The third variety of Napoleonic maneuver need not delay us long. This is the “Strategical Penetration”—a system devised to act as an introduction or commencement to one or other of the more important systems already described. When Napoleon found the enemy holding an extended “cordon line” type of defense, he devised a means to smash through it at some convenient place, followed this with a rapid march deep into enemy territory (using speed to offset the danger of being surrounded by the enemy) in order to seize some town or city for use as a centre des opérations for the next phase of the campaign. Thus in 1796, he broke through Colli’s and Argenteau’s cordon at Ceva to gain his central position; a little later, pursuing Beaulieu, he smashed his way over the defended Mincio River line at Borghetto to split the scattered Austrians in twain. The most impressive operations of this type took place in 1812, when the French stormed over the Niemen and headed for Vilna in an attempt to sunder the greater part of Barclay’s army from contact with General Bagration. Subsequently Napoleon’s main drive toward Vitebsk and Smolensk had as its main motivation his wish to achieve a strategic penetration through the prepared Russian lines based on the Dvina and Dnieper River systems. Such a maneuver, however, was never complete in itself; it did not lead to a decisive battle, but led to the creation of an initial favorable situation or what we might call “springboard” from which the main moves of the campaign could subsequently be undertaken.
However, in distinguishing between these three main Napoleonic stratagems, it is important to remember that no single one was necessarily—or even habitually—exclusive of the other two. The infinite genius of Napoleon could devise means of combining features of all three into a single campaign, as in 1796, when he developed an initial “strategical penetration” (Ceva) into an action based on the “central position” (the battles of Dego and the move on Mondovi), before switching to a whole series of manoeuvres sur les derrières in his vain attempts to trap Beaulieu before he could make good his escape. Then, once his offensive changed into a defensive phase as the Austrians made their succession of powerful attempts to relieve Mantua, General Bonaparte returned to his conception of maneuvering around a “central position” with occasional reversion to brief “envelopments” (as at Arcola). Napoleonic war was nothing if not complex—an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of moves and intentions, which by themselves went a long way towards baffling and dazing his muddled, conventionally minded opponents into that state of disconcerting moral disequilibrium which so often resulted in their catastrophic defeat.
French Six-Deep Divisional Squares in Action. Detail from The Battle of the Pyramids, 1798, by General Lejeune. This tactical formation was personally devised by General Bonaparte to meet the massed charges of the Mameluke horsemen in Egypt. It was virtually his only tactical innovation. Notice the cannon and grenadier companies protecting the vulnerable angles of the squares, and the outnumbered French cavalry sheltering within them.
See Appendix for a list of the main operations and the attendant circumstances.
See p. 363 for elucidation on Napoleon’s battle tactics.
16
GRAND TACTICS ON THE BATTLEFIELD
After this examination of the strategical methods Napoleon adopted to encompass the defeat and destruction of his foes, we must pass on to consider the Grand Tactics he employed to achieve success at those supremely critical moments of warfare—the hours immediately prior to, during and after giving battle. Grand Tactics in the Napoleonic era comprised the science and art of handling men, horses and guns during the crucial moves when close contact had been established with the enemy. It was not concerned with the confused and shifting techniques of actual hand-to-hand fighting, for these belong to the realm of tactics, a sphere that we shall explore in a later chapter.* Indeed, Napoleon made few original tactical contributions to the art of war—his development of the “divisional square” in Egypt being practically unique. Here we are concerned with the overall methods used by Napoleon to dominate the enemy in the last hours before a battle, to defeat him in the field, and, lastly, to destroy him during the pursuit.
As we have already discussed in the part of this chapter relating to Napoleon’s general philosophy of war, the Emperor’s greatest contribution to the art of fighting battles was his insistence that maneuver and “the bloody decision” were both part and parcel of strategy, in refutation of the commonly held eighteenth-century view that movement and battle were clearly distinguishable acts of war, one pertaining to the science of strategy, the other to that of tactics. Napoleon saw it differently: “It is often in the system of campaign that one conceives the system of battle,”50 he asserted.
Napoleon’s concept of battle owed a great deal to the authors he studied at Auxonne. The Welshman Lloyd taught him that battles should be fluid and not rigid, that surprise is the best way to demoralize an enemy and place him at a disadvantage. One idea of Lloyd’s is frequently echoed in the Correspondance: “A battle is a theatrical piece, with a beginning, a middle and an end”51; but the Welshman made perhaps his greatest contribution to young Bonaparte’s education by his insistence that Frederick the Great’s true display of military genius was at the battle of Prague (May 6, 1757) when he attacked the Austrian Marshal von Browne at the moment when he was in the process of breaking up his line. Frederick’s conduct at Prague was to color much of Napoleon’s Grand Tactical thinking,52 for it inspired him to undertake the task of devising a system of battle that would compel an adversary to break the continuity of his line, and thus expose himself to a fatal blow.
Guibert’s contribution, on the other hand, was less notable. He preached the need to select the correct target for attack with the greatest care, the importance of advancing into battle in a number of small columns for the sake of mobility but of deploying for the actual fight, and the advantages of the compromise ordre mixte battle formation over both the ordre mince and the ordre profonde; all these tactical ideas found an important place in Napoleon’s thinking. But Guibert also enunciated several ideas that were particularly heretical to our young Corsican gunner, the most nefarious of them being his conviction that the artillery arm was more of a nuisance than an assistance on the field of battle. This idea Napoleon never ceased to repudiate in his writings: “It is necessary to have as much artillery as the enemy. Experience shows that it is necessary to have four guns to every thousand men…. The better the infantry, the more one must husband and support it with good batteries….”53 “Missile weapons are now become the principal ones,” he wrote, echoing Turpin de Crissé’s statement that “it is by fire and not by shock that battles are decided today.”54 Or again, “It is with artillery that war is made.”55 Napoleon freely adopted du Teil’s teaching that big batteries are the true secret of victory, and in due course we shall see what use he made of them at Marengo, Eylau, Friedland, Borodino and Waterloo. Bonaparte also studied the great military controversies of his day with avid interest, and from a general collation of facts and a distillation of ideas he slowly elaborated his idea of a battle formula, or rather a whole series of alternatives, ranged around a central theme or ideal.
At the very base of his thinking lay certain fundamental ideas; among the most important of these was the concept of the offensive battle—based on the all-out attack—which aims to end the war at one blow. This was indeed Napoleon’s strategical as well as his tactical ideal, drawn from the teaching of Frederick the Great, who in turn based his precepts on the practice of the great Persian general Cyrus, who perfected the idea of the maneuver battle. It is very rarely that we find Napoleon fighting a truly defensive battle—even when he was strategically on the defensive; the much misused Napoleonic dictum, “the best means of defense is attack” puts this philosophy into a nutshell. Only three times did Napoleon definitely fight defensively—at Leipzig in 1813, and at La Rothière and Arcis the following year—but on each of these occasions he only resorted to such second-rate measures after the dismal failure of an initial attack.
Napoleon was committed throughout his military career to the idea of attacking the enemy, thereby winning the advantages of disorganizing him, unsettling his plans and retaining the initiative throughout. Even at Austerlitz, where it would at first appear that the French sat and waited for the Allies to attack, Napoleon was acting offensively. But with infinite subtlety he had created the impression of crippling French weakness and indecision and thus lured his more powerful enemies into making their fatal mistakes. Indeed, the true defensive-offensive battle found no place in the Napoleonic repertoire, although in the Peninsula some of the Emperor’s subordinates, most notably Soult and Massena, used it reasonably successfully against the Duke of Wellington. However, if the French invariably preferred to attack, yet paradoxically, as Colin points out, it is those foes who stayed most determinedly on the defensive that suffered least in battles with Napoleon; the outcome of the battles of Eylau, Borodino and Waterloo would seem to bear this argument out. Thus, generally speaking, Napoleon’s attacks were completely successful only when he stung his adversary into ill-conceived and ill-timed counterattacks.
If “toujours l’attaque” forms one basis of Napoleon’s battle philosophy, “toujours confondre” is another. The enemy must be thrown off balance from the very first moment and thereafter kept off balance. To help achieve this Napoleon adopted the advice of Turpin de Crissé—“It is very important to know the genius, character and talents of the enemy general; it is on this knowledge that one can develop plans …”—and many of Napoleon’s battle schemes were deliberately tailored to suit his impression of his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. If the Emperor made contact with an apprehensive or, alternatively, a very strong enemy too late in the day to force a decisive action on him, he did not postpone his attack until the morrow: instead he often launched an immediate, though frequently short-term, spoiling attack, aiming thereby to pin the enemy, preclude the possibility of his refusing battle by means of a night withdrawal, and at the same time disrupt the foe’s battle formations by involving him in “spoiling” actions with a view to exploiting their disarray the following morning. These are the intentions that lie behind the apparently premature first-day actions at Eylau and Wagram, and indeed behind the major battle at Friedland. Napoleon was from first to last determined to dominate and overawe his opponent, building up a moral superiority which was frequently more useful than mere numerical advantage.
As in his strategical system, so in his grand tactical formulae did Napoleon place the utmost importance on achieving an envelopment of the enemy; this was the third basis of his battle philosophy. While he owed the strategical concept to Frederick, he owed its tactical counterpart to Bourcet. The Frederickian advance in “oblique order” found no immediate place in Napoleon’s plans, although he adopted certain features of it for the final, decisive attack; he relied far more on the turning movement to achieve truly great results. The aim of the flank attack, as employed in almost all the Napoleonic battles from the humble Montenotte in 1796 and the more sophisticated Castiglione of the same campaign to the fully developed concept employed at the battle of Bautzen in 1813, was always to create an opportunity for total victory by disturbing the foe and upsetting his balance and morale, thus provoking an atmosphere and situation from which a real decision could be gained. The psychological effect of the sudden rumbling of cannon or the appearance of a large cloud of dust toward an army’s flank and rear cannot be overestimated; at Arcola (third day) it was the appearance of a handful of French cavalry on the enemy flank that decided the day, while at the Battle of Mount Tabor (1799) it took precisely two well-timed cannon shots to cause the panic-stricken flight of the huge Army of Damascus. Many more instances could be listed.
There is, however, one important variation to this basic idea of turning the enemy’s flank with the aid of an independent force, which Napoleon employed when he was not sufficiently strong to be able to afford troops for this role. This alternative was the tactical outflanking movement. The difference between the two is important, though at first glance apparently insignificant. A “turning” movement could be executed only by a fair-sized force—at least a corps in strength—which was capable of moving into action independently of the main body. Such an attack, properly timed, could lead to the destruction of an enemy if the “turning” force was able to place itself well in the foe’s rear athwart his line of retreat. An “outflanking” movement, on the other hand, was productive of less dramatic results. It was carried out by a formation forming an integral part of the French battle line, and at all times it remained linked to the main front; in no way was it a separate entity. Such an onslaught could often force an enemy to change front or partially redeploy his line, but it rarely led in itself to the major dislocation of the enemy position making possible the crushing victory Napoleon always set out to achieve. However, as we shall see below when we consider in detail the sequence of an “ideal” Napoleonic battle, the degree of success attained rested on the question of exact timing. As Napoleon well knew, everything depended on the correctly timed sequence of initial concentration, appearance of the turning force, crucial bombardment of the key enemy sector, and finally the loosing of the devastating main attack. His ability to judge the right moment—the coup d’oeil—was a vital attribute.
As with his system of maneuver, it is possible to distinguish between three different types of Napoleonic battle, although once again these were one and all essentially fluid concepts capable of infinite variation and even amalgamation according to circumstances. These three are the following: the battle based on the simple frontal attack, the double battle, and the enveloping or “strategical” battle. There is no doubt that the third was his favorite, and consequently the other two need not be described at great length.
The frontal battle bore a close resemblance to the greater number of eighteenth-century actions; it was usually a matter of two armies, drawn up in fairly rigid formation or within a definitely limited position, fighting it out with fire and shock, until one or the other conceded defeat. Napoleon probably disliked this kind of attritional battle on two counts. First, it could often prove inordinately expensive in lives, and contrary to popular belief Napoleon was always eager to conserve his army’s strength even if he did not flinch at the prospect of heavy casualties when these were unavoidable or necessary. Secondly, the set-piece, frontal battle was less likely to yield a truly decisive result, as the defeated party could usually retire along its line of communication. However, under certain circumstances he was prepared, to take on a battle of this sort; sometimes the exigencies of the strategical situation made a battle on any terms essential—as at Rivoli on January 14, 1797, when General Bonaparte was desperately trying to halt and if possible scatter the northern arm of d’Alvintzi’s “pincers” before his southern arm could force its way over the Adige toward Mantua. On this occasion, Napoleon accepted action on a fairly narrow plateau which permitted little grand tactical maneuver. Then again in cases when the enemy had been stupid enough to position himself in an extremely compromising position—as at Friedland on June 5, 1807, when Bennigsen placed his army across the neck of a bend in the River Alle, with a tributary stream (the Mühlen Fluss) further bisecting his battleline—Napoleon was prepared to fight a straightforward action to exploit such favorable circumstances. On other occasions, too, a battle of this type was forced on him; Marengo (June 1800) is one notable example. Similarly, at Borodino, because the Grande Armée was too weakened by strategic consumption to permit a full-scale enveloping attack against Kutusov’s exposed left flank (or so Napoleon asserted, though Davout was of a different opinion), and because Prince Poniatowski’s tactical outflanking move round the Russian left failed to make ground, the Emperor was forced to accept another full-scale battle of attrition. Leipzig in 1813 is another case in point, although on this occasion, of course, the Allies were really dictating the events. It should be pointed out, however, that the general “frontal” battle must not be confused with t
he initial “pinning” attack of the ideal Napoleonic action which will be described below, despite certain similarities.
Secondly, there was the double battle. Again this variety cannot be placed in a watertight compartment, for frequently double battles were resorted to in conjunction with both frontal and strategical battles. They invariably played a part in the development of the strategy based on the central position, as we have seen. Double battles were also generally used when the form of the field was definitely divided into two by some geographical feature (a mountain or a river, for instance) or when the large numbers of troops engaged on both sides made no other course practicable from the point of view of control. Thus at Austerlitz, while the main battle centered around control of the central Pratzen Heights and the terrain to its south, the area north of the massif was designated by Napoleon as the secondary battle area; and Lannes and Murat—centered around the Santon mound dominating the main Olmütz-to-Brünn highway—were entrusted with the basically defensive task of keeping Bagration’s army (the Allied right wing) from interfering in the main battle. Again at Borodino, the action that centered around the village of that name and subsequently ran along the north bank of the River Kalatsha was originally entrusted to Prince Eugène’s IVth Corps as a secondary action, though at a later stage of the main battle Napoleon saw fit to transfer half of Eugène’s troops to the south bank to participate in the main battle, centered around the capture of the Great Redoubt.
On occasion, too, a strategical battle could be turned into a double battle by force of circumstances; thus on October 13, 1806, Napoleon’s intended strategical battle aimed against an enemy presumed to be massed in the vicinity of Weimar (in which Davout and Bernadotte were to serve as the enveloping force) turned into the “double battle” of Jena and Auerstadt when the Prussians were found to have moved east and north from their original positions. Quatre Bras and Ligny form another good example of a double battle, closely associated in this case with the strategy of the central position. Lastly, the famous battle of Waterloo should in reality be designated a double battle, although, as at Jena-Auerstadt, this was due to force of circumstances rather than to deliberate design. A better title would be “Waterloo-Wavre,” for Grouchy’s failure to pin down Blücher in the secondary action at Wavre away to the east of the main battlefield had a most decisive effect on the outcome of the day along the ridge of Mont-St.-Jean. However, it is important at this point to distinguish between the double battle with its main and subsidiary actions (which are analagous to the main and secondary theaters in Napoleonic strategy) and the important main and secondary attacks which figure prominently in the strategic battle. This is not a matter of academic hairsplitting, for the underlying intention was fundamentally different.
The Campaigns of Napoleon Page 26
