He had received, indeed, an order coming from the Emperor, but he had received it only as the subordinate of Ney, and only, as he presumed, with Ney's knowledge and consent, either given or about to be given. In the midst of executing this order, he got another order countermanding it, and proceeding directly from his direct superior. He obeyed this second order as exactly as he had obeyed the first. Such is, undoubtedly, the explanation of the thing, and Ney's is the mind, the person, historically responsible for the whole business. Let us consider the difficulties in the way of accepting this conclusion. The first difficulty is that Ney would not have taken it upon himself to countermand an order of Napoleon's. Those who argue thus neither know the character of Ney nor the nature of the struggle at Quatre Bras; and they certainly underestimate both the confusion and the elasticity of warfare. Ney, a man of violent temperament (as, indeed, one might expect with such courage), was in the heat of the desperate struggle at Quatre Bras when he received Napoleon's order to abandon his own business (a course which was, so late in the action, physically impossible). Almost at the same moment Ney heard most tardily from a messenger whom Erlon had sent (a Colonel Delcambre) that Erlon, with his 20,000 men--Erlon, who had distinctly been placed under his orders--was gone off at a tangent, and was leaving him with a grossly insufficient force to meet the rapidly swelling numbers of Wellington. We have ample evidence of the rage into which he flew, and of the fact that he sent back Delcambre with the absolutely positive order to Erlon that he should turn round and come back to Quatre Bras. Of course, if war were clockwork, if there were no human character in a commander, if no latitude of judgment were understood in the very nature of a great independent command such as Ney's was upon that day, if there were always present before every independent commander's mental vision an exact map of the operations, and, _at the same time_, a plan of the exact position of all the troops upon it at any given moment--if all these armchair conceptions of war were true, then Ney's order would have been as undisciplined in character and as foolish in intention as it was disastrous in effect.