Waterloo Part 6

But it has rightly proved of considerable interest to historians to attempt to discover the human motives and the personal accidents of temperament and misunderstanding which led to so extraordinary a blunder as the utter waste of a whole army corps during a whole day, within an area not five miles by four.

It is for the purpose of considering these human motives and personal accidents that I offer these pages; for if we can comprehend Erlon's error, we shall fill the only remaining historical gap in the story of Waterloo, and determine the true causes of that action's result.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

There are two ways of appreciating historical evidence. The first is the lawyer's way: to establish the pieces of evidence as a series of disconnected units, to docket them, and then to see that they are mechanically pieced together; admitting, the while, only such evidence as would pa.s.s the strict and fossil rules of our particular procedure in the courts. This way, as might be inferred from its forensic origin, is particularly adapted to arriving at a foregone conclusion. It is useless or worse in an attempt to establish a doubtful truth.

The second way is that by which we continually judge all real evidence upon matters that are of importance to us in our ordinary lives: the way in which we invest money, defend our reputation, and judge of personal risk or personal advantage in every grave case.

This fashion consists in admitting every kind of evidence, first hand, second hand, third hand, doc.u.mentary, verbal, traditional, and judging the general effect of the whole, not according to set legal categories, but according to our general experience of life, and in particular of human psychology. We chiefly depend upon the way in which we know that men conduct themselves under the influence of such and such emotions, of the kind of truth and untruth which we know they will tell; and to this we add a consideration of physical circ.u.mstance, of the laws of nature, and hence of the degrees of probability attaching to the events which all this ma.s.s of evidence relates.

It is only by this second method, which is the method of common-sense, that anything can be made of a doubtful historical point. The legal method would make of history what it makes of justice. Which G.o.d forbid!

Historical points are doubtful precisely because there is conflict of evidence; and conflict of evidence is only properly resolved by a consideration of the psychology of witnesses, coupled with a consideration of the physical circ.u.mstances which limited the matter of their testimony.

Judged by these standards, the fatal march and countermarch of Erlon become plain enough.

His failure to help either Ney or Napoleon was not treason, simply because the man was not a traitor. It proceeded solely from obedience to orders; but these orders were fatal because Ney made an error of judgment both as to the real state of the double struggle--Quatre Bras, Ligny--and as to the time required for the countermarch. This I shall now show.

Briefly, then:--

Erlon, as he was leading his army corps up to help Ney, his immediate superior, turned it off the road before he reached Ney and led it away towards Napoleon.

Why did he do this?

It was because he had received, not indeed from his immediate superior, Ney himself, _but through a command of Napoleon's, which he knew to be addressed to Ney_, the order to do so.

When Erlon had almost reached Napoleon he turned his army corps right about face and led it off back again towards Ney.

Why did he do that?

It was because he had received at that moment _a further peremptory order from Ney, his direct superior, to act in this fashion_.

Such is the simple and common-sense explanation of the motives under which this fatal move and countermove, with its futile going and coming, with its apparent indecision, with its real strictness of military discipline, was conducted. As far as Erlon is concerned, it was no more than the continual obedience of orders, or supposed orders, to which a soldier is bound. With Ney's responsibility I shall deal in a moment.

Let me first make the matter plainer, if I can, by an ill.u.s.tration.

Fire breaks out in a rick near a farmer's house and at the same time in a barn half a mile away. The farmer sends ten men with water-buckets and an engine to put out the fire at the barn, while he himself, with another ten men, but without an engine, attends to the rick. He gives to his foreman, who is looking after the barn fire, the task of giving orders to the engine, and the man at the engine is told to look to the foreman and no one else for his orders. The foreman is known to be of the greatest authority with his master. Hardly has the farmer given all these instructions when he finds that the fire in the rick has spread to his house. He lets the barn go hang, and sends a messenger to the foreman with an urgent note to send back the engine at once to the house and rick. The messenger finds the man with the engine on his way to the barn, intercepts him, and tells him that the farmer has sent orders to the foreman that the engine is to go back at once to the house. The fellow turns round with his engine and is making his way towards the house when another messenger comes posthaste _from the foreman direct_, telling him at all costs to bring the engine back to the barn. The man with the engine turns once more, abandons the house, but cannot reach the barn in time to save it.

The result of the shilly-shally is that the barn is burnt down, and the fire at the farmer's house only put out after it has done grave damage.

The farmer is Napoleon. His rick and house are Ligny. The foreman is Ney, and the barn is Quatre Bras. The man with the engine is Erlon, and the engine is Erlon's command--the First Corps d'Armee.

There was no question of _contradictory_ orders in Erlon's mind, as many historians seem to imagine; there was simply, from Erlon's standpoint, a _countermanded_ order.

He had received, indeed, an order coming from the Emperor, but he had received it only as the subordinate of Ney, and only, as he presumed, with Ney's knowledge and consent, either given or about to be given. In the midst of executing this order, he got another order countermanding it, and proceeding directly from his direct superior. He obeyed this second order as exactly as he had obeyed the first.

Such is, undoubtedly, the explanation of the thing, and Ney's is the mind, the person, historically responsible for the whole business.

Let us consider the difficulties in the way of accepting this conclusion.

The first difficulty is that Ney would not have taken it upon himself to countermand an order of Napoleon's. Those who argue thus neither know the character of Ney nor the nature of the struggle at Quatre Bras; and they certainly underestimate both the confusion and the elasticity of warfare.

Ney, a man of violent temperament (as, indeed, one might expect with such courage), was in the heat of the desperate struggle at Quatre Bras when he received Napoleon's order to abandon his own business (a course which was, so late in the action, physically impossible). Almost at the same moment Ney heard most tardily from a messenger whom Erlon had sent (a Colonel Delcambre) that Erlon, with his 20,000 men--Erlon, who had distinctly been placed under his orders--was gone off at a tangent, and was leaving him with a grossly insufficient force to meet the rapidly swelling numbers of Wellington. We have ample evidence of the rage into which he flew, and of the fact that he sent back Delcambre with the absolutely positive order to Erlon that he should turn round and come back to Quatre Bras.

Of course, if war were clockwork, if there were no human character in a commander, if no lat.i.tude of judgment were understood in the very nature of a great independent command such as Ney's was upon that day, if there were always present before every independent commander's mental vision an exact map of the operations, and, _at the same time_, a plan of the exact position of all the troops upon it at any given moment--if all these armchair conceptions of war were true, then Ney's order would have been as undisciplined in character and as foolish in intention as it was disastrous in effect.

But such conceptions are not true. Great generals entrusted with separate forces, and told off to engage in a great action at a distance from the supreme command, have, by the very nature of their mission, the widest lat.i.tude of judgment left to them. They are perfectly free to decide, in some desperate circ.u.mstance, that if their superior knew of that circ.u.mstance, he would understand why an afterorder of his was not obeyed, or was even directly countermanded. That Ney should have sent this furious counterorder, therefore, to Erlon, telling him to come back instantly, in spite of Napoleon's first note, though it was a grievous error, is one perfectly explicable, and parallel to many other similar incidents that diversify the history of war. In effect, Ney said to himself: "The Emperor has no idea of the grave crisis at _my_ end of the struggle or he wouldn't have sent that order. He is winning, anyhow; I am actually in danger of defeat; and if I am defeated, Wellington's troops will pour through and come up on the Emperor's army from the rear and destroy it. I have a right, therefore, to summon Erlon back." Such was the rationale of Ney's decision. His pa.s.sionate mood did the rest.

A second and graver difficulty is this: By the time Erlon got the message to come back, it was so late that he could not possibly bring his 20,000 up in time to be of any use to Ney at Quatre Bras. They could only arrive on the field, as they did in fact arrive, when darkness had already set in. It is argued that a general in Ney's position would have rapidly calculated the distance involved, and would have seen that it was useless to send for his subordinate at such an hour.

The answer to this suggestion is twofold. In the first place, a man under hot fire is capable of making mistakes; and Ney was, at the moment when he gave that order, under the hottest fire of the whole action. In the second place, he could not have any very exact idea of where in all those four miles of open fields behind him the head of Erlon's column might be, still less where exactly Delcambre would find it by the time he had ridden back.

A mile either way would have made all the difference; if Erlon was anywhere fairly close; if Delcambre knew exactly where to find him, and galloped by the shortest route--if this and if that, it might still be that Erlon would turn up just before darkness and decide the field in Ney's favour.[11]

Considerable discussion has turned on whether, as the best authorities believe, Erlon did or did not receive a pencilled note written personally to him by the Emperor, telling him to turn at once and come to his, Napoleon's, aid, and by his unexpected advent upon its flank destroy the Prussian army.

As an explanation of the false move of Erlon back and forth, the existence of this note is immaterial. The weight of evidence is in its favour, and men will believe or disbelieve it according to the way in which they judge human character and motive. For the purposes of a dramatic story the incident of a little pencilled note to Erlon is very valuable, but as an elucidation of the historical problem it has no importance, for, even if he got such a note, Erlon only got it in connection with general orders, which, he knew, were on their way to _Ney_, his superior.

The point for military history is that--

(_a_) Erlon, with the First Corps, on his way up to Quatre Bras that afternoon, was intercepted by a messenger, who told him that the Emperor wanted him to turn off eastward and go to Ligny, and not to Quatre Bras; while--

(_b_) He also knew that that message was intended also to be delivered, and either had been or was about to be delivered, to his superior officer, Ney. Therefore he went eastward as he had been told, believing that Ney knew all about it; and therefore, also, on receiving a further direct order from Ney to turn back again westward, he did turn back.

If we proceed to apportion the blame for that disastrous episode, which, by permitting Blucher to escape, was the plain cause of Napoleon's subsequent defeat at Waterloo, it is obvious that the blame must fall upon Ney, who could not believe, in the heat of the violent action in which he was involved, that Napoleon's contemporary action against Ligny could be more decisive or more important than his own. It was a question of exercising judgment, and of deciding whether Napoleon had justly judged the proportion between his chances of a great victory and Ney's chances; and further, whether a great victory at Ligny would have been of more effect than a great victory or the prevention of a bad defeat at Quatre Bras. Napoleon was right and Ney was wrong.

I have heard or read the further suggestion that Napoleon, on seeing Erlon, or having him reported, not two miles away, should have sent him further peremptory orders to continue his march and to come on to Ligny.

This is bad history. Erlon, as it was, was heading a trifle too much to the south, so that Napoleon, who thought the whole of Ney's command to be somewhat further up the Brussels road northward than it was, did not guess at first what the new troops coming up might be, and even feared they might be a detachment of Wellington's, who might have defeated Ney, and now be coming in from the west to attack _him_.

He sent an orderly to find out what the newcomers were. The orderly returned to report that the troops were Erlon's, but that they had turned back. Had Napoleon sent again, after this, to find Erlon, and to make him for a third time change his direction, it would have been altogether too late to have used Erlon's corps d'armee at Ligny by the time it should have come up. Napoleon had, therefore, no course before him but to do as he did, namely, give up all hope of help from the west, and defeat the Prussians at Ligny before him, if not decisively, at least to the best of his ability, with the troops immediately to his hand.

So much for Erlon.

Now for the second point: the way in which the units of Wellington's forces dribbled in all day haphazard upon the position of Quatre Bras.

Wellington, as we saw on an earlier page, was both misinformed and confused as to the nature and rapidity of the French advance into Belgium.

He did not appreciate, until too late, the importance of the position of Quatre Bras, nor the intention of the French to march along the great northern road. Even upon the field of Waterloo itself he was haunted by the odd misconception that Napoleon's army would try and get across his communications with the sea, and he left, while Waterloo was actually being fought, a considerable force useless, far off upon his right, on that same account.

The extent of Wellington's misjudgment we can easily perceive and understand. Every general must, in the nature of war, misjudge to some extent the nature of his opponent's movements, but the shocking errors into which bad staff work led him in this his last campaign are quite exceptional.

Wellington wrote to Blucher, on his arrival at the field of Quatre Bras, at about half-past ten in the morning, a note which distinctly left Blucher to understand that he might expect English aid during his forthcoming battle with Napoleon at Ligny. He did not say so in so many words, but he said: "My forces are at such and such places," equivalent, that is, to saying, "My forces can come up quite easily, for they are close by you," adding: "I do not see any large force of the enemy in front of us; and I await news from your Highness, and the arrival of troops, in order to determine my operations for the day."

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.