imperial reserve in the elite Imperial Guard, a force that would grow to be 60,000 strong,
but still they suffered. The Emperor was obliged to adapt his tactics to suit the variable
quality of his military instrument.
It is probably fair to comment that Napoleon’s Grande Armée, so titled in 1 8 03,
although one of history’s most effective military forces, was not especially strong in
tactical skills. The reasons are not hard to identify. The Emperor, while an inspired
battlefield general, was not a great tactician, especially for the infantry. He was an
educated artilleryman who, unlike Wellington for example, had not benefited from early
experience of infantry command in battle. The Emperor’s excellence was primarily
operational rather than tactical, let alone strategic. Moreover, careful study of his military
method shows clearly that despite his vast experience of command in warfare between
1796 and 1 8 15, he neither improved nor adapted and adjusted his military methods
significantly as the military and strategic contexts changed. The exception to that
generalization was his substitution of more artillery to take up the slack caused by the
shortage of experienced infantry.
Napoleon did not effect a battlefield revolution. As in all periods, the challenge was to
achieve an effective and mutually supporting balance among fire, movement and shock.
He inherited an army that typically attacked in battalion, or occasionally division,
columns. The column was a terrifying formation for assault which should redeploy
into line as it closed with a linear enemy in order to bring its thus far masked firepower
to bear. In practice, attack columns frequently would achieve so complete a moral
ascendancy by their seemingly inexorable advance that there would be no need to shift
into line to exchange musket-fire. Against steady, professional infantry, the head and
flanks of a column would take such a beating that it would be driven to retreat in bloody
confusion, not redeploy in good order into a thin firing line. It is well to remember the
rawness of much of the French Army throughout this lengthy period. Inexperience in the
ranks was the inevitable product of the high wastage of experienced troops from disease
and other hazards of military life, in addition to death and injury in battle. Because of
the high percentage of novice soldiers in the French Army, it is understandable that the
relatively unsophisticated tactic of the assault column battering ram never lost its appeal.
Indeed, the last hurrah for the nerve-testing columnular assault was provided by no less
a body than the Emperor’s Old Guard at Waterloo. When that failed against a steady and
well-handled allied line, the game truly was up for Napoleon.
Weapons technology was stable from 1792 to 1 8 15; in fact, it had barely changed in a
hundred years. The standard infantry weapon was the muzzle-loading flintlock musket,
smooth bore, approximately 1.75cm in calibre, and firing soft lead balls propelled by
black powder. The musket could kill at up to 300 yards, but in practice its effective lethal
range was little better than point blank, say 8 0–100 yards. Muskets were equipped with
a detachable socket bayonet, a great innovation over the former ‘plug’ bayonet at the
end of the seventeenth century, which enabled infantry to defend themselves from
cavalry (the pike, and therefore pikemen, consequently became obsolete). Musket and
bayonet comprised a weapon that combined firepower and the shock value of cold steel.
Napoleon, however, was never greatly interested in the weapons of his soldiers. His style
of battle did not depend upon the securing of fire superiority, but rather of decisive
manoeuvre and shock for the unhingeing of the mind and the destruction of the spirit of
the enemy.
42 War, peace and international relations