5. Column and Line in the Peninsula (4)
The Tactical Conceptions of the French Armies
After 1794, when the Republican armies had won their first series of great successes, and had driven their enemies behind their own frontiers, there is a distinct change in the tactical conceptions of the French armies. The troops had improved immensely in morale and self-confidence. A new race of generals had appeared, who were neither obsessed by reminiscences of the system of Frederick, like some of their predecessors, nor spurred to blind violence by the fear of the impending axe, as others had been. This race of capable self-made men soon learnt how to modify the brutal and unscientific methods of the Jacobin armies of 1793–4, which had won victory indeed, but only by the force of numbers, and at heavy cost. There remained as a permanent lesson from the earlier campaigns two principles—the “avoidance of dispersion, by which armies cover everything and protect nothing”, the necessity of striking at crucial points rather than delivering “linear” battles engaged with equal intensity along the whole front.
In general their tactics became very supple, their units manoeuvred with a freedom which had been unknown to the earlier generation. The divisional organization, now always employed, gave to the whole army a power of independent movement unknown in days when a line of battle was considered as a rigid thing, formed of brigades elbow-to-elbow, none of which ought to move without the direct orders of the general-in-chief. We find the French operating, as the years wore on, often with inferior numbers and not with the brute-force of heavy numerical superiority. They won by intelligent strategy rather than by headlong impetus, by brilliant manoeuvring rather than by mere bludgeon work. Yet, oddly enough, there was no formal revision of official tactics: the “Règlement d’Infanterie” which had been drawn up as early as 1791 was never recast, though many generals criticized it. It survived the whole of the wars of the Empire, and was not finally abolished till early in the reign of Louis Philippe. This is all the more strange because that compilation was singularly deficient in the section dealing with skirmishing and the use of light troops. It had the three-deep Frederician line, and the column of companies or divisions as its base, and knew nothing of the attack by dense swarms of tirailleurs which had been the salvation of France in 1793–4.
It is remarkable that Napoleon, during all his years of domination as Consul and Emperor, never issued a new general drill-book, but made the old one suffice. But, as we shall have occasion to state in another place, he was essentially a strategist rather than a tactician. When he had placed the requisite number of troops in the requisite position, he left the details of the actual stroke to his subordinates, without troubling too much as to whether a battalion advanced in column of companies or in column of divisions, or whether an army corps drew up its units in two or in three lines. It is not too much to say that from the mere point of view of tactics some of Napoleon’s battles were very badly fought—Marengo and Waterloo, his most brilliant victory and his last crushing defeat, illustrate this point clearly enough. Formation and movements were sometimes made under his eye which would have made Frederick the Great foam with rage. But his strategical insight was almost infallible, and usually the troops, being in the right strategical position, discharged their duty, even though tactical blunders sometimes made their success very costly.
If the Emperor had any favourite infantry formation it was the ordre mixte recommended by Guibert, far back before his own day, in which a certain combination of the advantages of line and column was obtained, by drawing up the brigade or regiment with alternate battalions in line three deep and in column, with a column always at each outer end, so as to give security against sudden flank attacks by cavalry. See Colin’s Education Militaire de Napoléon, lxxv, etc. He seems to have used this formation first at the passage of the Tagliamento in 1797. This gave a fair amount of frontal fire from the deployed battalions, combined with solidity secured by the columns interspersed among them.
If, for example, a regiment of three battalions of 900 men each was drawn up in the ordre mixte, with one deployed battalion flanked by two battalions in column, it had about 720 men in the firing-line, while if arrayed in three columns it would only have had about 180 able to use their muskets freely. Still, at the best, this formation was very heavy, when we reflect on all the serried back-ranks of the flanking battalions, with no power to join in the fusillade; for pure fire-effect it was as inferior to the line as it was superior to the mere column. Nor was it always employed by the imperial armies. At the striking-point of a battlefield, where the Emperor designed to deliver his decisive blow, he often used the pure columnar formation, covering the front of the mass which was to make the thrust by a skirmishing line, and, if possible, supporting it by a heavy artillery fire from the flank.
He was aware of the weak point of the column, its inadequate fire-force: “Même en plaine”, he observed in his celebrated interview with Foy, which the latter preserved with such photographic accuracy in his Memoirs, éd. Girod de l’Ain, p. 107, “les colonnes n’enfoncent les lignes qu’autant qu’elles sont appuyées par le feu d’une artillerie très supérieure, qui prépare l’attaque.”
And his attacks with columns were habitually preceded by a crushing artillery fire at the point which he was about to assail, a fire which he himself, as an old artillery officer, knew how to direct with the greatest accuracy and efficiency. It seems that he relied much more on such preparation by concentrated batteries for the shielding of his columns than on the sheathing of them by a thick skirmishing line, the old device of the generals of the Republic. An enemy’s firing-line might be occupied and demoralized by a heavy artillery attack, while the attacking force was drawing near, as well as by a screen of skirmishers. There seem to have been cases, even in his earlier battles, where the light-infantry screen, in front of the column that was to make the stroke, was practically non-existent. His generals in the Peninsular War seem habitually to have used for the skirmishing line no more than the voltigeur company of each battalion, no more than one-tenth of the whole unit when the battalion was at its original strength of ten companies, though somewhat greater in proportion after the number of companies was cut down from ten to six after 1808.
I do not remember any case in the Peninsular battles where whole battalions were broken up into skirmishers, and thrown forward ahead of the striking mass, as had been common in 1793 or 1794. Nor do I think that it occurred often, if ever, in any of the Imperial battles.
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