Read the Terrain Before You Arrive

“Napoleon had fought against Austrian forces that were invariably superior in number, but which he had often outnumbered on the field of battle thanks to his repeated strategy of the central position. A profound study of the history and geography of Italy before he ever set foot there had proved extremely helpful, as had his willingness to experiment with others’ ideas, most notably the bataillon carré and the ordre mixte, and his minute calculations of logistics, for which his prodigious memory was invaluable. Because he kept his divisions within one day’s march of each other, he was able to concentrate them for battle and, once joined, he showed great calmness under pressure.”

“Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’s three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.6 With the Bible guiding him about the faith of the Druze and Armenians, the Koran about Muslims, and the Vedas about the Hindus, he would be well supplied with suitable quotations for his proclamations to the local populations virtually wherever this campaign was finally to take him. He also included Herodotus for his – largely fantastical – description of Egypt.”