The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc - Hilaire Belloc

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Ney, his direct superior, to act in this fashion.

      Such is the simple and common-sense explanation of the motives under which this fatal move and countermove, with its futile going and coming, with its apparent indecision, with its real strictness of military discipline, was conducted. As far as Erlon is concerned, it was no more than the continual obedience of orders, or supposed orders, to which a soldier is bound. With Ney’s responsibility I shall deal in a moment.

      Let me first make the matter plainer, if I can, by an illustration.

      Fire breaks out in a rick near a farmer’s house and at the same time in a barn half a mile away. The farmer sends ten men with water-buckets and an engine to put out the fire at the barn, while he himself, with another ten men, but without an engine, attends to the rick. He gives to his foreman, who is looking after the barn fire, the task of giving orders to the engine, and the man at the engine is told to look to the foreman and no one else for his orders. The foreman is known to be of the greatest authority with his master. Hardly has the farmer given all these instructions when he finds that the fire in the rick has spread to his house. He lets the barn go hang, and sends a messenger to the foreman with an urgent note to send back the engine at once to the house and rick. The messenger finds the man with the engine on his way to the barn, intercepts him, and tells him that the farmer has sent orders to the foreman that the engine is to go back at once to the house. The fellow turns round with his engine and is making his way towards the house when another messenger comes posthaste from the foreman direct, telling him at all costs to bring the engine back to the barn. The man with the engine turns once more, abandons the house, but cannot reach the barn in time to save it. The result of the shilly-shally is that the barn is burnt down, and the fire at the farmer’s house only put out after it has done grave damage.

      The farmer is Napoleon. His rick and house are Ligny. The foreman is Ney, and the barn is Quatre Bras. The man with the engine is Erlon, and the engine is Erlon’s command—the First Corps d’Armée.

      There was no question of contradictory orders in Erlon’s mind, as many historians seem to imagine; there was simply, from Erlon’s standpoint, a countermanded order.

      He had received, indeed, an order coming from the Emperor, but he had received it only as the subordinate of Ney, and only, as he presumed, with Ney’s knowledge and consent, either given or about to be given. In the midst of executing this order, he got another order countermanding it, and proceeding directly from his direct superior. He obeyed this second order as exactly as he had obeyed the first.

      Such is, undoubtedly, the explanation of the thing, and Ney’s is the mind, the person, historically responsible for the whole business.

      Let us consider the difficulties in the way of accepting this conclusion. The first difficulty is that Ney would not have taken it upon himself to countermand an order of Napoleon’s. Those who argue thus neither know the character of Ney nor the nature of the struggle at Quatre Bras; and they certainly underestimate both the confusion and the elasticity of warfare. Ney, a man of violent temperament (as, indeed, one might expect with such courage), was in the heat of the desperate struggle at Quatre Bras when he received Napoleon’s order to abandon his own business (a course which was, so late in the action, physically impossible). Almost at the same moment Ney heard most tardily from a messenger whom Erlon had sent (a Colonel Delcambre) that Erlon, with his 20,000 men—Erlon, who had distinctly been placed under his orders—was gone off at a tangent, and was leaving him with a grossly insufficient force to meet the rapidly swelling numbers of Wellington. We have ample evidence of the rage into which he flew, and of the fact that he sent back Delcambre with the absolutely positive order to Erlon that he should turn round and come back to Quatre Bras.

      Of course, if war were clockwork, if there were no human character in a commander, if no latitude of judgment were understood in the very nature of a great independent command such as Ney’s was upon that day, if there were always present before every independent commander’s mental vision an exact map of the operations, and, at the same time, a plan of the exact position of all the troops upon it at any given moment—if all these armchair conceptions of war were true, then Ney’s order would have been as undisciplined in character and as foolish in intention as it was disastrous in effect.

      But such conceptions are not true. Great generals entrusted with separate forces, and told off to engage in a great action at a distance from the supreme command, have, by the very nature of their mission, the widest latitude of judgment left to them. They are perfectly free to decide, in some desperate circumstance, that if their superior knew of that circumstance, he would understand why an afterorder of his was not obeyed, or was even directly countermanded. That Ney should have sent this furious counterorder, therefore, to Erlon, telling him to come back instantly, in spite of Napoleon’s first note, though it was a grievous error, is one perfectly explicable, and parallel to many other similar incidents that diversify the history of war. In effect, Ney said to himself: “The Emperor has no idea of the grave crisis at my end of the struggle or he wouldn’t have sent that order. He is winning, anyhow; I am actually in danger of defeat; and if I am defeated, Wellington’s troops will pour through and come up on the Emperor’s army from the rear and destroy it. I have a right, therefore, to summon Erlon back.” Such was the rationale of Ney’s decision. His passionate mood did the rest.

      A second and graver difficulty is this: By the time Erlon got the message to come back, it was so late that he could not possibly bring his 20,000 up in time to be of any use to Ney at Quatre Bras. They could only arrive on the field, as they did in fact arrive, when darkness had already set in. It is argued that a general in Ney’s position would have rapidly calculated the distance involved, and would have seen that it was useless to send for his subordinate at such an hour.

      Considerable discussion has turned on whether, as the best authorities believe, Erlon did or did not receive a pencilled note written personally to him by the Emperor, telling him to turn at once and come to his, Napoleon’s, aid, and by his unexpected advent upon its flank destroy the Prussian army.

      As an explanation of the false move of Erlon back and forth, the existence of this note is immaterial. The weight of evidence is in its favour, and men will believe or disbelieve it according to the way in which they judge human character and motive. For the purposes of a dramatic story the incident of a little pencilled note to Erlon is very valuable, but as an elucidation of the historical problem it has no importance, for, even if he got such a note, Erlon only got it in connection with general orders, which, he knew, were on their way to Ney, his superior.

      The point for military history is that—

      (a) Erlon, with the First Corps, on his way up to Quatre Bras that afternoon, was intercepted by a messenger, who told him that the Emperor wanted him to turn off eastward and go to Ligny, and not to Quatre Bras; while—

      (b) He also knew that that message was intended also to be delivered, and either had been or was about to be delivered, to his superior officer, Ney. Therefore he went eastward as he had been told, believing that Ney knew all about it; and therefore, also, on receiving a further direct order from Ney to turn back again westward, he did turn back.

      If we proceed to apportion the blame for that disastrous episode, which, by permitting Blucher to escape, was the plain cause of Napoleon’s subsequent defeat at Waterloo, it is obvious that the blame must fall upon Ney, who could not believe, in the heat of the violent action in

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