Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/236

Rh 224 NAPOLEON [1815- in which he explains his change of attitude by saying that &quot;formerly he had endeavoured to organize a grand federal system in Europe, which he had regarded as agreeable to the spirit of the age and favourable to the progress of civilization,&quot; that &quot;for this purpose he had adjourned the introduction of free institutions,&quot; but that &quot; henceforward he had no other object but to increase the prosperity of France by strengthening public liberty.&quot; This neat misrepresentation deserves notice as having imposed on many people. For the rest it is to be observed that this act creates an hereditary peerage. The Field of May was held, but not till June 1. Napoleon appeared in a grand costume and distributed flags, but the &quot;well- beloved spouse and son &quot; were not there ; Europe had declared against him. On the 12th he set out for the campaign. The great powers had issued, immediately on hearing of Napoleon s disembarkation (March 13th), a declaration putting him outside all civil and social relations, and con signing him to public vengeance as &quot; an enemy and disturber of the peace of the world.&quot; On March 25th they recon stituted the Coalition. Was this a disappointment to Napoleon 1 A war of liberation was perhaps necessary to him. To be freely accepted by the French people, and then to be rejected by Europe, gave him precisely the opportunity he sought of standing forth as the heroic champion of national independence. He had now all the soldiers who at the time of his first fall had been locked up in fortresses or foreign prisons. His position was there fore such as it had been in 1813, not in 1814, and he proposed to defend not a vast empire but simply France, so that he had on his side patriotism and liberalism. All this, and his own genius ! Would not so much suffice ? Probably he remembered Brumaire, how low the fortune of France at that time had been, and how sud denly Marengo had restored all. For the moment, however, the inequality of numbers was great. In June the allies had in the field more than 700,000, Napoleon little more than 200,000, men. There were already English troops in Belgium, where they were engaged in establishing the new kingdom of the Netherlands, and there were Prussian troops in the Rhenish province which had just been given to Prussia. It was a question for Napoleon whether he should assume a defensive attitude and allow the allies to invade France this in itself would have suited his new policy best or carry the war into Belgium, a country long united with France, and attack the English and Prussians. He shrank from inflicting a new invasion upon France, especially on account of the strength of the royalist party in many regions, and thus it was that the scene of the campaign was laid in Belgium. The English had their headquarters at Brussels, the Prussians at Lie&quot;ge. He formed the plan of dividing them and beating them in turn, as he had served the Austrians and Sardinians at the very beginning of his career. Many circumstances, however, were different. Wellington and Bliicher with Gneisenau were superior to Colli and Beaulieu; the Napoleon of 1815 was vastly inferior to the Bonaparte of 1796. Of all the Napoleonic campaigns this was by far the most rapid and decisive. Even the Marengo campaign had lasted a month, but this was decided in three days. Leaving Paris on the 12th, Napoleon was in Paris again on the 21st, his own fate and that of his empire and that of France decided. Everything concurred to make this short struggle the most interesting military occurrence of modern history : its desperate intensity, its complete decisiveness, the presence for the first and last time of the English army in the front of the European contest, the presence of the three most renowned commanders, Napoleon, Wellington, and Bliicher. Accordingly it has been debated with infinite curiosity, and misrepresented on all sides with infinite partiality. Napoleon s army amounted to 122,401 men; it contained a large number of veterans, besides many who had seen the campaigns of 1813-14, and was perhaps the finest army he had ever com manded. That of Wellington was composed of English men, Hanoverians, Brunswickers, Nassauers, Germans, and Netherlanders ; the total is stated at 105,950. But in the Netherlander of the newly-established kingdom no con fidence could be placed, and yet these amounted to nearly 30,000 ; the English too (about 35,000) were in great part raw recruits (the Peninsular veterans being mainly absent in America) ; altogether Wellington pronounced it &quot; the worst army ever brought together.&quot; The army of Bliicher numbered 116,897 disciplined troops, animated by an intensely warlike spirit. Napoleon s opening was prosper ous. He maintained so much secrecy and used so much rapidity that he succeeded in throwing himself between the two armies. On the 15th he advanced and occupied Charleroi. On the 1 6th he engaged the Prussians at Ligny and the English at Quatrebras, desiring to block the cross road between Quatrebras and Sombreffe, and so to sever the two armies. Napoleon personally commanded against the Prussians, and here he gained his last victory. The battle was very bloody; about 12,000 Prussians fell, and Bliicher himself was wounded. At Quatrebras Ney met Wellington and was forced to retreat. But the defeat of Bliicher made it necessary for Wellington to retire on Brussels in order to effect a junction with the Prussians. The 17th was spent in this retrograde movement, and on the 18th Wellington accepted battle on the heights of St Jean, from which the French name it, while the English give it the name of Waterloo, a village four miles nearer Battle of to Brussels, where Wellington wrote his despatch. He Waterloo accepted battle in full reliance upon the help of the Prussians, who are not therefore to be considered as having saved him from defeat. Military writers point out several errors, some of them considerable, committed by Wellington, but their criticism of Napoleon, which begins by sweeping away a mass of falsehood devised by himself and his admirers in order to throw the blame upon others, is so crushing that it seems to show us Napoleon after his brilliant commencement acting as an indolent and inefficient general. He first, through mere want of energy, allows the Prussians to escape him after Ligny, and then sends Marshal Grouchy with 33,000 men in the wrong direction in pursuit of them. Owing to this mismanagement Grouchy is at Wavre on the day of the battle of Waterloo, fighting a useless battle against the Prussian corps of Thielemann, while Bliicher is enabled to keep his engagement to Wellington. Everywhere during these days Napoleon appears negligent, inactive, inacces sible, and rather a Darius than an Alexander, so that it has been plausibly maintained that he was physically incapaci tated by illness. The battle itself was one of the most re markable and terrible ever fought, but it was perhaps on both sides rather a soldiers than a generals battle. It con sisted of five distinct attacks on the English position : (1) an attack on the English right by the division Reille, (2) an attack on the left by the division D Erlon (here Picton was killed), (3) a grand cavalry attack, where the splendid French cavalry &quot; foamed itself away &quot; upon the English squares, (4) a successful attack by Ney on La Haye Sainte (which Wellington is thought to have too much neglected ; it was after this that the French prospect seemed brightest), (5) the charge of the guard. In the middle of the third act of this drama the Prussians began to take part in the action. The battle seems to have begun about 11.30, and about 8 o clock in the evening the cry &quot; Sauve qui peut &quot;