The revolutionary tactics of Napoleon
Speed, maneuver and the schwerpunkt made him master of Europe
Carl von Clausewitz sat in a wooden chair every night and laboured over his manuscript, a treatise called On War. He was only 51 years old, but a life of front line military combat through the Napoleonic Wars had aged the man. He shivered because he was often cold. He coughed frequently. He knew he was dying and was determined to put his philosophy of warfare on paper from which others could learn.
The grey-haired man with the thin Prussian face had been there from the start of the greatest wars the continent had yet seen. He was a young lance-corporal in the Prussian army during a campaign to seize Mainz from the French during the French Revolution. He was a lieutenant commanding a platoon of infantry when Napoleon’s infantry and cavalry smashed through the flanks of the Prussian army and routed it at Jena. He was a Major at Austerlitz and stood valiantly while French cannon shot exploded around him. He served with the Russian army and commanded a brigade at Borodino. All the while, Clausewitz studied what was going on, and found himself fascinated by the changes in warfare he was witnessing with his own eyes.
He passed in 1831 just as spring emerged over his home in Upper Silesia, today a part of Poland but formerly the powerful kingdom of Prussia. His wife, Marie von Bruhl, had his treatise published a year later. On War quickly became a textbook for military academies around the world. Now, just shy of 200 years later, it is still studied even at West Point.
The changing face of war
Clausewitz was just one of millions who were swept up in the turbulence of those historic times. War changed drastically, beginning with the American Revolution but more significantly with the French Revolution and the immense clash of arms that followed.
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