THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN.*

Tins addition to the present cyclone of Napoleonic literature seems to justify Scott's prophecy that although Agincourt might soon be forgotten and " Blenheim's name be new," there would long live in our memories "the towers of Hougoumont and field of Waterloo." For the Camberley Staff College student or the inquiring amateur the volume will be a useful and -attractive handbook of the war of June 14th-181h, 1815. A thorough master of the vast literature of his subject, Colonel Pratt, who is no novice in military writing, commands a clear and vivacious manner. He never palms off guesses as established facts, and his text, which is a capital mixture of narrative and comment, is supported by proper paragraph references and a select list of books. We cannot compliment him on his cartography, or the hideous khaki uniform inflicted on the series, or on the absence of an index.

The historian of the events in question encounters puzzles that keep him, as Lord Wolseley has expressed it, "dancing among eggs." In the brittle topics of the four days Lord Wolseley includes Wellington's scheme of defence of the line of Belgian territory between Ostend and Brussels, placed under his protection by the terms of his Vienna Agreement with Blucher's Chief of the Staff, Gneisenau. Our author's handling of this " egg " is more complimentary to Wellington than that of Lord Wolseley. He clearly proves that the Duke's dispositions, the much- discussed occupation of Hal included, exactly met the requirements of the allied armies, not as they appear in the light of knowledge available in 1907, but as seen in 1815. The Duke's immobility at Brussels was due to tho insufficiency of the belated reports sent him from the Prussian outposts when the French crossed the Sambre. His diffi- culties were, we think, the greater, because, as explained in 011ech's classical lectures, both he and Bliicher had been strictly forbidden to send a single patrol beyond the French frontier, so that one of Ziethen's first trustworthy warnings of the enemy's near approach was derived from the reflections thrown on the sky by the watchfires of the concentrated French army on the night of June 13th: Napoleon had forbidden such fires to be lighted. The fighting days June 15th-18th were from Thursday to Sunday. The Emperor's headquarters at Charleroi, on his passage of the Sambre on the Thursday, were twelve miles south of the key position,—Quatre Bras. Was his order to Ney to occupy the cross-roads significant of

• a plan for wedging himself in between the two allied armies

• that he might take them in detail ? Not giving a positive • The Waterloo Campaign a Study. By Lieutenant-Colonel Sisson C. Pratt, late B.A. With 7 Maps and Sketches. "Special Campaign Series," No. T. London : Swan Sonnenschein and Co. [50. net.] opinion on this highly contentions topic, our author inquires whether Ney was "definitely told" to seize Quatre Bras. All we know is that, on the Marshal's arrival at Charleroi, lie took over the two corps of Reille and d'Erlon with a Staff limited to one officer, and leisurely approaching Frasnes, in front of the cross-roads, with a squadron of Polish lancers, was met by the fire of a battery of guns under the command of young Bernard of Saxe-Weimar. Thereupon, strange to say, the "bravest; of the brave," exchanging his traditional audacity for feelings of exaggerated caution, called a halt, and on the approach of darkness appears to have cantered back to Charleroi, where he perhaps interviewed the Emperor, or sent him in a report. Next day the " Roland " of the

Grand Army, as Napoleon used to call him, found his old humour again, but not his old luck, for just as he opened

fire before Quatre Bras, his subordinate d'Erlon, who was in the rear, suddenly executing a voile-face, vanished front the front of the cross-roads and marched off to the field of Ligny, where Napoleon was fighting Blucher. Then another sphinx-like incident occurred. Instead of joining the Emperor, who was preparing for the critical move of the battle, d'Erlon, after a short halt, marched back upon Quatre Bras, where he arrived in time to witness Ney's retreat, so that his twenty thousand men did not fire a shot either at Blucher or at Wellington.

Devoting a searching chapter to the various conjectural interpretations of these pendulum movements.- which were partly due to scrawled pencil orders, Colonel Pratt convicts d'Erlon of blunders and remissness, and concludes that in the four days Napoleon, "as was often his wont, trusted too much to the judgment of his subordinate Generals, and did not give his directions in sufficient detail or with the necessary precision." The author does not add that the vagueness, or, as 011ech thought, the ultra-dictatorial tone, of an order from Gneisenau caused the absence from Ligny of Bfilow's 4th Prussian Corps, thus depriving old " Vorwarts " of a quarter of his calculated strength. Wellington's descrip- tion of his own force as "the worst army and worst staff ever brought together" is quoted by our author, though not his words, "an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped." In

the opinion of Sir Evelyn Wood, this language expressed the Duke's disgust at the behaviour of the War Office rather than

his actual valuation of his army. For the final French saure qui peut special causes were in play. Of the rank-and-file, fifty per cent. were recruits; of the eighteen thousand meu of the Imperial Guard, a quarter were untrained men ;

discipline was wanting, the regimental officers were a scratch lot, and the old Paladins of the Pyramids, Marengo, and

Jena were' mostly absent. The model Chief of the Staff, Bernier, having just committed suicide, Napoleon gave that office to Soult, whose greatness as a leader of troops did not prevent his proving a hopeless failure in his new capacity. As to the Marshals present, Vandamtue would not speak to Soult, and he disobeyed Grouchy, who again, with all his genius as a leader of horse, showed himself in his pursuit of the Prussians after Ligny to be an inefficient Generalissimo. Summing up this state of things, the author remarks that in the army "treason was everywhere scented," all orders and movements were viewed with suspicion, jealousies were rampant, so that the great leader was only followed "with a half-hearted effort." Napoleon himself was not in his physical zenith. The old accounts of the patho- logical conditions which limited his activities in the four days may be dismissed by Houssaye as fables : more convincing than such negatives is the testimony of the Emperor's brother Jerome regarding a Parisian incident unsuitable for relation

here.

The great battle of the 18th opened at 11.50 a.m. with

Jerome's partially successful attack on the German detachment posted in the wood in front of the Château of Hougoumont on Wellington's right flank. Describing the retreat, the

author says :—

" Step by step the Nassau and Hanoverian troops were driven back. Reinforced by the light companies of the Guards, the defenders offered a gallant resistance, and it was nearly one o'clock before the attack was brought to a stand in front of the château and loopholed garden-wall of Hougoumont. The English were well under shelter, and every shot told. Daring attempts were made to scale the wall and break in the door of the château, but without success. Jerome now called up his second brigade to relieve the assailants, who tc ok ground to the left, and assaulted the château on its western si,h An entrance into the orchard

was forced by the newly arrived supports. The attacks both on the eastern and western sides of the farm enclosure were repulsed by the advance of some companies of the Guards from the main line, and it was nearly two o'clock when the decimated battalions withdrew to the cover of the woods."

The place was too strong for the ex-King of Westphalia's twelve-pounders ; but if in 1907 troops were cooped up behind masonry like "the towers of Hougoumont " under the fire of our modern howitzers, they would be annihilated in an hour or so. The dan2c1e of Waterloo followed. Supposing that on the previous three days there had been at the dis- posal of Napoleon, Ney, and d'Erlon fountain-pens, field- telegraphs, telephones, cycles, and motor-cars, the hesitations, marchings, and counter-marching,s above described would not have occurred, and Billow would have been in his place at Ligny. Again, if Grouchy after that battle could have sent up a scout in a steerable balloon of the new 'Petrie' species or in a "kite" to make an aerial reconnaissance, his pursuit of the Prussians, instead of being mere guesswork, would have enabled him to divert their course from Wavre and Waterloo.

On June 18th the French and English armies each num- bered nearly seventy thousand men, their frontage being about three miles ; in our days of extended formations the equivalent stretch of ground might be several times that length. Then, incredible as it may seem to the contemporaries of Mnkden, on the night before the battle the hostile armies bivouacked within twelve hundred yards of each other, while the French deployed on the crest of the slope a thousand yards from the British position, a distance which in an age of quick-firing guns, shrapnel, and magazine rifles would mean the immediate collapse of the attack. Napoleon's intrepid horsemen, making their wonderful charge in squadron columns up the slope to the gap between Hougoumont and the farm of La Hays Sainte, reached the plateau in spite of the case-shot from our batteries ; their advance brought them within what in our day would be a cross-fire at decisive rifle-range,—that is to say, to absolute destruction.

Passing from details to principles, we would point out that with the magnitude of modern armies, the new facilities of railway transport and supply, the increased range of gun and rifle fire, and other conditions of military progress, the assault of an enemy's main position will be effected, not by hazardous rushes, but by a succession of advances, occupying not hours but days, or maybe weeks, each entailing a separate fight. The twentieth-century Mars will not be merely guided by the inspirations of the moment—he will be the Professor of an exact science. A Salamanca with a "defeat of forty thousand men in forty minutes" will not recur, neither shall we hear of another "Up Guards and at 'em I" For all this, proper mastery of the cardinal points of victorious war and efficiency in high command are not to be acquired without the study of the strategy and tactics of the great captains of battle, of whom "he of Lodi's bridge, Marengo's field, and Wagram's ridge" was the chief.