George Nafziger: Imperial Bayonets: Tactics of the Napoleonic Battery, Battalion and Brigade as Found in Contemporary Regulations. Greenhill 1996 ISBN 1-85567-250-5 Brent Nosworthy: Battle Tactics of Napoleon and his Enemies Constable 1995 ISBN 0-09-474510-2 Rory Muir: Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon Yale University Press 1998 ISBN 0-500-07585-2 As their titles proclaim, all three books under review purport to describe Napoleonic tactics. However each of them approaches the subject from a quite different and indeed rather limited angle. Consequently they tend to complement rather than compete with each other and at the end of the day there is still a nagging suspicion that we may still not be seeing the complete picture. George Nafziger takes the most elementary step of examining and analysing contemporary drill books and this approach clearly has a lot going for it. A thorough knowledge of the regulations is absolutely necessary if we are to have any real chance of fully understanding what is being described in cryptic references by contemporary corespondents, diarists and aged warriors penning their memoirs. This book may not be the easiest of bedtime reading but any serious study of tactics must rest at least in part on a foundation of this kind. That being said, there are limitations to this approach in that while the regulations tell us how particular manoeuvres were carried out, they do not always tell us when and why, or if indeed they actually carried them out at all. Nafziger has argued that under stress good troops will naturally behave in accordance with their training rather than trying anything clever which isn't in the book. This argument has a lot going for it except for the all-important point that the manual doesn't always tell the whole story. The regulations prescribe how particular manoeuvres or evolutions are to be performed, but not when. Individual commanding officers were generaily free to make their own selection from the ~menu according to the tactical situation. At the most basic level they might for example favour a line formation rather than a column for the assault. There is little point therefore in making a strict comparison of the methods of forming a hollow square as practiced by two different armies if one of them had a distinct preference for forming solid squares. For this reason it's probably best to start off not with Nafziger's survey, but with Brent Nosworthy's equally comprehensive study of tactical doctrines and their development. While he does not lavish the same degree of detail on operational mechanics, he does provide an excellent overview of tactical preferences. Having once established what those preferences were you can then turn to Nafziger to see how they were executed. That being said a note of caution does need to be registered against both titles. Both, in attempting to be truly comprehensive may not cover the subject with as much depth as they claim. Beyond the reading of secondary sources I have no intimate acquaintanceship with the armies of the Continental powers, but the British Army is a different matter. While I am unable to comment with any presence of authority on Messrs Nafziger and Nosworthy's studies of the principal Continentals, it is clear, unfortunately, that their treatment of the British Army is disappointingly shallow. This is perhaps most marked in examination of skirmishing tactics, which provide a good example of how far official regulation and actual practice can diverge.. The lack of attention paid to this subject in Dundas was not reflected on the battlefleld - although it is surprising how closely so- called light infantry maneuvres conformed to those executed by troops in close order. A number of German armies, drawing up in the traditional three ranks, designated some of the men in the third rank as skirmishers, sharpshooters, flankers, chasseurs or whatever. Both Nafziger and Nosworthy assure us that this practice was not followed in the British service. In fact it was! The practice does not appear in any of the drill books consulted, but Sir John Moore unsuccessfully tried to suppress it while he was in command of the Mediterranean and some units were still employing marksmen at Waterloo. Moore moreover was not objecting to the system per se but rather to the longestablished one of gathering both the regimental light companies and the marksmen into provisional "Flank" battalions. This system, supposedly, was also suppressed by Wellington but in fact the service records of a number of field officers relate how they commanded Divisional Light Battalions in the Peninsula. Its probably all to the good therefore that Rory Muir's study concentrates on English language material. This is not to deny the richness or validity of Continental resources, but I would probably dispute his cheerful assumption that the military experience. was universal. While this particular study does concentrate on what might be termed the human experience rather than the mechanics of the operation - and does it rather well - each army and the circumstances under which it squared up to another was unique. The differences may be considerable, or they may be subtle, but the differences are there. Consequently Muir's work provides a good study of the British and French armies at work in the Peninsula. The inclusion of a limited amount of material on Central European battles may or may not be helpful - but as a counterpoint rather than as an assurance that Leipzig was but Vittoria writ large. A broad overview can be useful of course and depending upon the individual reader's level of interest can be sufficient, but neither singly nor collectively can the three titles reviewed be taken as Gospel. Rather they, and in particular Nafziger's admirable book, should be used to form the basis of much more detailed research into individual armies. Back to Age of Napoleon No. 28 Table of Contents Back to Age of Napoleon List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master List of Magazines © Copyright 1998 by Partizan Press. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com