The War of Wars (67 page)

Yet he was clearly a cut above not just the ordinary people, but almost everyone else, noble or commoner, and perhaps the most
precise and efficient administrative brain ever to have governed Britain. He laid the foundations for eventual victory in the Napoleonic wars and for Victorian imperial greatness.

With the most formidable military leader in Britain and its dominant political leader now scythed from the scene, the country seemed adrift, unable to comprehend its plight or alter its course. Charles James Fox, Pitt’s great political rival, expressed it best and for once succinctly: ‘It feels as if something is missing in the world.’

Yet appearances were to some extent deceptive. If his cold, calculating pragmatism made him the ideal foil for the emotional, impulsive Napoleon, it also made him surprisingly unimaginative, missing many possible opportunities in the war, often hedging his bets and dispersing his forces, never grasping, for example, the opportunity to support the royalist uprisings in France and the seizure of Toulon when given the chance.

A failure on his own terms, he was certainly a dominant statesman. But he was not indispensable, as so many such figures believe they are. Yet the British people, desperate for reassurance after the enemy’s triumphs on the continent, could not know that. Of one thing they were certain: France was no longer a threat by sea, which was what they had been most concerned about. But Napoleon, savouring the scent of great victories and absolute master of much of Europe, had had the satisfaction of seeing off his two greatest British enemies one after another.

The hurricane that was about to descend on Europe was the product of years of evolution, preparation and training. A military machine, equipped with revolutionary new tactics, had been prepared to wreak havoc against the traditional armies of Europe. Napoleon had not considered Amiens to be more than a delaying tactic. Sooner or later he intended to fight, and although war was forced upon him more quickly than he expected, he now headed an engine of war of fearsome magnitude, speed, force, manoeuvrability, motivation and innovation.

Its size alone was unlike anything hitherto experienced. The 350,000-strong
Grande Armée
consisted of seven huge corps, more or less independent self-supporting armies, each containing two to five infantry divisions, a brigade or division of cavalry, some forty cannon, a corps of engineers and support troops. Napoleon also established a formidable cavalry reserve of two divisions of cuirassiers (the breast-plated elite), four ordinary dragoon divisions, one of dismounted dragoons and one of light cavalry, amounting to some 22,000 cavalry and an artillery reserve of 24-guns.

The original political purpose of creating the
Grande Armée
was to overcome the feuding between Moreau’s old Army of the Rhine and Napoleon’s veterans from Italy and Egypt. The
Grande Armée
was set up in 1802 and Napoleon began systematically training the two merged armies, as well as re-equipping them, levying additional conscripts and formulating tactics. At first there were serious shortages of horses, transport and artillery.

Napoleon set up a centralized command under his own small staff,
the Maison, which was highly effective in issuing orders to the commanders of his quasi-separate armies, permitting the flexibility and manoeuvrability that were to give him his early military victories. This was supplemented by the much larger and more cumbersome Imperial Headquarters, which initially had 400 officers and 5,000 men and eventually swelled to some 3,500 and 10,000 respectively, stifling initiative through bureaucracy and elaborate chains of command and holding up the despatch of instructions, as was to occur spectacularly in later campaigns.

The two key men around Napoleon were trusted staff officers. General Alexandre Berthier, minister of war, was a gifted organizer as long as the staff was reasonably self-contained. At fifty he was older than most of his colleagues. Christophe Duroc, Napoleon’s grand marshal, was the other key figure. Duroc was the Emperor’s favourite. Well born, from Lorraine, three years younger than Napoleon, he was tall and good-looking with dark hair and wide, frank eyes. He was gentle, patient, hard-working and loyal. The master of horse, General Auguste de Caulaincourt (brother of the man who was to become Napoleon’s finest civilian aide Armand), and the map officer Bacler d’Albe were also indispensable.

The individual corps were each commanded by one of the marshals. The officers numbered around 5,000, most of them already combat veterans, and an increasing number of them trained at the elite École Spéciale Militaire at St Cyr. The ranks were conscripted under the Jourdan law of 1798, predating Napoleon. Surprisingly few received any further training except in 1802–5, but they were encouraged to have a strong
esprit de corps
.

The army was equipped by a steadily growing munitions industry in France which already assembled some 125,000 weapons a year, mostly by hand. The level of production increased: by 1815 some 4 million weapons had been manufactured. Gaspard Monge, the chief of artillery production in 1793, had created an advanced casting method, had turned churches seized in the Revolution into foundries, and pillaged copper from their bells for barrels. Seven new factories were set up by Napoleon. Demand always outstripped supply.

The Imperial Guard was the most under-used part of his army.
Formed as an elite, and better paid and housed, it was originally no more than a personal bodyguard of some 5,000 infantry, 2,000 troopers and twenty-four guns. It mushroomed into a force of 56,000 by 1812 and an army in its own right of 112,000 by 1814. Napoleon’s real motive was to guarantee his safety and dominance against the over-mighty marshals of the rest of the army, which was the main reason he so often kept it out of battle. He was as paranoid as any dictator about the possibility of a military coup. It consisted of veteran Old Guards, Middle Guards, who were mostly trained sharpshooters, and Young Guards, the pick of the light infantry. But it was so special to the Emperor that it was not sent into battle at all until 1813.

Napoleon’s tactics were far from original. Just as Nelson’s tactics had originally been inspired by Howe, the revolution in French tactics derived from the middle of the eighteenth century. The introduction of the flintlock musket in place of the matchlock, and the bayonet replacing the lengthy and unwieldy pike at around the same time, had been responsible for the introduction of lines of battle just three or four foot deep in place of the huge amorphous forces of earlier times. These had been made necessary by the long and dangerous fuses of the matchlock which meant men had to be at a safe distance from one another.

The usual practice through the early part of the eighteenth century was for each army to deploy from its marching column in lines two or three deep protected by cavalry on their flanks, several yards before engaging an enemy. Brent Nosworthy in his classic work on the subject,
Battle Tactics of Napoleon and his Enemies
, has explained the procedure:

Forced to maintain a lengthy line of battalions, the army formed a ‘single, unified body’ in the sense that it functioned as a single entity acting along a single axis of operations. Once the troops were to advance they would have to do so along the length of the line, or at the very least a major portion of it. Without taking special precautions, it was difficult in open terrain to order part of a line forward while holding another part back. The very nature of a line made this impractical. If, for example, two brigades along a line had advanced
beyond supporting range of a portion of the line which remained stationary, their flanks which had previously run into the remainder of the line would now be exposed, while the line which remained behind now had a large gap in it. Under the worst conditions, the entire two brigades which had advanced could be rolled up in an instant by enemy cavalry, if the latter made an unexpected appearance.

Talented commanders such as Marlborough and Frederick circumvented these difficulties and devised ways of fragmenting the line into manageable parts, so that each could be assigned a different grand tactical objective. However, this was only achieved by overcoming the intrinsic limitations of the linear system. The most usual method was to fragment a line so that individual groups of battalions in line were separated by natural terrain, such as woods or villages, or when in a large open area deploying the groups so that significant gaps were left between each.

However, in the middle of the century Frederick the Great’s Prussians had evolved a new way of manoeuvring columns swiftly into line, traditionally a risky moment of maximum vulnerability. This permitted a much speedier deployment of troops into battle order. But Frederick was a hierarchical ruler who still insisted on absolute obedience from his lines acting as a single army, which counteracted this improvement in speed. What he had not realized was that he had stumbled on a way of giving soldiers much greater flexibility in action.

Frederick then inadvertently discovered that if his flanks were attacked by cavalry it was a relatively speedy process for the third line to run up alongside the other two from behind and face outwards to protect them: this latter became known as a closed square. This meant that lines would no longer need to have their flanks protected by cavalry, which freed the cavalry to attack the enemy and also gave the infantry room for greater manoeuvre and redeployment around the battlefield.

This in turn permitted ‘columns in waiting’ – reserve infantry – and mixed order columns’ – a mixture of lines and columns – to evolve, which then led to the discovery that the line-of-battle was an
appallingly cumbersome formation: it was much easier to manoeuvre compact bodies of troops which could change shape from columns into squares and manoeuvre all over the battlefield. Just as significant, cavalry could now rush into the battlefield, supporting an infantry unit here or there, or be ordered into attacking the enemy where it was most vulnerable.

Thus the impact of Frederick’s discoveries in the eighteenth century, although the Prussian army was slow to implement them, was to turn the old rigid duelling between lines of infantry supported by flanking cavalry into a much more complex and intricate battle of squares and columns with cavalry attacking in between. This made fighting much more elaborate and skilled on the part of individual commanders, although far untidier in appearance.

At about the same time as Frederick was evolving these revolutionary new tactics without taking full advantage of them, the French decided to organize their army into divisions, each more or less autonomous under the control of a lieutenant-general, who took only broad orders from the commander-in-chief As Nosworthy explains:

At the same time, the division became a much more organic entity than a lieutenant-general’s command of comparable size during the linear era. Subject to conforming to the overall grand tactical dictates imposed by the army’s commander, the corps or divisional commander was usually free to employ his forces as he saw fit. The divisional commander decided where the artillery was placed, the extent of the skirmishers to mask the front, and how the infantry was deployed and when its individual elements would come into play.

A similar increase in flexibility was also encountered at the army level. No longer forced to deploy along lengthy extended lines, the army ceased to function as an indivisible unit. It thus became easier to split up available forces so that each of the corps- or divisional-size forces could temporarily function independently while still working towards a common overall goal or plan. The battle ceased to be a single expansive action raging from one side of the battlefield to the other. Instead, at least during the initial phases, it became a number of separate actions fought by individual corps or even divisional-level
forces. Each division, if ordered, could operate along a unique axis of operations. One part of the army, for example, could fight an action along the army’s front while another either held off a threat to its flank or even its rear or, if on the offensive, worked its way around the enemy’s position. Not only could each division or corps now orient itself independently of the remainder of the army, it no longer had to be physically connected to its neighbours. It became possible, at least occasionally, to allow significant intervals to appear between these forces, even during the heat of an engagement. When circumstances demanded, a division, now deployed in depth along several tiers, could easily defend itself on an exposed flank.

Although the great leap forward in thinking had thus taken place under the
ancien régime
, it was only properly implemented with the French Revolution. In the early stages of this there was a vigorous debate between proponents of the traditional line system, the
ordre mince
(thin line) school, and the new school, the
ordre profond
(deep line), which believed in converting fast from columns into squares to break through enemy lines. General Charles Dumouriez, the great general of the early part of the Revolution, practised a mixture of these tactics. At Jemappes, Dumouriez used the new thinking to considerable effect, even though at the end of the battle he brought his men back into traditional lines. Others were more radical still, preferring to order their men straight into battle in columns simply because the raw recruits that increasingly made up the new conscript army found it difficult to carry out complex manoeuvres.

France’s aggressive use of massed artillery bombardment was also an innovation, and it helped win the Battle of Valmy in 1792. The French were not alone in employing the new tactics. The Prussian general Gebhart von Blücher used concealed forces split into several units and twice spectacularly surprised and routed much larger French forces at the Battle of Kirrweiler the same year.

Instead General Moreau, Napoleon’s great rival, made use of the traditional line tactics in fighting against the Austrians. At the Battle of Biberach the French under Moreau and Jourdan inflicted a major defeat on the Austrians, taking some 5,000 prisoners, by using a
mixture of the new and old tactics long in advance of Napoleon. The latter adopted these tactics in Italy and also in Egypt, where at the Battle of the Pyramids employed the principle of independent infantry squares to devastating effect against the Mameluke cavalry. This, of course, was very different to fighting in Europe where armies were much better equipped. But the French learned from the experience of Moreau, Jourdan and Napoleon three things: how to deploy different divisions to act independently of each other, how to co-ordinate infantry, cavalry and artillery along these independent axes of the battle, and how to concentrate overwhelming force at the enemy’s weakest point at the crucial stage in the battle.