was always a second best to the golden dream of Cannae-style
envelopment.
From the Italian campaign evolved certain military principles that
Napoleon never altered. These may be summed up as follows: the army's
lines of communication must always be kept open; the army must have a
clear primary objective with no secondary distractions; the enemy army,
not his capital or fortified towns, must always be the objective; always
attack, never remain on the defensive; always remember the importance
of artillery so that ideally you go into battle with four big guns for every
thousand men; the moral factor is to the material as three is to one. Above
all, Napoleon emphasized the importance of concentration of force, speed
and the factor of time, and the cardinal principle of outflanking.
Each of these ideas fed into each other. Speed of response would
demoralize the enemy even as it allowed for concentration of force. A
favourite Napoleonic ploy was to disperse in order to tempt the enemy
into counter-dispersal, followed immediately by a rapid concertina-like
concentration that caught the enemy still strung out. Speed was the single
key to successful strategy and called for careful research and preselection
of the shortest practicable routes. As Napoleon wrote: 'Strategy is the art
of making use of time and space ... space we can recover, time never.'
Once contact was made with the enemy, concentration on the flanks was
crucial; the army should always strive to turn the enemy's most exposed
flank. This meant either total envelopment with a large force or an
outflanking movement by corps operating apart from the main army.
Napoleon's military genius is hard to pin down, but certain categories
help to elucidate it. He was a painstaking, mathematical planner; a master
of deception; a supremely talented improviser; he had an amazing spatial
and geographical imagination; and he had a phenomenal memory for facts
and minute detail. He believed in meticulous planning and war-gaming,
aiming to incorporate the element of chance as far as possible. By logic
and probability he could eliminate most of the enemy's options and work
out exactly where he was likely to offer battle. By carefully calculating the
odds he knew the likely outcome of his own moves and his opponent's.
His superb natural intelligence and encyclopedic memory allowed him to
anticipate most possible outcomes and conceivable military permutations
days, months, even years in advance. Madame de Remusat quotes what is
surely an authentic observation: 'Military science consists in calculating
all the chances accurately in the first place, and then in giving accident
exactly, almost mathematically, its place in one's calculations. It is upon
this point that one must not deceive oneself, and yet a decimal more or
less may change all. Now this apportioning of accident and science cannot
marcin
(Marcin)
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