Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

pay great attention to the soldiers, and see about them in detail. The first time you arrive at the camp, line up the battalions, and spend eight hours at a stretch seeing the soldiers one by one; receive their complaints, inspect their weapons, and make sure they lack nothing.

There are many advantages to making these reviews of seven to eight hours; the soldier becomes accustomed to being armed and on duty, it proves to him that the leader is paying attention to and taking complete care of him; which is a great confidence-inspiring motivation for the soldier.

Napoleon pioneered an operational level of warfare that lies between strategy and tactics. His corps became the standard unit adopted by every European army by 1812, and which lasted until 1945. It was his unique contribution to the art of war, and its first use in 1805 can be regarded as heralding the birth of modern warfare.

These brief but obviously heartfelt interactions with private soldiers, inconceivable for most Allied generals, were an integral part of Napoleon’s impact on his men.

‘Religion is a kind of vaccination, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvellous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurors. The priests are better than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany.’52*

He accepted them, questioned or opposed them, without losing the tone or overstepping the bounds of a business conversation; and I have never felt the least difficulty in saying to him what I believed to be the truth, even when it was not likely to please him.84

‘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’.

The deal he struck at Tilsit hardly reflected the scale of his defeat; Prussia paid almost the entire price and Russia lost no territory except the Ionian Isles (including Corfu, which Napoleon called ‘the key to the Adriatic’).

‘In war, men are nothing, but one man is everything,’

As Frederick the Great said of Maria Theresa at the time of the first partition of Poland: ‘She wept, but she took.’

Ironically, although it was to get an imperial heir that Napoleon divorced Josephine, it would turn out to be her grandson, rather than any offspring of Napoleon, who would become the next emperor of France and her direct descendants who today sit on the thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg. His sit on none.

‘One must never ask of Fortune more than she can grant.’

Napoleon used to say, ‘It’s better to have an open enemy than a doubtful ally,’ but he did not act according to that belief in 1812.

‘Rule one on page one of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow.”

Having a smaller army would therefore paradoxically have helped Napoleon by tempting the Russians into the early battle he logistically needed to fight, and would also have allowed him (because of its lesser supply needs) more time to fight it.

Somehow the culture of the army had changed, so that Napoleon, who used to be so close to his men, was now regularly lied to by his senior commanders. He continued his personal inspections, but the sheer size of the Grande Armée and the breadth of its advance meant that he relied far more on his commanders than in any previous campaign.

The priest may have been overcome by the official declaration by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church that Napoleon was in fact the Anti-Christ from the Book of Revelation.

‘More battles are lost by loss of hope than loss of blood.’

Napoleon had lost some 524,000 men, around 100,000 to 120,000 of whom had been captured.

The idea was to force Napoleon to choose between three options: going on the defensive, leaving open his lines of communication or dividing his forces.101 The Trachenberg strategy was explicitly tailored to counteract Napoleon’s military genius and it would be used to tremendous effect.

‘Fear and uncertainty accelerate the fall of empires: they are a thousand times more fatal than the dangers and losses of an ill-fated war.’

‘I sensed that Fortune was abandoning me. I no longer had in me the feeling of ultimate success, and if one is not prepared to take risks when the time is ripe, one ends up doing nothing.’

‘In war,’ he told one of his captors the following year, ‘the game is always with him who commits the fewest faults.’

‘There is a moment in combat when the slightest manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority,’ he once wrote. ‘It is the drop of water that starts the overflow.’