Had he done so, it would simply have meant that he would later have effected a junction with his allies, and that in the long-run Napoleon would still have had to fight an allied army immensely superior to his own.

All this is as much as to say once more what has been insisted upon throughout these pages; Waterloo was lost, not upon Sunday, June 18th, but two days before, when the 63,000 of Napoleon broke and drove back the 80,000 of Blucher but failed to contain them, failed to drive them eastward, away from Wellington, or to cause a general surrender, and failed because the First French Army Corps, under Erlon, a matter of 20,000 men, failed to come up in flank at the critical moment.

We have seen what the effect of that failure was; we have discussed its causes, and we must repeat the main fact for military history of all those four days: the breakdown of Napoleon’s last desperate venture turned upon Erlon’s useless marching and countermarching between Quatre Bras and Ligny, two days before the final action of Waterloo was fought.

This being so, the battle of Waterloo must resolve itself into two main phases: the first, the beginning of the struggle with Wellington before the Prussians come up; the second, the main and decisive part of the action, in which both Prussians and English are combined against the French army.

This second phase develops continually as the numbers of the arriving Prussians increase, until it is clinched by the appearance of Ziethen’s corps at the very end of the day, and the break-up of the French army; this second part is therefore itself capable of considerable subdivision. But in any large and general view of the whole action, we must regard it as divided into these two great chapters, during the first of which is engaged the doubtful struggle between Napoleon and Wellington; during the second of which the struggle, no longer doubtful, is determined by the arrival of the Prussians in flank upon the field.

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Elements of Waterloo.