire at the farmer's house only put out after it has done grave damage.
+
+The farmer is Napoleon. His rick and house are Ligny. The foreman is Ney,
+and the barn is Quatre Bras. The man with the engine is Erlon, and the
+engine is Erlon's command--the First Corps d'Armee.
+
+There was no question of _contradictory_ orders in Erlon's mind, as many
+historians seem to imagine; there was simply, from Erlon's standpoint, a
+_countermanded_ order.
+
+He had received, indeed, an order coming from the Emperor, but he had
+received it only as the subordinate of Ney, and only, as he presumed, with
+Ney's knowledge and consent, either given or about to be given. In the
+midst of executing this order, he got another order countermanding it, and
+proceeding directly from his direct superior. He obeyed this second order
+as exactly as he had obeyed the first.
+
+Such is, undoubtedly, the explanation of the thing, and Ney's is the mind,
+the person, historically responsible for the whole business.
+
+Let us consider the difficulties in the way of accepting this conclusion.
+The first difficulty is that Ney would not have taken it upon himself to
+countermand an order of Napoleon's. Those who argue thus neither know the
+character of Ney nor the nature of the struggle at Quatre Bras; and they
+certainly underestimate both the confusion and the elasticity of warfare.
+Ney, a man of violent temperament (as, indeed, one might expect with such
+courage), was in the heat of the desperate struggle at Quatre Bras when he
+received Napoleon's order to abandon his own business (a course which was,
+so late in the action, physically impossible). Almost at the same moment
+Ney heard most tardily from a messenger whom Erlon had sent (a Colonel
+Delcambre) that Erlon, with his 20,000 men--Erlon, who had distinctly been
+placed under his orders--was gone off at a tangent, and was leaving him
+with a grossly insufficient force to meet the rapidly swelling numbers of
+Wellington. We have ample evidence of the rage into which he flew, and of
+the fact that he sent back Delcambre with the absolutely positive order to
+Erlon that he should turn round and come back to Quatre Bras.
+
+Of course, if war were clockwork, if there were no human character in a
+commander, if no latitude of judgment were understood in the very nature
+of a great independent command such as Ney's was upon that day, if there
+were always present before every independent commander's mental vision an
+exact map of the operations, and, _at the same time_, a plan of the exact
+position of all the troops upon it at any given moment--if all these
+armchair conceptions of war were true, then Ney's order would have been
+as undisciplined in character and as foolish in intention as it was
+disastrous in effect.
+
+But such conceptions are not true. Great generals entrusted with separate
+forces, and told off to engage in a great action at a distance from the
+supreme command, have, by the very nature of their mission, the widest
+latitude of judgment left to them. They are perfectly free to decide, in
+some desperate circumstance, that if their superior knew of that
+circumstance, he would understand why an afterorder of his was not obeyed,
+or was even directly countermanded. That Ney should have sent this furious
+counterorder, therefore, to Erlon, telling him to come back instantly, in
+spite of Napoleon's first note, though it was a grievous error, is one
+perfectly explicable, and parallel to many other similar incidents that
+diversify the history of war. In effect, Ney said to himself: "The Emperor
+has no idea of the grave crisis at _my_ end of the struggle or he wouldn't
+have sent that order. He is winning, anyhow; I am actually in danger of
+defeat; and if I am defeated, Wellington's troops will pour through and
+come up on the Emperor's army from the rear and destroy it. I have a
+right, therefore, to summon Erlon back." Such was the rationale of Ney's
+decision. His passionate mood did the rest.
+
+A second and graver difficulty is this: By the time Erlon got the message
+to come back, it was so late that he could not possibly bring his 20,000
+up in time to be of any use to Ney at Quatre Bras. They could only arrive
+on the field, as they did in fact arrive, when darkness had already set
+in. It is argued that a general in Ney's position would have rapidly
+calculated the distance involved, and would have seen that it was useless
+to send for his subordinate at such an hour.
+
+The answer to this suggestion is twofold. In the first place, a man under
+hot fire is capable of making mistakes; and Ney was, at the moment when he
+gave that order, under the hottest fire of the whole action. In the second
+place, he could not have any very exact idea of where in all those four
+miles of open fields behind him the head of Erlon's column might be, still
+less where exactly Delcambre would find it by the time he had ridden back.
+A mile either way would have made all the difference; if Erlon was
+anywhere fairly close; if Delcambre knew exactly where to find him, and
+galloped by the shortest route--if this and if that, it might still be
+that Erlon would turn up just before darkness and decide the field in
+Ney's favour.[11]
+
+Considerable discussion has turned on whether, as the best authorities
+believe, Erlon did or did not receive a pencilled note written personally
+to him by the Emperor, telling him to turn at once and come to his,
+Napoleon's, aid, and by his unexpected advent upon its flank destroy the
+Prussian army.
+
+As an explanation of the false move of Erlon back and forth, the existence
+of this note is immaterial. The weight of evidence is in its favour, and
+men will believe or disbelieve it according to the way in which they judge
+human character and motive. For the purposes of a dramatic story the
+incident of a little pencilled note to Erlon is very valuable, but as an
+elucidation of the historical problem it has no importance, for, even if
+he got such a note, Erlon only got it in connection with general orders,
+which, he knew, were on their way to _Ney_, his superior.
+
+The point for military history is that--
+
+(_a_) Erlon, with the First Corps, on his way up to Quatre Bras that
+afternoon, was intercepted by a messenger, who told him that the Emperor
+wanted him to turn off eastward and go to Ligny, and not to Quatre Bras;
+while--
+
+(_b_) He also knew that that message was intended also to be delivered,
+and either had been or was about to be delivered, to his superior officer,
+Ney. Therefore he went eastward as he had been told, believing that Ney
+knew all about it; and therefore, also, on receiving a further direct
+order from Ney to turn back again westward, he did turn back.
+
+If we proceed to apportion the blame for that disastrous episode, which,
+by permitting Blucher to escape, was the plain cause of Napoleon's
+subsequent defeat at Waterloo, it is obvious that the blame must fall upon
+Ney, who could not believe, in the heat of the violent action in which he
+was involved, that Napoleon's contemporary action against Ligny could be
+more decisive or more important than his own. It was a question of
+exercising judgment, and of deciding whether Napoleon had justly judged
+the proportion between his chances of a great victory and Ney's chances;
+and further, whether a great victory at Ligny would have been of more
+effect than a great victory or the prevention of a bad defeat at Quatre
+Bras. Napoleon was right and Ney was wrong.
+
+I have heard or read the further suggestion that Napoleon, on seeing
+Erlon, or having him reported, not two miles away, should have sent him
+further peremptory orders to continue his march and to come on to Ligny.
+
+This is bad history. Erlon, as it was, was heading a trifle too much to
+the south, so that Napoleon, who thought the whole of Ney's command to be
+somewhat further up the Brussels road northward than it was, did not guess
+at first what the new troops coming up might be, and even feared they
+might be a detachment of Wellington's, who might have defeated Ney, and
+now be coming in from the west to attack _him_.
+
+He sent an orderly to find out what the newcomers were. The orderly
+returned to report that the troops were Erlon's, but that they had turned
+back. Had Napoleon sent again, after this, to find Erlon, and to make him
+for a third time change his direction, it would have been altogether too
+late to have used Erlon's corps d'armee at Ligny by the time it should
+have come up. Napoleon had, therefore, no course before him but to do as
+he did, namely, give up all hope of help from the west, and defeat the
+Prussians at Ligny before him, if not decisively, at least to the best of
+his ability, with the troops immediately to his hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So much for Erlon.
+
+Now for the second point: the way in which the units of Wellington's
+forces dribbled in all day haphazard upon the position of Quatre Bras.
+
+Wellington, as we saw on an earlier page, was both misinformed and
+confused as to the nature and rapidity of the French advance into Belgium.
+He did not appreciate, until too late, the importance of the position of
+Quatre Bras, nor the intention of the French to march along the great
+northern road. Even upon the field of Waterloo itself he was haunted by
+the odd misconception that Napoleon's army would try and get across his
+communications with the sea, and he left, while Waterloo was actually
+being fought, a considerable force useless, far off upon his right, on
+that same account.
+
+The extent of Wellington's misjudgment we can easily perceive and
+understand. Every general must, in the nature of war, misjudge to some
+extent the nature of his opponent's movements, but the shocking errors
+into which bad staff work led him in this his last campaign are quite
+exceptional.
+
+Wellington wrote to Blucher, on his arrival at the field of Quatre Bras,
+at about half-past ten in the morning, a note which distinctly left
+Blucher to understand that he might expect English aid during his
+forthcoming battle with Napoleon at Ligny. He did not say so in so many
+words, but he said: "My forces are at such and such places," equivalent,
+that is, to saying, "My forces can come up quite easily, for they are
+close by you," adding: "I do not see any large force of the enemy in front
+of us; and I await news from your Highness, and the arrival of troops, in
+order to determine my operations for the day."
+
+In this letter, moreover, he said in so many words that his reserve, the
+large body upon which he mainly depended, would be within three miles of
+him by noon, the British cavalry within seven miles of him at the same
+hour.
+
+Then he rode over to see Blucher on the field of Ligny before Napoleon's
+attack on that general had begun. He got there at about one o'clock.
+
+An acrimonious discussion has arisen as to whether he promised to come up
+and help Blucher shortly afterwards or not, but it is a discussion beside
+the mark, for, in the first place, Wellington quite certainly _intended_
+to come up and help the Prussians; and in the second place, he was quite
+as certainly _unable_ to do so, for the French opposition under Ney which
+he had under-estimated, turned out to be a serious thing.
+
+But his letter, and his undoubted intention to come up and help Blucher,
+depended upon his belief that the units of his army were all fairly close,
+and that by, say, half-past one he would have the whole lot occupying the
+heights of Quatre Bras.
+
+Now, as a fact, the units of Wellington's command were scattered all over
+the place, and it is astonishing to note the discrepancy between his idea
+of their position and their real position on the morning of the day when
+Quatre Bras was fought. When one appreciates what that discrepancy was,
+one has a measure of the bad staff work that was being done under
+Wellington at the moment.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+The plan (p. 127)[12] distinguishes between the real positions of
+Wellington's command on the morning of the 16th when he was writing his
+letter to Blucher and the positions which Wellington, in that letter,
+erroneously ascribes to them. It will show the reader the wide difference
+there was between Wellington's idea of where his troops were and their
+actual position on that morning. It needs no comment. It is sufficient in
+itself to explain why the action at Quatre Bras consisted not in a set
+army meeting and repelling the French (it could have destroyed them as
+things turned out, seeing Erlon's absence), but in the perpetual arrival
+of separate and hurried units, which went on from midday almost until
+nightfall.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH ADVANCE UPON WATERLOO AND WAVRE
+
+
+When the Prussians had concentrated to meet Napoleon at Ligny they had
+managed to collect, in time for the battle, three out of their four army
+corps.
+
+These three army corps were the First, the Second, and the Third, and, as
+we have just seen, they were defeated.
+
+But, as we have also seen, they were not thoroughly defeated. They were
+not disorganised, still less were the bulk of them captured and disarmed.
+Most important of all, they were free to retreat by any road that did not
+bring them against their victorious enemy. In other words, they were free
+to retreat to the north as well as to the east.
+
+The full importance of this choice will, after the constant reiteration of
+it in the preceding pages, be clear to the reader. A retreat towards the
+east, and upon the line of communications which fed the Prussian army,
+would have had these two effects: First, it would have involved in the
+retirement that fresh Fourth Army Corps under Bulow which had not yet come
+into action, and which numbered no less than 32,000 men. For it lay to the
+east of the battlefield. In other words, that army corps would have been
+wasted, and the whole of the Prussian forces would have been forced out of
+the remainder of the campaign. Secondly, it would have finally separated
+Blucher and his Prussians from Wellington's command. The Duke, with his
+western half of the allied forces, would have had to stand up alone to the
+mass of Napoleon's army, which would, after the defeat of the Prussians at
+Ligny, naturally turn to the task of defeating the English General.
+
+Now the fact of capital importance upon which the reader must concentrate
+if he is to grasp the issue of the campaign is the fact that the French
+staff fell into an error as to the true direction of the Prussian retreat.
+
+Napoleon, Soult, and all the heads of the French army were convinced that
+the Prussian retreat _was_ being made by that eastern road.
+
+As a fact, the Prussians, under the cover of darkness, had retired _not_
+east but north.
+
+The defeated army corps, the First, Second, and Third, did not fall back
+upon the fresh and unused Fourth Corps; they left it unhampered to march
+northward also; and all during the darkness the Prussian forces, as a
+whole, were marching in roughly parallel columns upon Wavre and its
+neighbourhood.
+
+It was this escape to the north instead of the east that made it possible
+for the Prussians to effect their junction with Wellington upon the day of
+Waterloo; but it must not be imagined that this supremely fortunate
+decision to abandon the field of their defeat at Ligny in a northerly
+rather than an easterly direction was at first deliberately conceived by
+the Prussians with the particular object of effecting a junction with
+Wellington later on.
+
+In the first place, the Prussians had no idea what line Wellington's
+retreat would take. They knew that he was particularly anxious about his
+communications with the sea, and quite as likely to move westward as
+northward when Napoleon should come against him.
+
+The full historical truth, accurately stated, cannot be put into the
+formula, "The Prussians retreated northward in order to be able to join
+Wellington two days later at Waterloo." To state it so would be to read
+history backwards, and to presuppose in the Prussian staff a knowledge of
+the future. The true formula is rather as follows:--"The Prussians retired
+northward, and not eastward, because the incompleteness of their defeat
+permitted them to do so, and thus at once to avoid the waste of their
+Fourth Army Corps and to gain positions where they would be able, if
+necessity arose, to get news of what had happened to Wellington."
+
+In other words, to retreat northwards, though the decision to do so
+depended only upon considerations of the most general kind, was wise
+strategy, and the opportunity for that piece of strategy was seized; but
+the retreat northwards was not undertaken with the specific object of at
+once rejoining Wellington.
+
+It must further be pointed out that this retreat northwards, though it
+abandoned the fixed line of communications leading through Namur and Liege
+to Aix la Chapelle, would pick up in a very few miles another line of
+communications through Louvain, Maestricht, and Cologne. The Prussian
+commanders, in determining upon this northward march, were in no way
+risking their supply nor hazarding the existence of their army upon a
+great chance. They were taking advantage of one of two courses left open
+to them, and that one the wiser of the two.
+
+This retreat upon Wavre was conducted with a precision and an endurance
+most remarkable when we consider the fact that it took place just after a
+severe, though not a decisive, defeat.
+
+Of the eighty odd thousand Prussians engaged at Ligny, probably 12,000 had
+fallen, killed or wounded. When the Prussian centre broke, many units
+became totally disorganised; and, counting the prisoners and runaways who
+failed to rejoin the colours, we must accept as certainly not exaggerated
+the Prussian official report of a loss of 15,000.[13]
+
+In spite, I say, of this severe defeat, the order of the retreat was well
+maintained, and was rewarded by an exceptional rapidity.
+
+The First Corps marched along the westerly route that lay directly before
+them by Tilly and Mont St Guibert. They marched past Wavre itself, and
+bivouacked about midday of Saturday the 17th, round about the village of
+Bierges, on the other side of the river Dyle.
+
+The Second Corps followed the First, and ended its march on the southern
+side of Wavre, round about the village of St Anne.
+
+The Third Corps did not complete the retreat until the end of daylight
+upon the 17th, and then marched through Wavre, across the river to the
+north, and bivouacked around La Bavette.
+
+Finally, still later on the same evening, the Fourth Corps, that of Bulow,
+which had come to Ligny too late for the action, marching by the eastward
+lanes, through Sart and Corry, lay round Dion Le Mont.
+
+By nightfall, therefore, on Saturday the 17th of June, we have the mass of
+the Prussian army safe round Wavre, and duly disposed all round that town
+in perfect order.
+
+With the exception of a rearguard, which did not come up until the morning
+of the Sunday, all had been safely withdrawn in the twenty-four hours that
+followed the defeat at Ligny.
+
+It may be asked why this great movement had been permitted to take place
+without molestation from the victors.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Napoleon would naturally, of course, after his defeat of the Prussians,
+withdraw to the west the greater part of the forces he had used against
+Blucher at Ligny and direct them towards the Brussels road in order to use
+them next against Wellington. But Napoleon had left behind him Grouchy in
+supreme command over a great body of troops, some 33,000 in all, whose
+business it was to follow up the Prussians, to find out what road they had
+taken; at the least to watch their movements, and at the best to cut off
+any isolated bodies or to give battle to any disjointed parts which the
+retreat might have separated from support. In general, Grouchy was to see
+to it that the Prussians did not return.
+
+In this task Grouchy failed. True, he was not given his final instructions
+by the Emperor until nearly midday of the 17th, but a man up to his work
+would have discovered the line of the Prussian retreat and have hung on to
+it. Grouchy failed, partly because he was insufficiently provided with
+cavalry, partly because he was a man excellent only in a sudden tactical
+dilemma, incompetent in large strategical problems, partly because he
+mistrusted his subordinates, and they him; but most of all because of an
+original prepossession (under which, it is but fair to him to add, all the
+French leaders lay) that the Prussian retreat had taken the form of a
+flight towards Namur, along the eastern line of communications, while, as
+a fact, it had taken the form of a disciplined retreat upon Wavre and the
+north.
+
+At ten o'clock in the evening of Saturday the 17th, twenty-four hours
+after the battle of Ligny, and at the moment when the whole body of the
+Prussian forces was already reunited in an orderly circle round Wavre,
+Grouchy, twelve miles to the south of them, was beginning--but only
+beginning--to discover the truth. He wrote at that hour to the Emperor
+that "the Prussians had retired in several directions," one body towards
+Namur, another with Blucher the Commander-in-chief towards Liege, _and a
+third body apparently towards Wavre_. He even added that he was going to
+find out whether it might not be the larger of the three bodies which had
+gone towards Wavre, and he appreciated that whoever had gone towards Wavre
+intended keeping in touch with the rest of the Allies under Wellington.
+But all that Grouchy did after writing this letter proves how little he,
+as yet, really believed that any great body of the enemy had marched on
+Wavre. He anxiously sent out, not northward, but eastward and
+north-eastward, to feel for what he believed to be the main body of the
+retreating foe.
+
+During the night he did become finally convinced by the mass of evidence
+brought in by his scouts that round Wavre was the whole Prussian force,
+and the conclusion that he came to was singular! He took it for granted
+that through Wavre the Prussians certainly intended a full retreat on
+Brussels. He wrote at daybreak of the 18th of June that he was about to
+pursue them.
+
+That Blucher could dream of taking a short cut westward, thus effecting an
+immediate junction with Wellington, never entered Grouchy's head. He did
+not put his army in motion until after having written this letter. He
+advanced his troops in a decent and leisurely manner up the Wavre road
+through the mid hours of the day, and himself, just before noon, wrote a
+dispatch to the Emperor; he wrote it from Sart, a point ten miles south of
+Wavre. In that letter he announced "his intention to be massed at Wavre
+_that night_," and begging for "orders as to how he should begin his
+attack of the _next day_."
+
+The next day! Monday!
+
+Already, hours before--by midnight of Saturday--Blucher had sent his
+message to Wellington assuring him that the Prussians would come to his
+assistance upon Sunday, the morrow.
+
+Even as Grouchy was writing, the Prussian Corps were streaming westward
+across country to appear upon Napoleon's flank four hours later and decide
+the campaign.
+
+Having written his letter, Grouchy sat down to lunch. As he sat there at
+meat, far off, the first shots of the battle of Waterloo were fired.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So far, we have followed the retreat of the Prussians northwards from
+their defeat at Ligny. With the exception of the rearguard, they were all
+disposed by the evening of Saturday the 17th in an orderly fashion round
+the little town of Wavre. We have also followed the methodical but tardy
+and ill-conceived pursuit in which Grouchy felt out with his cavalry to
+discover the line of the Prussian retreat, and continued to be in doubt of
+its nature at least until midnight, and probably until even later than
+midnight, in that night between Saturday the 17th, evening, and Sunday the
+18th of June.
+
+We have further seen that during the morning of Sunday the 18th of June he
+was taking no dispositions for a rapid pursuit, but, being now convinced
+that the Prussians merely intended a general retreat upon Brussels,
+proposed to follow them in order to watch that retreat, and, if possible,
+to shepherd them eastwards. He wrote, as we have just said, to the Emperor
+in the course of that morning of the Sunday, announcing that he meant to
+mass his troops at Wavre by nightfall, and asking for orders for the next
+day.
+
+What the Prussians were doing during that Sunday morning when Grouchy was
+so quietly and soberly taking for granted that they could not or would not
+rejoin Wellington, and was so quietly shielding his own responsibility
+behind the Emperor's orders, we shall see when we come to talk of the
+action itself--the battle of Waterloo.
+
+Meanwhile we must return to the second half of the great strategic move,
+and watch the retreat of the Duke of Wellington during that same Saturday,
+and the stand which he made on the ridge called "the Mont St Jean" by the
+nightfall of that day, in order to accept battle on the Sunday morning.
+
+An observer watching the whole business of that Saturday from some height
+in the air above the valley of the Sambre, and looking northwards, would
+have seen on the landscape below, to his right, the Prussians streaming in
+great parallel columns upon Wavre from the battlefield of Ligny. He would
+have seen, scattered upon the roads, small groups of mounted men, here in
+touch with the last files of a Prussian column, there lost and wandering
+forward into empty spaces where no soldiers were. These were the cavalry
+scouts of Grouchy. South of these, and far behind the Prussian rear,
+separated from them by a gap of ten miles, a dense body of infantry, drawn
+up in heavy columns of route, was the corps commanded by Grouchy.
+
+What would such an observer have seen upon the landscape below and before
+him to his left? He would have seen an interminable line of men streaming
+northward also, all afternoon, up the Brussels road from Quatre Bras; and
+behind them, treading upon their heels, another column, miles in length,
+pressing the pursuit. The retreating column, as it hurried off, he would
+see screened on its rear by a mass of cavalry, that from time to time
+charged and checked the pursuers, and sometimes put guns in line to hold
+them back. The pursuers, after each such check, would still press on. The
+first, the thousands in retreat, were Wellington's command retiring from
+Quatre Bras; the second, the pursuers, were a body some 74,000 strong
+formed by the junction of Ney and Napoleon, and pressing forward to bring
+Wellington to battle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Quatre Bras, Wellington had not been able, as he had hoped, to join the
+Prussians and save them from defeat. The French, under Ney, had held him
+up. He would even have suffered a reverse had Ney attacked promptly and
+strongly earlier in the day of Friday the 16th, but Ney had not acted
+promptly and strongly.
+
+All day long reinforcements had come in one after the other, much later
+than the Duke intended, but in a sufficient measure to meet the tardy and
+too cautious development of Ney's attack. Finally, the real peril under
+which the Duke lay (though he did not know it)--the junction of Erlon and
+his forces with Ney--had not taken place until darkness fell, and Erlon's
+20,000 had been wasted in the futile fashion which has been described and
+analysed.
+
+The upshot, therefore, of the whole business at Quatre Bras was, that
+during the night between Friday and Saturday the 16th and the 17th the
+English and the French lay upon their positions, neither seriously
+incommoding the other.
+
+During that night further reinforcements reached Wellington where his
+troops had bivouacked upon the positions they had held so well. Lord
+Uxbridge, in command of the British cavalry, and Ompteda's brigade both
+came up with the morning, as did also Clinton's division and Colville's
+division, and so did the reserve artillery.
+
+In spite of all these reinforcements, in spite even of the great mass of
+horse which Uxbridge had brought up, and of the new guns, Wellington's
+position upon that morning of Saturday the 17th of June was, though he did
+not yet know it, very perilous.
+
+He still believed that the Prussians were holding on to Ligny, and that
+they had kept their positions during the night, which night he had himself
+spent at Genappe, to the rear of the battlefield of Quatre Bras.[14]
+
+When Wellington awoke on the morning of Saturday in Genappe, there were
+rumours in the place that the Prussians had been defeated the day before
+at Ligny. The Duke went at once to Quatre Bras; sent Colonel Gordon off
+eastward with a detachment of the Tenth Hussars to find out what had
+happened, and that officer, finding the road from Ligny in the hands of
+the French, had the sense to scout up northwards, came upon the tail of
+the Prussian retreat, and returned to Wellington at Quatre Bras by
+half-past seven with the whole story: the Prussians had indeed been
+beaten; they were in full retreat; but a chance of retreat had lain open
+towards the north, and that was the road they had taken.
+
+Wellington knew, therefore, before eight o'clock on that Saturday morning,
+that his whole left or eastern flank was exposed, and it was common-sense
+to expect that Napoleon, with the main body of the French, having defeated
+the Prussians at Ligny, would now march against himself, come up upon that
+exposed flank (while Ney held the front), and so outnumber the Anglo-Dutch
+under the Duke's command. At the worst that command would be destroyed; at
+the best it could only hope, if it gave time for Napoleon to come up, to
+have to retreat westward, and to lose touch, for good, with the
+Prussians.
+
+In such a plight it was Wellington's business to retreat towards the
+north, so as to remain in touch with his Prussian allies, while yet that
+line of retreat was open to him, and before Napoleon should have forced a
+battle.
+
+
+[Illustration: Sketch showing the situation in which Wellington was at
+Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th.]
+
+
+The Duke was in no hurry to undertake this movement, for as yet there was
+no sign of Napoleon's arrival. The men breakfasted, and it was not until
+ten o'clock that the retreat began. He sent word back up the road to stop
+the reinforcements that were still upon their way to join him at Quatre
+Bras, and to turn them round again up the Brussels road, the way they had
+come, until they should reach the ridge of the Mont St Jean, just in front
+of the village of Waterloo, where he had determined to stand. This done,
+he made his dispositions for retirement, and a little after ten o'clock
+the retreat upon Waterloo began. His English infantry led the retreat, the
+Netherland troops following, then the Brunswickers, and the last files of
+that whole great body of men were marching up the Brussels road northward
+before noon. Meanwhile, Lord Uxbridge, with his very considerable force of
+cavalry and the guns necessary to support it, deployed to cover the
+retreat, and watched the enemy.
+
+That enemy was motionless. Ney did not propose to attack until Napoleon
+should come up. Napoleon and his troops, arriving from the battlefield of
+Ligny, were not visible until within the neighbourhood of two o'clock. As
+he came near the Emperor was perceived, his memorable form distinguished
+in the midst of a small escorting body, urging the march; and the English
+guns, during one of those rare moments in which war discovers something of
+drama, fired upon the man who was the incarnation of all that furious
+generation of arms. In a military study, this moment, valuable to civilian
+history, may be neglected.
+
+The flood of French troops arriving made it hard for Uxbridge, in spite of
+his very numerous cavalry and supporting guns, to cover Wellington's
+retreat.
+
+The task was, however, not only successfully but nobly accomplished. Just
+as the French came up the sky had darkened and a furious storm had broken
+from the north-west upon the opposing forces. It was in the midst of a
+rain so violent that friend could be hardly distinguished from foe at
+thirty yards distance that the pursuit began, and to the noise of limbers
+galloped furiously to avoid capture, and of all those squadrons pursuing
+and pursued, was joined an incessant thunder.
+
+Things are accomplished in war which do not fit into the framework of its
+largest stories, and tend, therefore, to be lost. Overshadowed by the
+great story of Waterloo, the work which Lord Uxbridge and his Horse did on
+that afternoon of Saturday the 17th of June is too often forgotten.
+
+The ability and the energy displayed were equal.
+
+The first deployment to meet the French advance, the watching of the
+retirement of Wellington's main body, the continual appreciation of ground
+during a rapid and dangerous movement and in the worst of weather, the
+choice of occasional artillery positions--all these showed mastery, and
+secured the complete order of Wellington's retreat.[15]
+
+The pursuit was checked at its most important point (where the French had
+to cross the river Dyle at Genappe) by a rapid deployment of the cavalry
+upon the slope beyond the stream, a rapid unlimbering of the batteries in
+retreat, and a double charge, first of the Seventh Hussars, next of the
+First Life Guards.
+
+These charges were successful, they checked the French, and during the
+remainder of the afternoon the pursuit to the north of the Dyle slackened
+off until, before darkness, it ceased altogether.
+
+Indeed, there was by that time no further use in it. The mass of
+Wellington's army had reached, and had deployed upon, that ridge of the
+Mont St Jean where he intended to turn and give battle. They were in a
+position to receive any immediate attack, and the purposes of mere pursuit
+were at an end.
+
+Facing that ridge of the Mont St Jean, where, at the end of the afternoon
+and through the evening, Wellington's troops were already taking up their
+positions, was another ridge, best remembered by the name of a farm upon
+its crest, the "Belle Alliance." This ridge formed the natural
+halting-place of the pursuers. From the height above Genappe to the ridge
+of the Belle Alliance was but 5000 yards; and if a further reason be
+quoted for the cessation of the pursuit and the ranging into battle array
+of either force, the weather will provide that reason.
+
+The soil of all these fields is of a peculiar black and consistent sort,
+almost impassable after a drenching rain. The great paved high road which
+traverses it was occupied and encumbered by the wheeled vehicles and by
+the artillery. A rapid advance of infantry bodies thrown out to the right
+and left of the road, and so securing speed by parallel advance, was made
+impossible by mud, and the line grew longer and longer down the main road,
+forbidding rapid movement. From mud, that "fifth element in war" (as
+Napoleon himself called it), Wellington's troops--the mass of them at
+least--had been fairly free. They had reached their positions before the
+downpour. Only the cavalry of the rearguard and its batteries had felt the
+full force of the storm. Dry straw of the tall standing crops had been cut
+on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, and the men of Wellington's command
+bivouacked as well as might be under such weather.
+
+With the French it was otherwise. Their belated units kept straggling in
+until long after nightfall. The army was drawn up only at great expense of
+time and floundering effort, mainly in the dark, drenched, sodden with
+mud, along the ridge of the Belle Alliance. It was with difficulty that
+the wood of the bivouac fires could be got to burn at all. They were
+perpetually going out; and all that darkness was passed in a misery which
+the private soldier must silently expect as part of his trade, and which
+is relieved only by those vague corporate intuitions of a common peril,
+and perhaps a common glory, which, down below all the physical business,
+form the soul of an army.
+
+Napoleon, when he had inspected all this and assured himself that
+Wellington was standing ranged upon the opposite ridge, returned to sleep
+an hour or two at the farm called Le Caillou, a mile behind the line of
+bivouacs. Wellington took up his quarters in the village of Waterloo,
+about a mile and a half behind the bivouacs of his troops upon the Mont St
+Jean.
+
+In such a disposition the two commanders and their forces waited for the
+day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There must, lastly, be considered, before the description of action is
+entered on, the nature of the field upon which it was about to be
+contested. That field had been studied by Wellington the year before. He,
+incomparably the greatest tactical defensive commander of his time, and
+one of the greatest of all time, had chosen it for its capacities of
+defence. They were formidable. Relying upon them, and confident of the
+Prussians coming to his aid when the battle was joined, he rightly counted
+upon success.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us begin by noting that of no battle is it more important to seize the
+exact nature of the terrain, that is, of the ground over which it was
+fought, than of Waterloo.
+
+To the eye the structure of the battlefield is simple, consisting
+essentially of two slight and rounded ridges, separated by a very shallow
+undulation of land.
+
+But this general formation is complicated by certain features which can
+only be grasped with the aid of contours, and these contours, again, are
+not very easy to follow at first sight for those who have not seen the
+battlefield.
+
+In the map which forms the frontispiece of this volume, and to which I
+will beg the reader to turn, I have indicated the undulations of land in
+pale green lines underlying the other features of the battle, which are in
+black, red, and blue. The contours are drawn at five metres (that is 16
+feet 4 inches) distance; no contours are given below that of 100 metres
+above the sea. The valley floors below that level are shaded. Up to the
+120-metre line the contours are indicated by continuous lines of
+increasing thickness. Above the 120-metre line they are indicated by faint
+dotted or dashed lines. I hope in this manner, though the task is a
+difficult one, to give a general impression of the field.
+
+The whole field, both slight ridges and the intervening depression, lies
+upon a large swell of land many square miles in extent, while it slopes
+away gradually to the east on one side and the west on the other. The
+highest and hardly distinguishable knolls of it stand about 450 feet above
+the sea. The site of the battle lies actually on the highest part, the
+water-parting; and the floors of the valleys, down which the streams run
+to the east and to the west, are from 150 to 200 feet lower than this
+confused lift of land between. To one, however, standing upon any part of
+the battlefield, this feature of height is not very apparent. True, one
+sees lower levels falling away left and right, and the view seems oddly
+wide, but the eye gathers the impression of little more than a rolling
+plain. This is because, in comparison with the scale of the landscape as a
+whole, the elevations and depressions are slight.
+
+Upon this rolling mass of high land there stand out, as I have said, those
+two slight ridges, and these ridges lie, roughly speaking, east and
+west--perpendicular to the great Brussels road, which cuts them from south
+to north. It was upon this great Brussels road that both Wellington and
+Napoleon took up, at distances less than a mile apart, their respective
+centres of position for the struggle. Though this line of the road did not
+precisely bisect the two lines of the opposing armies, the point where it
+crossed each line marked the tactical centre of that line: both Wellington
+and Napoleon remained in person upon that road.
+
+Now it must not be imagined that the shallow depression between the ridges
+stretches of even depth between the two positions taken up by Wellington
+and Napoleon, with the road cutting its middle; on the contrary, it is
+bridged, a little to the west of the road, by a "saddle," a belt of fields
+very nearly flat, and very nearly as high as each ridge. The eastern half
+of the depression therefore rises continually, and gets shallower and
+shallower as it approaches the road from east westward, and the road only
+cuts off the last dip of it. Then, just west of the road there is the
+saddle; and as you proceed still further westward along the line midway
+between the French and English positions you find a second shallow valley
+falling away. This second valley does not precisely continue the direction
+of the first, but turns rather more to the north. In the first slight
+decline of this second valley, and a few hundred yards west of the road,
+lies the country-house called Hougomont, and just behind it lay the
+western end of Wellington's line. The whole position, therefore, if it
+were cut out as a model in section from a block of wood, might appear as
+does the accompanying plan.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+In such a model the northern ridge P--Q some two miles in length is that
+held by Wellington. The southern one M--N is that held by Napoleon.
+Napoleon commanded from the point A, Wellington from the point B, and the
+dark band running from one to the other represents the great Brussels High
+Road. The subsidiary ridge O--O is that on which Napoleon, as we shall
+see, planted his great battery preparatory to the assault. The enclosure H
+is Hougomont, the enclosure S is La Haye Sainte.
+
+Of the two ridges, that held by Napoleon needs less careful study for the
+comprehension of the battle than that held by Wellington.
+
+The latter is known as the Ridge of the Mont St Jean, from a farm lying a
+little below its highest point and a little behind its central axis. This
+ridge Wellington had carefully studied the year before, and that great
+master of defence had noted and admired the excellence of its defensive
+character. Not only does the land rise towards the ridge through the whole
+length of the couple of miles his troops occupied, not only is it almost
+free of "dead"[16] ground, but there lie before it two walled enclosures,
+the small one of La Haye Sainte, the large one of Hougomont, which,
+properly prepared and loopholed as they were, were equivalent to a couple
+of forts standing out to break the attack. There is, again, behind the
+whole line of the ridge, lower ground upon which the Duke could and did
+conceal troops, and along which he could and did move them safely during
+the course of the action.
+
+Anyone acquainted with Wellington's various actions and their terrains
+will recognise a common quality in them: they were all chosen by an eye
+unequalled for seizing, even in where an immediate decision was necessary,
+all the capabilities of a defensive position. That taken up on the 18th of
+June 1815, in the Duke's last battle, had been chosen, not under the
+exigencies of immediate combat, but with full leisure and after a complete
+study. It is little wonder, then, that it is the best example of all. Of
+all the defensive positions which the genius of Wellington has made famous
+in Europe, none excels that of Waterloo.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ACTION
+
+
+In approaching this famous action, it is essential to recapitulate the
+strategical conditions which determined its result.
+
+I have mentioned them at the outset and again in the middle of this study;
+I must repeat them here.
+
+The only chance Napoleon had when he set forward in early June to attack
+the allies in Belgium, the vanguard of his enemies (who were all Europe),
+was a chance of surprising that vanguard, of striking in suddenly between
+its two halves, of thoroughly defeating one or the other, and then turning
+to defeat as thoroughly its colleague.
+
+Other chances than this desperate chance he had none; for he was fighting
+against odds of very nearly two to one even in his attack upon this mere
+vanguard of the armed kings; their total forces were, of course,
+overwhelmingly superior.
+
+He did succeed, as we have seen, in striking suddenly in between the two
+halves of the allied army in Belgium. He was not as quick as he had
+intended to be. There were faults and delays, but he managed, mainly
+through the malinformation and misjudgment of Wellington, to deal with the
+Prussians unsupported by Wellington's western wing.
+
+He attacked those Prussians with the bulk of his forces; and although he
+was outnumbered even upon that field, he defeated the Prussians at Ligny.
+But the defeat was not complete. The Prussians were free to retire
+northward, and so ultimately to rejoin Wellington. They took that
+opportunity, and from the moment they had taken it Napoleon was doomed.
+
+We have further seen that Grouchy, who had been sent after the Prussian
+retreat, might, if he had seen all the possibilities of that retreat, and
+had seen them in time, have stepped in between the Prussians and
+Wellington, and have prevented the appearance of the former upon the field
+of Waterloo.
+
+Had Grouchy done so, Waterloo would not have been the crushing defeat it
+was for Napoleon. It would very probably have been a tactical success for
+Napoleon.
+
+But, on the other hand, we have no ground for thinking that it would have
+been a final and determining success for the Emperor. For if Wellington
+had not known quite early in the action that he could count upon the
+arrival of the Prussians, he would not have accepted battle. If, as a
+fact, he had found the Prussians intercepted, he could have broken contact
+and retreated before it was too late.
+
+Had he done so, it would simply have meant that he would later have
+effected a junction with his allies, and that in the long-run Napoleon
+would still have had to fight an allied army immensely superior to his
+own.
+
+All this is as much as to say once more what has been insisted upon
+throughout these pages; Waterloo was lost, not upon Sunday, June 18th, but
+two days before, when the 63,000 of Napoleon broke and drove back the
+80,000 of Blucher but failed to contain them, failed to drive them
+eastward, away from Wellington, or to cause a general surrender, and
+failed because the First French Army Corps, under Erlon, a matter of
+20,000 men, failed to come up in flank at the critical moment.
+
+We have seen what the effect of that failure was; we have discussed its
+causes, and we must repeat the main fact for military history of all
+those four days: the breakdown of Napoleon's last desperate venture turned
+upon Erlon's useless marching and countermarching between Quatre Bras and
+Ligny, two days before the final action of Waterloo was fought.
+
+This being so, the battle of Waterloo must resolve itself into two main
+phases: the first, the beginning of the struggle with Wellington before
+the Prussians come up; the second, the main and decisive part of the
+action, in which both Prussians and English are combined against the
+French army.
+
+This second phase develops continually as the numbers of the arriving
+Prussians increase, until it is clinched by the appearance of Ziethen's
+corps at the very end of the day, and the break-up of the French army;
+this second part is therefore itself capable of considerable subdivision.
+But in any large and general view of the whole action, we must regard it
+as divided into these two great chapters, during the first of which is
+engaged the doubtful struggle between Napoleon and Wellington; during the
+second of which the struggle, no longer doubtful, is determined by the
+arrival of the Prussians in flank upon the field.
+
+
+[Illustration: ELEMENTS OF WATERLOO.]
+
+
+THE FIRST PART OF THE ACTION
+
+_Before the Arrival of the Prussians_
+
+The action was to take the form of an assault by Napoleon's forces against
+this defensive position held by Wellington. It was the business of
+Wellington, although his total force was slightly inferior to the enemy in
+numbers,[17] and considerably inferior in guns, to hold that defensive
+position until the Prussians should come up in flank. This he had had word
+would take place at latest by one or two o'clock. It was the business of
+Napoleon to capture the strong outworks, Hougomont and La Haye Sainte;
+and, that done, to hammer the enemy's line until he broke it. That delay
+in beginning this hammering would be fatal; that the Prussians were
+present upon his flank, could arrive in the midst of the battle, and were
+both confidently and necessarily expected by his enemy; that his simple
+single battle would turn into two increasingly complex ones, Napoleon
+could have no idea. Napoleon could see no need for haste. A long daylight
+was before him. It was necessary to let the ground dry somewhat after the
+terrible rain of the day before if artillery was to be used effectively;
+nor did he press his columns, which were moving into position all through
+the morning, and which had not completely deployed even by eleven o'clock.
+
+It was a little after that hour that he dictated to Soult the order of
+battle. Its first and effective phrases run as follows:--
+
+"Once the whole army is deployed, that is, at about half-past one, at the
+moment when the Emperor shall send the order to Marshal Ney, the attack is
+to be delivered. It will have for its object the capture of the village of
+Mont St Jean and the cross-roads...."
+
+The remainder of the order sets out forces to be engaged in this first
+attack.
+
+The French forces consisted in the IInd Army Corps deployed to the left or
+west of the road, the Ist to the right or east of it, and behind Napoleon,
+in the centre and in reserve, the VIth Corps and the Guard.
+
+The plan in the Emperor's mind was perfectly simple. There was to be no
+turning of the right nor of the left flank of the enemy, which would only
+have the effect of throwing back that enemy east or west. His line was to
+be pierced, the village of Mont St Jean which lay on the ridge of
+Wellington's position and which overlooks the plateau on every side was
+to be carried, and this done Napoleon would be free to decide upon his
+next action, according to the nature and extent of the disorder into which
+he had thrown the enemy's broken line.
+
+As a fact, Napoleon made a movement before that hour of half-past one
+which he had set down in his order for the beginning of the assault. That
+movement was a movement against the advanced and fortified position of
+Hougomont.
+
+He sent orders to his left, to the body on the east of the high road, the
+Second Army Corps, under Reille, to send troops to occupy the outer
+gardens, wood, and orchards of the country-house, and at twenty-five
+minutes to twelve the first gun fired in support of that movement was also
+the first cannonshot of Waterloo.
+
+After a brief artillery duel and exchange of cannonshots between the
+height on the French left, which overlooks Hougomont, and the
+corresponding height upon the English right, the French infantry began to
+march down the slope to occupy the little wood which stands to the south
+of the chateau. These four regiments were commanded by the Emperor's
+brother Jerome, who was--as we have seen at Quatre Bras--under the orders
+of Reille. The clearing of the wood was no very desperate affair, but it
+was a difficult one, and it took an hour. The Germans of Nassau and
+Hanover, who were charged with the defence of Hougomont and its
+approaches, stubbornly contested the standing trees and the cut-clearing
+which lay between them and the garden wall of the chateau.
+
+It must be clearly seized, at this early and even premature point in the
+action, that Napoleon's object in making this attack upon Hougomont was
+only to weaken Wellington's centre.
+
+Hougomont lay upon Wellington's right. Wellington had always been nervous
+of his right, and feared the turning of his line there, because, should he
+have to retreat, his communications would ultimately lie in that
+direction. It was for this reason that he had set right off at Braine
+l'Alleud, nearly a mile to the west of his line, the Dutch-Belgian
+Division of Chasse and sixteen guns, which force he connected with a
+reserve body at Hal, much further to the west.
+
+Napoleon judged that an attack on Hougomont before the action proper was
+begun, coming thus upon Wellington's right, would make him attempt to
+reinforce the place and degarnish his centre, where the Emperor intended
+the brunt of the attack to fall.
+
+Napoleon had no other intention that history can discover in pressing the
+attack against Hougomont so early. It was almost in the nature of a
+"feint." But when, towards half-past twelve, his brother's division had
+cleared the wood and come up against the high garden wall of the farm, for
+some reason which cannot be determined, whether the eagerness of the
+troops, the impulsiveness of Jerome himself, or whatever cause, instead of
+being contented with holding the wood according to orders, the French
+furiously attacked the loopholed and defended wall. They attempted to
+break in the great door, which was recessed, and therefore protected by a
+murderous cross-fire. They were beaten back into the wood, leaving a heap
+of dead. At this point Reille, according to his own account (which may
+well enough be accurate), sent orders for the division to remain in the
+wood, and not to waste itself against so strong an outpost. But Jerome and
+his men were not to be denied. They marched round the chateau, under a
+heavy artillery fire from the English batteries above, and attempted to
+carry the north wall. As they were so doing, four companies of the
+Coldstreams, the sole reinforcement which Wellington could be tempted to
+part with from his main line, came in reinforcement to the defence, and,
+after a sharp struggle, the French were thrust back once more.
+
+It was by that time past one o'clock, and this first furious attempt upon
+Hougomont, unintended by the Emperor, and a sheer waste, had doubly
+failed. It had failed in itself--the house and garden still remained
+untaken, the post was still held. It had failed in its object, which had
+been to draw Wellington, and to get him to send numerous troops from his
+centre to his right in defence of the threatened place.
+
+Meanwhile the Emperor, for whom this diversion of a few regiments against
+Hougomont was but a small matter, had prepared and was about to deliver
+his main attack.
+
+The reader will see upon the contours of the coloured map a definite spur
+of land marked with a broad green band in front of the French order of
+battle, and further marked by the green letter "B" in the very centre of
+the map. It was along this spur and at about one o'clock that the Emperor
+drew up a great battery of eighty pieces in order to prepare the assault
+upon the opposing ridge, which was to be delivered the moment their fire
+had ceased. Napoleon at that moment was watching his army and its
+approaching engagement from that summit upon the great road marked "A" in
+green upon my coloured map, whence the whole landscape to the north and
+west lies open.[18]
+
+There he received the report of Ney that the guns were ready, and only
+waiting for the order.
+
+A little while before the guns were ready and Ney had reported to that
+effect, Napoleon had received Grouchy's letter, in which it was announced
+that the mass of the Prussian army had retreated on Wavre. He had replied
+to it with instructions to Grouchy so to act that no Prussian corps at
+Wavre could come and join Wellington. Hardly had the Emperor dictated this
+reply when, looking northward and then eastward over the great view, he
+saw, somewhat over four miles away, a shadow, or a movement, or a stain
+upon the bare uplands towards Wavre; he thought that appearance to be
+companies of men. A few moments later a sergeant of Silesian Hussars,
+taken prisoner by certain cavalry detachments far out to the east, was
+brought in. He had upon him a letter sent from Bulow to Wellington
+announcing that the Prussians were at hand, and the prisoner further told
+the Emperor that the troops just perceived were the vanguard of the
+Prussian reinforcement. Thus informed, the Emperor caused a postscript to
+be added to his dictated letter, and bade Grouchy march at once towards
+this Prussian column, fall upon it while it was still upon the march and
+defenceless and destroy it.
+
+Such an order presupposed Grouchy's ability to act upon it; Napoleon took
+that ability for granted. But Grouchy, as a fact, could not act upon it in
+time. Hard riding could not get Napoleon's note to Grouchy's quarters
+within much less than an hour and a half. When it got there Grouchy
+himself must be found, and that done his 33,000 must be got together in
+order to take the new direction. Further, the Emperor could not know in
+what state Grouchy's forces might be, nor what direction they might
+already have taken. It should be mentioned, however, to explain Napoleon's
+evident hope at the moment of things going well, that _the prisoner had
+told the Emperor it was commonly believed in the Prussian lines that
+Grouchy was actually marching to join him, Napoleon, at that moment_.
+Napoleon sent some cavalry off eastward to watch the advent of the
+Prussians; he ordered his remnant of one army corps, the Sixth, which he
+had kept in reserve behind his line,[19] to march down the hill to the
+village of Plancenoit and stand ready to meet the Prussian attack; and
+having done all this, he made ready for the assault upon the ridge which
+Wellington's troops held.
+
+That assault was to be preceded, as I have said, by artillery preparation
+from the great battery of eighty guns which lay along the spur to the
+north and in front of the French line. For half an hour those guns filled
+the shallow valley with their smoke; at half-past one they ceased, and
+Erlon's First Corps d'Armee, fresh to the combat, because it had so
+unfortunately missed both Ligny and Quatre Bras, began to descend from its
+position, to cross the bottom, and to climb the opposite slope, while over
+the heads of the assaulting columns the French and English cannon answered
+each other from height to height.
+
+The advance across the valley, as will be apparent from the map, had upon
+its right the village of Papelotte, upon its left the farm of La Haye
+Sainte, and for its objective that highway which runs along the top of
+the ridge, and of which the most part was in those days a sunken road, as
+effective for defence as a regular trench.
+
+Following a practice which he never abandoned, which he had found
+universally successful, and upon which he ever relied, the Duke of
+Wellington had kept his British troops, the nucleus of his defensive plan,
+for the last and worst of the action. He had stationed to take the first
+brunt those troops upon which he least relied, and these were the first
+Dutch-Belgian brigade under Bijlandt. This body was stationed in front of
+the sunken road (at the point marked A in red upon the map). Behind it he
+had put Pack's brigade and Kemp's, both British; to the left of it, but
+also behind the road, Best's Hanoverian brigade. Papelotte village he held
+with Perponcher's Belgians.
+
+It will be seen that the crushing fire of the French eighty guns
+maintained for half an hour had fallen full upon the Dutch-Belgians,
+standing exposed upon the forward slope at a range of not more than 800
+yards.[20] At the French charge, though that was delivered through high
+standing crops and over drenched and slippery soil up the slope,
+Bijlandt's brigade broke. It is doubtful indeed whether any other troops
+would not have broken under such circumstances. Unfortunately the incident
+has been made the subject of repeated and most ungenerous accusation. A
+body purposely set forward before the whole line to stand such fearful
+pounding and to shelter the rest; one, moreover, which in two days of
+fighting certainly lost one-fourth of its number in killed and wounded,
+and probably lost more than one-third, is deserving of a much more
+chivalrous judgment than that shown by most historians in its regard.
+Anyhow, Kemp's brigade quickly filled the gap left by the failure of the
+Netherlanders, and began to press back the French charge.
+
+Meanwhile the French right, which had captured Papelotte, was compelled to
+retreat upon seeing the centre thus driven back, while the French left had
+failed to carry the farm of La Haye Sainte. Indeed upon this side, that
+is, in the neighbourhood of the great road, the check and reverse to the
+French assault had been more complete than elsewhere. An attempt to drive
+its first success home with a cavalry charge had been met by a
+countercharge, deservedly famous, in which, among other regiments, the
+First and Second Lifeguards, the Blues, the King's Dragoons, had broken
+the French horse and followed up the French retirement down the slope. The
+centre of that retirement was similarly charged by the Scots Greys; and in
+the end of the whole affair the English horsemen rode up to the spur where
+the great battery stood, sabred the gunners, and then, being thus advanced
+so uselessly and so dangerously from their line, were in their turn driven
+back to the English positions with bad loss.
+
+When this opening chapter of the battle closed, the net result was that
+the initial charge of the First Corps under Erlon had failed. It had left
+behind it many prisoners; certain guns which had advanced with it had been
+put out of action; it had lost two colours.
+
+Save for the furious inconsequent and almost purposeless fighting that was
+still raging far off to the left round Hougomont, the battle ceased. The
+valley between the opposing forces was strewn with the dead and dying, but
+no formed groups stood or moved among the fallen men. The swept slopes had
+all the appearance during that strange halt of a field already lost or
+won. The hour was between three and half-past in the afternoon, and so
+ended the first phase of the battle of Waterloo. It had lasted rather
+over two hours.
+
+
+THE SECOND PART OF THE ACTION
+
+The second and decisive phase of the battle of Waterloo differed from the
+first in this: In the first phase Napoleon was attacking Wellington's
+command alone. It was line against line. By hammering at the line opposed
+to him on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, Napoleon confidently expected to
+break it before the day should close. His first hammer blow, which was the
+charge of the First Army Corps under Erlon, had failed, and failed badly.
+The cavalry in support of that infantry charge had failed as well as their
+comrades, and the British in their turn had charged the retiring French,
+got right into their line, sabred their gunners, only to be broken in
+their turn by the counter-effort of further French horse.
+
+This first phase had ended in a sort of halt or faint in the battle, as I
+have described.
+
+The second phase was a very different matter. It developed into what were
+essentially two battles. It found Napoleon fighting not only against
+Wellington in front of him, but against Blucher to his right and almost
+behind him. It was no longer a simple business of hammering with the whole
+force of the French army at the British and their allies upon the ridge in
+front, but of desperately attempting to break the Anglo-Dutch line against
+time, with diminishing and perpetually reduced forces; with forces
+perpetually reduced by the necessity of sending more and more men off to
+the right to resist, if it were possible, the increasing pressure of the
+accumulating Prussian forces upon the right flank of the French.
+
+This second phase of the action at Waterloo began in the neighbourhood of
+four o'clock.
+
+It is true that the arriving Prussians had not yet debouched from the
+screen of wood that hid them two and a half miles away to the east, but at
+that hour (four o'clock) the heads of their columns were all ready to
+debouch, and the delay between their actual appearance upon the field and
+the beginning of the second half of the battle was not material to the
+result.
+
+That second half of the action began with a series of great cavalry
+charges which the Emperor had not designed, and which, even as he watched
+them, he believed would be fatal to him. As spectacles, these famous
+rides presented the most awful and memorable pageant in the history of
+modern war; as tactics they were erroneous, and grievously erroneous.
+
+Before this second phase of the battle was entered it was easily open to
+Napoleon, recognising the Prussians advancing and catching no sight of
+Grouchy, to change his plan, to abandon the offensive, to stand upon the
+defensive along the height which he commanded, there to await Grouchy,
+and, if Grouchy still delayed, to maintain the chances of an issue which
+might at least be negative, if he could prevent its being decisively
+disastrous.
+
+But even if such a conception had passed through the Emperor's mind,
+military science was against it. If ever those opposed to him had full
+time to concentrate their forces he would, even with the reinforcement of
+Grouchy, be fighting very nearly two to one. His obvious, one might say
+his necessary, plan was to break Wellington's line, if still it could be
+broken, before the full pressure of the arriving Prussians should be felt.
+Short of that, there could be nothing but immediate or ultimate disaster.
+
+We shall see how, much later in the action, yet another opportunity for
+breaking away, and for standing upon the defensive, or for retreating,
+was, in the opinion of some critics, offered to the Emperor by fate.
+
+But we shall see how, upon that second and later occasion in the day, his
+advantage in so doing was even less than it was now between this hour of
+half-past three and four o'clock, when he determined to renew the combat.
+
+He first sent orders to Ney to make certain of La Haye Sainte, to clear
+the enemy from that stronghold, which checked a direct assault upon the
+centre, and then to renew the general attack.
+
+La Haye Sainte was not taken at this first attempt. The French were
+repelled; the skirmishers, who were helping the direct attack by mounting
+the slope upon its right, were thrown back as well, and after this
+unsuccessful beginning of the movement the guns were called upon to
+prepare a further and more vigorous assault upon a larger scale. Not only
+the first great battery of eighty guns, but many of the batteries to the
+west of the Brussels road (which had hitherto been turned upon Hougomont
+and the English guns behind that position) were now directed upon the
+centre of the English line, and there broke out a cannonade even more
+furious than the one which had opened the action at one o'clock. Men
+trained in a generation's experience of war called it the most furious
+artillery effort of their time; and never, perhaps, even in the career of
+the Gunner who was now in the last extremity of his fate, had guns better
+served him.
+
+Under the battering of that discharge the front of Wellington's command
+was partially withdrawn behind the cover of the ridge. A stream of
+wounded, mixed with not a few men broken and flying, began to swell
+northward up the Brussels road; and Ney, imagining from such a sight that
+the enemy's line wavered, committed his capital error, and called upon the
+cavalry to charge.
+
+Wellington's line was not wavering. For the mass of the French cavalry to
+charge at such a moment was to waste irreparably a form of energy whose
+high potential upon the battlefield corresponds to a very rapid
+exhaustion, and which, invaluable against a front shaken and doubtful, is
+useless against a front still solid.
+
+It was not and could not have been the Emperor who ordered that false
+step. It is even uncertain whether the whole body of horsemen that moved
+had been summoned by Ney, or whether the rearmost did not simply follow
+the advance of their fellows. At any rate, the great group of mounted
+men[21] which lay in reserve behind the First Army Corps, and to the west
+of the road, passed in its entirety through the infantry, and began to
+advance at the trot down the valley for the assault upon the opposite
+slope.
+
+I repeat, it is not certain whether Ney called upon all this mass of
+cavalry and deliberately risked the waste of it in one blow. It is more
+probable that there was some misunderstanding; that Desnoettes' command,
+which was drawn up behind Milhaud's, followed Milhaud's, under the
+impression that a general order had been given to both; that Ney, seeing
+this extra body of horse following, imagined Napoleon to have given it
+orders. At any rate, Napoleon never gave such orders, and, from the height
+upon which he stood, could not have seen the first execution of them, for
+the first advance of that cavalry was hidden from him by a slight lift of
+land.
+
+There were 5000 mounted men drawn up in the hollow to the west of the
+Brussels road for the charge. It was not until they began to climb the
+slope that Napoleon saw what numbers were being risked, and perceived the
+full gravity of Ney's error.
+
+To charge unshaken infantry in this fashion, and to charge it without
+immediate infantry support, was a thing which that master of war would
+never have commanded, and which, when he saw it developing under the
+command of his lieutenant, filled him with a sense of peril. But it was
+too late to hesitate or to change the disposition of this sudden move. The
+5000 climbed at a slow and difficult trot through the standing crops and
+the thick mud of the rising ground, suffered--with a moment's
+wavering--the last discharge of the British guns, and then, on reaching
+the edge of the plateau, spurred to the gallop and charged.
+
+It was futile. They passed the line of guns (the gunners had orders to
+abandon their pieces and to retire within the infantry squares); they
+developed, in too short a start, too slight an impetus; they seethed, as
+the famous metaphor of that field goes, "like angry waves round rocks";
+they lashed against every side of the squares into which the allied
+infantry had formed. The squares stood.
+
+Wellington had had but a poor opinion of his command. It contained,
+indeed, elements more diverse and raw material in larger proportion than
+ever he, or perhaps any other general of the great wars, had had to deal
+with, but it was infantry hitherto unshaken; and the whole conception of
+that false movement, the whole error of that cavalry action, lay in the
+idea that the allied line had suffered in a fashion which it had been very
+far from suffering. Nothing was done against the squares; and the firmest
+of them, the nucleus of the whole resistance, were the squares of British
+infantry, three deep, against which the furious close-sabring, spurring,
+and fencing of sword with bayonet proved utterly vain. Upon this mass of
+horsemen moving tumultuous and ineffectual round the islands of foot
+resisting their every effort, Uxbridge, gathering all his cavalry,
+charged, and 5000 fresh horse fell upon the French lancers and
+cuirassiers, already shredded and lessened by grape at fifty yards and
+musket fire at ten. This countercharge of Uxbridge's cleared the plateau.
+The French horsemen turned bridle, fled to the hollow of the valley again,
+and the English gunners returned to their pieces. The whole fury of the
+thing had failed.
+
+But it had failed only for a moment. What remained of the French horse
+reformed and once again attempted to charge. Once again, for all their
+gravely diminished numbers, they climbed the slope; once again the squares
+were formed, and the torment of horsemen round about them struck once
+more.
+
+Seen from the point where Napoleon stood to the rear of his line, the high
+place that overlooked the battlefield, it seemed to eyes of less genius
+than his own that this second attempt had succeeded. Indeed, its fierce
+audacity seemed to other than the French observers at that distance to
+promise success. The drivers of the reserve batteries in the rear of
+Wellington's line were warned for retreat, and Napoleon, reluctant, but
+pressed by necessity, seeing one chance at last of victory by mere shock,
+himself sent forward a reserve of horse to support the distant cuirassiers
+and lancers. He called upon Kellerman, commanding the cavalry of the
+Guard, to follow up the charge.
+
+He knew how doubtful was the success of this last reinforcement, for he
+knew how ill-judged had been Ney's first launching of that great mass of
+horse at an unbroken enemy; but, now that the thing was done, lest,
+unsupported, it should turn to a panic which might gain the whole army, he
+risked almost the last mounted troops he had and sent them forward,
+acting thus like a man throwing good money after bad for fear that all may
+be lost.
+
+A better reason still decided Napoleon so to risk a very desperate chance,
+and to hurl Kellerman upon the heels of Milhaud. That reason was the
+advent, now accomplished, of the Prussians upon his right, and the
+necessity, imperative and agonised, of breaking Wellington's line before
+the whole strength of the newcomers should be felt upon the French flank
+and rear.
+
+Let us turn, then, and see how far and with what rapidity the Prussians at
+this moment--nearly half-past five o'clock--had accomplished their
+purpose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the four Prussian corps d'armee bivouacked in a circle round Wavre, and
+unmolested, as we have seen, by Grouchy, it was the fourth, that of Bulow,
+which was given the task of marching first upon the Sunday morning to
+effect the junction with Wellington. It lay, indeed, the furthest to the
+east of all the Prussian army,[22] but it was fresh to the fight, for it
+had come up too late to be engaged at Ligny. It was complete; it was well
+commanded.
+
+The road it had to traverse was not only long, but difficult. The passage
+of the river Lasne had to be effected across so steep a ravine and by so
+impassable a set of ways that the modern observer, following that march as
+the present writer has followed it, after rain and over those same fields
+and roads, is led to marvel that it was done in the time which Blucher's
+energy and the traditional discipline of the Prussian soldiers found
+possible. At any rate, the heads of the columns were on the Waterloo edge
+of the Wood of Fischermont[23] (or Paris) before four o'clock, and ready
+to debouch. Wellington had expected them upon the field by two o'clock at
+latest. They disappointed him by two hours, and nearly three, but the
+miracle is that they arrived when they did; and it is well here to
+consider in detail this feat which the Fourth Prussian Army Corps had
+accomplished, for it is a matter upon which our historians of Waterloo are
+often silent, and which has been most unfortunately neglected in this
+country.
+
+The Fourth Prussian Army Corps, under Bulow, lay as far east as Liege
+when, on the 14th of June, Napoleon was preparing to cross the Sambre.
+Its various units were all in the close neighbourhood of the town, so none
+of them were spared much of the considerable march which all were about to
+undertake to the west; even its most westward detachment was no more than
+three miles from Liege city.
+
+Bulow should have received the order to march westward at half-past ten on
+the morning of the 15th. The order, as we have seen in speaking of Ligny,
+was not delivered till the evening of that day. The Fourth Army Corps was
+told to concentrate in the neighbourhood of Hannut and a little east of
+that distant point. The corps, as a whole, did not arrive until the early
+afternoon of Friday the 16th.
+
+It is from this point--Hannut--that the great effort begins.
+
+Bulow, it must be remembered, commanded no less than 32,000 men. The
+fatigues and difficulties attendant upon the progress of such a body, most
+of it tied to one road, will easily be appreciated.
+
+During the afternoon of the 16th, while Ligny was being fought, he
+advanced the whole of this body to points immediately north and east of
+Gembloux. Not a man, therefore, of his great command had marched less than
+twenty miles, many must have marched over twenty-five, upon that Friday
+afternoon.
+
+Then followed the night during which the other three defeated corps fell
+back upon Wavre.
+
+That night was full of their confused but unmolested retreat. With the
+early morning of the Saturday Bulow's 32,000 fell back along a line
+parallel to the general retirement, and all that day they were making
+their way by the cross-country route through Welhain and Corroy to Dion Le
+Mont.
+
+This task was accomplished through pouring rain, by unpaved lanes and
+through intolerable mud, over a distance of close on seventeen miles for
+the hardest pushed of the troops, and not less than thirteen for those
+whom the accident of position had most spared.
+
+The greater part of the Fourth Corps had spent the first night in the
+open; all of it had spent the second night upon the drenched ground. Upon
+the _third_ day, the Sunday of Waterloo, this force, though it lies
+furthest from the field of Waterloo of all the Prussian forces, is picked
+out to march first to the aid of Wellington, because it as yet has had no
+fighting and is supposed to be "fresh." On the daybreak, therefore, after
+bivouacking in that dreadful weather, Bulow's force is again upon the
+move. It does not get through Wavre until something like eight o'clock,
+and the abominable conditions of the march may be guessed from the fact
+that its centre did not reach St Lambert until one o'clock, nor did the
+last brigade pass through that spot until three o'clock. Down the steep
+ravine of the Lasne and up on the westward side of it was so hard a
+business that, as we have seen, the brigades did not begin to debouch from
+the woods at the summit until after four o'clock. It was not until after
+five o'clock that the last brigade, the 14th, had come up in line with the
+rest upon the field of Waterloo, having moved, under such abominable
+conditions of slow, drenched marching, another fifteen miles.
+
+In about forty-eight hours, therefore, this magnificent piece of work had
+been accomplished. It was a total movement of over fifty miles for the
+average of the corps--certainly more than sixty for those who had marched
+furthest--broken only by two short nights, and those nights spent in the
+open, one under drenching rain. The whole thing was accomplished without
+appreciable loss of men, guns, or baggage, and at the end of it these men
+put up a fight which was the chief factor in deciding Waterloo.
+
+Such was the supreme effort of the Fourth Prussian Army Corps which
+decided Waterloo.
+
+There are not many examples of endurance so tenacious and organisation so
+excellent in the moving so large a body under such conditions in the whole
+history of war.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the Fourth Prussian Corps debouched from the Wood of Fischermont and
+began its two-mile approach towards his flank, Napoleon, who had already
+had it watched by a body of cavalry, ordered Lobau with the Sixth French
+Army Corps, or rather with what he had kept with him of the Sixth Army
+Corps, to go forward and check it.
+
+It could only be a question of delay. Lobau had but 10,000 against the
+30,000 which Bulow could ultimately bring against him when all his
+brigades had come up; but delay was the essential of the moment to
+Napoleon. To ward off the advancing Prussian pressure just so long as
+would permit him to carry the Mont St Jean was his most desperate need.
+Lobau met the enemy, three to two, in the hollow of Plancenoit,[24] was
+turned by such superior numbers, and driven from the village.
+
+All this while, during the Prussian success which brought that enemy's
+reinforcement nearer and nearer to the rear of the French army and to the
+Emperor's own standpoint, the wasted though magnificent action of the
+French cavalry was continuing against Wellington's right centre, west of
+the Brussels road. Kellerman had charged for the third time; the plateau
+was occupied, the British guns abandoned, the squares formed. For the
+third time that furious seething of horse against foot was seen from the
+distant height of the Belle Alliance. For the third time the sight carried
+with it a deceptive appearance of victory. For the third time the cavalry
+charge broke back again, spent, into the valley below. Ney, wild as he had
+been wild at Quatre Bras, failing in judgment as he had failed then,
+shouted for the last reserve of horse, and forgot to call for that 6000
+untouched infantry, the bulk of Reille's Second Corps, which watched from
+the height of the French ridge the futile efforts of their mounted
+comrades.
+
+Folly as it was to have charged unbroken infantry with horse alone, the
+charges had been so repeated and so tenacious that, _immediately_
+supported by infantry, they might have succeeded. If those 6000 men of
+Reille's, the mass of the Second Army Corps, which stood to arms unused
+upon the ridge to the west of the Brussels road, had been ordered to
+follow hard upon the last cavalry charge, Napoleon might yet have snatched
+victory from such a desperate double strain as no general yet in military
+history has escaped. He might conceivably have broken Wellington's line
+before that gathering flood of Prussians to the right and behind him
+should have completed his destruction.
+
+But the moment was missed. Reille's infantry was not ordered forward until
+the defending line had had ample time to prepare its defence; until the
+English gunners were back again at their pieces, and the English squares
+once more deployed and holding the whole line of their height.
+
+It is easy to note such errors as we measure hours and distances upon a
+map. It is a wonderment to some that such capital errors appear at all in
+the history of armies. Those who have experience of active service will
+tell us what the intoxication of the cavalry charges meant, of what blood
+Ney's brain was full, and why that order for the infantry came too late.
+Of the 6000 infantry which attempted so belated a charge, a quarter was
+broken before the British line was reached, and that assault, in its turn,
+failed.
+
+At this point in the battle, somewhat after six o'clock, two successes on
+the part of the French gave them an opportunity for their last disastrous
+effort, and introduced the close of the tragedy.
+
+The first was the capture of La Haye Sainte, the second was the recapture
+of Plancenoit.
+
+La Haye Sainte, standing still untaken before the very front of
+Wellington's line, must be captured if yet a further effort was to be
+attempted by Napoleon. Major Baring had held it with his small body of
+Germans all day long. Twice had he thrust back a general assault, and
+throughout more than five hours he had resisted partial and equally
+unsuccessful attacks. Now Ney, ordered to carry it at whatever cost,
+brought up against it a division, and more than a division. The French
+climbed upon their heaped dead, broke the doors, shot from the walls, and,
+at the end of the butchery, Baring with forty-two men--all that was left
+him out of nine companies--cut his way back through to the main line, and
+the farm was taken. Hougomont, on the left, round which so meaningless a
+struggle had raged all day long, was never wholly cleared of its
+defenders, but the main body of it was in flames, and with the capture of
+La Haye Sainte the whole front was free for a final attack at the moment
+which Napoleon should decide.
+
+Meanwhile, at Plancenoit, further French reinforcements had recaptured the
+village and again lost it. The Sixth Corps had given way before the
+Prussian advance, as we have seen. The next French reinforcements, though
+they had at first thrust the Prussians back, in turn gave way as the last
+units of the enemy arrived, and the Prussian batteries were dropping shot
+right on to the fields which bordered the Brussels road.
+
+Napoleon took eleven battalions of the Guard (the Imperial Guard was his
+reserve, and had not yet come into action[25]) and drew them up upon his
+flank to defend the Brussels road; with two more battalions he reinforced
+the wavering troops in Plancenoit. They cleared the enemy out of the
+village with the bayonet, and for the moment checked that pressure upon
+the flank and rear which could not but ultimately return.
+
+It was somewhat past seven by the time all this was accomplished. Napoleon
+surveyed a field over which it was still just possible (in his judgment at
+least) to strike a blow that might save him. He saw, far upon the left,
+Hougomont in flames; in the centre, La Haye Sainte captured; on the right,
+the skirmishers advancing upon the slope before the English line; his
+eastern flank for the moment free of the Prussians, who had retired before
+the sudden charge of the Guard. He heard far off a cannonade which might
+be that of Grouchy.
+
+But even as he looked upon his opportunity he saw one further thing that
+goaded him to an immediate hazard. Upon the north-eastern corner of his
+strained and bent-back line of battle, against the far, perilous, exposed
+angle of it, he saw new, quite unexpected hordes of men advancing. It was
+Ziethen debouching with the head of his First Prussian Army Corps at this
+latest hour--and Napoleon saw those most distant of his troops ready to
+yield to the new torrent.
+
+The sun, now within an hour of setting, had shone out again. Its light
+came level down the shallow valley, but all that hollow was so filled with
+the smoke of recent discharges that the last stroke which Napoleon was now
+preparing was in part hidden from the Allies upon the hill. That final
+stake, the only venture left, was to be use of his last reserve and the
+charge of the Guard.
+
+No combat in history, perhaps, had seen a situation so desperate
+maintained without the order for retreat. Wellington's front, which the
+French were attacking, was still held unbroken; upon the French flank and
+rear, though the Fourth Prussian Army Corps were for the moment held, they
+must inevitably return; more remained to come: they were in the act of
+pressing upon the only line open to the French for retreat, and now here
+came Ziethen with his new masses upon the top of all.
+
+If, at this hour, just after seven, upon that fatal day, retreat had been
+possible or advisable to Napoleon, every rule of military art demanded it.
+He was now quite outnumbered; his exhausted troops were strained up to and
+beyond the breaking point. To carry such strains too far means in all
+things, not only in war, an irretrievable catastrophe.
+
+But retreat was hardly possible as a military action; it was impossible as
+a political one.
+
+Napoleon could hardly retreat at that hour, although he was already
+defeated, because the fury and the exhaustion of the combat, its
+increasing confusion, and the increasing dispersion of its units, made any
+rapid concentration and organisation for the purposes of a sudden
+retirement hazardous in the extreme. The doomed body, held closer and
+closer upon its right flank, menaced more and more on its right rear, now
+suddenly threatened on its exposed salient angle, would fight on.
+
+Though Napoleon had withdrawn from the combat an hour before, when Buelow's
+30,000 had struck at his right flank and made his destruction certain;
+though he had then, while yet he could, organised a retirement, abandoned
+the furious struggle for La Haye Sainte before it was successful, and
+covered with his best troops an immediate retreat, that retreat would not
+have availed his cause.
+
+The appearance of the Prussians on his right proved glaringly the nature
+of his doom. Grouchy--a quarter of his forces--was cut off from him
+altogether. The enemy, whom he believed to be beyond Grouchy, and pursued
+by Grouchy, had appeared, upon the contrary, between Grouchy and himself.
+Now Ziethen too was here.
+
+Did Napoleon retire, he would retire before forces half as large again as
+his own, and destined to grow to double his own within a few hours. His
+retirement would leave Grouchy to certain disaster.
+
+Politically, retreat was still more hopeless. He himself would re-enter
+France defeated, with, at the most, half the strength that had crossed the
+frontier three days before. He would so re-enter France--the wealthier
+classes of which watched his power, nearly all of them with jealousy, most
+with active hate--surrounded by general officers not ten of whom, perhaps,
+he could sincerely trust, and by a whole society which supported him only
+upon the doubtful condition of victory.
+
+Such a retirement was ruin. It was more impossible morally even than it
+was impossible physically, under the conditions of the field. Therefore it
+was that, under conditions so desperate, with his battle lost if ever
+battle was, the Emperor yet attempted one ultimate throw, and in this
+half-hour before the sunset sent forward the Guard.
+
+In those solemn moments, wherein the Imperial Guard formed for their
+descent into that hollow whose further slope was to see their last feat of
+arms, Ziethen, with the First Prussian Corps, pressed on into the far
+corner the field of battle. At the far end of the long ridge of the Mont
+St Jean, more than a mile away, this last great body and newest
+reinforcement of the Emperor's foes had emerged from the walls and
+thickets of Smohain and, new to the fighting, was already pushing in the
+weary French line that had stood the carnage of six hours. It was not
+enough that the Fourth Prussian Corps should have determined the day
+already with its 30,000 come up from the east against him; now the
+foremost battalions of the First coming up from the north were appearing
+to clinch the matter altogether.
+
+It was under such conditions of irretrievable disaster that Napoleon
+played for miracle, and himself riding slowly down the valley at the head
+of his comrades and veterans, gave them over to Ney for the final attack
+against Wellington's line which still held the opposing slope.
+
+It was then, at the moment when Ziethen and the men of the First Prussian
+Army Corps began to press upon the north-eastern angle of the fight, and
+were ready to determine it altogether, that the Guard began its ponderous
+thrust up between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte, to the west of the
+Brussels road. Up that fatal hill, which had seen the four great cavalry
+charges, and more recently the breaking of the Second Corps, the tall men,
+taller for the bearskins and the shouldered musket, the inheritors of
+twenty-two victorious and now immortal years, leant forward, advancing. To
+the hanging smoke of the cannon in the vale was added the rising mist of
+evening; and when the furious cannonade which was to support their attack
+had ceased with their approach to the enemy's line, a sort of silence fell
+upon the spectators of that great event.
+
+The event was brief.
+
+It was preceded by a strange sight: a single horseman galloped unharmed
+from the French to the English line (a captain); he announced to the enemy
+the approaching movement of the Guard. He was a hater of the flag and of
+the Revolution, and of its soldier: he was for the old Kings.
+
+There was no need for this dramatic aid. The lull in the action,
+Napoleon's necessity for a last stroke, possibly through the mist and
+smoke the actual movement of the Guard, were apparent. The infantry whom
+Wellington had retired behind the ridge during the worst of the artillery
+preparation was now set forward again. It was the strongest and the most
+trusted of his troops whom Wellington posted to receive the shock--Adams'
+brigade and the brigade of Guards. Three batteries of the reserve were
+brought forward, with orders not to reply to the French cannon, but to
+fire at the advancing columns of the charge.
+
+As the Guard went upward, the whole French front to the right moved
+forward and supported the attack. But upon the left, the Second Army
+Corps, Reille's recently broken 6000, could not yet move. They came far
+behind and to the west of the Brussels road; the Guard went up the slope
+alone.
+
+At two hundred yards from the English line the grape began to mow through
+them. They closed up after each discharge. Their advance continued
+unchecked.
+
+Of the four columns,[26] that nearest to the Brussels road reached,
+touched, and broke the line of the defenders. Its strength was one
+battalion, yet it took the two English batteries, and, in charging
+Halkett's brigade, threw the 30th and the 73rd into confusion. It might
+have been imagined for one moment that the line had here been pierced, but
+this first and greatest chance of success was defeated, and with it all
+chances, for it is the head of a charge that tells.
+
+The reader will have seen upon the map, far off to the west or left, at
+Braine l'Alleud, a body of reserve, Belgian, which Wellington had put so
+far off in the mistaken notion that the French would try to turn him in
+that direction. This force of 3000 men with sixteen guns Wellington had
+recalled in the last phases of the battle. It was their action, and
+especially that of their artillery, that broke this first success of the
+Guard. The Netherlanders charged with the bayonet to drive home the effect
+of their cannon, and the westernmost column of the French attack was
+ruined.
+
+As the four columns were not all abreast, but the head of the first a
+little more forward than that of the second, the head of the second than
+that of the third, and so forth, the shock of the French guard upon the
+British came in four separate blows, each delivered a few moments later
+than the last.
+
+We have seen how the Dutch broke the first column.
+
+The second column, which attacked the right of Halkett's brigade, failed
+also. The 33rd and 69th wavered indeed, but recovered, and their recovery
+was largely due to the personal courage of their chief.
+
+The next column, again, the third, came upon the British Guards; and the
+Guards, reserving their fire until the enemy were at a stone's-throw,
+fired point-blank and threw the French into confusion. During that
+confusion the brigade of Guards charged, pursued the enemy part of the way
+down the slope, were closed upon by the enemy and driven back again to the
+ridge.
+
+The fourth column of the French was now all but striking the extremity of
+the British line. Here Adams' brigade, a battalion of the 95th, the 71st,
+and the 52nd regiments, awaited the blow.
+
+The 52nd was the inmost of the three.
+
+It stood just where the confusion of the Guards as they were thrown back
+up the hill joined the still unbroken ranks of Adams' extremity of the
+British line.
+
+The 52nd determined the crisis of that day. And it was then precisely that
+the battle of Waterloo was decided, or, to be more accurate, this was the
+moment when the inevitable breaking-point appeared.
+
+Colborne was its commander. Instead of waiting in the line, he determined
+to run the very grave risk of leaving it upon his own initiative, and of
+playing a tremendous hazard; he took it upon himself to bring the 52nd
+out, forward in advance of and perpendicular to the defending line, and so
+to bring a flank fire upon the last French charge.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+The peril was very great indeed. It left a gap in the English line; the
+possibility, even the chance, of a French advance to the left against that
+gap and behind the 52nd meant ruin. It was the sort of thing which, when
+men do it and fail, is quite the end of them. Colborne did it and
+succeeded. No French effort was made to the left of the 52nd. It had
+therefore but its front to consider; it wheeled round, left that
+dangerous gap in the English line, and poured its fire in flank upon the
+last charge of the fourth French column. That fire was successful. The
+assault halted, wavered, and began to break.
+
+The French line to the right, advancing in support of the efforts of the
+Guard, saw that backward movement, and even as they saw it there came the
+news of Ziethen's unchecked and overwhelming pressure upon the north-east
+of the field, a pressure which there also had at last broken the French
+formation.
+
+The two things were so nearly simultaneous that no historical search or
+argument will now determine the right of either to priority. As the French
+west of the Brussels road gave way, the whole English line moved together
+and began to advance. As the remnants of the First French Army Corps to
+the east of the Brussels road were struck by Ziethen _they_ also broke. At
+which point the first flexion occurred will never be determined.
+
+The host of Napoleon, stretched to the last limit, and beyond, snapped
+with the more violence, and in those last moments of daylight a complete
+confusion seized upon all but two of its numerous and scattered units.
+
+Those two were, first, certain remnants of the Guard itself, and secondly,
+Lobau's troops, still stubbornly holding the eastern flank.
+
+Squares of the Old Guard, standing firm but isolated in the flood of the
+panic, checked the pursuit only as islands check a torrent. The pursuit
+still held. All the world knows the story of the challenge shouted to
+these veterans, and of Cambronne's disputed reply just before the musket
+ball broke his face and he fell for dead. Lobau also, as I have said, held
+his troops together. But the flood of the Prussian advance, perpetually
+increasing, carried Plancenoit; the rear ranks of the Sixth Army Corps,
+thrust into the great river of fugitives that was now pouring southward in
+panic down the Brussels road, were swept away by it and were lost; and at
+last, as darkness fell, the first ranks also were mixed into the mass of
+panic, and the Imperial army had ceased to exist.
+
+There was a moon that night; and hour after hour the Prussian cavalry, to
+whom the task had been entrusted, followed, sabring, pressing, urging the
+rout. Mile after mile, past the field of Quatre Bras itself, where the
+corpses, stripped by the peasantry, still lay stark after those two days,
+the rush of the breakdown ran. Exhaustion had weakened the pursuers before
+fear had given way to fatigue with the pursued; and when the remnants of
+Napoleon's army were past the Sambre again, not 30,000 disjointed,
+unorganised, dispersed, and broken men had survived the disaster.[27]
+
+
+FINIS
+
+
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+
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+highly original and thought-provoking book is a dramatic presentment of
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+
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+materialisation into one grotesque shape of the drifting ideas and false
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+
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+wonderful charm ... enthralling as any romance.... Truth, though often
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+6d. net. "It is a pleasure to read a critic who is serious and who takes
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+
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+
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+contains the latest work of the greatest essayist of our time.... "Essays
+among the most subtle and substantial that I know."--MAURICE MAETERLINCK.
+
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+meditations pleines d'apercus profonds et sagaces. J'ai ete frappe de
+l'originalite puissante de la pensee de l'auteur."--SULLY PRUDHOMME (de
+l'Academie Francaise).
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] I use the word "English" here to emphasise the character of
+Wellington's command; for though even this second half of the allied line
+was not in its majority of British origin, yet it contained a large
+proportion of British troops; the commander was an Englishman, the Duke of
+Wellington, and the best elements in the force were from these islands.
+
+[2] Rather more than 106,000; guns 204.
+
+[3] Surely an error in judgment, for thus the whole mass of the army, all
+of it except the First and Second Corps, would be crossing the Sambre at
+that one place, with all the delay such a plan would involve. As a fact,
+the Fourth Corps, or right wing of the advance, was at last sent over the
+river by Chatelet, but it would have been better to have given such orders
+at the beginning.
+
+[4] There were some five hundred Prussian prisoners.
+
+[5] See _ante_, pp. 27 and 32.
+
+[6] A lengthy digression might here be admitted upon the question of how
+defence against aerial scouting will develop. That it will develop none
+can doubt. Every such advantage upon the part of one combatant has at last
+been neutralised by the spread of a common knowledge and a common method
+to all.
+
+[7] To be accurate, not quite five-twelfths.
+
+[8] It is worth remarking that Perponcher had been told by Wellington,
+when he first heard of Napoleon's approach, to remain some miles off to
+the west at Nivelles. Wellington laboured, right up to the battle of
+Waterloo, under the fantastic impression that the French, or a
+considerable body of them, were, for some extraordinary reason, going to
+leave the Brussels road, go round westward and attack his _right_. He was,
+as might be expected of a defensive genius, nervous for his
+communications. Luckily for Wellington, Perponcher simply disobeyed these
+orders, left Nivelles before dawn, was at Quatre Bras before sunrise, and
+proceeded to act as we shall see above.
+
+[9] Or at the most sixteen.
+
+[10] This first division of the Guards consisted of the two brigades of
+Maitland and of Byng.
+
+[11] Let it be remembered, for instance, that Ziethen's corps, which
+helped to turn the scale at Waterloo, two days later, only arrived, on the
+field of battle _less than half an hour before sunset_.
+
+[12] I have in this map numbered separate corps and units from one to ten,
+without giving them names. The units include the English cavalry and
+Dornberg's brigade, with the Cumberland Hussars, the First, Second, Third,
+and Fifth Infantry Divisions, the corps of Brunswick, the Nassauers, and
+the Second and Third Netherlands Divisions. All of these ultimately
+reached Quatre Bras with the exception of the Second Infantry Division.
+
+[13] In which 15,000, as accurate statistics are totally lacking, and the
+whole thing is a matter of rough estimate, we may assign what proportion
+we will to killed, to wounded, and to prisoners respectively.
+
+[14] The reason he was thus ignorant of what had really happened to the
+Prussians was, that the officer who had been sent by the chief of the
+Prussian staff to the Duke after nightfall to inform him of the Prussian
+defeat had never arrived. That officer had been severely wounded on the
+way, and the message was not delivered.
+
+[15] There has arisen a discussion as to the whole nature of this retreat
+between the French authorities, who insist upon the close pursuit by their
+troops and the precipitate flight of the English rearguard, and the
+English authorities, who point out how slight were the losses of that
+rearguard, and how just was Wellington's comment that the retreat, as a
+whole, was unmolested.
+
+This dispute is solved, as are many disputes, by the consideration that
+each narrator is right from his point of view. The French pursuit was most
+vigorous, the English rearguard was very hard pressed indeed; but that
+rearguard was so well handled that it continually held its own, gave back
+as good as it got, and efficiently protected the unmolested retreat of the
+mass of the army.
+
+[16] "Dead" ground means ground in front of a position sheltered _by its
+very steepness_ from the fire of the defence upon the summit. The ideal
+front for a defence conducted with firearms is not a very steep slope, but
+a long, slight, open and _even_ one.
+
+[17] Almost exactly ten per cent.
+
+[18] It is from thirty to fifty feet above the spur on which he had just
+ranged his guns in front of the army, some twenty-five feet higher than
+the crest occupied a mile off by the allied army, and a few feet higher
+than the bare land somewhat more than four miles off, upon which Napoleon
+first discerned the arriving Prussians.
+
+[19] See map opposite title-page.
+
+[20] There is conflict of evidence as to how long the brigade was exposed
+to this terrible ordeal. It was slightly withdrawn at some moment, but
+what moment is doubtful.
+
+[21] The group marked "C" upon the coloured map. It was for the most part
+under the command of Milhaud, but the rear of it was under the command of
+Desnoettes.
+
+[22] See sketch opposite page 134.
+
+[23] This is the wood upon the extreme right hand of the coloured map.
+
+[24] In the model on p. 155 Plancenoit is not shown. It would be out of
+the model, nearer the spectator, behind Napoleon's position at A, and
+between A and N.
+
+[25] The Guard as a whole had lain behind the French line in reserve all
+day upon the point marked D upon the coloured map.
+
+[26] Virtually, this advance in echelon had turned into four columns.
+
+[27] We may allow certainly 7000 prisoners and 30,000 killed and wounded,
+but that is a minimum. It is quite possible that another 3000 should be
+added to the prisoners and other 5000 to those who fell. The estimates
+differ so widely because the numerous desertions after the fall of the
+Empire make it very difficult to compare the remnant of the army with its
+original strength.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
+
+The following misprints have been corrected:
+  "prople" corrected to "people" (page 19)
+  "Quartre" corrected to "Quatre" (page 49)
+  "Brussells" corrected to "Brussels" (page 155)
+
+Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in
+spelling and hyphenation usage have been retained.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Waterloo, by Hilaire Belloc
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