victory thus was his personal ability to grasp the essentials of a highly fluid situation.
Another key was his ‘joined-up’ approach to warfare, which, unusually among his
contemporaries, enabled him to campaign for decisive battle, rather than to move and
manoeuvre and then consider whether battle might be forced on favourable terms.
Napoleon always moved for the purpose of forcing battle on the enemy. He marched to
fight.
Napoleon’s strictly military innovations were modest, although in one instance highly
important. He innovated with the battlefield formation of the division square – as
contrasted with the usual battalion square – in Egypt in 179 8 , in order to repulse
Mameluke cavalry. Of far greater moment, however, was his innovation of the wholesale
introduction of corps organization to the army. The idea was not his, but its compre-
hensive introduction and employment in 1 8 00 was. Each of his corps d’armée, of which
he created seven initially, comprised three or four divisions, of eight to ten thousand
men each, providing a balanced all-arms force of infantry, cavalry and artillery – a mini-
army, in effect. The corps, unlike the division, which had been introduced into the pre-
revolutionary army in 17 8 7– 8 , was strong enough to stand alone against a large enemy
force pending relief and assistance. Also, an army organized by corps, each thirty to
forty thousand men strong, could be much larger than a single unarticulated force
because of the delegation of command that it mandated. Until the introduction of the
corps, a general could aspire to command not many more than 70,000 men. It was an
elementary matter of the physical limits of personal command. Corps organization also
enabled the army to move more swiftly and flexibly on parallel roads and tracks, and to
live off the land where that was possible. The operative principle was that the army,
subdivided into all-arms corps, should march divided but fight united. One need hardly
emphasize the vulnerability of this excellent principle both to the variable quality of
corps commanders and to the evil machinations of those ubiquitous hindrances covered
by Clausewitz’s compound concept of ‘friction’ (Clausewitz, 1976: 119–21). However,
the military potency of an isolated Napoleonic army corps may be gauged from the fact
that with a single such corps, totalling only 2 8 ,000 men, Marshal Davout defeated the
main body of the Prussian Army at Auerstädt on 14 October 1 8 06. Napoleon, fifteen
miles away at Jena, in command of most of the Grande Armée, was mortified to discover
that he had faced no more than a wing of the Prussian forces.
Napoleon’s army, as noted already, adopted state-of-the-art tactics but only insofar as
the skill and experience of the soldiers and their officers permitted. Although the years
of warfare necessarily produced a highly professional cadre of veterans, the mass of his
armies tended to comprise volunteers and, increasingly, raw conscripts. Between 1 800
and 1 8 11 he conscripted and mobilized 1 million soldiers, while in 1 8 12–13 alone he
conscripted a further 1.4 million. It is well to remember that, aside from Russia, France,
with 29 million people, was by far the most populous country in Europe in this period.
(For comparison, the British census of 1 8 01 revealed a population total of 8 .3 million.)
Also, French armies of the Napoleonic period always included a healthy wad of
contingents from allied and subject states (the two were typically indistinguishable). As
a general rule, maintaining a ready flow of manpower was not Napoleon’s dominant
military problem. Far more challenging was the need to field armies sufficiently skilled
in the trade of war. Constant campaigning and frequent battles wrought appalling attrition
upon the troops. The veterans suffered least, especially if they were husbanded as the
From limited war to national war 41