The left wing under Ney was so long in closing up to Quatre Bras, that the British troops at the end of the day outnumbered their opponents, and D’Erlon’s corps had been swinging pendulum-like between the two battlefields of Ligny and Quatre Bras, to be useful at neither. Turning to the Allied side, Blucher had readily gauged the French plan, if Wellington had not. The night sky, reddened with the glare of many fires on the night of the 14th June, had warned the advanced corps of Ziethen that a large force lay in front of him, the details of which were told him by the deserter Bourmont, who was received with scant courtesy by the honest old Prussian. “It is all one,” he said in German, when he noticed the white cockade of the Bourbons in the general’s hat, “what a man sticks in his hat, a scoundrel remains a scoundrel”; and so, dismissing him, he carried out the concentration of his army towards Ligny. Here, on the morning of the 16th, the French right wing, under Napoleon’s personal leadership, forced back the Prussians, and after a severe conflict, which lasted till night, drove them back, he thought in the direction of Liège, practically in the direction of Wavre. But when defeated, Blucher’s “noble daring” in deciding on falling back on Wavre rather than Liège, “at once snatched from Napoleon the hoped-for fruits of his victory, and the danger Ligny had for a few hours averted was left impending over him.” On the other flank, there is much to be said. There seems little doubt that false reports from France had lulled Wellington into a feeling of security for which, as results proved, there was little basis; and to this may be added the somewhat futile demonstrations against his right front. Even when the passage of the Sambre by the French army was actually known, on the afternoon of the 15th, still he delayed his decision, and merely _orders_ for the concentration of his widely-spread units were issued. When at night the news was confirmed, the general tenor of the orders pointed rather to a concentration at Nivelle than on the Charleroi road; yet he knew by then that imposing masses of hostile troops were north of that place. Had Ney been vigorous and rapid, nothing could have prevented the separation of the Allied armies. That this was not so, was due to the independent initiative of a Dutch-Belgian general, Perponcher, who assembled his command at Quatre Bras, without orders, only a mile or two from the French bivouac, on the night of the 15th June. Then came the celebrated ball when-- “There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium’s capital had gathered then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men; A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again, And all went merry as a marriage bell; But hush! hark! A deep sound strikes like a rising knell!