A History of Strategy (6 page)

Next a thorough reconnaissance made by the commander in person was to reveal the fortress’ weak points. The guns were to be brought up, properly situated, and dug in. The bombardment itself was to be carried out in three bounds as each bound brought the attackers closer to the walls. Sallies by the defenders were to be carefully guarded against and, if they took place nevertheless, allowed to run their course and repulsed before siege operations properly speaking resumed. Breaches were to be systematically widened until they were “practicable.” And so on, measure for measure, until the capture—or, even better, the surrender—of the fortress—was obtained.

As of late, attempts have been made to belittle Vauban’s originality and deny his historical importance both as a builder and as a commander. Be this as it may, the fact remains that his writings have never been surpassed in their own field. As late as 1830 they were still being reprinted as a practical guide. Meanwhile whatever theoretical wisdom was contributed by others who were active in the field had been long forgotten. One and all, the aim of his successors was to extend his approach to warfare in its entirety, a task in which they invariably failed.

To pass over them rapidly, Jacques Francois de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur (1655–1743) spent most of his life fighting for Louis XIV in whose army he finally rose to the position of quartermaster general. Written in the 1720s, his
Art of War by Principles and Rules
was explicitly modeled on Vauban. What the latter had done for siege warfare Puységur sought to do for “the entire theory of war from the smallest part to the largest.” Seeking to contradict those who claimed that only practice mattered, moreover, he wanted to show that war could be taught “without war, without troops, without an army, without having to leave one’s home, simply by means of study, with a little geometry and geography.”

Having provided a survey of ancient and modern military writers as well as his own military experience, Puységur explains that “the foundation of the art of war is knowing how to form good
ordres de battaile
and how to make them move and operate according to the most perfect rules of movement, the principles of which are derived from geometry, with which all officers must be familiar.” Applying his own recipe step by step, he then illustrates the use of geometrical principles in order to find “the best method” for (
inter alia
) conducting marches, carrying out maneuvers in the face of the enemy, constructing camps, confronting an enemy who may have taken shelter behind lines, rivers, marshes, inundations, woods, and other obstacles, as well as foraging and passing convoys. Having done all this, he concludes with “the movements of two armies advancing upon each other,” only to break off his near-endless catalogue of “principles and rules” at precisely at the point where war, understood as an
interaction
of the two sides, begins.

More famous than Puységur was Maurice, also known as the Marshal, de Saxe. A natural son of the Elector of Saxony, he became a professional soldier. Ultimately he was appointed commander in chief of the French Army during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). His
Reveries
(Dreams) were written in 1732, allegedly during thirteen feverish nights and with no other aim in mind except that of amusing himself. On one level the book is a reaction against Puységur. It starts by lamenting the absence of any reference to the “sublime” (i.e. non-mechanical) aspects of war in his predecessor’s work. On another it epitomizes eighteenth century warfare at its complex best, assuming as it does two comparatively small armies (at one point, following Montecuccoli, he says that 50,000 is the maximum that can be handled by any general) maneuvering against each other with the aim of fulfilling the sovereign’s orders to capture this province or that.

This maneuvering was seen as the essence of war. Battle was to be engaged in only as a last resort; and then only when the prospects for victory appeared certain. There are separate chapters about field warfare, mountain warfare, siege warfare, and the problems of building field fortifications and dealing with them. Unlike many of his contemporaries, moreover, Saxe as a foreign nobleman without an independent fortune had worked his way up the chain of command almost from the bottom. Hence he also had many shrewd observations concerning the need to keep the soldiers’ clothing simple and the commander’s mind free of excessive detail, not to mention the danger of making generals out of colonels and thereby risking the possibility that they would be promoted one level above their natural ability.

Generally, though, his most important contribution is considered to be the “legion.” Against the background of a period which still did not possess integrated formations comprising all arms—the largest unit was the regiment—he proposed the establishment of such formations. Each one was to number exactly 3,582 men. Each was to comprise, besides four infantry regiments, four troops of horse (one for each regiment), two twelve-pounder guns, a permanent headquarters, transport, engineers, and various supporting services. With that, the need to draw up a detailed
ordre de
battaile
, which Puységur had regarded as the very essence of the military art, for each occasion would be obviated. One would simply be able to name a “legion” and send it on this mission or that.

Permanent formations would prove more cohesive than the rest and would be thus able to serve as “a kind of universal seminary of soldiers where different nations are freely adopted and their natural prejudices effectually removed.” In any event, the idea of building large, permanent, combined formations was destined to be adopted during the second half of the century and proved critical to the development of the art of war and of strategy in particular. Still, no more than his contemporaries did de Saxe himself distinguish between strategy and tactics.

To round off this chapter, the military works of Frederick the Great must be briefly discussed. Reflecting the typical Enlightenment belief in education, they were produced over a period of some thirty years. First came the
Principes Genereaux
of 1746; this was followed by the
Testament Politique
(1761), the
Testament Militaire
(1768) and the
Éleménts de
Castrametrique et de Tactique
(1771) as well as a long didactic poem known as
The Art of War
. Much of this material was originally secret and intended strictly for the use of senior Prussian officers and officials. Accordingly it does not so much deal with the art of war
per se
as to the way in which it ought to be practiced by Prussia, and again the reason for including it here is mainly the fact that its author was undoubtedly one of the greatest commanders of all times.

Prussia, then, is described as an artificial country, spread over much of Germany and Poland, and held together as a work of art. At the center of the work was the army. It alone could guarantee the state’s continued existence, and therefore had to be fostered by all means. For both military and political reasons the army’s commander was to be the king alone. Not for Frederick the
conseils de guerre
which were common elsewhere and for which he not seldom expressed his contempt, commenting e.g. that France under Louis XV was governed by a cabal of four plus Madame de Pompadour. The officers were to be drawn exclusively from the nobility. That was because the one factor that can make men march into the cannon which are trained at them is honor, and honor was to be found among nobles alone. Frederick was not incapable of putting on a show of gruff appreciation for the rank and file. Still, he firmly believed that the one means to keep them in line was ferocious discipline. As he once said, “they need to fear their officers more than the enemy.”

Held together by iron bonds, such an army would be able to march more rapidly, maneuver more precisely, and fire more rapidly than the enemy. Above all, it would be able to take casualties, recover from defeat and fight again. A most important factor, considering the number of battles Frederick lost. With these rock-solid elements in place, he could instruct his generals about the details. Thus, during marches, the army’s two wings were not to be separated by more than a few miles. Provisions were to be obtained by “eating everything there is to eat [in a province] and then moving somewhere else.” Mountains, swamps, forests and other places capable of offering shelter to deserters were to be avoided as far as possible, and foraging soldiers were to be carefully guarded. The best method of espionage “which always succeeds” was to choose a peasant, arrest his wife as a hostage, and attach to him a soldier disguised as a servant. Next he would be sent into the enemy’s camp—an idea which could equally well have come out of some Chinese, or Byzantine, manual. There was something about the use of artillery and cavalry and something about the capture of defended places. Much of what Frederick has to say is incisive and succinct. Limited as it is to his own time and place, however, little of it deserves to be studied by way of a theoretical introduction to war.

By the end of the nineteenth century the king had come to be celebrated as the founder of the Prussian-German Army. To gain respect, any military action had to be traceable to him. Much ink was spilt over the question as to whether he preferred annihilation (
Niederwerfung
) over attrition (
Ermattung
) or the other way around. In fact his written works do not have very much to say about the matter. His views must be deduced from his practice. On two occasions, then, Frederick engaged in what today would be called a
Blitzkrieg
. In 1740 he sought to overrun Silesia, and in 1756 Saxony, before the enemy, who in both cases was Austria, could react. In both cases the attempt failed. Instead he became involved in a protracted war which even assumed pan-European dimensions. If only because two are needed for a fight, broadly speaking in these wars Frederick showed himself neither more nor less inclined toward fighting decisive battles than his contemporaries. Such bloodbaths were indeed frequent. But so, particularly during the latter phases of the Seven Years War, were lengthy pauses and complicated maneuvers intended to preserve his own forces and outfox the enemy.

As has already been mentioned, several Enlightenment military writers lamented the fact that, unlike the remaining sciences, the one of war did not have any clear and universally applicable rules. One and all, their objective in writing was to provide such rules, either for themselves, for their comrades, for their subordinates, or for a wider readership. Precisely because its scope was limited—it completely ignores both the military and the political context of the fortifications and sieges with which it deals—among all these works that of Vauban is by far the most successful. Lacking any similar focus, the rest sought to construct “systems” which would not comprise mere handbooks, but would cover war as a whole.

Seldom did that attempt succeed. While many authors had interesting things to say, with the possible exception of Saxe and his legions they are concerned with the technicalities of their own age rather than anything that foreshadows the future. Perhaps the best that can be said for them is that, as the growing number of publications in the field proves, they both reflected and were responsible for a situation in which warfare was coming to be considered a fit subject for serious theoretical study. The age of the self-taught officer who was also an entrepreneur was drawing to an end. His place was taken by officers who received their commissions after having passed through a military academy and later subjected to further study at one of the new staff colleges. The latter began to open their doors in Prussia and France from about 1770. In the future it was to the students and graduates of these institutions, above all, that writers on military theory were to address themselves.

In the military field, as in others, the years leading up to the French Revolution were marked by intellectual ferment. The political system of absolute states, created at Westphalia in 1648, was visibly coming apart at the seams. Both Louis XV and Frederick II were aware that radical change was on the way. The former in particular expressed his hope that the deluge would only come “
après moi
.” The nature of the change was foreshadowed in the work of political writers of whom the most radical one was Rousseau. In the military field, the writer who made the greatest name for himself was a young man named Jacques Antoine Hypolite, Comte de Guibert.

The background to Guibert’s work, like that of his late eighteenth century contemporaries, was formed by the Seven Years War. It stood to the period 1763–1789 much as World War I did to the period 1919–1939, as a paradigm. In the Seven Years War, the French Army had performed poorly. It failed to achieve much against Frederick the Great’s Prussia even though, together with its allies Austria and Russia, France had enjoyed every economic, numerical, and geographical advantage. Guibert
père
had participated in the Seven Years War as an assistant to the last French commander in Germany, the Marshal de Broglie. The question which occupied Guibert
fils
, who ended that conflict as a colonel, was how to do better next time. Typical of the times in which he lived, he sought to answer the question not merely by offering specific recommendations but by producing a grand “system” of war which would cover the entire subject, both historically and philosophically. The
Essai General de Tactique
, published in 1770 when Guibert was only twenty seven years old, was supposed to represent that system and, at the same time, confer immortality upon its author.

Guibert’s detailed recommendations concerning the shape of military formations—he helped write the ordinance of 1791 with which the French Army fought the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, for example—need not concern us here. Four propositions, however, are outstanding and justify the high reputation he enjoyed among his contemporaries. First, to overcome the feebleness so characteristic of France’s conduct of the recent conflict, future war should be waged not merely with the aid of the standing army but on the basis of the united forces of the entire nation. Second, to make such participation possible, general conscription was to be introduced. Third, to enable the huge armies that would result to exist without ruining the treasury, the existing logistic system was to be scrapped and war made to feed war. Fourth, those same huge armies were to move not in a single block, as had been standard practice from times immemorial to that of Frederick the Great, but in independent formations of all arms. The last-named demand clearly echoed de Saxe. But it could also rely on the French commander de Broglie. During the later years of the Seven Years War, he became the first to conduct practical experiments with the type of unit later to be known as the division.