Strains on Europe's Bureaucrat hat ion of Violence 163
which the deployment of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and supporting
elements like engineers, medical personnel, and communications ex
perts could be coordinated by an appropriate staff and subordinated to
a single commander. Numbering up to 12,000, a division could act as
an independent fighting unit, complete in itself, or, as the case might
be, could combine with others, converging on an enemy or on a
strategic point according to plans devised by superior headquarters.
French experiments along these lines dated back to the War of the
Austrian Succession (1740–48), but it was only in 1787–88 that army
administration was permanently arranged along divisional lines, and in
the field divisional organization did not become standard until 1796.^20
With mapping, skilled staff officers, written orders, and a divisional
structure, the French were thus in a position by 1788 to surpass older
limits on the effective size of field armies. The levee en masse of 1793
would have been useless otherwise. Mere numbers, without effective
control on the battlefield, could not have won the victories that in fact
came to the revolutionary armies.
Less could be done to relieve limitations of supply. Wagons and
boats could carry only so much food and fodder from here to there
along existing roads, canals, or rivers. Every improvement in roads and
every new canal increased the ease and rapidity with which goods
could circulate; and the eighteenth century, particularly its second
half, was a time when Europeans invested in roads and canals on a
scale far greater than ever before. In Prussia, canal building was con
sciously connected with strategic planning. Canals constructed during
the reign of Frederick the Great, uniting the Oder with the Elbe into a
single internal waterway, were intended to assure speedy and secure
movement of grain and other supplies into and out of the royal mili
tary depots. As Frederick himself remarked to his generals: “The
advantage of navigation is, however, never to be neglected, for with
out this convenience, no army can be abundantly supplied.”^21 In
France and England direct linkage between communications im
provements and military convenience seems not to have prevailed,
with the exception of the road building through the Highlands of
Scotland which British authorities undertook after the rebellion of
- Instead, toll roads and canals were usually built by private en
trepreneurs who expected to make a profit from their investments. To
- Stephen T. Ross, “The Development of the Combat Division in Eighteenth Cen
tury French Armies,” French Historical Studies 1 (1965): 84–94.
- Quoted from Geoffrey Symcox, ed., War. Diplomacy and Imperialism. 1618–1763
(London, 19^7 4), p. 194. Cf. also Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great, p. 134.
