Converge All Force on the Decisive Point

“Each corps needed to be large enough to fix an entire enemy army into position on the battlefield, while the others could descend to reinforce and relieve it within twenty-four hours, or, more usefully, outflank or possibly even envelop the enemy. Individual corps commanders – who tended to be marshals – would be given a place to go to and a date to arrive there by and would be expected to do the rest themselves. Having never commanded a company, battalion, regiment, brigade, division or corps of infantry or cavalry in battle, and trusting to his marshals’ experience and competence, Napoleon was generally content to leave logistics and battlefield tactics to them, so long as they delivered what he required.38 Corps needed to be capable of making significant inroads into an enemy force on the offensive too.39 It was an inspired system, originally the brainchild of Guibert and Marshal de Saxe.40 Napoleon employed it in almost all his coming victories – most notably at Ulm, Jena, Friedland, Lützen, Bautzen and Dresden – not wishing to relive the perils of Marengo where his forces had been too widely spread. His defeats – particularly at Aspern-Essling, Leipzig and Waterloo – would come when he failed to employ the corps system properly. ‘During the Revolutionary wars the plan was to stretch out, to send columns to the right and left,’ Napoleon said years later, ‘which did no good. To tell you the truth, the thing that made me gain so many battles was that the evening before a fight, instead of giving orders to extend our lines, I tried to converge all our forces on the point I wanted to attack. I massed them there.’41 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.”

“‘During the Revolutionary wars the plan was to stretch out, to send columns to the right and left,’ Napoleon said years later, ‘which did no good. To tell you the truth, the thing that made me gain so many battles was that the evening before a fight, instead of giving orders to extend our lines, I tried to converge all our forces on the point I wanted to attack. I massed them there.’41”