Hilaire Belloc - The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc

In this letter, moreover, he said in so many words that his reserve, the large body upon which he mainly depended, would be within three miles of him by noon, the British cavalry within seven miles of him at the same hour.

Then he rode over to see Blucher on the field of Ligny before Napoleon’s attack on that general had begun. He got there at about one o’clock.

An acrimonious discussion has arisen as to whether he promised to come up and help Blucher shortly afterwards or not, but it is a discussion beside the mark, for, in the first place, Wellington quite certainly intended to come up and help the Prussians; and in the second place, he was quite as certainly unable to do so, for the French opposition under Ney which he had under-estimated, turned out to be a serious thing.

But his letter, and his undoubted intention to come up and help Blucher, depended upon his belief that the units of his army were all fairly close, and that by, say, half-past one he would have the whole lot occupying the heights of Quatre Bras.

Now, as a fact, the units of Wellington’s command were scattered all over the place, and it is astonishing to note the discrepancy between his idea of their position and their real position on the morning of the day when Quatre Bras was fought. When one appreciates what that discrepancy was, one has a measure of the bad staff work that was being done under Wellington at the moment.

The plan (p. 127) 12distinguishes between the real positions of Wellington’s command on the morning of the 16th when he was writing his letter to Blucher and the positions which Wellington, in that letter, erroneously ascribes to them. It will show the reader the wide difference there was between Wellington’s idea of where his troops were and their actual position on that morning. It needs no comment. It is sufficient in itself to explain why the action at Quatre Bras consisted not in a set army meeting and repelling the French (it could have destroyed them as things turned out, seeing Erlon’s absence), but in the perpetual arrival of separate and hurried units, which went on from midday almost until nightfall.

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When the Prussians had concentrated to meet Napoleon at Ligny they had managed to collect, in time for the battle, three out of their four army corps.

These three army corps were the First, the Second, and the Third, and, as we have just seen, they were defeated.

But, as we have also seen, they were not thoroughly defeated. They were not disorganised, still less were the bulk of them captured and disarmed. Most important of all, they were free to retreat by any road that did not bring them against their victorious enemy. In other words, they were free to retreat to the north as well as to the east.

The full importance of this choice will, after the constant reiteration of it in the preceding pages, be clear to the reader. A retreat towards the east, and upon the line of communications which fed the Prussian army, would have had these two effects: First, it would have involved in the retirement that fresh Fourth Army Corps under Bulow which had not yet come into action, and which numbered no less than 32,000 men. For it lay to the east of the battlefield. In other words, that army corps would have been wasted, and the whole of the Prussian forces would have been forced out of the remainder of the campaign. Secondly, it would have finally separated Blucher and his Prussians from Wellington’s command. The Duke, with his western half of the allied forces, would have had to stand up alone to the mass of Napoleon’s army, which would, after the defeat of the Prussians at Ligny, naturally turn to the task of defeating the English General.

Now the fact of capital importance upon which the reader must concentrate if he is to grasp the issue of the campaign is the fact that the French staff fell into an error as to the true direction of the Prussian retreat.

Napoleon, Soult, and all the heads of the French army were convinced that the Prussian retreat was being made by that eastern road.

As a fact, the Prussians, under the cover of darkness, had retired not east but north.

The defeated army corps, the First, Second, and Third, did not fall back upon the fresh and unused Fourth Corps; they left it unhampered to march northward also; and all during the darkness the Prussian forces, as a whole, were marching in roughly parallel columns upon Wavre and its neighbourhood.

It was this escape to the north instead of the east that made it possible for the Prussians to effect their junction with Wellington upon the day of Waterloo; but it must not be imagined that this supremely fortunate decision to abandon the field of their defeat at Ligny in a northerly rather than an easterly direction was at first deliberately conceived by the Prussians with the particular object of effecting a junction with Wellington later on.

In the first place, the Prussians had no idea what line Wellington’s retreat would take. They knew that he was particularly anxious about his communications with the sea, and quite as likely to move westward as northward when Napoleon should come against him.

The full historical truth, accurately stated, cannot be put into the formula, “The Prussians retreated northward in order to be able to join Wellington two days later at Waterloo.” To state it so would be to read history backwards, and to presuppose in the Prussian staff a knowledge of the future. The true formula is rather as follows:—“The Prussians retired northward, and not eastward, because the incompleteness of their defeat permitted them to do so, and thus at once to avoid the waste of their Fourth Army Corps and to gain positions where they would be able, if necessity arose, to get news of what had happened to Wellington.”

In other words, to retreat northwards, though the decision to do so depended only upon considerations of the most general kind, was wise strategy, and the opportunity for that piece of strategy was seized; but the retreat northwards was not undertaken with the specific object of at once rejoining Wellington.

It must further be pointed out that this retreat northwards, though it abandoned the fixed line of communications leading through Namur and Liège to Aix la Chapelle, would pick up in a very few miles another line of communications through Louvain, Maestricht, and Cologne. The Prussian commanders, in determining upon this northward march, were in no way risking their supply nor hazarding the existence of their army upon a great chance. They were taking advantage of one of two courses left open to them, and that one the wiser of the two.

This retreat upon Wavre was conducted with a precision and an endurance most remarkable when we consider the fact that it took place just after a severe, though not a decisive, defeat.

Of the eighty odd thousand Prussians engaged at Ligny, probably 12,000 had fallen, killed or wounded. When the Prussian centre broke, many units became totally disorganised; and, counting the prisoners and runaways who failed to rejoin the colours, we must accept as certainly not exaggerated the Prussian official report of a loss of 15,000. 13

In spite, I say, of this severe defeat, the order of the retreat was well maintained, and was rewarded by an exceptional rapidity.

The First Corps marched along the westerly route that lay directly before them by Tilly and Mont St. Guibert. They marched past Wavre itself, and bivouacked about midday of Saturday the 17th, round about the village of Bierges, on the other side of the river Dyle.