Nowadays, perhaps because so many people in the humanities and the social
sciences have developed an inferiority complex vis-a`-vis their colleagues in the
natural sciences, there is a tendency to assume that all-important developments
are, essentially, technological ones. 20 Whether this idea is broadly correct—
whether, for example, Rome’s victories over Carthage and the Hellenistic king-
doms can really be attributed to technological superiority—will not be disputed
here. Suffice it to say that, referring to the period around 1800 in which we are
interested here, it is definitelynotcorrect. It isnotcorrect that military technology
made any great strides between the end of the Seven Years War in 1756 (perhaps,
the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714) and the outbreak of the
French Revolutionary Wars; for example, in 1815, the British ‘Brown Bess’
musket had been in service for a hundred years. Nor is it true that Napoleon’s
armies, whatever their other virtues, enjoyed any real technological advantage
over their opponents.
To prove the last-named fact, it is enough to recall the way Napoleon, the
future emperor, laying siege to Acre in 1799, commanded his troops to gather
spent enemy cannon balls and bring them to general headquarters. Evidently, the
artillery pieces of the ‘progressive’ French and of the ‘backward’ Turks were
interchangeable. Similarly, in the wake of the victorious 1805 campaign against
Austria, Napoleon incorporated the entire artillery park of his defeated enemy,
lock, stock, and barrel. The next year, the muskets with which the Prussian army
fought and lost the Battle of Jena were actually somewhat superior to their French
counterparts. Later, the emperor used captured ones to equip the troops he raised
in Poland. At the time when he was finally sent to Saint Helena in 1815, the
Industrial Revolution, while in full swing, had not yet reached the battlefield.
Most of the important technological developments that were to revolutionize
nineteenth-century warfare, such as percussion caps, rifled, breach-loading small
arms and cannon, railroads, and telegraphs, let alone machine guns, were still in
the future. Even as late as 1830, Clausewitz in hismagnum opusdoes not mention
a single one of them.
This is not to say there were no improvements of any kind. We have already
referred to maps. Assisted by the telescope and by triangulation—starting in the
second half of the seventeenth century, the former made it possible to carry out
the latter over large areas—they underwent considerable development. Converse-
ly, it was the lack of adequate maps that almost caused the French expeditionary
force in the north-western Sinai to die of thirst in 1798 and contributed to
Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812. Roads improved—Napoleon himself once
estimated that he was able to cover long distances twice as fast as Caesar had—
and so did carriages which were now equipped with springs. Perhaps the most
important improvement was introduced during the French Revolution itself. The
idea of building an optical telegraph that would use various kinds of signals to
transmit messages is an ancient one and is mentioned by Polybios among others.
It may even have been realized along the Romanlimes, or border. 21 However,
prior to the introduction of telescopes, such systems suffered from the disadvan-
tage that the relay stations had to be built closely together, making them
16 The Evolution of Operational Art