were to overtake him and march all the way to Naumburg and Auerstadt. There,
turning about and facing west, they would form the army’s new right (northern)
flank. Finally, Soult and Ney, marching right across Murat’s, Bernadotte’s, and
Davout’s communications, were to approach Jena from the east, even as Lannes
was advancing towards it from the south. Again, one can only admire the quality
of the staff work and traffic discipline that went into these orders and made the
complicated moves possible. Except for Bernadotte, whose 1st Corps got lost at
Naumburg and was not heard of again until after the Prussian army had been
brought to battle and destroyed, everything went like clockwork.
This is not the place to analyse the double battle of Jena–Auerstadt, a subject
that belongs more to tactics than to operational art. Suffice it to say that, contrary
to the opinion of most subsequent historians, the Prussian infantry—so often
described as consisting of yokels forcibly enlisted and kept in place by means of
the knout and the lash—stood its ground and fought magnificently. Drilled until
they could perform with machine-like precision, they loaded and fired and loaded
and fired until they literally dropped; in the whole world, probably no troops
could have done more. 46 If there was a failure of fighting spirit on the Prussian
side, it affected the officers and not the famousKantonisten. An examination of
the respective numbers of both groups who were killed in the two battles will
confirm this point. 47 Nor was Napoleon’s victory due to any superior information
at his disposal. In fact, the problems with information, concerning both the
enemy and the whereabouts of the various French corps and their activities,
that had bedevilled the campaign right from the beginning still continued.
Remarkable as it sounds, when the Battle of Jena ended in victory early in the
evening of 14 October, the emperorstillhad no idea what was going on.
Throughout the day, he had simply forgotten about several of his own corps,
neither sending orders to them nor receiving their reports. Instead of command-
ing the campaign, he took charge of the battle. If he had once written that each
one of his marshals thought that the point wherehewas operating was the most
important of all, now he himself was guilty of the same fault. Much worse still, the
information at his disposal, which was two days old, led him to think that the
forces he had just defeated constituted the main Prussian army. In fact, they were
no more than a flank guard with 60,000 men; meanwhile, the main Prussian
force, numbering around 100,000, was situated further north-east and remained
untouched by the battle. When an orderly, sent by Davout, informed Napoleon
that the 3rd Corps had just defeated the Prussians at Auerstadt, he snapped back
that ‘your marshal must be seeing double today’. 48
CONCLUSIONS: THE NEW METHOD UNLEASHEDRevolutions in military affairs are tremendous events. Like bursting supernovae,
they light up the sky; the particular revolution we are discussing here enabled one
ruler/commander, Napoleon, and one country, France, to overrun practically the
Napoleon and the Dawn of Operational Warfare 29