The Campaigns of Napoleon

by David G Chandler

  As an administrator, Carnot also performed miracles in equipping the new armies. Although food was always short and pay virtually nonexistent, most armies were reasonably well equipped (the Army of Italy in 1796 was an exception). Using the vast powers of the Committee, Carnot acquired specie by means of requisitions, forced and negotiated loans—but so great were the financial difficulties of the Republic that from the first he was insistent that “war must pay for war.” He created factories and arm-foundries, and in sum fully deserved his soubriquet “Organizer of Victory.” Aware of the basic problem of communication, he adopted the Chappe visual telegraph system to link Paris with the Rhine frontier, and raised two companies of Balloonists to facilitate reconnaissance. (It is noteworthy that these were later disbanded as useless by Napoleon as First Consul in a less imaginative moment.)

  Carnot, then, in all essentials, created the weapon which Napoleon later used to such great effect. Napoleon might improve and develop—but he rarely innovated. However great his genius as an administrator, Carnot had limitations as a war director. Nevertheless, by July 1795 his armies had induced three belligerents (Prussia, Holland and Spain) to quit the First Coalition and make peace with France.

  14

  THE INGREDIENTS OF NAPOLEONIC WAR

  Before passing on to an analysis of the Napoleonic systems of maneuver and battle, it is first of all necessary to examine the factors that underlay all the Emperor’s plans. To speak of Napoleon’s “principles of war” is to court misunderstanding, because the word “principle” conjures up in the mind the idea of a fundamental law governing conduct. The most outstanding feature of Napoleonic warfare is its limitless variation and flexibility. Nevertheless, although the Emperor was never bound by any set of hard and fast rules governing his conduct of military operations, there were certain vital guides to action which he almost invariably took into careful consideration. Indeed, he frequently speaks of the importance of having due concern for the “principles of war,” but in the following extract he goes on to define the meaning he placed on this over-used phrase. He wrote in his “Maxims”:

  All the great generals of antiquity, as well as those who have since worthily followed in their footsteps, accomplished their great deeds by obeying the rules and principles of the art, that is to say, by the correctness of their combinations and a careful balancing of means and results, efforts and obstacles. They have been successful only by adapting themselves to these rules, whatever in other ways the boldness of their undertakings and the extent of their operations may have been. They never ceased to make war a real science. To this extent they are our great examples, and only by imitating them in this manner can we hope to emulate them.21

  Two phrases stand out in this passage: “a careful balancing of means and results” and the making of war “a real [or living] science.” The first connotes the idea of economy of force, the careful tailoring of all available military and political power to the requirements of the politico-military aim: the destruction of the foe’s will to resist; the avoidance of unnecessary waste of manpower resources in elaborate rear-echelon formations or of “breaking windows with golden guineas” by detaching large numbers of troops against secondary objectives; the avoidance of the opposite extreme—the commitment of too little too late—for it is impossible to have too many men on or near the battlefield; and, above all, the achievement of a carefully calculated balance between means and ends, between conflicting priorities—and thereby cause the destruction of the enemy’s state of equilibrium, if possible before the decisive battle is physically fought. The second phrase refers to the need to prosecute war in a realistic, decisive fashion; this facet of Napoleon’s ideas has already been discussed above.

  By what means did Napoleon set out to achieve these politico-military goals? First, by means of bold offensive action. “Make war offensively; it is the sole means to become a great captain and to fathom the secrets of the art.”22 The soldier who sits in his position and waits for his adversary to attack is more than half-beaten before the first shots are exchanged—as the young Bonaparte had realized by the time he wrote Le Souper de Beaucaire. However, the need to be aggressive should not be allowed to sink to the level of foolhardiness and mere attacking for attacking’s sake: the requirements of security have also to be considered. Napoleon’s ideal combination of these two apparently conflicting factors was “a well-reasoned and circumspect defensive followed by a rapid and audacious attack”23—that is to say, he preferred to attack from a strong position or “center of operations,” with the knowledge that his communications were secure after allowing just sufficient time to elapse for the enemy to reveal his broad intentions, and at the same time the errors of his dispositions and calculations.

  Napoleon was extremely thorough in all his planning; as little as possible was left to chance. As soon as the possibility of a war with a European power arose, the Emperor would send for his librarian and demand a comprehensive series of books—historical, descriptive, geographical and topical—which he would read with all the old energy of Auxonne, building up a clear mental picture of his future opponent. Nor did Napoleon believe in rapid and incomplete preparation for campaigns. “I am accustomed to thinking out what I shall do three or four months in advance, and I base my calculations on the worst conceivable situation.”24 This statement is very revealing of the method, as well as the timing, of Napoleon’s planning. He invariably created a hypothetical plan of action, involving the most complicated military situation his fertile brain could devise, given the known strength, alliances, and penchants of the possible adversary. But the “master plan” that emerged was no hard and fast set of rules for the conduct of forthcoming operations; rather it was the “mean” or standard against which all actual events and adjustments could be measured and their effect assessed. Napoleon was ever the proponent of the “alternative plan,” an approach he drew from the teachings of Bourcet who stressed the need for a plan of “many branches.”25 For, after devising his master strategy, the Emperor would then consider every conceivable alternative sequence of events, and ensure that his general dispositions would measure up to any unexpected situation. “Nothing is attained in war except by calculation,” he wrote. “During a campaign whatever is not profoundly considered in all its details is without result. Every enterprise should be conducted according to a system; chance alone can never bring success.”26

  However, Napoleon never undervalued the part played by sheer chance in war. Instead of shrugging it off as one of the imponderables, he demanded that it should be faced up to and almost systematized. By careful foresight, he taught, the detrimental effects of chance can be minimized. And every Napoleonic plan, whether for a daily march or an entire campaign, allowed a period of spare time for remedying or exploiting the unpredictable. On active service, Napoleon was continually weighing up the odds in his favor. At the outset of Waterloo, he told Soult that the odds were ninety to ten in his favor; when the Prussian intervention began, he redrew them at sixty to forty. This ceaseless reconsideration of the situation in the light of events was an important facet of Napoleon’s genius. Rarely was he found at a loss; his encyclopaedic memory and penetrating mind made allowance for practically every conceivable happening, hours or days in advance. As he once stated: “Military science consists in calculating all the chances accurately in the first place, and then in giving accident exactly, almost mathematically, its place in one’s calculations. It is upon this point that one must not deceive oneself, and yet a decimal more or less may change all. Now this apportioning of accident and science cannot get into any head except that of a genius…. Accident, hazard, chance, call it what you may, a mystery to ordinary minds, becomes a reality to superior men.”27

  One way of reducing the element of chance in war is by ensuring good field security. This involves the concealment of one’s own strength and intentions from the enemy, and Napoleon was a master of deception. Long before a campaign opened, the curtain of military security w
as habitually lowered; the press, so often a source of information about impending military moves in the eighteenth-century, was ruthlessly controlled and “tuned” to produce the information that Napoleon wished the enemy to comprehend; weeks before a major move, the frontiers of France would be closed to foreigners, and Fouché’s secret police would redouble their activities in watching suspects. At the same time, elaborate deception schemes and secondary offensives would be devised and implemented to confuse the foe and place him off balance. All these common characteristics of twentieth-century military security were employed by Napoleon at the beginning of the nineteenth.

  Then, when the real movement began, a large number of cunning stratagems were employed to delude the enemy. Ahead of the hurrying columns, the light cavalry—hussars, lancers, chasseurs—would form a dense mobile screen through which the enemy’s patrols were not permitted to penetrate. This moving curtain disguised Napoleon’s line of operations (or march) and at the same time protected his lines of communication snaking back to the place de campagne or operational base where the depots, hospitals and parks were initially situated. Then again, in the interests of security and deception, Napoleon was in the habit of continually altering the composition of his major formations whether for operational or administrative reasons, adding a division here, taking away a brigade there, creating an occasional provisional corps d’armée for a special mission in mid-campaign. Measures of this type served to confuse the enemy still further; Austrian intelligence learned, for instance, that outside Ulm on October 16, 1805, Marshal Lannes’s Vth Corps comprised the infantry divisions of Generals Oudinot and Gazan and the light cavalry of Treilhard, but from the 24th of the same month Lannes’s command also included two more infantry divisions transferred from Ney’s and Marmont’s corps and no less than three more cavalry formations switched from Murat’s cavalry reserve. Even if this intelligence was eventually discovered and digested by the enemy it was soon completely out of date, for the moment the French eastward advance passed the River Enns, the same administrative and operational flexibility enabled Napoleon to withdraw three infantry divisions from Lannes and re-form them into a new provisional corps (the VIIIth) under Marshal Mortier. Thus at no time could the foe rely on “accurate” information concerning the strength of their opponents or the placing of their units.

  All this time, however, besides fulfilling their counterintelligence role, Napoleon’s questing cavalry would be scientifically probing every village and emptying every postbox in their search for information about the enemy, perhaps capturing a prisoner or two or finding a handful of deserters, or listening to and passing back local gossip. From this mass of information, Napoleon and his staff would at least be able to settle the places where the enemy was not situated, and thus build up an idea of where he might still be. As the Duke of Wellington described it: “The whole art of war consists in getting at what lies on the other side of the hill, or, in other words, in deciding what we do not know from what we do.”28

  As the distance between the two adversaries narrowed, security often became more difficult to maintain, and both sides would receive a stream of information—some of it misleading to be sure, but most of it relevant. Then, when “the veil was torn,” Napoleon would rely on speed of movement to complete his approach towards a dazed opponent. The length of the daily marches would be abruptly increased, and all foraging forbidden as the jealously conserved supplies of the ration convoys were distributed. As Colin describes it, “rapidity is an essential and primordial factor in Napoleon’s warfare.”29

  Strategic protection: the employment of the cavalry screen before the Battle of Austerlitz, December 1805

  This insistence on speed and mobility was a basic feature of the Emperor’s campaigns from beginning to end, and was the feature of his warfare that most confused and unsettled the majority of his opponents, brought up in a tradition that taught a more leisurely type of warfare. Three examples will suffice to show what the French grognards meant when they half-complainingly, half-admiringly claimed that “the Emperor has discovered a new way of waging war; he makes use of our legs instead of our bayonets.”30 First, at one critical stage in the First Italian Campaign, General Augereau marched his division over a distance of 50 miles in 36 hours to reach the field of Castiglione in time for the battle with Würmser. Secondly, in 1805, Napoleon moved 210,000 men from the Rhine to the Danube and from there a part of them to the outskirts of Ulm in a mere 17 days; during the period between September 24 and October 16 Marshal Soult’s command (to cite but one example) covered a total of 275 miles—no mean feat of sustained marching. The same campaign holds an example of an even more celebrated forced march; summoned from Vienna to join Napoleon at Austerlitz, Davout drove the leading division of IIIrd Corps over the staggering distance of 140 kilometers in a little over 48 hours—no less than 35 of which were spent on the road. These examples, although outstanding, were by no means unique. Well might Napoleon declare that “Marches are war.”

  These amazing performances on the roads of Europe were made feasible by three factors: the self-contained and more or less independent French divisional and corps system; the French system of doing without lengthy and slow-moving convoys of supplies, “living off the countryside” in lieu; and lastly the iron will and resolve of the Emperor who could bully, cajole and inspire his men into according him blind obedience day after day, week after week. These factors will receive fuller attention later in this chapter, but for Napoleon there is no doubt that speed was the element that could transform danger into opportunity, defeat into victory.

  This insistence on rapid movement as a basic principle of war highlights another of Napoleon’s master concepts—the vital significance of time and its accurate calculation in relation to space. “The loss of time is irreparable in war,” he once asserted. Considerations of time and distance were the basic calculations underlying all his great strategic moves: “Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less chary of the latter than of the former; space we can recover, time never”; “I may lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute”; “Time is the great element between weight and force.”31 The Correspondance is full of references to this element of warfare as understood by Napoleon. Hours, even days, could be saved or gained by a careful selection of the best routes to the chosen objective. Indeed, Napoleon did not usually demand an unreasonable degree of effort from his marching columns—except, as we have seen, at moments of crisis; under more or less normal conditions he expected them to cover only an average of between 10 and 12 miles a day. For the real secret of his rapid concentrations and unanticipated blitzkrieg blows lay far more in the selection of the shortest and most practicable routes to preselected points than in inspiring his men to continue their superhuman efforts. This type of true economy of effort eased the wear and tear on the troops, reducing the wastage occasioned by sickness and desertion, and ideally left a margin of time each day for dealing with any unforeseen incidents or implementing any change of plan. Thus in May 1800, the Army of the Reserve was able to reverse its line of march from west to east without the least confusion or delay, and immediately before Jena in October 1806 the Grande Armée proved capable of changing its line of operations from north-south to east-west on the receipt of a single order from Imperial headquarters.

  Of course this beautiful simplicity of strategic movement, with its infinite flexibility, is extremely deceptive. The task of correlating and coordinating the daily movements of a dozen or more major formations, all moving along separate routes, of ensuring that every component is within one or, at most, two days’ marching distance of its immediate neighbors, and yet at the same time preserving the appearance of an arbitrary and ill-coordinated “scatter” of large units in order to deceive the foe concerning the true gravity of his situation—this is the work of a mathematical mind of no common caliber. It is in fact the hallmark of genius—that “infinite capacity for taking pains.” Given a clear aim and the determinati
on of a Napoleon to enforce its implementation, together with his unimpeachable talent for exact calculation, an acquired eye for ground and an imagination that could conjure up an accurate picture of the terrain lying ahead from the sparse information contained on a map—there was nothing that could prevent the arrival of the French army at its chosen destination. Sometimes subordinates failed the master and added additional complications to the situation; sometimes the enemy adopted the least probable course; sometimes unusually violent weather or the spate of a river interrupted the ruthless unfolding of the plan; but almost invariably every possibility had been foreseen and allowed for in the Emperor’s all-embracing mind. He remained perfectly content to continue marking up his campaign-maps with the aid of his dividers, preset to show a daily distance of 20 kilometers, adapting the master plan as need arose, but still relentlessly and calmly pursuing the objective of his campaign.

  The ultimate aim of all this carefully considered activity was to produce the greatest possible number of men on the battlefield, which on occasion had been chosen months in advance of the actual event. Bourienne gives his celebrated—if probably embroidered—eyewitness account of the First Consul, in the early days of the Italian Campaign of 1800, lying full-length on the floor, pushing colored pins into his maps, and saying, “I shall fight him here—on the plain of the Scrivia,”32 with that uncanny prescience which was in reality the product of mental calculations of computer-like complexity. After considering every possible course of action open to the Austrian Melas, Bonaparte eliminated them one by one, made allowance for the effect of chance on events, and came up with the answer—subsequently borne out by the events of June 14 on the field of Marengo, which lies, surely enough, on the plain bounded by the rivers Bormida and Scrivia. Such prophetic accuracy was not always obtainable—neither Austerlitz nor Jena were exactly foreseen—but on almost every campaign Napoleon knew the probable outcome of his and the enemy’s moves from an early date by means of a careful calculation of all the odds. Well might Napoleon claim that “aptitude for maneuver is the supreme skill in a general; it is the most useful and rarest of gifts by which genius is estimated.”33