d, could certainly not
have come up to help Napoleon with his whole force. He might, however,
have spared a portion of it, and that portion, as we shall see later,
would have been most obviously Erlon's corps--the First. Rather more than
an hour later, at about a quarter-past three, when Napoleon had just
joined battle with the Prussians, he got a note from Ney informing him
that the left wing was meeting with considerable resistance, and could
hardly abandon the place where it was engaged before Quatre Bras to come
up against the Prussian flank at Ligny. Napoleon sent a note back to say
that, none the less, an effort must be made at all costs to send Ney's
forces to come over to him to attack the Prussian flank, for such an
attack would mean the winning of a great decisive battle.

The distance over which these notes had to be carried to and fro, from
Napoleon to Ney, was not quite five miles. The Emperor might therefore
fairly expect after his last message that in the late middle of the
afternoon--say half-past five or six--troops would appear upon his
north-west horizon and march down to his aid. In good time such troops did
appear; how inconclusively it will be my business to record.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had begun the fight at Ligny with his usual signal of
three cannonshots, and between three and four o'clock the front of the
whole army was engaged. It was for many hours mere hammer-and-tongs
fighting, the French making little impression upon their right against
Ligny or the villages to the east of it, but fighting desperately for St
Amand and for Wagnelee. Such a course was part of Napoleon's plan, for he
had decided, as I have said, only to hold the Prussian left, to strike
hardest at their right, and, when his reinforcement should come from Ney,
to turn that right, envelop it, and so destroy the whole Prussian army.

These villages upon the Prussian right were taken and retaken in a series
of furious attacks and counter-attacks, which it would be as tedious to
detail as it must have been intolerable to endure.

All this indecisive but furious struggle for the line of villages (not one
of which was as yet carried and held permanently by the French) lasted
over two hours. It was well after five o'clock when there appeared, far
off, under the westering sun, a new and large body of troops advancing
eastward as though to reach that point between Wagnelee and St Amand where
the left of the French force was strugglin