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.