As long as this remained the case, the possibilities open to operational art were
limited. On occasions, armies simply blundered about, groping for the enemy
until they found him. This is what happened, we are told, on the eve of the Battle
of Cynoscephalae in 197 BC and also formed the prelude to many a medieval
battle. On other occasions, they might deliberately advance towards each other or
retreat from each other. Under commanders, such as Conde, Turenne, Marlbor-
ough, and the Marshal de Saxe, they might also circle one another as dogs do.
Sometimes they did so in an attempt to press the enemy against some kind of
natural or artificial obstacle, such as a river, a mountain range, a fortress, or a
moat, and force him to give battle under unfavourable circumstances. On other
occasions, it was a question of compelling him to abandon, not his lines of
communications—there were none—but the area from which he drew his
supplies. Yet if only because changing from an order of march, which required
depth, into an order of battle, which demanded width, took a considerable time,
in the end, it was almost always a question of forming two lines. Depending on
equipment and tactics, those lines might be thick or thin. However, almost
certainly they would confront one another for a time, perhaps even a considerable
time, before coming to grips. Indeed, cases are on record when armies faced one
another for several days on end.
Under such circumstances, the logic behind Clausewitz’s somewhat puzzling
statement that most battles took place by a sort of tacit agreement between the
opposing commanders becomes clear. 18 As he says, battle was something that one
side, hoping for victory, offered, and the other, hoping for victory or fearing
defeat, either accepted or declined. Once it was accepted, everything depended on
what happened on the field itself; that is, on the tactics both sides might use. One
might, indeed, go further. The logic could be taken as the explanation for the
master’s famous claim that, in war, the bestmodus operandiis always to be very
strong—first in general and then at the decisive point—and that the decisive
point in question always ought to be the enemy’s army. 19 If this interpretation is
accepted, it shows Clausewitz in a surprisingly backward-looking light. Here,
however, we are concerned not with the way Clausewitz understood war as it
was waged during the centuries before 1800, but with the manner in which it
developed after that date.
ENTER ‘THE GOD OF WAR’To bring about a revolution in military affairs, two things are normally needed: an
objective development that will make it possible, and a man who will seize that
development by the horns, ride it, and direct it. In the last decade of the
eighteenth century, both things happened to coincide. Together, they produced
a sea change in warfare that was to dominate the field until 1945 and whose
consequences are still with us today.
Napoleon and the Dawn of Operational Warfare 15