On the Prussian side, there was a current of intense feeling against Wellington; but there were such powerful motives for silence that the truth crept out slowly, and at long intervals. At first, Waterloo was claimed to be an English victory. Wellington led the way in this by his slighting reference to “the flank movement of Bülow.” No one would gather from the Duke’s report that 16,000 of the French troops, during the afternoon of the 18th, had been fighting desperately, for several hours to hold the Prussians in check. No one could possibly learn from this report the fact that the French did not give way on the English front until the cannon balls of the oncoming Prussians of Zeiten’s corps were crossing those of the English batteries which swept the approaches to Mont-Saint-Jean. Reading Wellington’s official report of the battle, one would believe that the Prussians arrived after the fight was won--that they had nothing to do but chase the defeated. Only by degrees did the world learn that Wellington entirely disregarded the pledge he had given Blücher at the conference in May; that he wrote Blücher a letter on the morning of June 16th that was full of deception; left his troops widely scattered when the enemy was upon him; gave orders which his lieutenants had the nerve and the wisdom to violate, and was saved from annihilation at the very opening of the campaign by the incredible mistakes of Napoleon’s officers and the heroic gallantry of the Prussians. Lord Wolseley complacently states that Wellington was an English gentleman of the highest type and, therefore, incapable of falsehood. Yet the Duke’s official report states that on the 15th he ordered the concentration of his army at Quatre Bras; _and Lord Wolseley demonstrates that the statement was untrue_. It was on Nivelles that a partial concentration was ordered, and had the orders been obeyed the campaign would have been wrecked. Only of late years has it been perfectly clear that at half-past one o’clock in the afternoon of June 18th Napoleon had to divide his army, and to withhold the corps of Lobau which had been ordered to support the great charge of D’Erlon and Ney. Suppose this corps of fresh men had been thrown against the English line when it had already been well-nigh broken. At the time the premature cavalry charges were being made, and the English, in squares, were suffering so terribly from the French skirmishers and artillery, suppose 16,000 men whom Napoleon had sent to drive the Prussians back from Plancenoit, where they threatened his rear, had been in hand to clinch the cavalry charges! How could the English have prevented these fresh troops from pouring through the gap in their line behind La Haye-Sainte? Only of late years has it been generally known that it was the arrival of Zeiten’s Prussians on his left that released the troops with which Wellington filled this break in his line.