Lectures on Land Warfare | Page 8

sent by Grant were in position. "If
Early had been but one day earlier he might have entered the capital
before the arrival of the reinforcements I had sent. General Wallace
contributed on this occasion, by the defeat of the troops under him, a
greater benefit to the cause than often falls to the lot of a commander of
an equal force to render by means of a victory" (Grant's "Memoirs"). A
tactical success may be not only useless, but actually inopportune, if it
is out of accord with the plans of the higher command. On the morning
of June 18, 1815, Marshal Grouchy was in {8} pursuit of the Prussians
whom Napoleon had defeated on June 16 at Ligny. Although urged "to
march to the sound of the cannon" (at Waterloo), Grouchy pushed on
eastwards, where he found Thielmann's Prussian Corps of 16,000 men
holding the passage across the Dyle at Wavre. The Battle of Wavre was
begun at 4 p.m. on June 18, and by 11 a.m. on the next day Grouchy
was victorious. But his victory was barren. His tactical achievement
was useless to the higher command and had exposed his own force to
considerable danger. As he sat down to pen a vainglorious dispatch to
the Emperor, he received the news that Napoleon was a fugitive and the
Imperial Army defeated and scattered. Grouchy's feeble and false
manoeuvres had permitted Blücher to join forces with Wellington. To
the Emperor's dismay it was the Prussians who came from the eastward
to the sound of the cannon: "C'est les Prussiens qui viennent!"
MORAL.--It is seen that Strategy may be defined as the art of
concentrating troops at the required strength, at the required time, at the
required place, for the purpose of overthrowing the enemy's main
armies; while Tactics may be defined as the art of arranging and
handling troops so concentrated for the purpose of defeating the enemy

when encountered. But although Strategy may be considered as the art
of bringing an opponent to battle, and Tactics as the art of defeating
him in action, there are excluded from these definitions many
considerations which influence a commander in the field.
The art of war does not commence with a strategical reconnaissance
from the air, or the saddle, to ascertain whether, and if so in what
locality and in what strength, hostile troops are being concentrated.
From information so obtained, the physical force of an enemy may
indeed be determined; but "in war (said Napoleon) moral force is to the
physical (that is, to numbers and {9} armament) as three to one," and
upwards of a hundred years later the same idea has again been
expressed. "To understand war you must go beyond its instruments and
materials; you must study in the book of history, conscientiously
analysed, armies, troops in movement and in action, with their needs,
their passions, their devotions, their capacities of all kinds. That is the
essence of the subject, that is the point of departure for a reasonable
study of the art of war" (Marshal Foch). And while dealing with moral
force it must be remembered that the moral force of opposing leaders of
nations or of armies is at least as important as that of the nations or
armies themselves, for a war is a struggle between human intelligences
rather than between masses of men. "There have been soldiers' battles
but never a soldiers' campaign" ("The Science of War"). "It was not the
Roman legions which conquered Gaul, it was Caesar. It was not the
French Army which reached the Weser and the Inn, it was Turenne"
(Napoleon). A commander must, therefore, take into account the
character, the moral fibre, as well as the ability and the means at the
disposal of his adversary. He must project his mind to his adversary's
council chamber, and putting himself in his place must conjecture how
a man of that character and of that ability will act under the given
circumstances.
History supplies many examples of mental activity of this kind.[2]
Napoleon predicted the impetuous onset of the Russian left wing
against his right at Austerlitz, Dec. 2, 1805, because he knew the
temperament of the Tsar Alexander. At Austerlitz, the most brilliant of
all his battles, Napoleon had 70,000 troops and was confronted by

80,000 Austrians and Russians drawn up on the Heights of Pratzen. His
plan was to draw the weight of the Russian attack against his
right--which was so disposed as to invite the headstrong and {10}
self-confident Tsar "to administer a lesson in generalship to
Napoleon"--and then to launch a superior attack against the Heights,
which contained a village and a knoll, the key to the position; and
finally to hurl his General Reserve in a decisive counter-attack on the
Russians when they were