In most any discussion of the encounters between British and French forces in the Napoleonic Wars, a question of luck arises. To my satisfaction this question has never been adequately answered, even where it 'is acknowledged. Whether the analysis is boiled down to the firepower advantage of the line over the column of divisions, the virtues of reverse slope deployment vs. artillery fire, the failure of coordination between "combined arms"... whatever - the question remains. It is a question of why, given the fact that the French were so often bested by the British (and always in much the same way), why did the French not in time modify their techniques? How is it that French generals so frequently played into the stronger hand of the British on the battlefield? How could Wellington be so lucky? The most striking account of the predicament the French so often faced when meeting British forces is the testimony of 1812 Chef de Bataillon Bugeaud. [1] First extracted by Sir Charles Oman in 1913, this passage has appeared many times since and been used in support of many contentions. Considering the power of this account, I make no excuse for including it again here. I served seven years in the Peninsula, during that time we sometimes beat the English in isolated encounters and raids which as a field officer detached as I was able to prepare and direct But during that long period of war, it was my sorrow to see that only in a very small number of general actions did the British army fail to get the better of us. We almost invariably attacked our adversaries, without either taking into account our own past experience, or bearing in mind that the tactics that answered well enough when we only had Spaniards to deal with, almost invariably failed when an English force was in our front. The English generally held good defensive positions, carefully selected and usually on rising ground, behind the crest of which they found cover for a good part of their men. The usual obligatory cannonade would commence the operation, then, in haste, without duty reconnoitering the position, without ascertaining whether the ground afforded any facilities for lateral or turning movements, we marched straight forward, 'taking the bull by the horns'. When we got to about a thousand yards from the English line the men would begin to get restless and excited: they exchanged ideas with one another, their march began to be somewhat precipitate, and was already growing a little disorderly And all the while the red English line, still silent and motionless, even when we were only 300 yards away, seemed to take no notice of the storm which was about to beat upon it The contrast was striking. More than one among us began to reflect that the enemy's fire, so long reserved, would be very unpleasant when it did break forth. Our ardour began to cool. At this moment of painful expectation the English line would make a quarter-turn -- the muskets were going up to the 'ready'. An indefinable sensation nailed to the spot many of our men, who halted and opened a wavering fire. The enemy's return, a volley of simultaneous precision and deadly effect, crashed in us like a thunderbolt. Decimated by it we reeled together, staggering under the blow and trying to recover our equilibrium. Then three formidable Hurrahs terminated the long silence of our adversaries. With the third they were down upon us, pressing us into a disorderly retreat. In the wake of this account, Oman, paying his respect to the courage of the French rank and file, states our question: "The only thing that is hard for us to understand is the reason which induced capable men like Soult, D'Erlon, or Foy to continue to use the columnar formation all through the dark days of 1813-14, and even in the final campaign of Waterloo." [2] Fixing on his obsession with the "physical aspect of the contest between the line and the column," Oman, like so many historians, makes no attempt at further examining what "is hard to understand." Chandler, in his popular history THE CAMPAIGNS OF NAPOLEON, also quotes Bugeaud. [3] To Chandler, Bugeaud's account represents "the limitations of over-hasty attacks in column against troops drawn up in line." It seems that Chandler's answer to our question would call into question the skills of the French generals in applying their tactics against British countermeasures. Thus French Peninsula generals persisted in launching "over-hasty attacks" out of incompetence when faced by the British; while later at Waterloo, it is Napoleon's reliance on many of these same generals in the direction of the battle (most particularly the "unreliable" Ney with his "overheated brain") that compromised the success of French tactics. Undoubtably, in Chandler's view, a little more skill in the coordination of the French assaults would have brought better results, even against the British. Chandler's view may be reasonable, even if we do not accept all his notions about a combined arms concept of Napoleonic warfare. But this view becomes less reasonable when the sheer weight of cases is considered. Could French commanders, who routinely enjoyed great success against all the arms of Europe, all prove invariably incompetent when faced by a British line on a reverse slope? Bugeaud, writing frorn the experience of a battalion commander, may have thought so. But taking the larger view, endemic incompetence among French general officers faced by the British in the Peninsula and later at Waterloo is an insufficient explanation. Such an explanation, far from answering our puzzlement over the performance of French generals, begs the question. The beginnings of a better answer lie in a careful examination of the tools the French commanders in the Peninsula and later at Waterloo had to work with. An understanding of the tactical capabilities of French armies and how they evolved with time, rather than the assumption of the limitations of the French commanders, is ultimately more valuable. In the period 1793-94, during the Duke of York's campaign against the French in Flanders, British forces first met the armies of Revolutionary France in the open field. For the British at least it was a seminal experience. Among junior officers who would rise to higher rank in the coming years, many lessons would be learned at the hands of the forces of the Republic. On the French side, this first period of success following the Revolution, and all it had meant to the effectiveness of the old Royal Army, represented a coming of age. Political factors that arose from the Revolution had made an innovative form of tactics viable. These innovations were the beginning of the more refined techniques of French practice under Napoleon. The British experience of these techniques began the move toward the countermeasures perfected in the Peninsula. As is well known, the attack column supported by the disruptive effects of a skirmisher swarm ("tirailleurs en grandes bandes") was the principle means by which Revolutionary armies defeated the Frederickian linear practices of the major European powers. What is not so well known, and is demonstrated in the recent book THE ANATOMY OF VICTORY by Brent Nosworthy, is the extent to which these Revolutionary innovations owe their theoretical foundations to the tactical thinking of the Ancien Regime. De Folard and de Saxe were in fact both writing of tactics in roughly "Napoleonic" terms in the early part of the 18th Century. Through the mediation of Francois Mesnil-Durand these earlier ideas were passed to French officers in the days just prior to the Revolution. [5] Thus the theoretical conception of columns of assault, supported closely by cavalry, guns and light troops long ante-dates the first real success of these tactics in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. That the column of divisions remained useful only as a device for moving past obstacles before the Revolution, speaks to the power the political changes of 1789 imparted to theories of de Folard and de Saxe. [5] These political changes transformed French military practices in three important ways. (1) The sheer numbers of enthusiastic recruits that entered French forces soon after the Revolution effectively swamped the smaller professional armies arrayed against the French. Although this is certainly the shortest lived of the advantages the French armies enjoyed over their enemies, a numerical advantage in enthusiastic (if ill trained) troops could be used to no little advantage by the tactics of columnar assault. (2) Somewhat more importantly, the quality of the new recruits brought forward by the political revolution in France made the tactics of skirmishing much more viable. Motivated Republican soldiers excelled in the arts of skirmishing to harass and disrupt linear formations prior to the assault of the columns. Revolutionary armies with an abysmal cavalry arm, and lacking the coordinating skills to make their artillery decisive, chiefly depended on the tirailleurs' support for tactical success. (3) On the higher tactical level, the division of the army into permanent units above the regimental level undermotivated semi-independent generals, created a much greater flexibility. The removal of the authority of "the king" in the direction of all the regiment sof the army, triumphed over the ponderous Frederickian practice of engaging the whole line of the army at once, which became slow and impractical as numbers increased. This is more or less how the French army came down to Napoleon when by 1800 he began to exercise a conscious role in its further evolution. It is also the experience of the early careers of his generals. There had been changes in the years before 1800 of course. The cavalry had begun to improve. The infantry had been "professionalized" to the point that the Revolutionary columns of attack could now deploy into a three rank line when the need arose, and the famous "order mixte" (another prerevolutionary conception) could now be used. [6] The artillery was also more effective in the more ordered professional scheme of the French forces. From this point definite choices began to be made in the direction of French tactics and force structure. Although the tactical objective of disrupting an enemy's linear formation prior to a spirited assault by the attack column remains the basic mode of operation, the means of disruption change in the battles of the Empire. Divisional and corps organization rise to the highest standards and in time are copied by France's adversaries. Conscription replaces the ardor of Republican masses for the fight and also becomes an element in the creation of many other continental armies. What changes is the primacy of light infantry in the army of Napoleon. Cavalry and artillery, viewed as more decisive in effect on the battlefield, rise to become large proportions of the French force structure and come to be relied on more and more. Scotty Bowden, in the appendices to EMPIRE II, suggests that the proportion of cavalry in French forces from 1800 to 1809 rose steadily from about 15% to approximately 25%. This rise in cavalry strength is all the more significant when we consider how precipitously the total strength of all French forces rose in this same period. In addition, within this increase of cavalry strength the proportion of light cavalry (Chasseurs and Hussars) is suggested to drop from 60% to 40% against heavier types (battle cavaryr). So not only did cavalry strength increase as a proportion of French forces after 1800, but the sorts of cavalry most useful on the battlefield in support of columnar assaults rose as a proportion of this increased strength. This increase in cavalry under the Empire is marked in the concentration of horsemen into divisions and corps outside the infantry command structure. The corps of the cavalry reserve became under Napoleon a force for winning battles and exploiting pursuits, much in contrast to the parcelling of an ineffective cavalry into small units during the wars of the Republic. As for the artillery, Napoleon's well known predisposition towards icreasing the number of his guns to offset the decline in the quality of his infantry need not be beaten to death here. EMPIRE II suggests a ratio of 1:500 (guns:men) in 1800, be dropped to 1:275 by 1815. But beyond this steady increase in the proportion of guns found in French armies as compensation for the drop in troop quality (particularly after 1807), there is a definite role for the guns as instruments of victory. French artillery superiority at a chosen point in the "grand battery" paved the way for the success of the infantry attack columns. The guns, like the cavalry, became options in the disruption of enemy linear formations, supplanting the role of the skirmisher as it had evolved in Republican armies. Simply because French commanders after 1800 began to acquire more options when considering the role traditionally filled by light infantry in the preparation of infantry assaults, does not mean that the quality of their light infantry necessarily declined. Indeed, light infantry would have occasion to play its accustomed role into the campaign of 1807. But from this period, even before the debacle of 1812, it clearly became the policy of Napoleon to curtail the role of light infantry within the French force structure. The reorganization of French infantry battalions that took place at this time (from nine companies to six) technically increased the voltigeur company to one sixth the strength of the battalion; but this increase came at a time when fewer fusilier companies were being deployed in a skirmish role. The result was a net loss in the proportion of light troops among the line battalions compared with Republican times. As for the regiments of infantry designated "Leger", it is unclear that such a designation had any meaning in the later Empire. "Leger" regiments were invariably deployed in close order in the Peninsula, [7] where only voltigeur companies were left to harass the enemy in preparation for the assault. By 1813 Napoleon had even begun to drop the pretext of the "Leger" designation; by that date the proportion of light units had fallen to one sixth that of the line. In 1803 it had been closer to one third. [8] We have further evidence of a decline in the skills of that small proportion of troops still used as skirmishers. In October of 1811, on the eve of the invasion of Russia, Davout issued instructions to his generals on the use of skirmishers. [9] Such instructions issued out of concern for the level of training within his corps, are not surprising when we consider the attrition rate among veteran light troops by this date. As the quality of the infantry deteriorated in general, light infantry capabilities would be among the first thing lost. The above analysis gives us some indication where French commanders stood with relation to the capabilities of their troops. We can now consider the genesis of the British countermeasures to French tactics. Surprisingly, the adjustments made in the British force structure following their experiences in Flanders against the armies of the Republic, was an increase in the only area the French lost in under the Empire. The British, returning to their experience in the American Revolutionary War, began to expand their own light infantry capabilities. As early as 1794 the 90th or Perthshire Light Infantry was created. By 1809 there were seven regular light infantry regiments, most of two battalions. In addition four rifle battalions were formed, besides other foreign light corps which served in the British forces. [10] By the time of the Peninsular War the average British division had considerably more light infantry than the average French division; and these were probably of better quality than the voltigeurs they faced, especially as time went on. In the other areas where French armies increased their strength and proficiency, the British made no advances between Flanders and the Peninsula. British artillery was always scarce and patently unprepared for a major campaign in Spain. British cavalry only gained strength with time, after the war in the Peninsula dragged on. Now perhaps we may be able to put it all together and see in what Wellington's "luck" really lies. The French generals who came to Spain to fight the British commanded forces whose capabilities had fundamentally been altered in the fourteen years since they had last met the British. In the intervening years all the forces of the continent had been overthrown by infantry columns whose assault had been prepared by calvary and massed guns. The practice of using skirmishers to prepare the way for he assault had largely been lost, this as a result of the increase in guns and cavalry (more decisive options) and the inevitable decline in the quality of the infantry. The British came to Spain with substantially the same army and practice they had brought to Flanders. Only now the British had the ascendancy in light infantry. With the additional innovation of favoring deployment in positions that minimalized the French artillery and cavalry advantages, this ascendancy in light infantry capability was the decisive factor. Consider the dilemma of a French general officer faced by a general encounter against the British. Consider what "is hard to understand". The success of an attack by infantry columns in columns of divisions would depend on the disruption of the British line. But conditions in Spain and skill of the British in deploying in sheltered positions would frustrate the two principle means a French army of the Empire had of doing this. The difficulty of the ground combined with the deterioration of the French cavalry as an effective battle force as the war progressed, would frustrate the cavalry option. The British infantry's sheltered positions would negate any French superiority in guns. In Flanders the "tirailleur en grandes bandes" would have dominated the middle ground and shot the British line to pieces. In Spain this was no longer possible. Many historians introduce the "ordre mixte" at this point, as a possible solution to the tactical difficulties of the French in the Peninsula. But the fact that this formation was not used more often, is probably indicative of the fact that it was not such a complete solution to the problem. After all, the "order mixte", while combining the firepower of the deployed battalion to the shock weight of the assault column, also tied the movement of the column to the pace of the line. Such a formation, launched into the teeth of a hostile position hidden on a reverse slope behind a dense sheath of protective light infantry, would be at a disadvantage in many respects compared to the line of battalion columns more often encountered in Peninsular battles. At least over difficult, unscouted ground, the line of battalion columns would not lose momentum waiting for the supporting lines to keep up. Waiting until the last moment, when the British line had finally been encountered, before deploying the linking battalions in the "order mixte" could not have been the answer either; by the time French columns had found the British line it was by most accounts already too late. Few managed to deploy: as in Bugeaud's experience, they were already beaten. Waterloo is everyone's exception to the rule. It is perhaps not an accident that Napoleon's last battle appears (at least superficially) to be the least Napoleonic. The regular pattern of the deployment of the various brigades and regiments on the field of Waterloo is so much more Frederickian, or even Marlboroughian. This is appropriate, as the line again wins the day. The abundance of good battle cavalry on the French side (and some favorable ground on which to use it), makes the battle a departure from the typical Peninsula encounter. But the Prussians arriving from Wavre late in the afternoon meant that Wellington didn't have to do as well to win. In other respects the Battle of Waterloo is much as Wellington himself observed in claiming the French came on in the same old way and were turned back in the same old way. The one episode that makes Waterloo a very unique battle for French arms is the deployment of D'Erlon's corps at the opening of the battle. Contrary to Chandler's assumption that D'Erlon's deployment was a "misunderstanding or gross incompetence," [11] it is probably no more than an indication just how desperate the French were to make some headway against the countermeasures of the British. With the Prussians already known to be advancing against his right, Napoleon needed to break the British line in a hurry. D'Erlon's array of three divisions stacked into columns of deployed battalions, with Durutte's division in battalion columns on the open flank, undoubtedly represented an attempt to solve this problem. The fact that such a tactic should be tried when it was shows what a gambler's throw the battle was for the French. In hindsight the deployment was ineffective; the steadiness of Picton's infantry and the charge of Ponsonby and Somerset sent D'Erlon scurrying back up La Belle Alliance. D'Erlon, like so many French commanders, far from being an incompetent general, was little more than a desperate man. In a sense the tactics of the French Republican and later Napoleonic armies is only a special case in the linear tactics of Frederick's organum. There were after all no significant technical innovations in the art of war between Frederick and Napoleon, only political ones. This special case became viable when the linear formation could be disrupted. Once this possibility had been minimized by countermeasures to the disruptive effects of skirmishers, massed artillery, and cavalry, it was all over. The linear formation would always beat the column. This was perhaps Wellington's "luck". NOTES [1] T.R. Bugeaud, as quoted by Oman, Wellington's Army, 1809-1814, London, 1913, pg. 91-92. [2] Sir Charles Oman, Wellingtona Army, 1809-1814, pg. 92. [3] Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon, New York, 1966, pg. 348. [4] John Elting, Swords Around A Throne, New York, 1988, pg. 532. [5] Brent Nosworthy, The Anatomy of Victory, New York, 1990, pg. 350. [6] The First Amalgamation, completed 1795, each regular battalion brigaded with two of volunteers. [7] David Gates, The Spanish Ulcer, New York, 1986, pg. 24. [8] Chandler, pg. 340. [9] G.F. Nafziger, Napoleon's Invasion of Russia, Presidio, 1989, pg. 24-25. [10] Oman, pg. 75-76. [11] Chandler, pg. 1077. 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