Napoleon I on War

From the Memoirs of Napoleon, the Memorial of Saint Helena, the Memoirs of Louis Joseph Marchand

On the genius of war

Achilles was the son of a goddess and a mortal: he is the image of the genius of war. The divine part is everything that derives from the moral considerations of the character, the talent, the interest of your adversary, the opinion, the spirit of the soldier who is strong and victorious, weak and beaten as he believes he is. The earthly part is the weapons, the entrenchments, the positions, the orders of battle, everything that relates to the combination of material things.

Bad side of the profession

“Gentlemen,” said Napoleon to the Council of State, “war is not an easy job. You only know it here, on your benches, from reading the bulletins or the story of our triumphs; you do not know our bivouacs, our forced marches, our privations of all kinds, our sufferings of all kinds. I know them, because I see them and sometimes I share them.”

Some principles of war

We are often deceived in war about the strength of the enemy we have to fight. The prisoners only know their bodies; the officers make very uncertain reports; This is what led to the adoption of an axiom which remedies everything: that an army must be every day, every night and every hour, ready to put up all the resistance of which it is capable. Which requires that soldiers have their weapons and ammunition at all times; that the infantry has constantly with it its artillery, its cavalry, its generals; that the various divisions of the army are constantly able to support, and protect each other; that in the camps, in the halts and on the marches, the troops are always in advantageous dispositions, which have the qualities required for any battlefield, namely: 1) that the flanks are supported; 2) that all throwing weapons can be brought into play in the positions that are most advantageous to them. To satisfy these conditions, when we are in marching columns, we must have vanguards and flankers who illuminate in front, to the right and to the left, far enough so that the main body can deploy and take position. Austrian tacticians constantly moved away from these principles, making plans based on uncertain relationships, which even if they had been true at the time they made the plans, ceased to be true the next day, or the day after, that is to say when they were to be executed.

It is a principle that no detachments should be made the day before the day of an attack, because, during the night, the state of things can change, either by retreating movements of the enemy, or by the arrival of large reinforcements, which may allow him to take the offensive and make the premature arrangements you have made disastrous.

It is a principle that meetings of the various army corps must never take place near the enemy.

Working alongside an army double in strength is a very difficult operation: there are very few positions strong enough to be able to protect an army so inferior in number.

Never separate the wings of your army from each other, so that your enemy can place himself in the intervals.

On methodical warfare

Any well-conducted war is a methodical war. The principles of war are those who directed the great captains, whose great deeds history has transmitted to us: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Prince Eugene, Frederick the Great.
Alexander conducted eight campaigns, during which he conquered Asia and part of India; Hannibal did seventeen, one in Spain, fifteen in Italy, one in Africa; Caesar made thirteen, eight against the Gauls, five against Pompey's legions; Gustavus Adolphus made three, one in Livonia against the Russians, two in Germany against the House of Austria; Turenne made eighteen, nine in France, nine in Germany; Prince Eugene of Savoy made thirteen, two against the Turks, five in Italy against France, six on the Rhine or in Flanders; Frederick made eleven, in Silesia, Bohemia and on the banks of the Elbe. The history of these eighty-four campaigns, written with care, would be a complete treatise on the art of war; the principles that must be followed in defensive and offensive war would flow from this as if from a source.

Any war conducted according to the rules of the art is a methodical war…
The wars of Genghis-Kan, of Tamerlane, were methodical, because they conformed to the rules, and reasoned, because their enterprises were proportionate to the strength of their army: the habit of a giant is not that of a pygmy…
Every war must be methodical, because every war must be conducted in accordance with the principles and rules of the art and with a purpose; it must be done with forces proportionate to the obstacles anticipated. There are therefore two types of offensive war: that which is well designed, conforming to the principles of science, and that which is poorly conceived, which violates them. Charles XII was beaten by the Tsar, the most despotic of men, because his war was poorly thought out; Tamerlane would have been by Bajazet, if his war plan had resembled that of the Swedish monarch.

On offensive warfare

Every offensive war is a war of invasion... Wage offensive war like Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Prince Eugene and Frederick; read, reread the history of their eighty- four campaigns, model yourself on them; it is the only way to become a great captain, and to discover the secrets of the art.

On offensive and defensive warfare

Defensive war does not exclude attack, just as offensive war does not exclude defense, although its aim is to force the border and invade the enemy country.

On the system of war

“The system of war,” said the emperor, “has often changed; and nowadays it is already no longer that of the times of Turenne and Vauban. Today campaign work became useless, and the very system of our positions was now problematic or ineffective: the enormous quantity of bombs and shells changed everything. It was no longer against the horizontal that we had to defend ourselves, but against the curve and the development. None of the old positions were now safe; they ceased to be tenable; no country was rich enough to maintain them. The revenue of France could not suffice for its lines in Flanders; because the external fortifications were today hardly more than a quarter or a fifth of the necessary expenditure. The casemates, the stores, the establishments sheltered from the bomb, that's what was crucial in the future, and what we could not provide.”
The emperor complained above all of the weakness of the current masonry. The engineering had a radical defect on this subject. It had cost him immense sums in pure loss.
The emperor, struck by these inconveniences, had imagined a system which went completely against the axioms established until now: it was to have a caliber of large sample, pushed outside the master line towards the enemy, and to have this master line itself, on the contrary, defended by a large quantity of small mobile artillery. By this the enemy was stopped short in his sudden approach: he had only weak pieces with which to attack strong pieces; it was dominated by this large sample around which the resources of the place, the small pieces came to group themselves, or even moved far away as skirmishers, and could follow all the movements of the enemy, thanks to their mobility. The enemy therefore needed siege artillery; he had to open the trench; time was gained, and the real object of the fortification was accomplished. The emperor used this means with great success, and to the great astonishment of the engineers, in the defense of Vienna and that of Dresden; he wanted to use it for that of Paris, which he believed to be defensible only in this way; but he would have had no doubt of success, etc.

Project concerning the administration of war

The emperor found that France was too big for a minister of war. “It was above the strength of a man,” he said; “decisions, markets, supplies, and preparations had been centralized in Paris, and the minister's correspondence had been subdivided into as many people as there were regiments and corps. On the contrary, it was necessary to centralize correspondence and subdivide resources by transporting them to the localities themselves. So I had long meditated on the project of forming twenty or twenty-five military districts in France, which would have composed as many armies. There would have been only this number of accounts filed… If there had been twenty deputy ministers, twenty honest people would have had to be found. The minister would have had only twenty correspondences left. He would have centralized everything, and made the machine move quickly, etc, etc.”

Of war and accidents

The emperor said that war consisted only of accidents, and that although required to comply with general principles, a leader must never lose sight of everything that could put him in a position to take advantage of these accidents. The vulgar would call this luck, and yet it would only be the property of genius...

At a glance in war. Austerlitz. Marengo. Jena, etc.

Success in war depends so much on the eye and the moment, that the battle of Austerlitz, won so completely, would have been lost if I had attacked six hours earlier. The Russians showed themselves excellent troops that have never been found since: the Russian army of Austerlitz would not have lost the Battle of the Moskova.
Marengo was the battle where the Austrians had fought best: their troops had shown themselves admirable; but their value was buried there: they have not been found since.
The Prussians did not put up the resistance to Jena that was expected from their reputation.
Besides, the multitudes of 1814 and 1815 were nothing but rabble compared to the old soldiers of Austerlitz, Marengo, and Jéna.

Of luck in war and the great captains

“There are no great and sustained actions,” said the Emperor, “which are the work of chance and fortune; they always derive from combination and genius. We rarely see great men fail in their most perilous undertakings. Look at Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, the great Gustavus and others, they always succeed; Is it because they are lucky that they thus become great men? No; but because being great men, they knew how to master luck. When we want to study the sources of their success, we are quite surprised to see that they had done everything to obtain it.”
”Alexander, barely emerging from childhood, conquers, with a handful of people, part of the globe; but was it a simple irruption on his part, a sort of flood? No; everything is calculated with depth, executed with boldness, conducted with wisdom. Alexander shows himself to be a great warrior, a great politician, a great legislator. Unfortunately when he reaches the zenith of glory and success, his head spins or his heart spoils: he began with the soul of Trajan, he ends with the heart of Nero and the morals of Heliogabalus.” And the emperor developed the campaigns of Alexander, and showed the subject in a completely new light.
Moving on to Caesar, he said that, unlike Alexander, he had begun his career very late, and that having begun with an idle and most vicious youth, he had ended up showing the most active soul, the highest, the most beautiful; he thought he was one of the most amiable characters in history. “Caesar,” he observed, “conquers the Gauls and the laws of his fatherland; but is it to chance and simple fortune that he owes his great acts of war?” And he still analyzed Caesar's deeds as he had done those of Alexander.”
”And this Hannibal," he said, "the most daring of all, the most astonishing perhaps, so bold, so sure, so broad in all things, who at twenty-six years of age conceives what is barely conceivable, executes what was to be considered impossible; who, renouncing all communication with his country, crosses enemy or unknown peoples who must be attacked and conquered, climbs the Pyrenees and the Alps, which were believed to be insurmountable, and only descends into Italy by paying the cost of half of his army for the sole acquisition of his battlefield, the sole right to fight; who occupies, travels and governs this same Italy for sixteen years, several times brings the terrible and formidable Rome to the brink of destruction, and only lets go of his prey when they take advantage of the lesson he gave to go fight him at home. Will we believe that he owed his career and so many great actions only to the whims of chance, to the favors of fortune? Certainly, he must have been endowed with a soul of the strongest caliber, and had a very high idea of ​​his knowledge in war, the one who, challenged by his young conqueror, does not hesitate to take his place, although defeated, immediately after Alexander and Pyrrhus, whom he considers the first two in the profession.
”All these great captains of antiquity,” Napoleon continued, “and those who later worthily followed in their footsteps, only did great things by conforming to the rules and natural principles of art; that is to say by the accuracy of the combinations and the reasoned relationship of the means with the consequences, of the efforts with the obstacles. They only succeeded by complying with it, whatever the audacity of their enterprises and the extent of their success. They have constantly made war a true science. It is for this reason alone that they are our great models, and it is only by imitating them that we should hope to approach them.”
”My greatest acts have been attributed to fortune, and my setbacks will not fail to be attributed to my faults; but if I write down my campaigns, one will be very surprised to see that in both cases, and always, my reason and my faculties were only exercised in conformity with the principles, etc.”

Mountain warfare

In the mountains, we find everywhere a large number of positions which are extremely strong in themselves, which we must be careful not to attack. The genius of this war consists of occupying camps, or on the flanks or in the rear of those of the enemy which leave him only the alternative or to evacuate his positions without fighting to take others, in the rear, or to come out and attack you. In mountain warfare, the one who attacks has a disadvantage; even in offensive war, the art consists of having only defensive combats, and of forcing the enemy to attack.

Of land war and sea warfare

Land warfare generally consumes more men than sea warfare; it is more dangerous. The sea soldier, on a squadron, only fights once in a campaign, the land soldier fights every day. The sea soldier, whatever the dangers and fatigue attached to this element, experiences much less than that of the land soldier: he never suffers from hunger or thirst, he always has his accommodation with him, his kitchen, his hospital and his pharmacy. The naval armies, in the services of France and England, where discipline maintains cleanliness, and where experience has made known all the measures that must be taken to maintain health, have fewer sick people than the land armies. Independently of the danger of combat, the sea soldier has that of storms; but art has so diminished the latter that it cannot be compared to those of the earth, such as popular riots, partial assassinations, surprises of light enemy troops.

On civil war

When the torches of civil war are once lit, the military leaders are only means of victory; it is the crowd that governs.

In party wars, he who is defeated one day is discouraged for a long time. It is especially in civil wars that fortune is necessary.

In civil wars, it is not given to every man to know how to behave; something more is needed than military prudence, it requires sagacity, knowledge of men.

Wars of the ancients and wars of the moderns compared

The opinion is established that the wars of the ancients were bloodier than those of the moderns: is this correct? Modern armies fight every day, because cannons and rifles reach far; the vanguards and posts shoot each other and often leave five or six hundred men on the battlefield on each side. Among the ancients, fights were rarer and less bloody. In modern battles, the loss suffered by both armies, which is, in relation to the dead and wounded, approximately equal, is greater than the loss in ancient battles which fell only on the beaten army.