Napoleon had, thus far, as we have seen, in the main, accomplished his programme. Things had turned out, so far as the enemy were concerned, very much as he had originally expected. He had found Blücher determined to fight; he had found Wellington wholly unprepared to assist his ally. He had encountered the Prussians, therefore, alone; and he had beaten them. He had, in the main, as we have said, done what he expected to do. It now only remained to complete the original plan marked out in the letters to Ney and Grouchy of the morning before; and, leaving the latter with the 3d and 4th Corps and plenty of cavalry to ascertain the direction in which the Prussians had retreated, to march himself at the head of the 6th Corps and the Guard to join Ney, and move promptly against the English. (See Map 8.) There was no reason in the world for delay. As has been pointed out above, Napoleon had not been obliged to employ all his troops in obtaining the victory of Ligny. The troops which he intended to take with him were fresh, or substantially so. The 6th Corps had not fired a shot; the Guard, though it had lost perhaps a thousand men, had certainly done no very hard fighting, and it had been brilliantly successful. The cavalry, also, had suffered but little. Ney, too, had plenty of fresh troops. The 1st Corps, d’Erlon’s, had not been engaged; nor had the light cavalry division of Lefebvre-Desnouettes; only one of the four brigades of Kellermann’s heavy cavalry had been in action at Quatre Bras. Thus a formidable army, almost entirely composed of fresh troops, could be led at once against the Duke of Wellington’s heterogeneous forces. The weather, in the morning of the 17th, was fine; the Prussians, wherever they had gone, were, at any rate, for the time being, out of the way; there was no reason, we repeat, why advantage should not have been promptly taken of the fortunate situation in which the victory of Ligny had temporarily placed the French,—why there should have been any hesitation whatever in dealing with the Anglo-Dutch army, separated, as it now was, from its ally.