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“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.

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 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.

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.