five hours in twenty-four, in addition to sometimes taking a nap at convenient
times. The days were filled with travel—as much as fifty miles per day, either by
carriage or on horseback—during which he reviewed troops, carried out personal
reconnaissance, met with subordinates, and occasionally issued an order. Serious
staff work, the kind of work on which the course of the campaign and the fate of
the army depended, was done in the evenings and early in the mornings. These
were the times when maps were laid out, messages received, and orders dictated,
often to four secretaries trying to keep up at once.
Would operational art have seen the light of day even without Napoleon? Given
the other factors that were involved, on which more presently, the answer is
almost certainly yes. Would it have done so in the same form and, above all, with
the same force? The answer is almost certainly no. To understand the man, it is
perhaps best to read his letters in general and his military ones in particular. They
are written in fairly simple, often extremely colourful, if sometimes somewhat
ungrammatical, French. Sometimes they go into fairly great, sometimes even
excessive, detail; on other occasions, they are exceedingly short and to the point,
telling subordinates what to do and leaving the rest to them. Invariably, they are
infused with a sense of urgency and dynamism that aresans pareil. There are no
lengthy theoretical expositions, often not even numbered paragraphs. To peruse
them, to understand them, and to appreciate the enormous powers of memory
and concentration on which they are based, is to sense oneself in the presence of
perhaps the most competent person who ever lived.
THE GREATEST ARMY ON EARTHWhile certain technological developments were indispensable in forming the
background to operational warfare, theeffectivecause which made that warfare
both possible and necessary, and which was the one on which Napoleon seized,
was the growth in the size of armies. We have already noted that, during the
eighteenth century, it was considered beyond any man’s capability to command
more than 50,000 men or so. Comparing theory with reality, we find that some
armies were larger than this; at Malplaquet, in 1709, the allies had 86,000 men,
the French 75,000. This, however, was exceptional. Though subsequent eigh-
teenth-century battlefields occasionally saw armies numbering 60,000 men,
almost a century had to pass until forces of this size were again assembled.
For about a century and a half before 1789, the armies of theancien regime
consisted of long-serving professionals, which meant that they remained relative-
ly small. By contrast, the French Revolution brought into being theleve ́een
masse—the first time anything similar had been seen in Europe for about a
thousand years. Neither the feudal lords of the Middle Ages, nor the Italian city
states, nor the absolute monarchies that dominated the continent from about
1500 on had used anything of the kind. Conscripted at the age of nineteen, the
number of men under arms underwent a spectacular increase. By 1798, France,
18 The Evolution of Operational Art