totally unfit for operational command; ‘a goose whom I have turned into an eagle
of sorts’, was Napoleon’s own cruel, but not unjust, description of him. While
some of the marshals, Soult in particular, were closer to the emperor than others,
almost as long as the campaign lasted none of them was given full insight into
their master’s plans. Such an insight was granted only to King Louis of Holland,
and then at a very early stage when the emperor still had no idea where in
Germany the clash of arms would take place. Presumably, he thought that,
since the king remained safely in his palace in Holland, letting him in on the
secret could do no harm.
On the other hand, in making this assessment, historians have been guilty of
confusing Napoleon’s time with their own—of looking at things through the
wrong end of the field glasses, so to speak. Whether through their work or
through personal experience, those historians have long been familiar with
combined-arms formations and the staffs that make them work. Not so Napoleon
who, although he was not entirely without forerunners, had to create them almost
ex novo. As he was well aware and occasionally said, the machine that Berthier ran
was incomparably larger and more complicated than anything ever seen in
history until that time. Taking into account the size of the formations the
marshals led and the distances at which they operated from the imperial head-
quarters, they were given greater independence, and carried greater responsibil-
ities, than almost any of their predecessors. Certainly, they were not without their
shortcomings, idiosyncrasies, and petty jealousies. A very good example comes
from the Jena campaign itself. At Auerstadt, Bernadotte, taking offence at not
being given separate orders and being told to follow in Davout’s wake, sulked and
delayed. The result was the near destruction of the 3rd French corps by the
Prussians. Nevertheless, on the whole, they served their master as well as any
similar group of men in history did.
As this episode and many similar ones show, the system was far from perfect—
what machine, made of fallible human parts, operating against an enemy who is
free to act as he sees fit, and engaged in the most stressful human activity of all,
ever was? Quite a number of the shortcomings were the emperor’s own fault.
Though he was undoubtedly a genius, throughout the campaigns he seems to
have sent out his orders with no kind of system whatsoever. He personally
analysed bits and pieces of intelligence as they came in and responded to them,
wrote to whomever he thought necessary at that moment, put into his messages
whatever part of his plan he thought fit, and informed only those others whose
names happened to occur to him at that particular time.
Particularly in view of the slow pace at which they travelled, greater attention
could have been paid to the sequence in which orders were written and sent so as
to make sure that all the marshals should get theirs on time. Nor did Napoleon,
working incessantly, always distinguish between operational command and at-
tention to all kinds of administrative and logistic details; had he done so, he
would have been able to concentrate on the former and leave more of the latter to
his subordinates, especially Berthier and Dejean. Further savings could have been
made, and errors avoided, by systematically providing Berthier and the E ́tat
Napoleon and the Dawn of Operational Warfare 31