Napoleon on the Art of War

This book has been in the making, off and on, since 1966, when my Frederick the Great on the Art of War was published. Had anyone suggested then that it would be three decades before Napoleon finally emerged, I probably would never have started this project.

The basic research was done in the first twenty years and perhaps six chapters were more or less complete when I left Allegheny College in 1982 for Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I served as visiting professor of the U.S. Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks. I set the book aside for that year intending to pick it up later, but then was invited to move across the street to the U.S. Army War College to become their first Professor of Military History.

Here I immediately became immersed in the effort to keep up with my students — colonels and lieutenant colonels on the fast track and an occasional general officer — and to publish materials relevant to their interests and needs. There was no time for my own work during the week. I could never find those long, unbroken periods that I needed to spend with Napoleon. Indeed, not until retiring from the War College two years ago did I have the time — and the energy — to return to the book.

My decade-long hiatus from Napoleon was probably a blessing in disguise, for my students at the War College had raised many issues that gave me new insights and questions to ask of Napoleon. Moreover, until the U.S. army rediscovered the operational art in the mid-1980s (see Chapter 10), I had not been aware of Napoleon's mastery of this intermediate level of war. A strong case could be made that Napoleon created the operational level of war as it is understood and practiced by soldiers today. Without the corps — which Napoleon organized and manipulated so skillfully — it would have been impossible for commanders to function effectively at the operational level.

But, behind the military genius was a man who often overreached himself. After World War I, Field Marshal Foch wrote what may have been Napoleon's most fitting epitaph: "He forgot that a man cannot be God; that above the individual is the nation, and above mankind the moral law: he forgot that war is not the highest aim, for peace is above war."