until its neighbours received the call and converged on him. Either he would be
forced to beat a hasty retreat, or else he would be threatened with annihilation.
Most importantly of all, the system put Napoleon in a position where he was
often able to accomplish what previous commanders only seldom succeeded in
doing—namely,forcethe enemy to give battle at a time and place of his own
choosing. The days when, to quote Clausewitz again, ‘war [was] nothing but a
duel on a large scale’ were coming to an end. As Napoleon himself put it in a
famous bulletin, ‘it is said that the Emperor invented a new method of waging
war, making use of the soldiers’ legs instead of their muskets’. 28
While operational warfare increased, siege warfare decreased—the two modes
balanced one another like an elevator and the counterweight that is attached to
the cables. From the beginning of history, a well-situated, well-constructed, and
garrisoned and provisioned fortress or town had often been able to hold up an
army for days, weeks, or even months. Cases when sieges lasted for years are on
record. Especially during the early modern age, siege warfare, pitting itself against
the large numbers of powerful fortresses by which Europe was covered, played
just as important a role in war as battles did. The advent of the new system of war,
together with the vast armies on which it ultimately rested, changed this situa-
tion. Fronts as wide as the ones on which Napoleon and, not long after, his
opponents deployed meant that practically any fortress could be bypassed and left
behind. In a sense, the relationship between field- and siege warfare was inverted.
From the time of the biblical Joshua to that of Frederick the Great, a country
could not be said to be truly conquered as long as its fortresses still held out. Now,
to the contrary, most fortresses were only taken after the occupation and as a
result of it. From the beginning of his career, Napoleon, who at one point boasted
of having commanded in sixtybattailles range ́es, only conducted four sieges.
The emperor’s formidable personality apart, the capstone that held the entire
system together was the imperial headquarters. Its composition and functioning
have been described many times; 29 here, we shall limit ourselves to essentials. It
was made up of three parts with only the emperor himself to link them. They
were, first, the Maison, an ancient institution taken over from royal times, the
E ́tat Major de l’Arme ́e, and an administrative headquarters. The Maison, divided
into a cabinet, a secretariat, a statistical bureau, and a topographical bureau, was
where all intelligence reports arrived and were put in a form suitable for the
emperor’s scrutiny (sometimes, however, he would cut through the organization,
going on reconnaissance or personally interrogating prisoners himself). It was
there, too, that information about all subordinate formations was stored and kept
up to date, and the maps needed for planning the campaign prepared.
The E ́tat Major received the corps’ daily and periodical situation reports, and
presented them to the emperor. Its chief, Berthier, helped him work out his next
moves, translated them into detailed orders (normally, the corps commander
could expect to receive two messages: a brief, often personal, one from Napoleon
and another from Berthier which amplified it), and made sure that they reached
the corps. Especially at night, which was when much of the real work of planning
and commanding was done, both these organizations were always located close to
Napoleon and the Dawn of Operational Warfare 23