John Codman Ropes - The Battle of Waterloo

In his “Réponse aux Notes critiques de Napoléon,”107 Rogniat criticises this observation as follows:—

“In occupying Sombreffe on the 15th, Napoleon would have won, without striking a blow, the immense result of isolating the two opposing armies in order to fight them separately, a result which the victory of Ligny, so dearly purchased, did not obtain for him.”108

While Rogniat thus condemns Napoleon for not having proposed to himself to occupy Sombreffe on the 15th, Charras109 summarily dismisses Napoleon’s statement just quoted, as unworthy of serious attention. Not to have aimed at occupying Sombreffe on the 15th, he says, would have been contrary to “the very principles of his strategy.” He accordingly finds that in this respect Napoleon had failed on the evening of the 15th to attain his objective point.

Jomini’s view110 of Napoleon’s plan, as we have seen above, coincides with that of Charras.111

In respect to these criticisms, we observe in the first place that these writers have adduced no sufficient reason for distrusting Napoleon’s own account of his plan and intentions. That account is perfectly clear and consistent throughout. He wanted, he tells us, to fight at the outset a decisive battle with one of the allied armies. He looked for great results from such a battle. He expected, he says, that the Prussians would be promptly concentrated, and would offer battle near Fleurus,—to the south of Sombreffe; and that owing to the unreadiness of the Anglo-allied army, and his proposed seizure of Quatre Bras on the first day of the campaign, he would be able to fight the Prussians, isolated, for the time being, from the English.112 While he claims to have ordered the occupation of Quatre Bras on the first day, he nowhere says that he proposed to occupy Sombreffe on the first day. When he is criticised for not having attempted this, he maintains that he was right. He considered, he says, that Blücher’s object in fighting a battle at this stage in the campaign must be the maintenance of his communications with his allies;113 the Prussians would, therefore, fight, if they fought at all, to the south of the Namur-Quatre-Bras turnpike, somewhere to the south of Sombreffe. And, as he expected great and perhaps decisive results114 from such a battle, he contented himself on the 15th of June with threatening with his centre and right this turnpike, and purposely abstained from occupying Sombreffe. For if Blücher should find Sombreffe occupied and his line of communications with Wellington actually in the enemy’s hands, it was probable, so Napoleon thought, that he would retire to some point further north, where a union of the two armies could easily be effected, and so this opportunity of fighting the Prussians alone and isolated from the English would be lost.

In the second place, we fail to see that the plan which Rogniat blames Napoleon for not having adopted, and which Jomini and Charras believe he really entertained, but failed to carry into effect, that is, the plan of occupying both Sombreffe and Quatre Bras on the 15th, was an improvement in any way over Napoleon’s plan as described by himself, as stated above. These writers would have Napoleon begin the campaign by separating the two hostile armies by occupying two points on the road by which they communicated with each other. Napoleon says that if he had done this, while the two armies would certainly have been separated, his chances of dealing decisively with one of them, alone and unsupported by its ally, would most likely have vanished. And the probabilities are that Napoleon was right in this opinion. Blücher would naturally have retired, if he had found the Namur-Quatre-Bras road occupied at Sombreffe by the French in force; he would have tried to concert with Wellington some combined operation in the neighborhood of Wavre or Brussels; and thus the opportunity which Napoleon had at Ligny, where the Prussians were exposed to the attack of the main French army without the assistance of a single English soldier, would not have been offered by Blücher.

It seems to us that Napoleon is right in his contention, and that the great chance which he had at the battle of Ligny of defeating one of his two adversaries alone and unsupported, was in exact accordance with his expectations, and, was, as much as such things ever are, the result of his well-calculated dispositions.

We conclude, therefore, that there is no good reason to suppose that Napoleon intended on the evening of the 15th to push forward to Sombreffe and hold the Namur-Nivelles road at that point. He may very possibly have expected to fix his headquarters at Fleurus, but, although he did not succeed in doing this, his object had been substantially attained at the close of the first day of the campaign, so far as the operations of the right and centre were concerned.

B. Let us now consider the other branch of the question,—Did Napoleon intend to occupy Quatre Bras on the 15th?

(1.) If we are correct in the view taken above, namely, that Napoleon did not intend to seize Sombreffe on the 15th, because he feared that if Blücher found his line of communications with Wellington occupied in force at Sombreffe, he would retire to the northward, and there form a junction with the Anglo-Dutch army, it would seem at first blush as if Blücher might be expected to take the same course if he found the turnpike to Nivelles occupied in force by the enemy at Quatre Bras. But this seems to be pushing the argument too far. Blücher could hardly be expected to be affected by the report of the occupation of Quatre Bras so much as by the expulsion of Zieten’s Corps from Sombreffe, and by the occupation of that place by the main French army. Theoretically, so to speak, the seizure of any one point on the Namur-Nivelles turnpike ought to produce the same effect on Marshal Blücher’s mind, and, therefore, on his subsequent movements, as the seizure of any other. Yet one can easily see that, practically, this might not be so. On the other hand, there was certainly the risk that Blücher would not fight at or near Sombreffe unless he thought he could count on receiving aid from Wellington, and this expectation could hardly be entertained, if he knew that the French were in possession of Quatre Bras. Still, the importance of preventing Wellington, by an early occupation of Quatre Bras, from assisting the Prussians in their resistance to the attack which he hoped to make upon them the next day, may well have induced Napoleon to give on the 15th to Marshal Ney orders to occupy Quatre Bras at once, and to take the chance of the result of this step being the withdrawal of the Prussian army to Wavre or Brussels.

(2.) But the matter is really of very little consequence, so far, at least, as the successful carrying out of Napoleon’s plan is concerned. Let us assume that Napoleon is correct in his statement that he gave a verbal order to Ney on the 15th to push forward to Quatre Bras. We have nevertheless just seen that the Memoirs testify to the Emperor’s general satisfaction on the evening of the 15th with the progress that had been made during the day, notwithstanding the non-occupation of Quatre Bras. Napoleon has in fact nowhere said that it was necessary to occupy Quatre Bras on the 15th. The written orders to Ney, on the morning of the 16th, which we shall shortly have occasion to consider, imply that, at the time he wrote them, Napoleon was content with Ney’s having on the 15th occupied Frasnes and threatened Quatre Bras, and that he then desired the movement on the latter point to take place on the forenoon of the 16th, while he himself was massing his troops for the advance on Sombreffe and the expected battle with the Prussians in the afternoon. In truth, when we consider that the bulk of the army under Napoleon in person could hardly have been in condition to engage the Prussians at daybreak of the 16th, we can easily comprehend that Napoleon,—whatever he might have enjoined on Ney at five o’clock in the afternoon before, when he no doubt expected that much more progress would be made before the next morning than actually was made,—should have been quite content with Ney’s not having reached a point so far to the front as Quatre Bras.115