y
or daring.

He determined with his smaller but compact and manageable army to thrust
himself between the two wings of the somewhat loosely coherent enemy
under its divided command; to hold off one while he smashed the other and
then to concentrate upon the surviving half and mete out to it the same
hard fortune. In other words, trusting to his ability, he deliberately
placed his own army between two others, each of which practically equaled
his own. He thrust himself within the jaws of a trap, to use a homely
simile, intending to hold one arm of the trap open while he broke up the
other. He intended to burst through the allied line and smash up each
half in succession.

Of course there was always the danger that he could not burst through
that line; or that he could not hold back one half while he fought the
other, or that holding back one half he could not beat the other, or
having beaten one half he would be too weak to fall on the other. There
was always the danger that the trap would be sprung, that he would be
caught in its jaws or, to change the metaphor, that he would be like the
wheat between the upper and the nether millstone. Still he did not think
so, and he did not go into the undertaking blindly. As he had said, in
his own case, "War was not a conjectural art," and he had most carefully
counted the cost, estimated the probabilities. In short, he looked well
before he leaped--yet a man may look well and leap wrong after all.

On these considerations he based his grand strategy. The army of the
Prussians had approached the French frontier from the east; the army of
the English and allies from the northwest. Napoleon had a complete
knowledge of one of the Captains opposing him. He knew and accurately
estimated Bluecher. He did not know and he did not accurately estimate
Wellington. He viewed the latter with contempt; the former with a
certain amount of disdainful approbation, for while Bluecher was no
strategist and less of a tactician, he was a fighter and a fighter is
always dangerous and to be dreaded. Gneisenau, a much more accomplished
soldier, was Bluecher's second in command, but he was a negligible factor
in the Emperor's mind. The fact that Wellington had beaten all of
Napoleon's Marshals with whom he had come in contact had intensified the
Emperor's hatred. Instead of begetting caution in dealing with him,
Napoleon's antagonism had blinded him as to Wellington's ability.

He also