whose forces were being organized by Lazare Carnot, had approximately 800,000
of them. Though it took time, others were forced to follow. From about 1805 on,
200,000 men operating in a single theatre of war were nothing unusual, and by
1812 Napoleon even mustered 600,000 for his Russian campaign, and this apart
from the forces needed to garrison Germany and hold down Spain.
If only for logistic reasons, such forces could no longer be concentrated along
narrow fronts as their predecessors had been. If only because they spread out, the
old methods whereby the bulk of them came under the direct control of the
commander-in-chief who directed them by way of messengers or else by acousti-
cal and visual means, such as bugles, drums, flags, and standards, were no longer
appropriate. A method had to be found, and urgently found, by which they could
spread outandcontinue to operate under a unified, central direction—without,
that is, becoming ‘detached’ as they used to. Ultimately, that method was found in
thecorps d’arme ́esystem. The more time passes and the better positioned we are
to appreciate the nature of the change, the more apparent its importance becomes
not merely to Napoleonic warfare but to everything that followed.
Considering how simple the idea is, the fact that it took so long to be
implemented appears surprising. Judging by archaeological evidence and by
what we know of tribal warfare, even during the Stone Age, many war parties
were not homogenous. Some braves carried edged weapons—knives, spears, and
the like—others, bows, others still slings. By the end of the second millennium
BC, heavy infantry, light infantry, heavy cavalry, light cavalry, and many interme-
diate types were all in existence. Shortly after 400 BC, artillery, in the form of
torsion-operated engines, some of which were light and mobile enough to be
used not merely during siege warfare but in the field, 23 was added. From that time
on, arguably no further change took place for over 2,000 years. Yet, with the
exception of the Roman legions, whichdidcomprise different kinds of units
armed with different kinds of weapons, it does not seem to have occurred to
anybody to combine the various arms under a single unified headquarters. And
even the legions were mainly administrative formations, not tactical ones.
Commanders from Alexander in the fourth-century BC to Scipio in the third-
century BC all the way to Richard the Lionheart in the twelfth-century AD
certainly understood combined-arms warfare and often engaged in it. So did
Prince Maurice and Gustavus Adolphus in the seventeenth century and Marlbor-
ough and Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century. One only has to think of
the way in which, in countless Hellenistic battles, the cavalry, acting as the
hammer in the commander’s hand, was used to press the enemy against the
anvil in the form of the infantry. Perhaps the real reason why combined forma-
tions suitable for waging such warfare were not created at a much earlier date was
social. Since the men brought along their own arms, and since the kind of arms
they brought often reflected class differences, those of them who were mounted
and carried the more expensive weapons may well have refused to serve with, or
under, their less well-to-do comrades. However that may be, the troops of each
arm were organized in their own units—regiments of infantry, squadrons of
cavalry, batteries of artillery, and so on.
Napoleon and the Dawn of Operational Warfare 19