What if, 'mid the cannons' thunder, Whistling shot and bursting bomb, When my brothers fall around me, Should my heart grow cold and numb?' But the drum Answered, 'Come! Better there in death united, than in life a recreant,--Come!'" --BRET HARTE. For weeks the British and Prussian armies, scattered over a district 100 miles by 40, had been keeping guard over the French frontier. Mighty hosts of Russians and Austrians were creeping slowly across Europe to join them. Napoleon, skilfully shrouding his movements in impenetrable secrecy, was about to leap across the Sambre, and both Bluecher and Wellington had to guess what would be his point of attack; and they, as it happened, guessed wrongly. Napoleon's strategy was determined partly by his knowledge of the personal characters of the two generals, and partly by the fact that the bases of the allied armies lay at widely separate points--the English base at Antwerp, the Prussian on the Rhine. Bluecher was essentially "a hussar general"; the fighting impulse ran riot in his blood. If attacked, he would certainly fight where he stood; if defeated, and driven back on his base, he must move in diverging lines from Wellington. That Bluecher would abandon his base to keep touch with Wellington--as actually happened--Napoleon never guessed. Wellington, cooler and more methodical than his Prussian fellow-commander, would not fight, it was certain, till his troops were called in on every side and he was ready. Bluecher was nearer the French frontier. Napoleon calculated that he could leap upon him, bar Wellington from coming to his help by planting Ney at Quatre Bras, win a great battle before Wellington could join hands with his ally, and then in turn crush Wellington. It was splendid strategy, splendidly begun, but left fatally incomplete. Napoleon fought and defeated Bluecher at Ligny on June 16, attacking Quatre Bras at the same time, so as to occupy the English. Wellington visited Bluecher's lines before the fight began, and said to him, "Every general knows his own men, but if my lines were drawn up in this fashion I should expect to get beaten;" and as he cantered back to his own army he said to those about him, "If Bonaparte be what I suppose he is, the Prussians will get a ---- good licking to-day." Captain Bowles was standing beside the Duke at Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th, when a Prussian staff-officer, his horse covered with sweat, galloped up and whispered an agitated message in the Duke's ear. The Duke, without a change of countenance, dismissed him, and, turning to Bowles, said, "Old Bluecher has had a ---- good licking, and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles. As he has gone back, we must go too. I suppose in England they will say we have been licked. I can't help it! As they have gone back, we must go too." And in five minutes, without stirring from the spot, he had given complete orders for a retreat to Waterloo.