“To give him speedy intelligence of the concentration of Wellington’s army. I immediately,” says Müffling, “communicated this to the Duke, who quite acquiesced in Blücher’s dispositions. However, he could not resolve on fixing his point of concentration before receiving the expected news from Mons.”
This information from Blücher, however, induced the Duke to issue, about ten o’clock in the evening,[164] a second set of orders, having for their object a general movement of the army towards the east.[165] Alten’s division was now positively ordered to Nivelles; Cooke’s division of guards, which had been ordered to collect at Ath, some thirteen miles south-west of its headquarters at Enghien, was now ordered on Braine-le-Comte, eight miles south-east of Enghien; and the second and fourth divisions, and the cavalry of Lord Uxbridge, which constituted the extreme right of the army and had been cantoned between Ath and Audenarde on the Scheldt, were now ordered to Enghien. Enghien is about eight miles north-west of Braine-le-Comte, which is about nine miles west of Nivelles, which in its turn is about seven miles west of Quatre Bras. No orders were issued to the reserves.
Up to this point we can go by the records. But here we encounter serious difficulties in the evidence. Everybody knows that, somehow or other, the Duke of Wellington collected the next day at Quatre Bras a considerable part of his army. We also know that it has been claimed that during the night of the 15th and 16th the Duke ordered the whole army to Quatre Bras. We shall presently have occasion to describe how the Dutch-Belgian troops got there without his orders; but our task now is to examine the orders which Wellington gave after the despatch of those the substance of which has just been given, and his Report of the campaign, and also his own doings on the morning of the 16th, and see what light these documents and doings throw upon the statements and claims which have been made and set up in his behalf.
The Duke’s official report,[166] dated Waterloo, June 19th, seems to contain express reference to three sets of orders.
“I did not hear,” he says, “of these events [the French attack on the Prussian posts on the Sambre] till in the evening of the 15th; and I immediately ordered the troops to prepare to march,” that is, by the orders which were sent off between 5 and 7 o’clock P.M., “and afterwards,” that is, by the orders issued at 10 o’clock, “to march to their left, as soon as I had intelligence from other quarters to prove that the enemy’s movement upon Charleroi was the real attack.”
Then, after stating how the Prince of Orange reinforced the brigade of Prince Bernhard at Quatre Bras, and had, early in the morning of the 16th, regained part of the ground which had been lost the evening before, he goes on to say:—
“In the meantime,”—that is to say, before the “early morning,”—“I had directed the whole army to march upon Les Quatre Bras.”[167]
Müffling says[168] that, towards midnight,[169] the Duke entered his room, and said:
“I have got news from Mons, from General Dörnberg, who reports that Napoleon has turned towards Charleroi with all his forces, and that there is no longer any enemy in front of him; therefore orders for the concentration of my army at Nivelles and Quatre Bras are already despatched. * * * Let us, therefore, go[170] * * * to the ball.”
In spite of this evidence, there is no little difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that orders for a general concentration of the Anglo-Dutch army at Quatre Bras were issued by the Duke of Wellington either during the night of the 15th and 16th, or on the morning of the 16th. It is not only that no such orders as Müffling says the Duke told him he had despatched,[171] that no orders directing (to use the Duke’s own words) “the whole army to march upon Les Quatre Bras,”—have ever been produced,—that, in fact, not a single order of Wellington’s, directing any troops, except those belonging to the reserves, upon Quatre Bras, has ever been brought to light. This, though true, is not conclusive. It is stated by Colonel Gurwood[172] that the original instructions issued to Colonel De Lancey[173] were lost with that officer’s[174] papers; and it is of course possible that there may have been instructions for him to issue orders for the different corps or divisions to concentrate at Quatre Bras which were thus lost.[175] But the real difficulty in holding the theory that, at some time during the night, or in the early morning of the 16th, the Duke issued such instructions, is, that such a theory is apparently inconsistent with the only orders[176] given on the early morning of the 16th, of which we have copies, and also, with the Duke’s actions during the same period.