te to be engaged at Ligny. It was complete; it was well
commanded.

The road it had to traverse was not only long, but difficult. The passage
of the river Lasne had to be effected across so steep a ravine and by so
impassable a set of ways that the modern observer, following that march as
the present writer has followed it, after rain and over those same fields
and roads, is led to marvel that it was done in the time which Blucher's
energy and the traditional discipline of the Prussian soldiers found
possible. At any rate, the heads of the columns were on the Waterloo edge
of the Wood of Fischermont[23] (or Paris) before four o'clock, and ready
to debouch. Wellington had expected them upon the field by two o'clock at
latest. They disappointed him by two hours, and nearly three, but the
miracle is that they arrived when they did; and it is well here to
consider in detail this feat which the Fourth Prussian Army Corps had
accomplished, for it is a matter upon which our historians of Waterloo are
often silent, and which has been most unfortunately neglected in this
country.

The Fourth Prussian Army Corps, under Bulow, lay as far east as Liege
when, on the 14th of June, Napoleon was preparing to cross the Sambre.
Its various units were all in the close neighbourhood of the town, so none
of them were spared much of the considerable march which all were about to
undertake to the west; even its most westward detachment was no more than
three miles from Liege city.

Bulow should have received the order to march westward at half-past ten on
the morning of the 15th. The order, as we have seen in speaking of Ligny,
was not delivered till the evening of that day. The Fourth Army Corps was
told to concentrate in the neighbourhood of Hannut and a little east of
that distant point. The corps, as a whole, did not arrive until the early
afternoon of Friday the 16th.

It is from this point--Hannut--that the great effort begins.

Bulow, it must be remembered, commanded no less than 32,000 men. The
fatigues and difficulties attendant upon the progress of such a body, most
of it tied to one road, will easily be appreciated.

During the afternoon of the 16th, while Ligny was being fought, he
advanced the whole of this body to points immediately north and east of
Gembloux. Not a man, therefore, of his great command had marched less than
twenty miles, many must have marched over twenty-five, upon that Friday
afternoon.

Then followed