ability to act upon it; Napoleon took
that ability for granted. But Grouchy, as a fact, could not act upon it in
time. Hard riding could not get Napoleon's note to Grouchy's quarters
within much less than an hour and a half. When it got there Grouchy
himself must be found, and that done his 33,000 must be got together in
order to take the new direction. Further, the Emperor could not know in
what state Grouchy's forces might be, nor what direction they might
already have taken. It should be mentioned, however, to explain Napoleon's
evident hope at the moment of things going well, that _the prisoner had
told the Emperor it was commonly believed in the Prussian lines that
Grouchy was actually marching to join him, Napoleon, at that moment_.
Napoleon sent some cavalry off eastward to watch the advent of the
Prussians; he ordered his remnant of one army corps, the Sixth, which he
had kept in reserve behind his line,[19] to march down the hill to the
village of Plancenoit and stand ready to meet the Prussian attack; and
having done all this, he made ready for the assault upon the ridge which
Wellington's troops held.

That assault was to be preceded, as I have said, by artillery preparation
from the great battery of eighty guns which lay along the spur to the
north and in front of the French line. For half an hour those guns filled
the shallow valley with their smoke; at half-past one they ceased, and
Erlon's First Corps d'Armee, fresh to the combat, because it had so
unfortunately missed both Ligny and Quatre Bras, began to descend from its
position, to cross the bottom, and to climb the opposite slope, while over
the heads of the assaulting columns the French and English cannon answered
each other from height to height.

The advance across the valley, as will be apparent from the map, had upon
its right the village of Papelotte, upon its left the farm of La Haye
Sainte, and for its objective that highway which runs along the top of
the ridge, and of which the most part was in those days a sunken road, as
effective for defence as a regular trench.

Following a practice which he never abandoned, which he had found
universally successful, and upon which he ever relied, the Duke of
Wellington had kept his British troops, the nucleus of his defensive plan,
for the last and worst of the action. He had stationed to take the first
brunt those troops upon which he least relied, and these were the first
Dutch-Belgian brigade under