Of course, his opponents’ record in respect of selection and maintenance of their aim was even more abysmal. For sheer dogmatic perseverance the Austrians cannot really be criticized, mounting as they did four major offensives one after another in the space of seven months, but the Aulic Council fatally miscalculated the true aim of their endeavors. Instead of expending every effort in hunting down and destroying the numerically weaker and considerably dispersed French army, they placed first priority on the actual relief of Mantua, apparently unaware that the best way to do this permanently was by defeating the Army of Italy in the field. Instead, we find Würmser successfully battling his way through to the city in July, forcing the French to abandon the siege, but then hesitating for several days in the vicinity of Mantua before moving off to seek out Bonaparte.
This delay gave the French just enough time to concentrate enough men to fight and win the actions at Lonato and Castiglione which drove Würmser and his colleagues back whence they had come and enabled Bonaparte to reopen the siege. On his second attempt two months later, Würmser again made his way into Mantua, albeit in rather bedraggled fashion, only to let himself be shut up within its walls and thus impose an impossible strain on the already depleted resources of the original garrison. Similarly, d’Alvintzi’s last attempt to succor Mantua ended in Provera’s relief force being compelled to surrender within sight of its walls. Throughout the whole year, the lure of Mantua continued to exert a fatal attraction over the Austrian field forces and led them to one costly failure after another.
However much Bonaparte merits criticism for allowing his attention to be divided, his record in respect of maintaining ceaseless pressure on the Austrians cannot be faulted. Despite the fact that his numerical inferiority and the breakdown of the main French offensives on the Rhine front compelled him to adopt the strategic defensive for the greater part of the period under review, he never abandoned the tactical offensive for a single day. Making full use of his central position, he attacked, counterattacked and pursued and harassed his stronger adversaries without respite, until he broke their resolve and induced them to abandon their missions; Bonaparte’s conduct of the Arcola and Rivoli phases of the campaign—to name but two instances—proves this aspect of his abilities beyond question. The Austrian record, on the other hand, shows the direct reverse: the garrison of Mantua, though often superior in strength to their nominal besiegers, showed few signs of activity even when General Bonaparte was compelled to recall his blockading forces. Only the gallant Count Würmser inspired a more offensive mentality during his period of enforced presence within the city. On the whole, the Austrian generals in the field showed inadequate initiative or aggressive-mindedness, even when the advantage was strongly in their favor. For instance, Davidovitch failed to press Vaubois’ retreating division to the uttermost during the crucial days in November when Bonaparte was striving to complete the battle of Arcola against d’Alvintzi, and this negligence undoubtedly cost the Austrians this phase of the campaign; Würmser’s earlier delays before Castiglione is another case in point. Bonaparte, on the other hand, undoubtedly did his utmost to keep the enemy under attack, and lost very few opportunities of doing so, even at the cost of irreplaceable casualties and the growing exhaustion of his men.
One of the basic maxims of Napoleon stresses the all-importance of achieving maximum concentration of forces at the right place and time, in other words on the battlefield. Another striking feature of the First Italian Campaign is the way Bonaparte always contrived to bring the greatest possible number of his available men onto the field. The Austrians, by contrast, repeatedly clung to a form of ill-conceived strategy which ultimately played straight into the hands of the French. In each of the four attempts to relieve Mantua, the Austrian high command divided their forces into unconnected parts routed along divergent lines of advance, which made coordinated effort impossible, hoping thereby to divert Bonaparte’s attention and cause the fragmentation of his forces. In the event, however, they only laid their own forces open to defeat in detail, throwing away the chance of commanding a decisive numerical superiority on the critical battlefield, thus violating the principle of true economy of force.
Tactical flexibility and the fine record of the French soldiers on the march enabled the commander in chief of the Army of Italy to outdistance and confuse his slow-moving and conventionally minded opponents. Bonaparte was forever turning up at the unexpected place, whether he was attempting to cross the River Po far in Beaulieu’s rear, trying to save Verona by placing himself athwart d’Alvintzi’s communications, or rushing North from Arcola to strengthen Vaubois’ wavering line. Mobility and surprise were two prime factors in our Corsican’s success, enabling him to take on superior enemy forces in rapid succession without fatally compromising his chances of overall victory. Augereau’s dash to the field of Castiglione, and Massena’s sustained march to the field of Rivoli and thence back to Mantua with never a breathing space, are further examples of French mobility and endurance. By comparison, the elaborate Austrian attempts to out-maneuver the French were hopelessly slow and badly coordinated.
Neither side shone in administrative matters; the French army was as often as not hungry, and the need to forage led to serious outbreaks of indiscipline and depleted the ranks as before Second Dego. Similarly it was a miscalculation of rations that compromised d’Alvintzi’s chances of success at Rivoli. The French spent a great deal of energy and time seeking out bridges and fords over the numerous water obstacles of the Po valley, but the French Government made no attempt to provide Bonaparte’s army with a bridging train of pontoons which might well have eased this problem. One wonders whether the bitter fighting for the bridges at Lodi, Ronco and Arcola was really necessary, as on each occasion a ford was soon discovered close-by. Probably Bonaparte considered the time-consuming construction of bridges too tedious a process for his dynamic moves.
More than anything else, it was Bonaparte’s unequaled gift for binding men to his service, instilling in them a devotion to his person closely akin to worship, that made his successes feasible. The state of his own morale varied considerably at different moments: after Lodi, he felt raised above the level of other mortals; before Castiglione we find him hesitant and downcast, and again in the crucial days before Arcola. But where his men were concerned, despite the fact that he wore them out with marching, fed and paid them hardly at all, and made ceaseless demands on their courage and endurance, Bonaparte became an idol from Lodi onwards, creating those vital personal bonds which would cause his troops to march to almost certain death, crying, “Vive Bonaparte!”
In many ways the Italian Campaign marks the end of an era. The days of limited eighteenth-century warfare were fast drawing to a close in the face of the energy and ideology of the French Revolutionary armies, now led for the first time by a general really worthy of their latent talents. For this period marks the emergence of one of the greatest captains of all time. In March 1796 Napoleone Buonaparte was known only to comparatively restricted circles within France, but a year later his name had become a household word throughout Europe. Even after Leoben, however, few recognized in the lank youth with the large hat and ungainly footwear nicknamed “Puss-in-Boots” by the coquettes of Parisian society the future master of two thirds of Europe and the scourge of the ancient monarchies, but his record in the field had already established him beyond doubt as a fine commander of men, and everyone prophesied a distinguished military career. Of all the French generals, only Moreau now stood in equal popular esteem. It was already a far cry from the near poverty of Ajaccio and Brienne. The young eagle had found his wings; the future lay with Destiny. For, as General Massena incisively (if somewhat crudely and ungrammatically) remarked: “Ce petit bougre de général leur a fait peur.”37
PART THREE
Napoleon’s Art of War
A STUDY OF NAPOLEON’S PHILOSOPHY OF WAR, AN ANALYSIS OF HIS STRATEGIC AND BATTLE METHODS—AND THE SOURCES OF HIS IDEAS
INTRODUCT
ION THE MASTER’S WORDS
W
AR HAS ALWAYS been one of the most unpleasant and least rewarding forms of human activity. As an old Scottish proverb describes it, “War begins when hell opens,”1 and the same sentiment was repeated two centuries later when General William Tecumseh Sherman—not the gentlest or mildest of soldiers during the American Civil War—said in a speech at Columbus, Ohio: “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell.”2 Nevertheless, in spite of the natural revulsion that pain, suffering and cruelty evoke in the hearts of sane men, there is a strong fascination in military affairs which affects almost everybody to a greater or lesser extent. As the great writer Thomas Hardy described it, “… War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.”³ Moreover, for the serious student of war, there is an even greater fascination in studying the military records of the great captains in the ambitious hope of discovering the secret of their successes—and the reasons for their failures—by means of a close analysis of their writings and, more importantly, of their actions.
In this respect there has never been a more rewarding and yet more baffling subject for study than Napoleon’s system of waging wars and fighting battles. It has attracted an enormous amount of attention from historians and commentators—some worshiping uncritically, others circumspectly—but it is perhaps fitting that the most realistic and accurate analyses that have emerged are contained in the works of two celebrated French military historians, namely General H. Camon and Commandant J. Colin.* Of Napoleon’s contemporaries, only two came anywhere near to comprehending his military genius. The first was Baron Jomini, who served on the Emperor’s staff as an official historian and was Ney’s chief of staff before defecting to the Allies in 1813; he came to understand several of Napoleon’s underlying ideas but in his subsequent writings unfortunately tried to relate them to eighteenth-century concepts. The second contemporary authority, the Prussian von Clausewitz, incorporated a great deal of the essence of Napoleonic warfare into his famous three-volume work On War (which subsequently became the military bible of von Moltke, Graf von Schlieffen and the Prussian general staff) although he completely misunderstood the significance of the crucial manoeuvre sur les derrières which will be described below.
The chief difficulty which every would-be commentator meets in his researches is the fact that Napoleon never really formulated a precise system of war—at least not on paper. This was partly due to a deliberate desire to keep his contemporaries, even the marshalate, in the dark, but even more significant is the fact that his genius was essentially practical rather than theoretical. In consequence there are so many variations and adaptations to be found in his conduct of campaigns that it is all too easy to reach the conclusion that he possessed no “system” of any sort. Napoleon’s own assertion that “Je n’ai jamais eu un plan d’opérations”* would appear at first glance to confirm this assessment, but any study of the voluminous Correspondance will reveal many instances when the Emperor stressed the very opposite. Indeed, Napoleon’s official correspondence is riddled with inconsistencies, and, in much the same way as a quotation can be found somewhere in the Bible to justify almost any form of human activity, however extreme or dogmatic, so at one time or another the Emperor appears to advocate almost every possible contradictory course of military action. Even more disturbing, it is only too easy to misunderstand the true import of his declarations because of the ambiguities arising from his occasionally misleading choice of words.
Napoleon, of course, was by birth a Corsican, and never to the end of his life did he fully master all the intricacies and finer points of the French language. Normally his orders were dictated at high speed to teams of perspiring secretaries, who passed their verbatim notes on to Berthier, the chief of staff, for expansion into written instructions. Although Berthier had a great gift for issuing clear and to the point orders to the corps commanders, he was really little more than a glorified chief clerk—as he himself freely admitted: “I am nothing in the army,” he once lamented. “I receive the marshals’ reports in the name of the Emperor, and I sign his orders for him.”42 Above all, the irreplaceable Berthier possessed a literal mind, and rarely would he presume to change a word of Napoleon’s dictation. As a result, small misunderstandings would creep into the orders, and this has only served to increase the bafflement of later generations of military students seeking the word of the master in his writings.
A single example will illustrate this difficulty. One of the best-known sayings of Napoleon is the following: “The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on a single point [italics added] and as soon as the breach is made the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.”5 As Captain B. H. Liddell-Hart has pointed out, subsequent military commentators have seized upon the phrase “a single point” and largely ignored the really vital word “equilibrium” toward the end of the sentence, which undoubtedly holds the real lesson which the Emperor was trying to convey. For it is by upsetting the enemy’s “balance” that the victory is won; the concentration of fire and the opening of a breach are only the means to the true end—which is the psychological destruction of the enemy’s will to continue resistance. Nor is this the only misunderstanding occasioned by this single observation. Controversy has also raged around the word “point,” one school maintaining that Napoleon meant the strongest sector of the enemy line, another that he implied the weakest. However, a study of the actual campaign which occasioned Napoleon’s observation* suggests that he might well have used the word “hinge” or “joint” in place of the word “point”; thus a small matter like the careless choice of a single word can lead to immense argument and misrepresentation.6 Many ideas have been attributed to Napoleon which he would be the first to refute.
These problems of inconsistency and lack of clarity notwithstanding, it is still from the pages of his official Correspondance that Napoleon’s basic theories of war can best be culled. His army bulletins issued on campaign and the later writings at St. Helena were often composed with the deliberate intention of misleading the enemy or explaining away by special pleading some Napoleonic error, and consequently are not to be trusted implicitly. But his day-to-day letters and orders contain a wealth of clues, especially when he is reproving a subordinate for some mistake or adding an explanatory footnote to a complicated set of movement instructions. Under such fortuitous circumstances Napoleon dropped occasional “pearls” of military wisdom to his marshals which give us an indication of his real convictions. But here again great caution has to be exercised. Napoleon never held to a rigid set of principles, but evolved and amended his ideas continually to meet particular situations; furthermore, he occasionally “tailored” his advice to suit the abilities and known proclivities of the soldier or statesman he was addressing, and in the process he often appears to contradict his most important maxims. The mind of a genius as revealed in his writings and orders is necessarily complex and often devious, for so is the art of war. There is no doubt that actions are far more revealing than words, and it follows that any analysis of Napoleon’s mode of waging warfare should take as its starting place a study of the actual events.
See Bibliography for a list of books by these authors.
Translation: “I never had a plan of operations.” The real implication is that he was never dominated by a hard and fast plan worked out in advance.
The campaign against Piedmont, 1794.
13
DOCTRINAL INHERITANCE
Just as Napoleon received his army ready-fashioned and tempered for war from his predecessors’ of the late Ancien Régime and the early Revolution, so, too, did he draw many of his strategical and tactical ideas from earlier thinkers and war leaders. One of the most interesting facets of Napoleon’s success as a soldier is his general lack of genuine originality. With certain comparatively minor exceptions, Napoleon was not an innovator in his own right, but rather the developer and perfecter of th
e ideas of others; he saw more clearly than any other soldier of his generation the full potentialities of the French military doctrines* and armed forces of the day, and proceeded to combine and exploit those potentialities to the very limit with that cold, calculating, ruthless “daemon” of physical and moral drive which alone could convert mere possibility into cast-iron achievement. He added little to the art of war or the armies of France except victory, and this he gained by transforming theory into actuality.
The development of his military ideas was at first wholly an intellectual process, and much of this was certainly carried through during the year 1788-89, when he was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant stationed at the Artillery Training School at Auxonne. Besides being in command of the “demonstration squad” charged with the duty of trying out new theories pertaining to his parent arm—an occupation stimulating enough in itself—the young Bonaparte also found time for intensive reading, using the comparatively well-stocked library of the school as the basic nourishment for his voracious mental appetites. In the words of General Camon, he was “a devourer of books.” Volume after volume was taken up, ruthlessly analyzed, then discarded for another. Idea after idea was extracted and ruthlessly examined, before being either abandoned as worthless or stored away in that amazing memory. Gradually the ideas from different sources began to coalesce and amalgamate as Bonaparte’s mathematical mind forged through the inessential to grasp the kernel of truth. And little by little the underlying concepts of war which were to govern the next twenty-seven years of his life began to emerge. It was no easy discipline that the young officer set himself. “In military, public or administrative affairs,” he wrote years later, “there is a need for deep thought as well as deep analysis, and also for an ability to concentrate on subjects for a long time without fatigue.”7
The Campaigns of Napoleon Page 20
