the campaigns of napoleon by david chandler

The uncomplicated, even brutal, basis of Napoleonic strategy was, however, open to infinite variations and countless subtleties of execution. I try to crush it, confident that secondary matters will then settle themselves.'

I see only one thing, namely the enemy's main body. 'There are many good generals in Europe,' he declared in 1797, tut they see too many things at once. This simple approach was one of Napoleon's greatest strengths. There is either- as in the Italian campaign and in 1815-a frontal attack on the centre of an enemy's wide front, followed by onslaughts on the divided or dispersed parts, or there is-as at Jena and Friedland-a flanking attack on an enemy's rear and line of communications. The basic framework of each campaign seems almost artless in its simplicity. Nor can any reader of David Chandler's huge, informative and painstakingly thorough work fail to be struck by the brilliance and versatility of Napoleon's mind, the force of intellect and personality that stamped a familiar pattern on every campaign he fought.

Yet no other soldier of his time saw as he did how the potentialities of the new system could be ex- ploited no other soldier could have turned theory into action with such astonishing suc- cess. His early mastery of the art of war may cer- tainly be attributed to a careful study of the works of Marshal Saxe, Pierre de Bottrcet, Guibert and Gribeauval the regiments he com- manded had already begun to adapt themselves to the new style of warfare which had been imposed upon them first by the defeats of the Seven Years' War and then by the levee en masse of the French Republic. To give credit to the sources of Napoleon's inspiration is not, however, to deny his genius. A painstaking and perceptive student, he took over the best ideas of the eighteenth century masters-as he took over armies which had been created by the ancien regime and transformed by the Revolution-and he adopted them as his own. Napoleon was not an original military thinker. No two of those battles had been fought in exactly the same way yet not only do the first cam- paigns in Piedmont contain the essential characteristics of every other campaign, but the principles of war which gave rise to Napoleonic strategy are the principles of an earlier age. The Campaigns of Napoleon David Chandler (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 6 gns) One day at St Helena, while fashioning his legend for the benefit of posterity, Napoleon announced, 'I have fought sixty battles, and I have learned nothing which I did not kno‘i, at the beginning.' The assertion contained more of the truth, perhaps, than he had intended.

The campaigns of napoleon by david chandler