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  Wellington added that all the resources of the French state were directed to the particular operation Bonaparte commanded to give it the maximum chance of success. He enjoyed direct, not delegated power like most commanders in chief, and to a degree, Wellington said, never before exercised by a sovereign in the field. He made all his subordinate appointments according to his own notions, without the need to consult anyone. (Wellington, by contrast, often had generals foisted upon him by the Horse Guards and sometimes could not even choose his own staff officers.) Finally, Wellington thought, Bonaparte’s sovereignty stilled disputes among his marshals and thus gave the French army “a unity of action.”

  Wellington might have made a further point. Bonaparte also controlled all the domestic channels of communication, including a subservient press. He could thus, except in ex tremis, present his own version of military events, and the roles played in them by individuals and units, to the French public and the world. He was not the first sovereign- commander in chief to appreciate the uses of propaganda, but certainly the first to recognize its central importance in war, and to take full advantage of the increasingly large-scale media, from giant placards to steam-produced newspapers, now available. The state semaphore and posting systems meant that he could always get his version to Paris first, and this enabled him, for instance, to present his Egyptian expedition as a huge cultural success, rather than a complete naval and military failure. He could also, if necessary, manipulate the mob, in much the same way as Arab military dictators do it in our time—not through a state political party, as in their case, but through the structures of the National Guard and other paramilitary formations that survived from Revolutionary times and remained loyal to him. Bonaparte had lived through the old times when civilian mobs intimidated the royal soldiers and persuaded them to be disloyal. Now he reversed the process—it was the military who set the political tone and the civilians who followed them.

  The French nation was behind the army during the Napoleonic period (1800-14), in a way that would not have been possible in any other European country at that time. The army was the premier institution of the state—in a sense it almost was the state—and the soldiers knew it. It made them proud and bolstered their morale. Here was one of the keys to Bonaparte’s military success: he could draw on this morale, rely on it, exploit it, before it was eventually destroyed, in Spain and Russia. The French army, under Bonaparte at his best, had an enviable corporate arrogance. It knew it was the finest. Correspondingly, it inspired fear, except among the best professional troops, and sometimes even among them.

  Indeed, fear was Bonaparte’s most useful weapon. It was the one he employed most frequently. In his aggressive strategy, it gave him a head start—it was as though an invisible army had softened up the enemy’s defenses before a French shot was fired. During his campaigns, with few exceptions, Bonaparte faced coalitions of nations with vastly superior manpower resources, if properly assembled and deployed. His strategy therefore was not only to strike quickly but to strike between his opponents’ forces, before they could join together. He went for each in turn, hoping he would have numerical superiority and defeat them separately. The Allied armies thus rarely had the confidence of numbers, and even when they had, Bonaparte’s notorious ability to bring up reinforcements quickly and surprisingly tended to undermine it. Granted these initial advantages, Bonaparte’s battle tactics were usually simple. Of course he knew of all the classic dodges—encirclement, attack from the rear, ambush—and used them when opportunity presented. His understanding and exploitation of terrain was comprehensive. Whenever possible, he deliberately chose his battlefields. But once his army was deployed on ground of his choosing, he simply attacked. His tactics were all of a piece with his strategy. There was much sense in this policy. In early nineteenth-century warfare, with unarmored men exposed to cannon and shot, it was essential to morale for a unit to keep in tight formation. Once that was lost, it was likely it would disintegrate into a shambles and run. No matter how well drilled and disciplined, a unit was likely to lose formation if ordered to carry out complicated movements over distances. Hence the simpler the plan the better, and the simplest plan was: attack!

  Moreover, the French army under Bonaparte was trained and organized for attack, and it had the equipment and formations to do so effectively. A good staff and reliable field signaling systems, expertly organized by General Berthier, meant that attacks were well timed and coordinated. There was no set procedure, but it was usually as follows. First, an intense artillery barrage. Bonaparte had good guns, plenty of them, and good gunners. His horse artillery could maneuver its teams to within close reach of the enemy, so the cannon could be fired point-blank, thus trebling the rate of fire. Then they could be whisked away if enemy cavalry tried to overrun them. The proper response to the barrage was to dig shallow slit trenches, but this meant carrying spades, and they were not usually available. The alternative, which Wellington stumbled on early in the peninsular campaign, and therefore employed whenever he could, was to command the infantry to lie down, especially on a reverse slope (if available). This cut casualties to virtually nil and taught the infantry they had nothing to fear from the French guns. But Austrian, Prussian, and Russian commanders never adopted this tactic, fearing loss of formation. At all events, Bonaparte’s opening barrages usually had considerable effect, inflicting heavy casualties and inspiring yet more fear.

  Behind the guns were the cavalry, waiting for the barrage to cease, reconnoitering the weak spots in the enemy line, and charging when appropriate. Bonaparte had by far the best cavalry in Europe, as Wellington acknowledged (his own he considered brave but unbiddable, and often positively dangerous to their own side). They had the great advantage that they could conduct a limited charge—that is, overrun a position and then re-form, instead of individually pursuing fleeing soldiers. The discipline of the French cavalry was due largely to some outstanding commanders, notably Masséna and Murat. But there were many others. The French cavalry were originally fairly well mounted, but after about 1808 the quality of horses declined and this was reflected in the cavalry’s loss of panache and power of impact.

  Bonaparte was not so foolish as to suppose that victory against a determined professional enemy could be secured by guns and cavalry alone. The infantry were essential to master and retain the field. They, too, were trained to inspire fear, advancing at the rapid pas de charge, with drums beating ferociously, bugles blaring, and trained war cries. Bonaparte exploited the intimidating power of martial noise, and he reinforced this with the design of uniforms intended to make his infantry seem taller. This was particularly true of the Old Guard, chosen for height anyway but made more formidable by huge bearskins sometimes two feet high. (The Old Guard had at least five year’s experience; the Young Guard were the best of each year’s conscripts.) The total Guard numbered 50,000 and formed a separate army in itself (rather like Hitler’s military SS divisions). They were kept behind the line regiments and deployed so that they could be sent to any part of the battle when needed. Their presence was a comfort to the line, and if the line did its job well, they did not need to be thrown into action at all. Thus, paradoxically, the elite Guard, especially the Old Guard, the best troops, saw less action than most units, unlike the British guards, who were always in the thick of it. This could have serious consequences. The Old Guard failed Bonaparte at Waterloo, when they were most needed.

  Bonaparte, having completed his three-wave attack, then reassessed the tactical situation and took measures accordingly. He directed operations from a piece of high ground or the roof of a building, if available. Sometimes he had a scaffolding tower made. But this was dangerous, and Bonaparte, though unquestionably brave, did not take needless risks with his person. He dressed in the dark green underuniform of the chasseurs of the Guard, sometimes with a gray greatcoat over it, which was inconspicuous. He never wore decorations in action (it was the flashing stars Nelson invariably wore on the quarterdeck that attra
cted the French sniper’s attention at Trafalgar and killed him). Wellington followed the same routine, wearing a dark suit almost indistinguishable from civilian dress. But whereas Bonaparte wore his hat square on, Wellington put the ends fore and aft. Why? Wellington liked to raise his hat, out of courtesy and to return salutes. Bonaparte rarely raised his hat to anyone.

  Both used telescopes constantly. Bonaparte often criticized the French optical industry for not producing better models. It was notorious that British officers had superior ones, and the first act of a French officer when dealing with a British prisoner of rank was to relieve him of his telescope.

  Directing a major battle in the poor visibility caused by drifting gunsmoke was no easy matter. Most of the Napoleonic battle pictures were painted long after the event by artists who were not present, and they drastically simplified the scene. But at Aspern, the battle was drawn while it was actually taking place by a professional Austrian watercolorist who was perched high on a building from which he could survey most of the field. His work’s verisimilitude leaves an impression of great confusion. No wonder experienced generals favored simple plans. Issuing fresh orders was not easy. They usually had to be carried by the hand of a brave and reliable aide-de-camp. Berthier, as staff chief, always sent more than one officer with duplicate orders—sometimes a dozen if the distance was great. But this was a military luxury of the kind that Bonaparte, who could command virtually unlimited resources, usually enjoyed. In any case, toward the end of a battle, the supply of ADCs ran out. All kinds of people were roped in to carry scraps of paper. At Waterloo, Wellington discovered a patriotic English tourist, who had somehow got involved in the battle, and made good use of him as a messenger. But often a commanding general had to ride about the battlefield and give orders in person. That was often how he was killed or captured.

  Though Bonaparte was an exceptionally enterprising and aggressive strategist and tactician, he was in many ways a rather conservative military man. Most of the military innovations from which he benefited—the general staff, the new artillery, the semaphore, and so on—had been introduced under the ancien régime or during the Revolutionary period. The French state had magnificent arsenals and arms factories, but Bonaparte never set up a department to study and make use of scientific warfare or new technology—this despite his frequent and public commendation of the scientific approach. France had many skilled engineers, chemists, physicists, and biologists who might have been put to military use. The American naval engineer and inventor Robert Fulton, who built the first steamship and who was fiercely anti-British, appeared in France with all kinds of ideas, especially for submarines. But he got only lukewarm support from the French admiralty and none from Bonaparte himself. It was left to a British colonel, Henry Shrapnel, to invent what was to become for generations the most effective antipersonnel shell, and to the Royal Ordnance at Woolwich to start work on rockets.

  Bonaparte enjoyed the services of a military scientist of genius in the shape of Domenique-Jean Larrey, who devoted his life to military medicine and was with Bonaparte on some of his most arduous campaigns. It was Larrey who invented the Flying Ambulance, the first effective vehicle for getting the wounded rapidly off the field. This was part of a system Larrey designed for ensuring that as many casualties as possible received proper medical treatment as quickly as possible. It undoubtedly worked, and saved innumerable lives. Moreover, Larrey deprecated the atrocious habit of military surgeons of sawing off arms and legs on the slightest pretext, usually because a bullet, in entering the limb, had carried with it a portion of clothing so that the wound became infected. He thought that limbs could usually be saved, and proved it in many cases.

  Yet curiously enough, though Bonaparte lavished praise on Larrey’s skills and character, he never made him head of the army’s medical services. The post went instead to an older and more conservative man, Pierre-François Percy, who was surgeon in chief to the army, later the Grande Armée, from 1801 to 1812, when he retired. (The Grande Armée was introduced in 1805, meaning the Imperial Army when formed into a single body for a major campaign.) Larrey then indeed succeeded him for a time, but when Bonaparte returned from Elba he reappointed Percy, who by then was clearly past it. For most of the wars, Larrey had to be content to be chief surgeon to the Guard, who thought the world of his methods. Bonaparte only once employed him personally. He preferred Alexandre Yvan, who served him from 1796 to 1814. The reason was that Yvan held old-fashioned views on amputation and the use of the scalpel as opposed to time, nursing, and medications. Bonaparte preferred the risk of losing a limb to the possible alternative of putrefaction and death. The same reasoning seems to have applied to his preference for Percy, an old hacksaw-and-chopper man. We have here a clue to an important element in Bonaparte’s personality. Like many people—most people, probably—who are radical and “progressive” in general, he tended to be conservative in particular, especially on matters he thought he knew a lot about. Battle wounds were one of these subjects. Another was cannon and ammunition. On these matters he thought the improvements introduced in his youth were quite enough, and though he fiddled with the standard equipment, he never changed it substantially. Pontoons, mobile metal bridging materials, siege howitzers, anything involving naval technology including barges and troopships—he was not interested. He made little use of observation balloons; indeed he took no notice of airpower, though it was then much discussed. He ignored steam power, though the traction engine and the railroad were just over the horizon, and rail was to transform grand strategy in the decades to come. One might have said that the military rail was made for Bonaparte’s geo-strategy of swift transfer of armies. But he preferred merely to improve the old military road system, mostly laid down in the days of Louis XIV. It is a fact that Bonaparte introduced many innovations, notably the decimal system. But he was never keen on decimals, preferring the old system in which he had shone in youth, and on Saint Helena he denounced it root and branch. Radical in appearance, he had a hard, obstinate, conservative core.

  One suspects that Bonaparte would have subscribed to the modern American adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” What he inherited, he improved and built upon, but he was disinclined to change a military apparatus that worked well for him. And he had reason for complacency. His record as a battle winner and conqueror, as a destroyer of armies and sub jugator of governments, has never been equaled. Or rather, one has to go back to Alexander the Great to find comparable success. It may be useful at this stage to summarize his wars and campaigns, the coalitions that resisted him, and how he dealt with them.

  The First Coalition of 1792-97 came into existence as a result of the French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands. The French government declared war against the Austrian emperor in his capacity of king of Hungary, hoping that Austria’s defensive treaties would not thereby be invoked. In fact the coalition was swiftly formed, involving Austria, Prussia, Britain (from 1793), Naples, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and various smaller states. The coalition was never cohesive, and in 1795 Tuscany, Prussia, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Spain defected, making separate peace treaties. Bonaparte came onto the scene in a leading role in 1797, and as a result of his Italian victories, he forced the Austrians to sign preliminary terms at Leoben on 17 April 1797, confirmed by the Treaty of Campo Formio in October.

  Britain, which had won naval victories and taken French overseas possessions, refused French terms, continued the struggle, and tried to form the Second Coalition. Britain had already begun the system of financing coalition partners in Naples, and these were on offer from 1798 onward, the British naval victory against Bonaparte’s fleet at the Battle of the Nile providing further encouragement. Naples was the first to join Britain, followed by other Italian states and Austria (Prussia remaining benevolently neutral), and by Russia and Turkey, which took action against the French occupation of the Ionian Isles. But the Austrians lost the Italian campaign, Bonaparte marching the Reserve Army through the Saint Bernard
Pass to take them in the rear and win the decisive Battle of Marengo (14 June 1800). In November, though detained himself in Paris to consolidate his political position, he directed a vigorous campaign against Austria in Germany, culminating in the victory of Hohenlinden (3 December). Austria made peace at the Treaty of Lunéville in February 1801. William Pitt, British prime minister and Bonaparte’s most vigorous and consistent opponent, resigned the same month. By now Portugal was Britain’s only ally, so the coalition was effectively dead, and Pitt’s successor, Henry Addington, made a preliminary peace at Amiens in October 1801. This was the only interruption in Britain’s war against France from 1793 to 1814.

  Nor did it last long. Both Britain and France, mutually suspicious, refused to carry out the terms of the treaty. Each accused the other of bad faith. In February 1803, Bonaparte summoned Lord Whitworth, the British ambassador and an old-fashioned gentleman-diplomat, to a stormy interview. Whitworth was barely allowed to speak, and he judged the object of the meeting was “to frighten and to bully.” He reported that “such conduct in private life would be a strong presumption of weakness,” and that was the conclusion he drew from the tirade. He haughtily added that one expression Bonaparte used “was too trivial and vulgar to find a place in a dispatch, or anywhere but in the mouth of a hackney coach-man.” A month later, on 13 March, Bonaparte reenacted the scene at a public diplomatic reception in the Tuileries. Whitworth was a big, imposing man, and his mere size, self-control, and taciturnity infuriated Bonaparte. Going up to Whitworth, Bonaparte accused Britain, in a loud voice, which could be heard by all the guests, of planning war for another fifteen years. He then added, “The English don’t respect treaties. So we will cover them in mourning.” Then he left the room so fast that the flunkies did not have time to open the double doors, and he stood fuming for a second while they fiddled with the knobs.