of which was as yet carried and held permanently by the French) lasted
over two hours. It was well after five o'clock when there appeared, far
off, under the westering sun, a new and large body of troops advancing
eastward as though to reach that point between Wagnelee and St Amand where
the left of the French force was struggling for mastery with the right of
the Prussians. For a moment there was no certitude as to what this distant
advancing force might be. But soon, and just when fortune appeared for a
moment to be favouring Blucher's superior numbers and the French line was
losing ground, the Emperor learned that it was his First Army Corps, under
the command of Erlon which was thus approaching.
At that moment--in the neighbourhood of six o'clock in the
evening--Napoleon must have believed that his new and rapidly formed plan
of that afternoon, with its urgent notes to Quatre Bras and its appeal for
reinforcement, had borne fruit; a portion at least of Ney's command had
been detached, as it seemed, to deliver that final and unexpected attack
upon the Prussian flank which was the keystone of the whole scheme.
Coincidently with the news that those distant advancing thousands were his
own men and would turn this doubtful struggle into a decisive victory for
the Emperor came the news--unexplained, inexplicable--that Erlon's troops
would advance no further! That huge distant body of men, isolated in the
empty fields to the westward; that reinforcement upon which the fate of
Napoleon and of the French army hung, drew no nearer. Watched from such a
distance, they might seem for a short time to be only halted. Soon it was
apparent that they were actually retiring. They passed back again,
retracing their steps beyond the western horizon, and were lost to the
great struggle against the Prussians. Why this amazing countermarch, with
all its catastrophic consequences was made will be discussed later. It is
sufficient to note that it rendered impossible that decisive victory which
Napoleon had held for a moment within his grasp. His resource under such a
disappointment singularly illustrates the nature of his mind.
Already the Emperor had determined, before any sign of advancing aid had
appeared, that if he were left alone to complete the decision, if he was
not to be allowed by fate to surround and destroy the Prussian force, he
might at least drive it from the field with heavy loss, and, as far as
possible, demoralised. In the long struggle of the afternoon he had meant
but to press the Prussian line, while awaiting forces that should complete
its envelopment; these forces being now denied him, he determined to
change his plan, to use his reserves, the Guard, and to drive the best
fighting material he had, like a spearhead, at the centre of the Prussian
positions. Since he could not capture, he would try and break.
As the hope of aid from Erlon's First Corps gradually disappeared, he
decided upon this course. It was insufficient. He could not hope by it to
destroy his enemy wholly. But he could drive him from the field and
perhaps demoralise him, or so weaken him with loss as to leave him
crippled.
Just at the time when Napoleon had determined thus to strike at the centre
of the Prussian fine, Blucher, full of his recent successes upon his right
and the partial recapture of the village of St Amand, had withdrawn
troops from that centre to pursue his advantage. It was the wrong moment.
While Blucher was thus off with the bulk of his men towards St Amand, the
Old Guard, with the heavy cavalry of the Guard, and Milhaud's cavalry as
well--all Napoleon's reserve--drew up opposite Ligny village for a final
assault.
Nearly all the guns of the Guard and all those of the Fourth Corps crashed
against the village to prepare the assault, and at this crisis of the
battle, as though to emphasise its character, a heavy thunderstorm broke
over the combatants, and at that late hour (it was near seven) darkened
the evening sky.
It was to the noise and downpour of that storm that the assault was
delivered, the Prussian centre forced, and Ligny taken.
When the clouds cleared, a little before sunset, this strongest veteran
corps of Napoleon's army had done the business. Ligny was carried and
held. The Prussian formation, from a convex line, was now a line bent
inwards at its centre and all but broken.
Blucher had rapidly returned from the right to meet the peril. He charged
at the head of his Uhlans. The head of the French column of Guards
reserved their fire until the horse was almost upon them; then, in volley
after volley at a stone's-throw range, they broke that cavalry, which, in
their turn, the French cuirassiers charged as it fled and destroyed it.
Blucher's own horse was shot under him, the colonel of the Uhlans
captured, the whole of the Prussian centre fell into disorder and was
crushed confusedly back towards the Nivelles-Namur road.
Darkness fell, and nothing more could be accomplished. The field was won,
indeed, but the Prussian army was still an organisation and a power. It
had lost heavily in surrenders, flight, and fallen, but its main part was
still organised. It was driven to retreat in the darkness, but remained
ready, when time should serve, to reappear. It kept its order against the
end of the French pressure throughout the last glimmer of twilight; and
when darkness fell, the troops of Blucher, though in retreat, were in a
retreat compact and orderly, and the bulk of his command was saved from
the enemy and available for further action.
Thus ended the battle of Ligny, glorious for the Emperor, who had achieved
so much success against great odds and after the hottest combat; but a
failure of his full plan, for the host before him was still in existence:
it was free to retreat in what direction, east or north, it might choose.
The choice was made with immediate and conquering decision: the order
passed in the darkness, "By Tilly on Wavre." The Prussian staff had not
lost its head under the blow of its defeat. It preserved a clear view of
the campaign, with its remaining chances, and the then beaten army corps
were concentrated upon a movement northwards. Word was sent to the fresh
and unused Fourth Corps to join the other three at _Wavre_, and the march
was begun which permitted Blucher, forty hours later, to come up on the
flank of the French at Waterloo and destroy them.
QUATRE BRAS
Such had been the result of the long afternoon's work upon the right-hand
or eastern battlefield, that of Ligny, where Napoleon had been in personal
command.
In spite of his appeals, no one had reached him from the western field,
and the First Corps had only appeared in Napoleon's neighbourhood to
disappear again.
What had been happening on that western battlefield, three to four miles
away, which had thus prevented some part at least of Ney's army coming up
upon the flank of the Prussians at Ligny, towards the end of the day, and
inflicting upon Blucher a complete disaster?
What had happened was the slow, confused action known to history as the
battle of Quatre Bras.
It will be remembered that Ney had been entrusted by Napoleon with the
absolute and independent command of something less than half of his whole
army.[7]
He had put at his disposal the First and the Second Army Corps, under
Erlon and Reille respectively--nearly 46,000 men; and to these he had
added, by an afterthought, eight regiments of heavy cavalry, commanded by
Kellerman.
The role of this force, in Napoleon's intention, was simply to advance up
the Brussels road, brushing before it towards the left or west, away from
the Prussians, as it went, the outposts of that western half of the allied
army, which Wellington commanded.
We have seen that Napoleon, who had certainly arrived quickly and
half-unexpectedly at the point of junction between Wellington's scattered
forces and those of the Prussians, when he crossed the Sambre at
Charleroi, overestimated his success. He thought his enemy had even less
notice of his advance than that enemy really had; he thought that enemy
had had less time to concentrate than he had really had. Napoleon
therefore necessarily concluded that his enemy had concentrated to a less
extent than he actually had.
That mistake had the effect, in the case of the army of the right, which
he himself commanded, of bringing him up against not one Prussian army
corps but three. This accident had not disconcerted him, for he hoped to
turn it into a general disaster for the Prussians, and to take advantage
of their unexpected concentration to accomplish their total ruin. But such
a plan was dependent upon the left-hand or western army, that upon the
Brussels road under Ney, not finding anything serious in front of it. Ney
could spare men less easily if the Emperor's calculation of the resistance
likely to be found on the Brussels road should be wrong. It was wrong.
That resistance was not slight but considerable, and Ney was not free to
come to Napoleon's aid. Tardy as had been the information conveyed to the
Duke of Wellington, and grievously as the Duke of Wellington had
misunderstood its importance, there was more in front of Ney upon the
Brussels road than the Emperor had expected. What there was, however,
might have been pushed back--after fairly heavy fighting it is true, but
without any risk of failure--but for another factor in the situation,
which was Ney's own misjudgment and inertia.
Napoleon himself said later that his marshal was no longer the same man
since the disasters of two years before; but even if Ney had been as alert
as ever, misjudgment quite as much as lack of will must have entered into
what he did. He had thought, as the Emperor had, that there would be
hardly anything in front of him upon the Brussels road. But there was this
difference between the two errors: Ney was on the spot, and could have
found out with his cavalry scouts quite early on the morning of Friday the
16th what he really had to face. He preferred to take matters for granted,
and he paid a heavy price. He thought that there was plenty of time for
him to advance at his leisure; and, thinking this, he must have further
concluded that to linger upon that part of the Brussels road which was
nearest the Emperor's forthcoming action to the east by Ligny would be
good policy in case the Emperor should have need of him there.
On the night of the 15th Ney himself was at Frasnes, while the furthest of
his detachments was no nearer than the bridge of Thuin over the Sambre,
sixteen miles away. The rough sketch printed opposite will show how very
long that line was, considering the nearness of the strategical point
Quatre Bras, which it was his next business to occupy. The Second Army
Corps under Reille was indeed fairly well moved up, and all in the
neighbourhood of Gosselies by the night between Thursday 15th and Friday
16th of June. But the other half of the force, the First Army Corps under
Erlon, was strung out over miles of road behind.
To concentrate all those 50,000 men, half of them spread out over so much
space, meant a day's ordinary marching; and one would have thought that
Ney should have begun to concentrate before night fell upon the 15th. He
remembered, however, that the men were fatigued, he thought he had plenty
of time before him, and he did not effect their concentration. The mass of
the Second Army Corps (Reille's) was, as I have said, near Gosselies on
the Friday dawn; but Erlon, with the First Army Corps, was not in
disposition to bring the bulk of it up by the same time. He could not
expect to be near Quatre Bras till noon or one o'clock. But even to this
element of delay, due to his lack of precision, Ney added further delay,
due to slackness in orders.
[Illustration]
It was eleven o'clock on the morning of that Friday the 16th before Ney
sent a definite order to Reille to march; it was _twelve_ before the head
of that Second Army Corps set out up the great road to cover the four or
five miles that separated them from Ney's headquarters at Frasnes. Erlon,
lying next behind Reille, could not advance until Reille's last division
had taken the road. So Erlon, with the First Army Corps, was not in column
and beginning his advance with his head troops until after one o'clock.
At about half-past one, then, we have the first troops of Reille's army
corps reaching Ney at Frasnes, its tail-end some little way out of
Gosselies; while at the same hour we have Erlon's First Army Corps
marching in column through Gosselies.
It would have been perfectly possible, at the expense of a little fatigue
to the men, to have had the Second Army Corps right up at Frasnes and in
front of it and deployed for action by nine o'clock, while Erlon's army
corps, the First, coming behind it as a reserve, an equal body in numbers,
excellence, and order, would have taken the morning to come up. In other
words, Ney could have had more than 20,000 men ready for the attack on
Quatre Bras by mid-morning, with as many men an hour or two behind them,
and ready on their arrival to act as a reserve. As a matter of fact, he
waited with his single battalion and a few horsemen at his headquarters at
Frasnes, only giving the orders we have seen, which did not bring Reille's
head columns up to him till as late as half-past one. It was well after
two o'clock before Reille's troops had deployed in front of Frasnes and
this Second Army Corps were ready to attack the position at Quatre Bras,
which Ney still believed to be very feebly held. The other half of Ney's
command, the First Army Corps, under Erlon, was still far away down the
road.
This said, it behoves us to consider the strategical value of the Quatre
Bras position, and later to see how far Ney was right in thinking that it
was still quite insufficiently furnished with defenders, even at that late
hour in the day.
Armies must march by roads. At any rate, the army marching by road has a
vast advantage over one attempting an advance across country; and the
better kept-up the road the greater advantage, other things being equal,
has the army using it over another army debarred from its use.
Quatre Bras is the cross-way of two great roads. The first road is that
main road from north to south, leading from the frontier and Charleroi to
Brussels; along this road, it was Napoleon's ultimate intention to sweep,
and up this road he was on that morning of the 16th sending Ney to clear
the way for him. The second road is the great road east and west from
Nivelles to Namur, which was in June 1815 the main line of communication
along which the two halves of the Allies could effect their junction.
The invader, then, when he held Quatre Bras, could hold up troops coming
against him from the north, troops coming against him from the east, or
troops coming against him from the west. He could prevent, or rather
delay, their junction. He would have stepped in between.
But Quatre Bras has advantages greater than this plain and elementary
strategical advantage. In the first place, it dominates the whole
countryside. A patch or knoll, 520 feet above the sea, the culminating
point of the plateau, is within a few yards of the cross-roads. Standing
there, a few steps to the west of the highway, you look in every direction
over a rolling plain, of which you occupy the highest point for some miles
around.
Now, this position of the "Quatre Bras" or "Cross Roads" can be easily
defended against a foe coming from the south, as were the two corps under
Ney. In 1815 its defence was easier still.
A large patch of undergrowth, cut in rotation, called the Wood of Bossu,
ran along the high road from Frasnes and Charleroi, flanking that road to
the west, and forming cover for troops that might wish to forbid access
along it. The ground falls somewhat rapidly in front of the cross-roads to
a little stream, and just where the stream crosses the road is the walled
farm of Gemioncourt, which can be held as an advanced position, while in
front of the fields where the Wood of Bossu once stood is the group of
farm buildings called Pierrepont. Finally, that arm of the cross-roads
which overlooks the slope down to Gemioncourt ran partly on an embankment
which could be used for defence as a ready-made earthwork.
Now, let us see what troops were actually present that Friday morning upon
the allied side to defend this position against Ney's advance, and what
others were near enough in the neighbourhood to come up in defence of the
position during the struggle.
There was but one division of the Allies actually on the spot. This was
the Netherlands division, commanded by Perponcher; and the whole of it,
including gunners and sappers (it had hardly any cavalry[8] with it), was
less than 8000 strong. It was a very small number to hold the extended
position which the division at once proceeded to occupy. They had to cover
a front of over 3000 yards, not far short of two miles.
They did not know, indeed, what Ney was bringing up against them;
Wellington himself, later on, greatly underestimated the French forces on
that day. Now even if Ney had had far less men than he had, it was none
the less a very risky thing to disperse the division as Perponcher did,
especially with no more than fourteen guns to support him,[9] but under
the circumstances it turned out to be a wise risk to have taken. Ney had
hesitated already, and was in a mood to be surprised at any serious
resistance. The more extended the veil that was drawn before him, the
better for the Allies and their card of delay. For everything depended
upon time. Ney, as will be seen, had thrown away his chance of victory by
his extreme dilatoriness, and during the day the Allies were to bring up
unit after unit, until by nightfall nearly 40,000 men not only held Quatre
Bras successfully, but pushed the French back from their attack upon it.
Perponcher, then, put a battalion and five guns in front of Gemioncourt,
another battalion inside the walls of the farm, four battalions and a
mounted battery before the Wood of Bossu and the farm of Pierrepont. Most
of his battalions were thus stretched in front of the position of Quatre
Bras, the actual Cross Roads where he left only two as a reserve.
Against the Dutchmen, thus extended, the French order to advance was
given, and somewhere between half-past two and a quarter to three the
French attack began. It was delivered upon Gemioncourt and the fields to
the right or east of the Brussels road.
The action that followed is one simple enough to understand by
description, but difficult to express upon a map. It is difficult to
express upon a map because it consisted in the repeated attack of one
fixed number of men against an increasing number of men.
Ney was hammering all that afternoon with a French force which soon
reached its maximum. The position against which he was hammering, though
held at first by a force greatly inferior to his own, began immediately
afterwards to receive reinforcement after reinforcement, until at the
close of the action the defenders were vastly superior in numbers to the
attackers.
I have attempted in the rough pen sketch opposite this page to express
this state of affairs on the allied side during the battle by marking in
successive degrees of shading the bodies of the defence in the order in
which they came up, but the reader must remember the factor of time, and
how all day long Wellington's command at Quatre Bras kept on swelling and
swelling by driblets, as the units marched in at a hurried summons from
various points behind the battlefield. This gradual reinforcement of the
defence gives all its character to the action.
[Illustration]
The French, then, began the assault by an advance to the right or east of
the Brussels road. They cleared out the defenders from Gemioncourt; they
occupied that walled position; they poured across the stream, and were
beginning to take the rise up to Quatre Bras when, at about three o'clock,
Wellington, who had been over at Ligny discussing the position with
Blucher, rode up and saw how critical the moment was.
In a few minutes the first French division might be up to the cross-roads
at Q.
Bossu Wood, with the four battalions holding it, had not yet been attacked
by the French, because their second division of Reille's Second Corps
(under Napoleon's brother Jerome), had not yet come up; Erlon's First
Corps was still far off, down the road. The men in the Bossu Wood came out
to try and stop the French advance. They were thrown back by French
cavalry, and even as this was proceeding Jerome's division arrived,
attacked the south of Bossu Wood, and brought up the whole of Ney's forces
to some 19,000 or 20,000 men.
The French advance, so continued, would now undoubtedly have succeeded
against the 8000 Dutch at this moment of three o'clock (and Wellington's
judgment that the situation was critical at that same moment was only too
sound) had there not arrived precisely at that moment the first of his
reinforcements.
A brigade of Dutch cavalry came up from the west along the Nivelles road,
and three brigades of infantry appeared marching hurriedly in from the
north, along the Brussels road; two of these brigades were British, under
the command of Kemp and of Pack, and they formed Picton's division. The
third were a brigade of Hanoverians, under Best. The British and the
Hanoverians formed along the Namur road at M N, protected by its
embankment, kneeling in the high wheat, and ready to fire when the enemy's
attacking line should come within close range of their muskets.
The newly arrived Dutch cavalry, on the other side of the road, charged
the advancing French, but were charged themselves in turn by French
cavalry, overthrown, and in their stampede carried Wellington and his
staff in a surge past the cross-roads; but the French cavalry, in its
turn, was compelled to retire by the infantry fire it met when it had
ridden too far. Immediately afterwards the French infantry as they reached
the Namur road came unexpectedly upon the just-arrived British and
Hanoverians, and were driven back in disorder by heavy volleying at close
range from the embankment and the deep cover beyond.
The cavalry charge and countercharge (Jerome beginning to clear the south
of the Bossu Wood), the check received by the French on the right from
Picton's brigade and the Hanoverians occupied nearly an hour. It was not
far short of four o'clock when Ney received that first urgent dispatch
from Napoleon which told him to despatch the enemy's resistance at Quatre
Bras, and then to come over eastward to Ligny and help against the
Prussians.
Ney could not obey. He had wasted the whole of a precious morning, and by
now, close on four o'clock in the afternoon, yet another unit came up to
increase the power of the defence, and to make his chance of carrying the
Quatre Bras cross-roads, of pushing back Wellington's command, of finding
himself free to send men to Napoleon increasingly doubtful.
The new unit which had come up was the corps under the Duke of Brunswick,
and when this arrived Wellington had for the first time a superiority of
numbers over Ney's single corps (there was still no sign of Erlon) though
he was still slightly inferior in guns.
However, the French advance was vigorously conducted. Nearly the whole of
the Wood of Bossu was cleared. The Brunswickers, who had been sent forward
along the road between Quatre Bras and Gemioncourt, were pushed back as to
their infantry; their cavalry broke itself against a French battalion.
It was in this doubly unsuccessful effort that the Duke of Brunswick, son
of the famous General of the earlier Revolutionary wars, fell, shot in the
stomach. He died that night in the village.
The check to this general advance of the French all along the line was
again given by the English troops along the Namur road. Picton seized the
moment, ordered a bayonet charge, and drove the French right down the
valley. His men were in turn driven back by the time they had cleared the
slope, but the check was given and the French never recovered it. Two
fierce cavalry charges by the French failed to break the English line,
though the Highlanders upon Pack's extreme right, close against Quatre
Bras itself, were caught before they could form square, and the second
phase of the battle ended in a draw.