QUATRE BRAS.

A. D. 1815. June 16.

On the 26th of February, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba. On the 1st of March he landed at Cannes, and on the night ofthe 20th of that month, having been joined by the whole French army, he triumphantly re-entered Paris. On the night of the 11th of June he quitted Paris to open the campaign in the Netherlands, where the English and their allies were concentrating their forces. As he stepped into his travelling carriage, his countenance, which had long been clouded, brightened up, and he said, with a confident tone, "Je vais me mésurer avec ce Vilainton." (I am going to measure myself with this Wellington). He had assembled an army of about 125,000 men, chiefly veteran troops, of whom 25,000 were cavalry, and 350 pieces of artillery. With this force, he advanced to the Belgian frontier on the 14th of June, and on the very next day the stern conflict began.

In the mean time, the Duke of Wellington had raised his force in the field to about 76,000 men, of whom not near onehalf were British. Knowing that his adversary would bring with him a tremendous artillery, Wellington had applied for 150 British pieces; but so miserably had he been supplied by our government, and by those who kept the keys at Woolwich, where there were guns enough to cannonade the world, that, when he united all his English pieces with those of the Dutch and German under him, he found he had only some eighty-four pieces.

The Duke's head-quarters were at Brussels, the capital of the country, which it was Bonaparte's first great object to gain, and the possession of which would have given the French immense advantages-moral and political, as well as military. On the Duke's left lay Marshal Blucher, with the Prussian army, estimated (after the junction of Bulow's corps) at about 80,000 men. The old marshal was well

supplied with artillery, his government having sent him 200 cannon; but, unluckily, his artillerymen were not very good, and he had to complain of the manner in which his guns were served when the French fell upon him. Blucher's head-quarters were at Namur.

The two armies were, of necessity, spread over a wide extent of country. The Duke of Wellington's had to preserve its communications with England, Holland, and Germany; to be near enough to connect readily with the Prussian army, and to protect Brussels. Blucher's army had to preserve its communications with the country in its rear and on his left, through which the reinforcements of the grand allied armies were to advance; he had to give the hand to Wellington, and, at the same time, he had to watch a long extent of frontier; and on that north-eastern frontier of France there were many strong fortresses, which enabled Bonaparte to make his movements, and to attack wherever he chose, without letting his attack be foreseen by the enemy.

In front of the extended lines of the British and their immediate allies, the Hanoverians, Brunswickers, &c., there were, besides country by-roads, no fewer than four great roads (paved roads, proper for the passage of artillery, and for all military purposes); and it was because there were all these roads leading from the French departments of the north, and the fortresses on the French frontier; and because the Duke of Wellington could not possibly tell or foresee by which of these roads the French might choose to advance, that part of his forces were widely spread, in order to watch them all, while the remainder of his army was kept in hand, in order to be thrown upon whatever point the attack should be made against. These men were every way better in and round Brussels than they would have been if bivouacked and cantoned on the high roads; and the artillery was also better there, for of this arm Wellington had not to spare it was needful that he should have it all on the field of battle, and embracing all the possible lines by which the French might attack, the British general had, where it stood, the best means of moving it rapidly to any one of them. If the guns had been collected on one point, and the enemy had attacked at another, the guns could not have been so easily moved. If, as some commanders might have done, he had

kept his troops marching and countermarching from point to point, he would very uselessly have wasted the strength and spirit of the men before the day of battle arrived.

Concentration of force is the finest of all things in war, in its proper place; and several of the continental armies, and especially the Austrians, had been, and continue to be, deservedly censured for their practice of extension in line, and separation of parts. But there are cases in which the idea of concentration is an absurdity; and certain English writers, destitute of military study, and incapable of comprehending the simplest principles of the military art, have taken up the old criticism against the Austrian generals, and have applied it to a case to which it is utterly inapplicable.

If, as he had once hoped, the Duke of Wellington had been enabled to commence operations by acting on the offensive, then he would have attacked Bonaparte on the French frontier in one or two condensed masses; and then Bonaparte, not knowing where the attack would be made, must have had his army stretched out in lines along that frontier, having merely reserved to himself (as Wellington did) the best plan and the best means of concentration when and where the attack should be made. But the Duke had not received from England the accession of strength which he had calculated upon; the grand army of Prince Schwartzenberg was still somewhere in Germany, and, with none but Blucher to co-operate with him, and with forces which, if united, would not have exceeded by 30,000 men the army which Bonaparte had actually in the field, it would indeed have been rash to attack a frontier covered with numerous and well-garrisoned fortresses, or to invade France, where an army of reserve was collecting to support the army on the frontier.

We trust that these few words will enable the reader to understand the absurd charge, that the Duke of Wellington was not only out-manoeuvred and out-generaled, but actually taken by surprise-an ignorant piece of babble, which has been recently and very ably exposed, but which every patriotic and well-informed writer ought to continue to hold up to scorn and derision, until the fallacy is utterly exploded, or left only in French books, where the truth in such matters is never to be expected.*

See an admirable memorandum on the battle of Waterloo, by

It was on the 15th of June that Bonaparte crossed the Sambre, and advanced upon Charleroi. At sunset, on the preceding evening, all had been quiet upon the frontier, and nothing had been observed at the Prussian outposts. As the foremost of the French columns had been put in motion as early as two or three o'clock in the morning, they fell suddenly upon those outposts just as day was dawning. The outposts fell back, and then a report was sent to the Duke of Wellington, who gave his orders for holding his troops in readiness to march. But it was not as yet sufficiently clear that Bonaparte intended the attack upon Charleroi to be a serious one, and that he really intended to open his road to Brussels by the valley of the Sambre. The Duke, therefore, waited until correct intelligence from various quarters proved, beyond the reach of a doubt, that the advance upon Charleroi was the real attack.

It was useless to move, and he had determined, all along, not to move, until he got information which could not be obtained before the event happened—that is, before the first French columns, advancing by the valley of the Sambre, were swelled to a great army-an operation which requires rather more time than is taken in the writing of a critical or chapsodical sentence for a book.

The certain and decided information was brought to Brussels by the Prince of Orange, who had so often "gone the pace" for the British general in the Peninsula. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon, and the prince found the Duke at dinner, at his hotel, about a hundred yards from his quarters in the park, which he had taken care not to quit during the morning, or even during the preceding day. The Prince of Orange was soon followed by the Prussian general Muffin, who brought accounts of the French onset, &c.*

Now that it was time to put his army in motion, Wellington put it in motion to his left. The orders for this memorable march were not decided upon in a scene of merriment and festivity, and at midnight, but in the Duke's hotel,

Sir Francis Head, in Quarterly Review, No. CXLIII.; and a very able article on the Life of Blucher, and the operations of Waterloo, in the same publication, No. CXL.

* Wellington Despatches. Pict. Hist. of England.

These orders must

and at about five o'clock in the afternoon. have reached most of the corps by eight, and probably all the corps by ten o'clock at night. It is quite true that the Duke did go to a ball that evening, and that many of his officers went as well as he, because their business of the day was done, and because their presence was not required for such details as packing up the baggage, &c. The Duke's being at the ball was a proof of his equanimity at the most critical moment of his whole life. The Duchess of Richmond's ball was a gay one, and Wellington, and his officers present at it, were as cheerful as any part of that gay company. About midnight the general officers were quietly warned, and quietly disappeared from the ball-room. Shortly after, the younger officers were summoned from the dance, but without any bustle.

By this time the troops were mustering, and before the sun of the 16th of June rose, "all were marching to the field of honor, and many to an early grave."

Major M. Sherer, who seems to be in general very correct, follows the widely spread error (which Lord Byron has in a manner perpetuated in verse), that the Duke's marching orders were decided upon at the Duchess of Richmond's ball. We know that many persons present at that ball believed this to be the case; but the contrary is proved by the writer in the "Quarterly Review," who has evidently had official sources of information, and whose account we have followed. The old story is, moreover, at variance with the Duke's memorandum for the deputy quarter-master general, of the 15th of June.* We also gather from the latter valuable repertory that the Duke's stay at the Duchess of Richmond's ball must have been but short; for at half-past nine in the evening, we find him writing to the Duke of Berri, and at ten to the Duke of Feltre (General Clarke), who had remained steady to the Bourbons. In the earlier part of the same day, the Duke had written a letter to General Sir Henry Clinton, and a very long letter, in French, and on the always difficult subject of strategy, to the Emperor Alexander. And yet, forsooth, his grace was taken by surprise and flustered! The

Quarterly Review, No. XC. Colonel Gurwood, Wellington Despatches.

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