ly
have turned the scale in favour of the Prussians, had the staff orders
been sent out promptly and conveyed with sufficient rapidity. As it was,
its most advanced units got no further west, during the course of the
action, than about halfway between Liege and the battlefield.

Napoleon was enabled to discover with some ease the great numbers which
had concentrated to oppose him from the fact that these numbers had
concentrated upon a defective position. Wellington, the greatest defensive
general of his time, at once discovered this weakness in Blucher's chosen
battlefield, and was provoked by the discovery to the exclamation which
stands at the head of this section. The rolling land occupied by the
Prussian army lay exposed in a regular sweep downwards towards the heights
upon which lay the French, and the Prussian army as it deployed came
wholly under the view of its enemy. Nothing was hidden; and a further
effect was that, as Napoleon himself remarked, all the artillery work
of the French side went home. If a round missed the foremost positions of
the Prussian army, it would necessarily fall within the ranks behind them.

This discovery, that there lay before him not one corps but a whole army,
seemed to Napoleon, upon one condition, an advantage. The new development
would, upon that one condition, give him, if his troops were of the
quality he estimated them to be, a complete victory over the united
Prussian force, and might well terminate the campaign on that afternoon
and in that place. That one condition was the possibility of getting Ney
upon the left, or some part at least of Ney's force, to leave the task of
holding off Wellington, to come down upon the flank of the Prussians from
the north and west, to envelop them, and thus, in company with the troops
of Napoleon himself, to destroy the three Prussian Army Corps altogether.

Had that condition been fulfilled, the campaign would indeed have come to
an end decisively in Napoleon's favour, and, as he put it in a famous
phrase, "not a gun" of the army opposing him "should escape."

Unfortunately for the Emperor, that one condition was not fulfilled. The
63,000 Frenchmen of the right wing, under Napoleon, did indeed defeat and
drive off the 80,000 men opposed to them. But that opposing army was not
destroyed; it was not contained; it remained organised for further
fighting, and it survived to decide Waterloo.

In order to appreciate Napoleon's idea and how it