Napoleon harangued Lannes’ corps in person at 6 a.m., before sending them off towards Tauentzien. The military historian Colonel Baron Henri de Jomini, whose 1804 book on strategy had caught Napoleon’s attention and whom he appointed as official historian on his staff, was impressed how he understood ‘that it is necessary never to inspire too much contempt for the enemy, because where you should find an obstinate resistance, the morale of the soldier might be shaken by it’. So when he addressed Lannes’ men he praised the Prussian cavalry, but promised that ‘it could do nothing against the
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