Hilaire Belloc - Premium Collection: Historical Works, Writings on Economy, Essays & Fiction. Hilaire Belloc
his victory would have its fullest effect. There were the troops under Wellington, a defeat of which would mean the cutting off of England, the financier of the Allies, from the Continent. There was present a population many elements of which sympathised with him and with the French revolutionary effort. Finally, the allied force in Belgium was the least homogeneous of the forces with which he would have to deal in the long succession of struggle from which even a success at this moment would not spare him.
From all these causes combined, and for the further reason that Paris was most immediately threatened from this neighbouring Belgian frontier, it was upon that frontier that Napoleon determined to cast his spear. It was upon the 5th of June that the first order was sent out for the concentration of this army for the invasion of Belgium.
In ten days the 124,000 men, with their 370 guns, were massed upon the line between Maubeuge and Philippeville, immediately upon the frontier, and ready to cross it. The way in which the frontier was passed and the river Sambre crossed before the first actions took place form between them the preliminaries of the campaign, and must be the subject of my next section.
II
THE PRELIMINARIES: NAPOLEON’S ADVANCE ACROSS THE SAMBRE
To understand the battle of Waterloo it is necessary, more perhaps than in the case of any other great decisive action, to read it strategically: that is, to regard the final struggle of Sunday the 18th of June as only the climax of certain general movements, the first phase of which was the concentration of the French Army of the North, and the second the passage of the Sambre river and the attack. This second phase covered four days in time, and in space an advance of nearly forty miles.
There is a sense, of course, in which it is true of every battle that its result is closely connected with the strategy which led up to its tactical features: how the opposing forces arrived upon the field, in what condition, and in what disposition and at what time, with what advantage or disadvantage, is always necessarily connected with the history of the campaign rather than of the individual action; but, as we saw in the case of Blenheim, and as might be exemplified from a hundred other cases, the greater part of battles can be understood by following the tactical dispositions upon the field. They are won or lost, in the main, according to those dispositions.
With Waterloo it was not so. Waterloo was lost by Napoleon, won by the Allies, not mainly on account of tactical movements upon the field itself, but mainly on account of what had happened in the course of the advance of the French army to that field. In other words, the military character of that great decisive action is always missed by those who have read it isolated from the movements immediately preceding it.
Napoleon, determining to strike at Belgium under the political circumstances we have already seen, was attacking forces about double his own.
He was like one man coming up rapidly and almost unexpectedly to attack two: but hoping if possible to deal successively and singly with either opponent.
His doubtful chance of success in such a hazard obviously lay in his being able to attack each enemy separately: that is, to engage first one before the second came to his aid; then the second; and thus to defeat each in turn. The chance of victory under such circumstances is slight. It presupposes the surprise of the two allied adversaries by their single opponent, and the defeat of one so quickly that the other cannot come to his aid till all is over. But no other avenue of victory is open to a man fighting enemies of double his numerical strength; at least under conditions where armament, material, and racial type are much the same upon either side.
The possibility of dealing thus with his enemy Napoleon thought possible, and thought it possible from two factors in the situation before him.
The first factor was that the allied army, seeing its great numbers, the comparatively small accumulation of supplies which it could yet command, the great length of frontier which it had to watch, was spread out in a great number of cantonments, the whole stretch of which was no less than one hundred miles in length, from Liège upon the east or left to Tournay upon the west or right.
The second factor which gave Napoleon his chance was that this long line depended for its supply, its orders, its line of retreat upon two separate and opposite bases.
The left or eastern half, formed mainly of Prussian subjects, and acting under Blucher, had arrived from the east, looked for safety in case of defeat to a retreat towards the Rhine, obtained its supplies from that direction, and in general was fed from the east along those communications, continual activity along which are as necessary to the life of an army as the uninterrupted working of the air-tube is necessary to the life of a diver.
The western or right-hand part of the line, Dutch, German, Belgian, and British, acting under Wellington, depended, upon the contrary, upon the North Sea, and upon communication across that sea with England. That is, it drew its supplies and the necessaries of its existence from the west, the opposite and contrary direction from that to which the Prussian half of the Allies were looking for theirs. The effect of this upon the campaign is at once simple to perceive and of capital importance in Napoleon’s plan.
Wellington and Blucher did not, under the circumstances, oppose to Napoleon a single body drawing its life from one stream of communications. They did not in combination command a force defending one goal; they commanded two forces defending two goals. The thorough defeat of one would throw it back away from the other if the attack were delivered at the point where the two just joined hands; and the English1 or western half under Wellington was bound to movements actually contrary to the Prussian or eastern half under Blucher in case either were defeated before the other could come to its aid.
Napoleon, then, in his rapid advance upon Belgium, was a man conducting a column against a line. He was conducting that column against one special point, the point of junction between two disparate halves of an opposing line. He advanced therefore upon a narrow front perpendicular to, and aimed at the centre of, the long scattered cordon of his double enemy, which cordon it was his business if possible to divide just where the western end of one half touched the eastern end of the other. He designed to fight in detail the first portion he could engage, then to turn upon the other, and thus to defeat both singly and in turn.
I will put this strategical position before the reader in the shape of an English parallel in order to make it the plainer, and I will then, by the aid of sketch maps, show how the Allies actually lay upon the Belgian frontier at the moment when Napoleon delivered his attack upon it.
Imagine near a quarter million of men spread out in a line of separate cantonments from Windsor at one extremity to Bristol at the other; and suppose that the eastern half of this line from Windsor to as far west as Wallingford is depending for its supplies and its communications upon the river Thames and its road system, and is prepared in case of defeat to fall back, down the valley of that stream towards London.
On the other hand, imagine that the western half from Swindon to Bristol is receiving its supplies from the Severn and the Bristol Channel, and must in case of defeat fall back westward upon that line.
Now, suppose an invading column rather more than 120,000 strong to be advancing from the south against this line, but prepared to strike up from almost any point on the Channel. It strikes, as a fact, from Southampton, and marches rapidly north by Winchester and Newbury. By the time it has reached Newbury, the eastern half of the opposing line, that between Wallingford and Windsor, has concentrated to meet it, but is defeated in the neighbourhood of that town.
Such a battle at Newbury would correspond to the battle at Ligny (let it be fought upon a Friday). Meanwhile, the western half, hurrying up in aid, has failed to effect a junction before the eastern half was defeated, comes up too late above Newbury, and finding it is too late, retires upon Abingdon. The victorious invader pursues them, and at noon on the second day engages them in a long line which they hold in front