Hilaire Belloc - Premium Collection: Historical Works, Writings on Economy, Essays & Fiction. Hilaire Belloc
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.
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.
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