The following day (June 17) a reinforcement under Bülow reached Blücher at Wavre; thus the loss sustained at Ligny was made good. At Grouchy’s approach the following morning (June 18) Blücher resolved to sacrifice deliberately a regiment of seventeen thousand men in order to detain Grouchy and keep him from returning to Napoleon, while he (Blücher) and Bülow with the bulk of the Prussian army should hasten to the aid of Wellington at Waterloo. Not at Wavre but at Waterloo was destiny at work; this Blücher knew and he acted accordingly: this Grouchy did not know; and after completely routing with great slaughter the Prussians under Thielman, he kept up a meaningless pursuit following a will-o-the-wisp, whilst Napoleon, after sending to him messenger after messenger urging his aid, stood still at last and deadly pale under the gorgeous June sunset, and saw all his hopes and dreams go down in darkness as the ominous moving cloud emerging from the direction of Wavre and advancing, glitteringly advancing, proved to be Blücher--not Grouchy. That deliberate leaving of seventeen thousand men as a bait in a trap for the victorious French forces thundering onward from Ligny is typical of the demon ingenuity of war. I have read somewhere that in darkest Africa the lure to the tiger trap is a kid securely fastened. Its fearful bleatings attract the night prowling brute: there is a spring: then awful shrieks arise growing shriller and shriller as the pangs of being devoured alive grow tenser and more terrible: by this time the cannibals are upon the scene and the trap is sprung. Seventeen thousand soldiers as kid to the tiger lure--and men call themselves civilized! Could a woman do that? No; woman is higher in the moral scale than man. And the higher, thank God, is the kinder, tenderer, the more compassionate. Wars and all hellish machinations of cruelty must cease as the race, as a whole, advances into that higher. And advancement, even tho’ zigzag, shall ultimately attain to the higher and even to the highest. We dream so. KING MAKING VICTORY. Perhaps no other battlefield of the historic past has been more frequently described or rendered more vivid to mental vision than the field of Waterloo. Victor Hugo’s masterly portrayal in _Les Miserables_ is doubtless the best; but Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Captain Siborne, and Napoleonic writers _ad infinitum_ have added richness of tonal qualities to the monochrome.