From the Italian campaign evolved certain military principles that Napoleon never altered.

These may be
summed up as follows: the army's lines of communication must always be kept open; the army must
have a clear primary objective with no secondary distractions; the enemy army, not his capital or
fortified towns, must always be the objective; always attack, never remain on the defensive; always
remember the importance of artillery so that ideally you go into battle with four big guns for every
thousand men; the moral factor is to the material as three is to one. Above all, Napoleon emphasized
the importance of concentration of force, speed and the factor of time, and the cardinal principle of
outflanking. Each of these ideas fed into each other. Speed of response would demoralize the enemy
even as it allowed for concentration of force. A favourite Napoleonic ploy was to disperse in order to
tempt the enemy into counter-dispersal, followed immediately by a rapid concertina-like concentration
that caught the enemy still strung out. Speed was the single key to successful strategy and called for
careful research and preselection of the shortest practicable routes. As Napoleon wrote: 'Strategy is the
art of making use of time and space ... space we can recover, time never.' Once contact was made with
the enemy, concentration on the flanks was crucial; the army should always strive to turn the enemy's
most exposed flank. This meant either total envelopment with a large force or an outflanking movement
by corps operating apart from the main army. Napoleon's military genius is hard to pin down, but
certain categories help to elucidate it. He was a painstaking, mathematical planner; a master of
deception; a supremely talented improviser; he had an amazing spatial and geographical imagination;
and he had a phenomenal memory for facts and minute detail. He believed in meticulous planning and
war-gaming, aiming to incorporate the element of chance as far as possible. By logic and probability he
could eliminate most of the enemy's options and work out exactly where he was likely to offer battle. By
carefully calculating the odds he knew the likely outcome of his own moves and his opponent's. His
superb natural intelligence and encyclopedic memory allowed him to anticipate most possible outcomes
and conceivable military permutations days, months, even years in advance. Madame de Remusat
quotes what is surely an authentic observation: 'Military science consists in calculating all the chances
accurately in the first place, and then in giving accident exactly, almost mathematically, its place in one's
calculations. It is upon this point that one must not deceive oneself, and yet a decimal more or less may
change all. Now this apportioning of accident and science cannot 144 get into any head except that of a
genius. Accident, hazard, chance, call it what you may, a mystery to ordinary minds, becomes a reality to
superior men.' Napoleon was also a prince among deceivers, who placed fundamental reliance on his
network of spies, agents and informers. It was a central part of his methods that when he made contact
with the enemy, he would immediately seek to mislead their spies as to his real numbers, adding a
division here, a brigade there at the very last moment and using a thick cavalry screen to hide the
concentration of infantry. His highly fluid corps system gave him flexibility in drawing up his battle lines,
which was always designed to bamboozle the enemy. He liked to deploy along very wide fronts,
sometimes more than one hundred kilometres, so that his opponents could never know exactly where
he was going to mass for the vital blow. In order to cover all of his presumed options, the opposing
general was likely to disperse his forces, with fatal results. The front tended to narrow as his prey was
spotted but, to prevent anticipation, Napoleon would often narrow the front and then widen it again to
keep the enemy guessing. A favourite ploy was to station his forces two days' march away from the
enemy on, say, a Sunday, leaving the enemy to conclude that battle would be joined on a Tuesday; the
French army would then stage a night march and catch their opponents unawares on Monday. But if
things went wrong, Napoleon was usually equal to the occasion as he was a superb improviser. One of
his maxims was that you should always be able to answer the question: if the enemy appears
unexpectedly on my right or on my left, what should I do? Naturally, improvisation was made easier by
the previous mathematical calculation of all chances, no matter how far-fetched. It was, for example,
essential for a commander always to have at his disposal at any given moment both an infantry and a
cavalry arm; and the worst perils could be anticipated by never having more than one line of operations
and never linking columns in sight of or close to the enemy. 'No detachment should be made on the eve
of the day of attack, because the state of affairs may alter during the night, either by means of the
enemy's movements in retreat, or the arrival of great reinforcements, which may place him in a
situation to assume an offensive attitude, and to turn the premature dispositions you have made to your
own destruction.' Napoleon additionally possessed an almost preternatural eye for ground and
battlefield terrain, including a minute awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of every possible
vantage point. From looking at a relief map he could visualize all the details of a potential battlefield 145
and work out how an enemy was likely to deploy on the ground. He particularly liked manoeuvring an
opponent on to ground where geographical features like mountains and rivers told against an overall
enemy numerical superiority. His frequent use of the 'centre position' was possible only because of his
eye for landscape. He also liked to conceal part of his forces behind natural topographical features, such
as woods or hills, and then unleash them to the surprise and consternation of the enemy. However, for
all his military genius, Napoleon was never a commander in the same league as Alexander, Hannibal or
Tamerlane. His chessplaying qualities were never absolute, for an imp of the perverse manifested itself
in a deliberate decision to leave certain things to chance, almost as if he were testing his own abilities at
the limit or superstitiously pushing his luck to see how far it would run. Side by side with his
mathematical propensity went a certain empirical pragmatism, summed up in the following statement:
'Tactics, evolution and the sciences of the engineer and the artillery officer may be learned from
treatises, much as in the same way as geometry, but the knowledge of the higher branches of the art of
war is only to be gained by experience and by studying the history of man and battles of great leaders.
Can one learn in a grammar to compose a book of the Iliad, or one of Corneille's tragedies?' Napoleon's
military talents were essentially practical rather than theoretical. It has been suggested that he never
put his ideas on strategy and tactics on paper so as to keep his generals (and later his marshals) in the
dark but the truth is that he was not much of an innovator anyway. Initially he got most of his ideas from
books and did not change his approach very much. Napoleon himself made no great claims as a military
theoretician. 'I have fought sixty battles and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the
beginning' is a statement that has sometimes raised eyebrows but, self-mocking cynicism aside, he was
being starkly realistic. The obvious snag was that his enemies would learn his methods and devise
counter measures. From a military point of view, two propositions about the Italian campaign seem
warranted. His great skill notwithstanding, Napoleon was lucky. He did not have to build a military
machine from scratch, inherited a potentially excellent army, and then fought indifferent generals. He
took many gambles at long odds, notably at Arcola, where the French army could and should have been
trapped in the swamps. The men he faced - Beaulieu, Wurmser and Alvinzi - did not have his burning will
to win; they were eighteenth-century generals, essentially amateurs ranged against a professional. But
the element of luck can be 146 stretched too far to explain the Bonapartist triumph. Napoleon's
willpower should not be discounted as a factor in his success: he never abandoned the tactical offensive
for a single day and devoted fiendish energy to bringing the greatest possible number of men on to the
battlefield by unremitting mobility and surprise; time and again he contrived to defeat the Austrians in
detail. There were other factors in Italy that produced the result where Napoleon, mistakenly, thought it
was his destiny always to be Fortune's darling. The plethora of talent unleashed by the Revolutionary
meritocracy and the short-lived period of social mobility played to Napoleon's strength. So too did his
idea that the army should live off the land. His army never carried more than three days' supplies, while
the Austrians always carried nine. The sheer size of the armies of 1793-96, making it impossible for any
conventional commissariat to supply them, forced them to live off the land, even if the Directory had
been able to pay for the campaign in Italy instead of being bankrupt. Long-term, the seizures,
requisitioning and plundering by Napoleon's armies would provoke a terrible civilian backlash, where
hideous atrocities became the norm. Again Napoleon was lucky in 1796--97 in that he did not elicit this
reaction from the Italians. The second caveat one must enter about the Italian campaign is that
Napoleon did not manage to carry out his own prescriptions. He neither destroyed the enemy's armies
nor sapped his will to resist further. Partly this was because of the obsession with Mantua - again in
defiance of his own principles. In 1796--97 he wavered between making the siege of Mantua his
supreme objective and searching out and destroying the enemy armies. Nor did he break the Austrians'
will, for they resumed the military struggle in Italy in 1 8oo. There are many who hold, with Stendhal,
that the Italian campaign was Napoleon's finest achievement and that with the occupation of Venice the
greatest chapter of his life came to an end. Yet no account of Napoleon in Italy is complete without a
discussion of the massive sums in cash and kind he expropriated from the conquered territories.
Napoleon, it is true, was under orders from the Directory to make the war pay for itself and to remit any
surplus obtained to Paris. One of the reasons the Directors connived at his frequent defiance of them
was the multimillion-franc sweeteners he sent them. But he went far beyond this and extracted the kind
of surplus from Italy for which the only proper word is exploitation. He turned a blind eye to the
peculations and embezzlements of notorious money-grubbers like Augereau and Massena, provided he
got his cut from them. An authentic story from Hamelin about some 147 confiscated mines shows how
the Bonapartist system worked. Napoleon himself received a million francs and his henchmen in the
affair proportionate sums: Berthier got roo,ooo francs, Murat so,ooo, Bernadotte so,ooo. Napoleon's
hagiographers point to his stern treatment of Saliceti and Garrau for their defalcations, but this misses
the point: his intention was to discredit the political commissioners, so that he was no longer subject to
effective control.