Napoleon: A Biography

frontal attack at the 'hinge' of the enemy's weakened front so as to cut his
army in two.
This aspect of military tactics appealed to Napoleon the mathemati­
cian. He liked to time his battles with a watch and showed uncharacteris­
tic patience while he waited for events to unfold. As he put it: 'There is a
moment in engagements when the least manoeuvre is decisive and gives
victory; it is the one drop of water which makes the vessel run over.' He
also liked the chessplaying aspects of varying cavalry and infantry attacks.
In the final assault a cavalry charge would make the enemy form square,
thus making the advancing infantry columns less vulnerable. When once
a hole was made in the enemy line, his forces would quickly fall into
disarray. In the final stage of exploitation of a victory the cavalry came
into its own, aiming to turn defeat into rout by relentless pursuit.
However, it was not always possible, for geographical and logistical
reasons, or because the enemy anticipated the move, for Napoleon to
employ his favourite enveloping strategy. In such a case, he liked to take
up the 'central position', interposing his forces between two parts of the
enemy army so as to destroy it piecemeal. Overwhelming the enemy in
detail was particularly suited to a situation where the battlefield itself was
divided, by a hill, river or some other natural feature. Time and again
Napoleon defeated overall superior numbers by gaining local numerical
superiority. He had a genius for finding the 'hinge' or joint between two
or sometimes even three different enemy armies. He would then
concentrate his forces, crash through the hinge and interpose himself
between two armies. Forced apart and thus, in technical language,
operating on exterior lines, the enemy would be at a natural disadvantage.
Having selected which enemy force he would deal with first, Napoleon
deployed two-thirds of his forces against the chosen victim while the
other third pinned the other enemy army, usually launching assaults that
looked like the prelude to a full-scale attack. After defeating the first
army, Napoleon would detach half his victorious host to deal with the
second enemy army, while the rest of his victorious troops pursued the
remnants of the vanquished force. There were two snags to this strategy.
The obvious one was that, since Napoleon himself could not be in two
places at once, it was likely that a less skilled general would botch the
operation Bonaparte was not supervising personally. The other, more
serious, problem was intrinsic to the strategy itself: because he needed to
divert half his victorious force to deal with the second enemy army, he
did not have the resources to follow up the vanquished foe and score a
truly decisive victory. For this reason the 'central position' as a strategy