urns 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'Armee.

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