1. It does not seem to us that Napoleon can be charged with any lack of activity or decision of character, except on the morning after the battle of Ligny, when he was, as we imagine, pretty well tired out. But his energy speedily returned, and we find him conducting the pursuit of the English during the afternoon, and making an examination of their position in the mud and rain in the middle of the night.
2. Nor was there any defect in his plan of campaign. Had Ney executed his orders with promptness and without hesitation, the campaign would have been finished on the 16th of June, either by Ney’s furnishing the needed force to take the Prussians in rear at Brye and Wagnelée, or by his defeating Wellington badly by the help of the 1st Corps. If either of these things had happened, there could not possibly have been any battle of Waterloo; the Prussian and English armies would have been definitely separated; one, and perhaps both, would have been beaten; and never, in all probability, would they have acted together again. For this failure to achieve success on the second day of the campaign, Ney and not Napoleon was responsible.
3. But for not overwhelming at Quatre Bras on the early morning of the 17th the two-thirds of his army which Wellington had collected there, no one but Napoleon was responsible; and his failure to do this must be attributed to his excessive fatigue.
4. Then, for his neglect to ascertain the direction of the Prussian retreat on the same morning, Napoleon is responsible; and although Soult ought to have attended to this, in his capacity of chief-of-staff, yet, as the Emperor does not appear to have blamed him for not having reconnoitred in the direction of Wavre, we must consider Napoleon as open to this censure. It is true, it was not likely that Blücher had retired in the direction of Wavre; but it was of vital importance to know whether he had or not. Hence it was a great neglect not to find out.
5. Napoleon is also solely responsible for having persisted in his original design of detaching Grouchy in pursuit of the Prussians after he had reason to believe that they were intending to unite with the English, and to suspect, in fact, that they had been approaching the English during the previous night and morning; and for contenting himself with merely giving Grouchy a warning that this might be their intention. He laid upon Grouchy, in fact, a burden which to that officer, as Napoleon was well aware, was entirely new; hence, the Emperor was not warranted in risking so much on the chance of Grouchy’s being able to sustain it. It is this that Napoleon is to blame for in this connection; for having, when he saw that the Prussians might (as the Bertrand order expresses it) be “intending to unite with the English to cover Brussels in trying the fate of another battle,” persisted in adhering to his original plan,—devised when he and Grouchy and everybody else supposed that the Prussians had gone to Namur,—of sending Grouchy in pursuit of them with two corps d’armée. Many writers will have it that “Napoleon did not in the least foresee the flank march of the Prussians.”[810] This,—if to foresee be equivalent to expect,—may be true. But Napoleon certainly did, at 1 P.M. of the 17th, recognize the possibility of the Prussians uniting with the English; and the true criticism on him is, as it seems to us, that, having this in mind, as a possibility, he should have detached Marshal Grouchy with 33,000 men from the main army, and have been content to rely on Grouchy’s being able to prevent this project of the Prussians from being carried out. It must be added to this, that his neglect to send Grouchy any information of his own situation, and any orders as to what he expected him to do if he found the Prussians were marching to join Wellington or to attack the main French army, showed an unjustifiable reliance on the favors of fortune.
6. To Marshal Grouchy belongs the blame of having entirely failed to apprehend his mission, as indicated to him by the express warning contained in the Bertrand order. Had he acted intelligently in accordance with the information which he acquired in the night of the 17th and 18th, he could have prevented the Emperor from being overwhelmed by both the allied armies. At daybreak, as appears from his letter to Pajol, he knew that the Prussians had retired towards Wavre and Brussels. But the meaning of this fact he utterly failed to grasp. He made no change in his previously ordered dispositions, which this news should have shown him were wholly unsuited to the situation as now ascertained. Nor did the sound of the cannon of Waterloo produce on him a greater effect. He would not accept the suggestion of Gérard. He persisted in a course which completely isolated his command, and prevented it from playing any part in the events of that memorable day. Napoleon, as we have pointed out, made a great mistake in trusting so much to Grouchy’s good judgment; he took a wholly unnecessary risk; he might, as well as not, have taken Grouchy, with far the larger part of his command, with the main army; had he done so, the catastrophe of Waterloo could not, so far as we can judge, have happened. But had Grouchy acted up to the demands of the situation in which he found himself, he also would have averted the ruin which the unhindered union of the allies brought upon Napoleon and his army.
APPENDIX A.
ON SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF NAPOLEON’S MEMOIRS.
Probably no military narratives that ever were written have been subjected to more harsh and unjust criticism than the two accounts of the campaign of Waterloo, which, under the names of the Gourgaud Narrative and the Memoirs, were dictated or written by Napoleon at St. Helena. To read the remarks of Charras, Chesney, Hooper, and others, about these books, one would suppose that a military narrative is the easiest, plainest sort of narrative to write, and that if a general wished to compose it properly he would isolate himself from his fellow-officers and subordinates, and get into some secluded corner of the world thousands of miles from the records of the war-department. For if this is not the view of these writers and of others like them, they are either ignorant of the extreme difficulty which attends the composition of a military narrative, or else are bent upon treating the fallen Emperor with gross injustice.