Could Napoleon Have Won?

by C. S. FORESTER

1

ON THE strength of a military reputation and by a show of military force Napoleon achieved supreme power in France, and he maintained that supreme power with the good will of the army. When his military reputation had declined, when he had lost the good will of the army, it was by military force that he was deposed. Whether anything short of a military disaster would have ended his reign or that of his dynasty is a question whose answer can never be known, and it can be left to the debate of the philosophers.

Arguments can indeed be put forward that every one of Napoleon’s wars was forced upon him — there have been plenty of apologists who have advanced this theory, although when the attacks on Portugal in 1807, on Spain in 1808, and on Russia in 1812 have to be defended the arguments seem feeble enough. Those attacks are hard to excuse; it is almost impossible to justify them as defensive or preventive wars, however irritating the behavior of the House of Braganza, of Godoy, or of Alexander I may have been to Napoleon. In the same way it is very hard to believe that he was forced into war with England after the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens. A more pliable man, a man less obsessed with a sense of his own importance, might, have maintained the peace until peace became a habit too hard to break, but a man of that sort would hardly have proclaimed himself First Consul for Life immediately before; in the same way it is obvious to us now that the monster who rose to power in Germany in the 1930s should never have been expected to act otherwise than to keep Europe in a turmoil as long as he lived.

So we need not concern ourselves with consideration of the theoretical point as to whether a peaceful Napoleon would have maintained himself in power by the aid of his efficiency of administration and his repression of liberal tendencies; it is no concern of ours as to whether in that case the dynasty of Bonaparte would have ended eventually in some revolution comparable with those of 1830 and 1848. By war Napoleon lived, whether he was inwardly or outwardly compelled to live like that, and by war he fell. So that how he came to fall and whether his fall could have been averted are purely military questions.

Napoleon inherited a magnificent fighting instrument. Even in 1796, when he assumed his first independent command, he took over an army with a long experience of war. The French army by that time had already originated—or at least had first put into practical use—the divisional system, which led to flexibility and ease of handling. It had accustomed itself to endure the privations and the consequent losses which were the price paid for mobility. It had developed out of its original indiscipline the system of employing its masses tactically behind a dense screen of skirmishers which defeated so many Continental armies trained in the school of Frederick the Great. It had a staff, and divisional generals, already of great experience in war, and which had been sifted out by the brutal methods of the French Revolution, so that all the grossly unfit had gone to the guillotine or retired into private life. Of all the twentysix marshals of the Empire there is not one who can be named who was not at least a general of brigade by the time Napoleon assumed power in 1799.

The army had a successful organization, a successful system of tactics, a successful galaxy of subordinate commanders, and a tradition already deep-rooted of dash and heroism. With this instrument Napoleon proceeded to win a remarkable series of victories, and he made his own contributions — many of them — to the formula for victory. The cavalry screen; the strategic advance guard of all arms; the retention of freedom of maneuver against an enemy already fixed or distracted; the remorseless concentration, both strategical and tactical, of strength at the important point — all these and many more were employed by Napoleon with an originality of thought and a resolution in execution that made them appear to be original conceptions, and many of them were.

With inferior numbers he won great victories; with superior numbers he won great victories; by his own vast personal activity as well as by his ingenuity and resourcefulness he achieved great results with the means at his hand. He won the victories; the fact that these derived much of their decisiveness from the rottenness of the governments that opposed him (in this connection 1805 and 1806 on the one hand may be profitably compared with 1940 on the other) does not make them any the less victories. Nor does it detract from his victories that many of them were won over men of inferior caliber. That is a relative and not an absolute standard — Napoleon was victorious over the generals who opposed him, over the Archduke Charles and Bennigsen as well as over Mack and Kalkreuth and the Spanish Junta. If some of the victories that he won were not as politically final—the Moscow, for instance, and all the Spanish victories — it might be said that the blame should be laid on Napoleon the politician and not upon Napoleon the soldier. The general who wins the victory has done all that his government can ask of him; if the victory turns out to be eventually unprofitable it appears that it is the government and not the general who should be blamed.

2

A NATION, to be successful, should change its tactics every ten years, said Napoleon, and without doubt the tactics of the French army varied considerably during the period of the Empire — Austerlitz and Wagram serve as two good examples. But then allowance has to be made for the fact that Austerlitz was fought with a disciplined army fresh from the training camps of the Channel coast, and Wagram with an army hastily raised to replace its predecessor, which (such of it as had survived the Prussian and Polish campaigns) was now deeply committed in Spain. Whether the undisciplined hordes which were sent swarming forward at Wagram would have gone into action in that particular manner if they had been as susceptible to good handling as the army of Austerlitz is much more doubtful. We have Wellington’s word for it, when he was describing Waterloo: “They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way”; and Wellington’s experience of French tactics extended continuously back to Vimeiro all of seven years before. No close student of the military history of the period can be in any doubt that the tactics of the French army for a dozen years or more only changed as far as the deterioration of the troops, in training and in morale, made changes unavoidable. Even the steady growth in the proportion of artillery employed was a deplorable necessity (in Napoleon’s eyes) brought about by the increasing lack of steadiness of the infantry.

The Continental armies changed their tactics, but in the same direction and for the same reasons as the French. Their hastily raised masses could not be trusted to maneuver and fight in line as Frederick’s battalions had done. The defeats they had suffered during the early years of the French Revolutionary Wars at the hands of the superior numbers and amateurish enthusiasm of the French conscript armies shook their faith in their original system; moreover the losses they suffered were so heavy and the forces raised later were so large that the proportion of veterans was too low to keep the regiments steady in line. So we find Prussian and Austrian armies making use of a tactical system similar to the French, with skirmish lines pouring forward in hordes and the main body of infantry perforce employed in large masses good perhaps for a single assault but liable to dissolve into an uncontrollable mob in the face of serious opposition. Confusion, mass panic, and wholesale skulking were to be found among Continental armies as well as among the French when they joined in battle; and Napoleon, with his vast experience of Continental battlefields and his astonishing ability to judge the tensions of a battle, was usually able — as 1814 showed, and Ligny especially — to win even in face of superior numbers.

On the other hand the British army adhered to its linear tactics. Its deplorable experiences in the early Revolutionary Wars were not of such a nature as to shake their faith in their system, and the victories they won — at Alexandria and Maida and on countless battlefields of India—went far, on the contrary, to confirm it. In Wellington they had a general of intellectual capacity, of remarkable ingenuity and resource, and of a flexibility of mind astonishing in one of his antecedents. He saw how to make best use of the British infantry and he had the resolution and moral courage to put his theories into practice. The result was that the British army advanced from victory to victory, and the French army fell back into defeat after defeat. The greatest of the marshals—Masséna, Soult, Victor, Ney —all had failed before the British infantry long before Napoleon encountered them. The French had gone forward to the attack, at Busaco and Sorauren, dealing exactly the same kind of hammer blows as had shaken down empires at Austerlitz and Jena, and they had fallen back in ruin. At Albuera and Salamanca they had seen the British lines come forward to sweep them to disaster. Even when they stood on the defensive at Vitoria with all the advantage of ground they still could not avoid defeat.

3

THERE was something wrong with the French system, but the marshals were never able to devise a remedy, nor did Napoleon. That is the point that must be borne in mind. It was the military defeats inflicted on his armies by the British that terminated his reign: of that there can be no question. If at Vimeiro or at Talavera the French had beaten the British as badly as the British actually beat the French the results would have been farreaching, and no one can doubt that Napoleon’s lease of power would have been far extended. The defeats went on and on, and still the orders came streaming from Paris or from Vienna or Warsaw, wherever Napoleon happened to be, calling on his dejected lieutenants in Spain to mass yet another army and win a victory. In all that correspondence there is no suggestion that the tactics employed were faulty. Then came Waterloo, when Napoleon saw British infantry in action himself for the first time save for his unenlightening experiences at Toulon twenty years before. “The British infantry are the devil when it comes to a fight,”warned Soult, who had only too much experience. But Napoleon sent the French army forward in exactly the same way as Junot had attacked in 1808 and it came back, too, in exactly the same fashion.

Napoleon had learned nothing during the seven years of French defeats. It might well be argued that he had become more fixed than ever in his erroneous notion, because the columns of attack which d’Erlon led forward at Waterloo were even more densely massed and helpless in the face of determined opposition than were Victor’s at Talavera. “You think the British are good troops because they have beaten you was what Napoleon said in reply to Soult’s warning; ”I tell you they are bad troops and this battle will he a picnic.”There is no record, unforlunately, of any comment he made when he saw d’Erlon’s columns beaten back by Picton’s division of half their strength. There is no way of knowing whether, if ever he had been granted another opportunity of meeting the British in the field, he would have profited by his experience and changed his ideas and methods, but what evidence there is is to the contrary: at the end of that dreadful day the Old Guard was sent into action in just as vicious a formation as d’Erlon had employed at the beginning.

It would be asking a good deal of Napoleon that he should have revised his tactical system during the seven hours between those two attacks at Waterloo, but he well might be expected to do so during the seven years that followed Vimeiro. Yet he did not. He really made no attempt to live up to his own maxim regarding revision of tactics that I have quoted. His own personal experiences had not called attention to the necessity, and presumably he was too self-centered to learn anything from the experiences of others.

Yet the continuance of his career depended on it. A great victory over the British army any time up to the year of Salamanca could not have failed to have the most profound political consequences, It would certainly have brought down the British Government—the individual members of the Ministry might even have felt lucky to escape the block — and that would have meant the accession to office of a Cabinet formed from the Opposition, pledged to a compromise peace, the betrayal of the British Allies on the Continent, and the acceptance of the notion that Napoleon’s power was too great to assail.

Once at peace with Britain Napoleon would have had every chance. He could have conquered the Peninsula, or he could have afforded to make such concessions as would bring about a stable peace there. He need not have had as deep a fear of Russia, and the clash between the Napoleonic ideas and the Russian need never have become violent enough to lead to war. He could have entered upon a period of consolidation and development, just as Hitler could have done if England had accepted the urgent peace offers he made to her in 1940. But Napoleon never won his victory and never achieved his peace.

All through the Napoleonic correspondence dealing with the Peninsular War we find the same ineradicable and completely unsound ideas persisting from 1808 to 1814. The difficulties of communication; the impossibility (as long as the current system of supply persisted) of maintaining any considerable concentration of troops; the difficulty of ensuring wholehearted cooperation between the various local commanders-in-chief even when they bore good will towards one another —all these are ignored although Napoleon had had considerable personal experience of war in the Peninsula. In 1813 he was as blithely ignoring the fighting capacity of the Portuguese army as in 1808, even though a score of defeats should have informed him on the matter. When the tide of war turned against him he insisted on garrisons being left behind in the wake of the retreating armies — just as Hitler did from 1943 onwards—and only too late discovered his error, to make unavailing efforts to recover those garrisons for use in the field and as cadres for the conscript forces he was employing.

These were all strategical mistakes, and attention has been called to them frequently, but they hardly seem to be of greater importance than the persistent wrong-headedness of the Napoleonic tactical doctrine. It is far harder to estimate the possible resuits of a revision of French tactical ideas, although the political results of a great French victory in the field have already been suggested. If an example is sought of what a reform in tactical doctrine can achieve one need go back no farther than 1918 — the prodigious success of Ludendorff’s offensive of March in that year arose directly from the revolutionary changes in the leadership and handling of the German infantry initiated in the autumn of 1917. Prisoners were taken by the hundred thousand; advances were made scores of miles in depth, and this with a no greater numerical or material superiority than the Allies had enjoyed during the two previous summers, when gains were measured by the yard and prisoners by the hundred at the expense of crippling casualties. The unavailing battering of the French columns against the British and Portuguese lines on twenty battlefields from Corunna to Bayonne was even less successful than the bloody assaults launched on the Somme and at Passchendaele. Although he lost when his enemies also revised their tactics, Ludendorff had sufficient flexibility of mind to learn from the lessons presented to him; Waterloo is the proof that Napoleon had not.

4

YET perhaps the most striking circumstance regarding the Napoleonic armies is that they went inlo action with exactly the same weapons as Louis XIV’s soldiers had used against Marlborough a century before. The musket and bayonet; flintlock ignition; the smooth-bore field gun firing a round solid shot; the cavalry charging forward with their sabers and cuirasses: there is no development to be noted at all. The steady cheapening in the price of metal meant that brass was used in place of wood for ramrods, with some increase of efficiency, but the private in the regiment of Picardy if transported a century in time could have picked up the weapons of a grognard of the Old Guard and employed them without a moment’s instruction.

Marlborough’s artillerymen would have regarded with approval the organization of Napoleon’s artillery drivers into a military body; they would have admired the better design of artillery material that enabled guns to be moved at a trot, but they could have loaded, aimed, elevated, and fired those guns in exactly the same way as Napoleon’s gunners did. When Napoleon constructed or re-established a fortress he made use of the same designs and the same materials as had Vauban a century earlier; when his engineers assailed Vauban’s fortresses they made use of exactly the same methods of approach and of assault that Vauban had in mind when he built the fortresses. For that matter even the fleets that engaged in battle were not much different in armament, equipment, motive power, and provision from those of Tourville and Rooke at the end of the seventeenth century. The most pressing need to preserve his power, the ingenuity and advice of a thousand inventors, did not lead Napoleon to make the slightest alteration in the equipment of his armed forces.

This is the more surprising because certain major inventions were already in existence and were even employed with effect against his troops. “Spherical case shot ” was invented by a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1784; it was intended to do exactly what its name implied — to produce the effect of case shot (an artillery projectile constructed of a fragile container and a number of musket balls) at a far greater range by the aid of a burster and fuze in a far stouter case.

The British artillery adopted the invention with enthusiasm—in fact seventy years later they renamed the projectile “shrapnel" in honor of the inventor, who eventually rose to the rank of colonel. It is hard to find any mention of it in the Wars of the Revolution, but it was undoubtedly employed in the field at Yimeiro— Wellington’s artillery employed it freely, with a high proportion of shells to round shot in their limbers. It made possible one of Wellington’s boldest and most spectacular military achievements, the crossing of the Douro in 1809. Across the whole width of (he river the British gunners burst their shells over the heads of the French troops with astonishing effect. It was thanks to the shrapnel that the French were never able to deliver a serious attack upon the Serra convent which constituted the bridgehead Wellington had seized. The French infantry formations were broken up, the French breaching artillery was silenced. There is a dramatic and quite authentic story of how every single man and horse bringing up a French gun to the attack was killed or wounded by one round of shrapnel neatly exploded over it — the range can be viewed to this day by the inquiring historian: it is only a shade under 600 yards, which would have been fair practice at Bull Run.

“Case shot preparation" played an important part in the Napoleonic scheme of battle; victories were won — Wagram is an example — by the canister fire of a great number of guns pushed close up to the opposing infantry. Through the hole torn in the enemy’s line the assaulting infantry columns could then move almost without opposition, however unsteady or undisciplined they might be; there are plenty of eyewitness accounts of how these attacks were delivered without a shot being fired by the infantry, and sometimes even with the muskets at the slope.

It is hard to understand how Napoleon, an artilleryman by training, failed to grasp the significance of the new projectile. It did what he wanted done more easily and more readily. It was a murderous weapon against formed infantry, at a far greater range than canister and at a considerably greater range than grape. And it had the advantages implicit in indirect fire as well; it could be employed against troops concealed in a fold of ground or behind a crest. That advantage becomes immeasurably greater when it is remembered that in all of the innumerable defensive battles that Wellington ever fought the British infantry was concealed behind a fold in the ground, with the deliberate object of protecting it against the Napoleonic artillery preparation. Waterloo is an example of the last and most classic of the Wellingtonian positions.

“Oh, for one hour of Murat!” Napoleon is reported to have said (on not very good authority) as he watched his cavalry charges fail against the British squares at Waterloo. He probably did not say it, but he well might have — the problem before him at that moment was merely one of how to break a dozen squares of British infantry. Had he succeeded he would have won the battle; it is not for us to wonder how long that would have profited him. It is hard to imagine a better target for shrapnel fire than those solid blocks of infantry drawn up checkerwise behind the crest at Waterloo, although the infantry on the ridge at Fuentes d’Onoro and the infantry in the center of the line at Talavera must have been equally vulnerable.

Shrapnel fire was the obvious and effective reply to the Wellingtonian system of tactics; doubtless Wellington might have found a counter-rejoinder, but he never had to. In the six years that elapsed after the passage of the Douro and even with the advantage of a period of unhurried meditation at Elba, Napoleon never grasped the significance of either the British system of defense or the British weapon which could have been applied to defeat it, even though one of his more valuable and intelligent divisional generals, Foy, was himself wounded by shrapnel at the battle of Orthez— the monument which Foy erected to commemorate his narrow escape from death is to be seen to this day on the battlefield. Discussion has already begun regarding what might have happened if Hitler had earlier devoted his attention to the development of the V-2 weapon; history might have been just as profoundly affected if Napoleon had arranged for the manufacture of shrapnel, and its issue to the French artillery, in 1808.

5

MOST of the principal military inventions which had attained general adoption by 1870 had been suggested, and even produced in small quantities, by the time Napoleon had achieved supreme power. The military rifle had of course made its appearance many years before; Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, had seen it employed in the field in the American War of Independence, when Napoleon was still a child. At various times and in various campaigns German jägers and Tyrolese irregulars employed riflemen against the Napoleonic armies, and one of the most distinguished units of the British army in the Peninsula was raised expressly to be armed with the rifle — and used the weapon with effect all through the war. Yet the French armies continued to be armed with the smooth-bore musket, the more strangely considering the tradition that had grown up among them regarding the importance of light troops used in a skirmishing screen.

The breechloader had been suggested centuries before, along with the rifle, but it had made far less advance in development, for some reason hard to explain. Yet the idea was abroad. Furthermore, the first percussion caps were on the market commercially by 1807. Fifty years after Waterloo the Prussian army was rearmed with the breechloading rifle that caused such execution at Sadowa; it would not have been wildly impossible for the French infantry to have had such a weapon in their hands long before Waterloo.

Some military inventions of first-rate importance actually dropped out of sight during that period of feverish military activity. The French army was employing observation balloons during the opening Revolutionary campaigns, and with good results, but their use was soon discontinued; Napoleon had personal experience of them, for he sent one up in Cairo in 1798 for the purpose of impressing the population, but he failed to realize their military value. Universal realization had to wait for the American Civil War, but the student might find a few minutes’ profitable recreation while considering the possible results if Napoleon had had an efficient balloon corps to keep him informed of movements within a ten-mile radius of him during the Waterloo campaign.

Rockets did not become an important military weapon until the Second World War, yet there were rocket units in the British army in the early years of the last century — Colonel Congreve’s name nearly became as common a noun as did Colonel Shrapnel’s. His rockets made sporadic appearances in action; they were used to harass Masséna’s bridge-building efforts on the Tagus in 1811, and it was the presence of a rocket battery at Leipzig which gained for Britain a place among the combatants in that Battle of the Nations. It is not suggested that Napoleon’s armies could have been benefited by the French adoption of the rocket as a military weapon; it was not until totally new propellants had been developed and suitable targets had appeared that the rocket was of any decisive use on land, but it is well worth considering whether it might have been decisive at sea.

There the French were in desperate need of some means with which to compensate for their inferiority. They tried using red-hot shot and abandoned the experiment after a few disastrous experiences. The rocket, even in the days of black powder, could have been employed as a more effective incendiary weapon with very little development. The painted wooden ships with their tarred rigging and vast expanses of canvas were highly combustible, as every man who served in them knew and as scores of losses — from the burning of Keith’s flagship Queen Charlotte downwards — amply demonstrated. Rockets could have set them on fire. The mind can conjure up a horrid picture of what might have happened if the British fleet bearing down into action at Trafalgar bad been met by even one or two hastily converted French ships of the line, carrying, instead of their three hundred tons of cannon and round shot, an equal weight of incendiary rockets despatched in salvos of fifty or more at each successive approaching ship. The picture may seem the product of a too exuberant imagination, but it is really less fantastic than the picture of London being suddenly assailed with streams of flying bombs launched from a hundred miles away. Hitler made the one picture a reality; it is as well that Napoleon did not do the same with the other.

He ignored the inventions that were available to him for military exploitation. Fulton actually traveled to France to offer the Emperor the plans for a practical steamboat after he had witnessed the success of the charlotte Dundas in Scotland, and just before the proclamation of the Empire he engined a boat on the Seine which he was able to move with steam power. This was the moment when Napoleon was most exercised in his mind with the problem of getting his flat-bottomed transports, loaded with his army, across the Channel. As far as close study of his correspondence reveals, it never crossed Napoleon’s mind for a moment that the steamboat might provide a solution to this problem. Fulton received no encouragement and soon took his Boulton and Watt engine across the Atlantic to put the Clermont into practical operation. Before Waterloo was fought the United States, thanks to Fulton, had afloat the first steam warship to be launched, and in the very waters where submarine boats and mines were first used in war. Napoleon could have made use of all of them had he chosen. He had the power and the money; he could have enforced secrecy while developing the inventions, and he might have scored a big tactical surprise.

It was the more strange — and the more fortunate— that he took so little interest in military invention, because he made more than a gesture towards the encouragement, of invention in the arts. It was he (under the pressure of the British blockade) who set the sugar beet industry on its feet in Europe, and his efforts to popularize the use of chicory as a coffee substitute have left their mark to this day on the coffee-drinking habits of France. Why he should have made so little effort to employ new material in war is very hard to explain. In the field and in the Cabinet he was fertile in expedients, ingenious, resourceful. No one was ever more inventive than he in the matter of stratagems to deceive his enemies or propaganda to deceive his allies or subterfuges to make the best of his financial statements.

His nephew Napoleon III was far more receptive to new ideas. The rifled cannon that turned the scale at Solferino, and the mitrailleuses that failed to do so at Sedan; the armored bombardment vessels of the Crimean War and the armored frigates that alarmed England subsequently, were all constructed to his order and with his approval. During the Second Empire we even find the human touch of a trireme being constructed by imperial command in accordance with the suggestions of naval designers and classical scholars, and tried upon the Seine as a contribution to the age-old controversy regarding the triple rowing benches. The incident in itself is trivial, but it serves to illustrate Napoleon III’s inquiring mind and receptiveness towards innovations, as opposed to the strange and blind conservatism that so unexplainably and sporadically influenced Napoleon I’s policy. It is Napoleon III, with his new myentions, his propaganda and his secret police, his attempted juggling with frontiers in the name of nationalism and his appeal for support to combat the Red Specter, his distortion of the history of the preceding generation to justify his behavior in the present, who can best be compared with Hitler, and not Napoleon I. The secret weapons of the Second Empire and those of the Third Reich find no counterpart in the history of the First Empire.

But Hitler failed in his attempt at world domination, despite the V-1 and the V-2, the Schnorkel submarine and the guided missile, despite his bold innovations in tactics and the victories they brought him. Could Napoleon ever have succeeded, whatever use he made of the resource’s of his Age? Thai is the question we cannot answer. We see England in imminent peril, and we see her facing her enemies unflinching, and we see her gradually struggle through from peril to victory, It seems to us as if a little more —so little more added to her burdens would have overborne her and laid her at the feet of a conqueror. But would it ? That is hardly a question of opinion, one way or the other, but of faith.