received from him "most satisfactory assurances of support." On the 21st of May the Duke informed Prince Schwarzenberg that, exclusive of the troops in the garrisons, he could place in the field 60,000 bayonets and nearly 16,000 sabres, and that, of the latter, 10,000 were as good as any in the world. Week by week throughout the month of May the harbour at Ostend was crowded with shipping disembarking troops, stores, and cannon; and many battalions, liberated by the peace with the United States, were crossing the Atlantic, some of them bound for Belgium, and destined not to arrive in time. But the Duke, although he put a good face upon matters to foreigners, did not fail to impress on his own Government the necessity for making every possible exertion. His sentiments in the beginning of May were strongly expressed in an often quoted letter to Lord Stewart. 'I have got. an infamous army," he wrote, " very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced staff. In my opinion they are doing nothing in England. They have not raised a man; they have not called out the militia; are unable to send me anything." Indeed, they professed in April to be able to send him only eighty-four field guns, and towards the end of that month the British artillery could only muster for field service forty-two pieces of cannon. But the Horse Guards did not forget to pour a torrent of staff officers into Belgium. "I command a very small British army with a very large British staff, to which my superiors are making additions every day," Wellington wrote on the 22nd of May. Ministers, it is true, had kept part of the militia embodied, which Lord Fitzwilliam and Sir Samuel Romilly strenuously stigmatised as illegal; but at the end of May the bill giving them power to embody the militia. had not passed both Houses, so that no additions could have been made to the force, which had not been disem

bodied at the peace, in time to enable the Government to substitute militia for regulars, and send the latter to the Low Countries. Nevertheless, by the middle of June the total force under the command of the Duke of Wellington, from all sources, had been raised to 105,950 men and 196 guns; and the army under Prince Blucher had, between March and June, grown by degrees, from 26,000 to nearly 120,000 men, with upwards of 300 guns.1

The raw material of these two great armies deserves notice. Wellington's force was a heterogeneous mass of British and Continental troops. The nucleus of the army was the purely British batteries, squadrons, and battalions, and the batteries and regiments of the King's German Legion. The greater part of the regiments had served in the Peninsula at some period, but nearly one-half were second battalions, and a large portion recruits who had volunteered from the militia when the line battalions were hurriedly made up for foreign service. There was a good supply of old soldiers, and the young ones, although not well broken in to manœuvring, were stout of heart and strong of limb. Some of the regiments were, indeed, such splendid specimens of British battalions that, in his despatches, Wellington himself, when speaking of them, uses the language of enthusiasm. The cavalry, especially, fills him with admiration. They were well mounted and thoroughly trained; some had “to fight for a name," and some had to fight to keep a name; and all were animated by the true military spirit. The artillery, in like manner, though

1 The numbers of the Anglo-Allied army are much disputed by historians. But the different estimates put forward by the best authorities arise mainly from different modes of reckoning. After much attention to the subject the writer has arrived at the conclusion that Captain Siborne's figures are as correct as it is possible to make them.

not numerous, was very efficient, both foot and horse; and at the last moment, by substituting 9-pounder for 6-pounder guns in the horse batteries, Colonel Frazer enabled them to cope more effectually with their opponents. The foot-batteries rivalled the infantry in stubbornness, and what sporting men call "staying power; and the horse batteries shared in the daring and velocity of the cavalry brigades, to which they were attached. The same praise is due to the King's German Legionaries, who from long association and natural aptitude had thoroughly acquired the spirit and method of the British. But the rest of the army, with some striking exceptions, and these mainly the older Hanoverian battalions, were far inferior to the British and the Legionaries. The Dutch-Belgian soldiers, hastily raised and poorly officered, had not reached that degree of discipline which would have made them safe soldiers. The greater part of the foot were militia, and the horse, newly raised like the rest, were inexperienced, and wanting in that confidence in their prowess so necessary to all soldiers who engage the French in fight. The ranks of the whole Dutch-Belgian army contained hosts of officers and soldiers who had served under Napoleon. Many were valiant and patriotic, but the valour and patriotism of the majority was tempered and attenuated by the memory of Napoleon's astounding victories. The Brunswick troops were full of mettle, but young and untried. Their hatred of the French sustained them in the arduous trials to which they were subjected. The Nassauers were also young, and not strong either in body or spirit; but they also were in part old soldiers. This mixed army, so unequal in its elements, brought abruptly together, had not at the opening of the campaign acquired that consistency and mutual confidence so essential to successful operations in war. The soldiers and

officers spoke four or five languages and many dialects. The special merits of the British soldiers were unknown to many of their Continental comrades. Wellington had been a victorious general, but the renown he had derived from his campaigns in the Peninsula was as nothing in their eyes compared with that of Napoleon, or the best of Napoleon's marshals. Yet it may be safely said that Wellington alone held together the incongruous body which had been assembled in the fertile plains of Belgium.

The Prussian army was composed entirely of Prussians -an attempt to make use of 14,000 Saxons failed, for these troops mutinied, and nearly slew Blucher in hist head-quarters. One-half of the infantry were regulars, and the other landwehr battalions; but the latter, like the former, had served throughout the war of 1813-14, and in the main they were good soldiers. The cavalry also was composed, in the proportion of three to two, partly of regulars and partly of landwehr.

The best troops were those drawn from the old Prussian provinces on the Elbe and the Oder, and the Baltic. The army was homogeneous, compact, devoted to the fierce captain appointed to guide and lead it, and over-brimming with intense hatred of the French. The slow Germans had been moved to wrath, and their rage was of the Teutonic type-a rage that survives defeat and is not soon satiated by success. The principal officers were skilful in their profession, and shared the passions of the men. Blucher himself was a fair representative of the Prussian nation and army, provoked and stung, by a hundred insults and defeats, to wipe out the former and avenge the latter, or die. At the end of 1806, says a modern French historian, Blucher, then a prisoner of war at Hamburg, displayed an unshakeable faith in the fall of

Napoleon, and predicted the near approach of a time when Europe would rise against him, wearied by his exactions. and exasperated by his bad faith. Wellington had held. firmly to the same belief; and their faith was greater in 1815 than it was at an earlier stage, for in 1814 they had seen their confidence justified.

§ 2. Disposition and Function of the Anglo-Prussian

Armies.

The allied armies formed the right of the vast body of men with which the Vienna coalition designed to overthrow finally the power of Bonaparte and the French. army. Hence the measures of Blucher and Wellington were dependent upon and in harmony with those of their allies, who were more backward in their preparations than Prussia and Great Britain. For the Austrians and Russians, the Swiss and Sardinians, not to speak of the Spaniards, the Swedes, and the Danes, were still, in May, 1815, far from being ready for an invasion of France, the great object of every Power in Europe. Their troops were in motion on all the roads leading to the French frontier, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, from the Vistula to the Rhine, from the Sound to the barrier fortresses of French Flanders. But though the Sardinians were gathering in the Apennines and the Swiss in the Alps, though the Austrians and Bavarians were collecting on the Rhine, though the Russians were moving down in great columns from Poland, the Prussians and the Anglo-Belgians alone had mustered in strength close to the frontier. Their object was twofold. It was their duty to be prepared for an attack, should Napoleon think it expedient to strike the first blow, and at the same time to be ready to cross the frontier at the first signal from