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.
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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.