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 Liège to Charleroi, and had been disposed regularly
from left to right in four corps d'armée.
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 Liège (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 Liège, 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 Liège
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 Wagnelée 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 Wagnelée 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 Wagnelée 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 Wagnelée. 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
Wagnelée 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 rôle 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'armée towards Napoleon and the
right—useless because it was not completed; the useless turning back
of that corps d'armée 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'Armée.
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'armée 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.