"My God! Look there! There, just below us-those are Frenchmen!" The staff officer's horrified cry immediately drew the attention of the Austro-Russian army's nominal commander, General Mikhail Kutusov. Kutusov stood aghast when he confirmed that the staff officer was correct. Down the slope, barely two hundred yards away, marched the bulk of Napoleon's army. In the crisp morning air, he distinctly heard the music of its military bands playing "On va leur percer le flanc...."

At full gallop messengers were sent out with new orders in an attempt to salvage the unsalvageable. Tsar Alexander I, present with Kutusov, was stunned at this dramatic turn of events. Both men knew what had happened. The French had plunged through a natural gap that had opened up between the Allied columns as they first advanced. But how had Napoleon reacted so quickly? Had he read their minds, or did he have a spy in camp, one who had compromised their carefully conceived plans? There would be time later to ponder these questions and more, but not today. The time was 9:30 a.m., 2 December, 1805, and the place was the field of Austerlitz.

Napoleon's great victory at Austerlitz stands as but one example of perhaps the single most significant military development to emerge from that fascinating era. This was a revolution in command and control technique that allowed for the rapid and efficient transmission of orders up and down the chain of command. As such, it gave France's Grande Armee an unprecedented advantage over its enemies, perhaps one as important as the Emperor's generalship itself.

To understand why, however, one should not immediately look at the Napoleonic army of France. Instead, the initial investigation of this intriguing story must go back to the prior period of Frederick the Great.

"Old Fritz" and Pre-Planned, Inflexible Battle

The development of the musket radically changed warfare. To effectively use the this new weapon it was necessary to adopt a formation that could bring the most muskets to bear on the enemy. By the time of Frederick the Great (1713-1786), this formation had evolved into a three rank battleline.

Thus, although the expensive, professional armies of Frederick's day remained small, they tended to fight on battlefields some three to four times wider than in the past. This, in turn, meant that a commander could often not even see his entire army, much less quickly intervene personally to set things right.

A commander's battlefield control problem was also compounded by the fact that most armies during Frederick's period rarely maintained permanent staffs outside the regimental and war ministry level. To do so would have been an additional monetary burden on the state. It also would have required the senior nobility (who would have manned such positions) to be away from important peacetime activities to which they were obligated. Given a lack of permanent staffs, it should come as no surprise that a staff doctrine was lacking as well.

Instead, when a nation like 18th Century Prussia or Austria went to war, it was common practice to take all available regiments and form them into temporary brigades and divisions. The composition of each varied from general to general and from day to day. It could be very confusing and made it difficult for commanders to really become familiar with the capabilities of the troops under them.

Likewise, the staffs that ran these formations were ad hoc affairs, with each commander organizing and running his headquarters according to his own personal whim and accepted custom. Staff officers were drawn from a pool of available nobles, often from the regiments that made up the command. As the staff officer would usually leave the staff to accompany his regiment if it went elsewhere, the lack of continuity in personnel becomes evident. Staff work suffered further from the fact that few officers were chosen because of their expertise in a particular field, rather, birth and politics were often more important considerations.

A look at artillery officers provides a good case in point. Because artillery officers were considered more "tradesmen" than soldiers, they generally came from the poorer nobility or middle class and hardly ever obtained rank above that of colonel. Artillery assignments requiring higher rank were filled from the legions of the noble elite (that is, infantry or cavalry officers), most knowing little about the trade of gunnery. Even in 1815, after years of experience facing the efficient artillery controlled by French artillery generals, the Prussian Army of the Lower Rhine under Field Marshal Blucher boasted General of Infantry Prince August as its Chief of Artillery. The good prince's service record showed little experience controlling cannon, but he was, after all, a member of the nation's ruling family.

Regardless of make up, typical staffs in Frederick's time were quite tiny. One reason for this was that the size of the professional army serving the typical European monarch was small enough to allow the commander to be his own chief of staff and operations officer, thus negating the need for a large number of assistants. Frederick's own permanent national level body, the Quartermaster General's Staff, rarely numbered more than 25 persons, though it later added a corps of Brigade majors to assist subordinate commands. Indeed, Frederick himself believed that an army of 60,000 could easily be serviced by a non-permanent staff consisting of one quartermaster, one quartermaster lieutenant and five other lieutenants-a total of only seven officers!

The other reason that field staffs could remain minuscule was because of the practical solution of centralized (and very detailed) planning which, theoretically at least, would allow the commander to position himself at the one decisive point he planned or expected for combat in order to take personal control.

Normally, on the night prior to a battle, the commander would sit down with his small staff and formally dictate the orders for the next day's engagement. His directives were very precise with detailed execution times, routes of march and the order in which the units were to deploy in battleline (thus originating the term "order of battle" or OB). Often, the commander would position himself at the head of his army's march column as it entered the battlefield so that last minute adjustments could be made personally by him. Then off he went to take charge of that part of the battlefield he felt would be the most important. The rest of the army was supposed to simply function automatically.

Such techniques worked well enough, and also fit nicely into autocratic societies that regarded obedience to established authority as a paramount virtue. The detailed planning that compensated for the lack of permanent staff organization and doctrine also made things like individual initiative unnecessary. Such an arrangement suited men like Grand Duke Constantine Romanov just fine. This "enlightened" officer, Tsar Alexander's brother, produced a set of "Maxims on Military Discipline" for the Russian army which stated: 1st Maxim-The officer is purely and simply a machine. 2nd Maxim-Everything which a superior commands of his subordinate must be carried out, even if it is an atrocity.

Constantine also went on to state, "An officer must never make use of his good sense or intelligence." While perhaps a bit extreme, the Grand Duke's attitudes were prevalent enough throughout Europe to insure that battlefield initiative was a rarity.

Poor Staffs and Inflexibility Lead to Disaster

It was with this system of command and control that the armies of autocratic Europe marched forth to meet the armies of the French Revolution and later those of Napoleon I. At first, the armies opposing the French generally proved to be better drilled and disciplined than their French adversaries, and acquitted themselves well. From a command and control point of view, however, things started poorly for the Allies and quickly deteriorated.

During the Austerlitz campaign, for example, the inexperienced Austrian staff bivouacked two major commands (those of Austrian Prince Lichtenstein and Russian Lieutenant-General Miloradovich) in the wrong areas, resulting in both being late to occupy their initial positions when the fighting began. In fact, although the Allied battle plan had been verbally outlined at midnight of 1 December, with an implementation time of 7:00 a.m. the next morning, the Austro-Russian staff was unable to have orders written and delivered by eight.

Things were little better for the Allies in 1809, even after the capable Archduke Charles reformed the Austrian army along French lines. When Charles requested a map of the army's traditional drill area (where the battle of Wagram was soon to be fought), his staff fumbled around and gave him the wrong one.

Even in Prussia, despite belated attempts at reform by Colonel von Massenbach, the situation was much the same. Certainly, the Prussian army that faced Napoleon was the rightful heir to that of Frederick the Great, but, as the U.S. Army War College's Dr. Richard Gabriel has suggested, this was the entire problem.

As but one example, during the 1806 Jena campaign, senior Prussian commanders often had to brief their regimental colonels in person. The regiment, with its small but permanent staff, simply proved more capable of handling operational instructions that did the staffs of the hastily formed divisions they served. It is little wonder that the great German historian General Bronsart von Schellendorf wrote that the Prussian staff "existed hardly even in name" during the early Napoleonic period.

Clausewitz: Eyewitness to Disaster

Allied disasters on the battlefield exposed one of the most fundamental problems in the staff system in most European armies of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. This was its singular inability to "conquer" time. That is, orders moved at a painfully slow pace from one echelon of command to an other and this made reacting to unforeseen events on the battlefield a near impossibility. Russian General Baron Levin Bennigsen proved this point at the battle of Friedland (14 June, 1807) when his staff was unable to move a single reserve division to the front within three and one half hours, though the formation was barely 1,700 yards away.

Professor Martin Van Creveld summed up these shortcomings in his book, Command in War: "...Frederick's system of tactical command, one of the earliest in which a commander attempted continuous control of the whole army, and relying for this purpose on as robotlike a body of troops as has ever been put into the field, cannot be called an unqualified success even when wielded by its inventor 's masterly hands. In those of his less competent successors it led directly to disaster."

Changes in France Lead to Changes in Organization

The disaster Van Creveld wrote about was created by the nemesis of autocratic Europe. The seed of the revolution in military organization and command and control was planted on 23 August, 1793, when the French Revolutionary government decreed: "From this moment until that when the enemy is driven from the territory of the Republic, every Frenchman is permanently requisitioned for the needs of the armies...."

Within one year of this, the decree of the famous levee en masse, the armed forces of France listed no less than 732,474 effectives. Compared to the tiny professional forces arrayed against them, this number was enormous. However, the swollen French army also proved to be an administrative nightmare and nearly unmanageable on the battlefield, particularly for a body of "amateur" (meaning other than noble) officers who had little or no experience in such matters.

To bring order and control to the armed mobs of Revolutionary France, semi-permanent corps, each consisting of several infantry divisions plus attached artillery and a light cavalry division for scouting, were formally established. The divisions themselves were also formally organized, each normally fielding two brigades of two regiments. Heavy cavalry corps were similarly constituted.

Supporting these field organizations was a permanent staff structure and doctrine, both of which found their genesis in an important work by Pierre de Bourcet entitled Principes de la guerre de montagne. The book was published in 1764 when Bourcet was made director of the experimental Grenoble Staff College and contained "the whole art of generalship as it was understood by the best French officers of the eighteenth century." It also included illustrations of its enunciated principles based on actions planned by Bourcet when he served as a staff officer during the Seven Years' War.

By 1766, Bourcet had used these concepts to organize a true general staff known as the service d'etat-major des logis des armees.

Bourcet's ideas disappeared in the turmoil of the Revolution, but were recovered in 1796 when Louis Alexandre Berthier, later to become Napoleon's famous chief of staff, published his Document sur la service de etat-major general a l'armee des Alpes. This document was essentially a handbook on how a headquarters staff should function based on the author's own experiences as a staff officer during the French Revolution. Among other things, it proclaimed the chief of staff as the primary coordinating organ for the rest of the staff's departments. Berthier, in fact, described the position as the "central pivot of all (staff) operations."

In 1800 the first complete staff manual was published for the armies of France. Called the Manuel des adjutants generaux et des adjoints employes dans les etats-majors divisionaires des armees and written by Adjutant General Paul Thiebault, the document was to become the veritable bible for all French staff work during the age of Napoleon. It laid out precisely how a staff was to be organized, and how each individual section was to perform its responsibilities. The manual even went into the esoteric subject of how to write reports, noting, "The aim of every officer charged with making a report should be to render it at once precise, accurate and complete." Other parts of the book detailed exactly how to compose and issue combat orders.

French Improvements in Command and Control

By 1805, Napoleon had fused the work of these three innovative men, Bourcet, Berthier and Thiebault, together into a marvelous creation known as the Imperial General Headquarters (Grand Quartier-General Imperial or GQG). This august body, which could include hundreds of personnel, was divided into the Maison (the Emperor's personal staff) and the Imperial Headquarters, the latter directly supervised by Marshal Berthier as chief of staff.

The Imperial Headquarters was subdivided into two parts. The first was Berthier's personal staff and the second the General Staff. The personal staff was no more than several trusted assistants who helped Berthier take care of the many details that his position required him to handle.

The most important part of the GQG was the General Staff and it included several sections, the most prominent being a corps of Adjutants Commandant, each of which took care of a specific function such as traffic, prisoners or the processing of orders. Other sections included an artillery staff, an engineer staff, a military police detachment (489 men in 1813) and a topographic bureau to supply maps to subordinate units. There was also a pool of unassigned officers to provide supervision of the army's line of communications or replacements for combat losses.

Berthier's staff generally followed Thiebault's manual and was uniformly repeated in smaller terms throughout the army at both the corps and division level. In this regard, Marshal Ney's corps staff of 1806 was typical. Compared to Frederick the Great's small field staff, Ney's 30,000-man corps fielded a staff of 23 primary staff officers including a chief of staff and an adjutant general. In addition, there was an artillery and engineer inspector general, each with his own staff, plus an officer to handle supply, two to handle matters along the corps line of communications, a surgeon general and a postal director, among others.

Normally, the officers serving with these staffs were selected because of their military competence, like, for example, Count Charles-Etienne-Francois Ruty, Napoleon's army artillery commander in 1815. Ruty was educated at the French artillery school of Chalons and had seen continuous staff and field service with the guns prior to his appointment. Soldiers like Ruty were usually selected for staff service when they had completed two years field duty at the rank of captain.

After apprentice training and a probationary period, they would be permanently retained as staff officers, even during times of peace. A further two years of competent service was mandatory before promotion to major. From that point on, rotation between line and staff assignments became standard practice to insure that each officer developed a broad base of military experience.

Outside of Berthier's organization, of course, there remained the Emperor's Maison. This mini-headquarters included a Cabinet subdivided into an intelligence section, a topographic section to maintain the situation map and a secretariat to write Napoleon's orders and directives.

Outside the Cabinet were two groups of hand picked soldiers. The first, the Imperial Aides de Camp (ADC's), was a set of a dozen or so general officers, each experienced in a specialized field such as artillery operations. To these men the Emperor would assign particularly delicate missions, ranging from diplomatic negotiations to special commands. Similar to the ADC's were the 12 Officiers d'Ordonnance. These young men were normally captains who performed similar functions to the ADC's, though their missions never involved the necessity of making command decisions or issuing orders.

Taken in total, this massive conglomeration of high ranking clerks and commanders seems awfully cumbersome when compared with modern staffs. Indeed, there were some pronounced weaknesses. One of the most glaring came from the fact that Napoleon actually operated two staffs, his own Maison and Berthier's crew. Because all intelligence matters went directly to the same named section of the Maison, they bypassed Berthier who was left in the dark unless Napoleon thought otherwise. Hardly the way to insure that one's chief of staff was the "pivot" of all staff operations.

Yet for all that, this system was greatly superior to anything the Allied powers had in the early years of the First Empire. The French staff system was permanent, it organized and functioned according to a validated doctrine that was generally uniform throughout the army, and it was manned by soldiers chosen by merit, not lineage.

And then there was Berthier himself. Often maligned and abused by the Emperor, he was a man who possessed an uncanny ability to translate his master's intentions into clear and concise orders. As Thiebault noted, Berthier was the one man Bonaparte needed, "capable of relieving him of all detailed work, to understand him instantly, and to foresee what he would need." It was little wonder that Napoleon lamented after Waterloo, "If Berthier had been there, I would not have met this misfortune."

Napoleon's GQG and ADC's Conquer Time

The French staff system showed its superiority over the Allied so-called "system" on several levels during the period 1805-1807. At the campaign level, the staff allowed individual corps to operate far away from the centralized authority of the army commander, making sweeping maneuvers across great distances a practical reality. On or near the battlefield, however, the French staff had one principal function. That was to live up to Berthier's 1796 directive which specifically decreed, "Speed is the most important thing in general staff work."

Here speed translated into accomplishing the very thing the Allies could not-mastering an adversary called time. As the army concentrated for battle, Berthier's staff constantly shifted orders up and down the chain of command, often giving the Emperor the luxury of dictating up to three separate movement orders in a single day, with a good expectation they would be carried out. The result was a confounding of the enemy as to French intentions and capabilities. Napoleon's GQG helped him build his reputation, astonishing his foes by enabling the Emperor to react quickly to battlefield developments. For example, before daylight on 12 October 1806, Napoleon's staff drew up march orders and sent messengers riding, with remarkable results. See "Speedy Staff Work"

Having orders executed an average of two hours after receipt was indeed amazing for the era (and, based on the author's own experience, for today as well), but the exigencies of the battlefield could well make things go faster. This was partly because of the men that Napoleon depended upon to do his bidding. His marshals, good or bad, were after all drawn from a revolutionary society that not only tolerated independent thought, but encouraged it as well.

Thus, it was unnecessary to take the precious time to lay out instructions in detail as would have been done in Frederick's day. It was enough to present the mission to the marshal and then allow him to execute that mission as he saw fit. The impulsive Ney, for example, managed to have his entire infantry corps in position and ready for the final 5:00 p.m. assault at Friedland (14 June, 1807), although he had accepted his orders only an hour before -while his forces were still marching into the main battle area!

Such speed was also due in part to the messengers who carried these directives. Whether Napoleon's personal ADC's or officers from Berthier's organization, they were truly a breed apart. One contemporary described Berthier's young hellions as: "hard drinkers, gamblers, duelists, rakes, great turners-up of petticoats, dare-devils and heart breakers, always in debt, insufferable, but who arrived where they intended to arrive, never got lost, knew how to speak proudly and firmly, even to marshals. A message entrusted to them was always delivered, neither obstacles nor man stopping them."

Nevertheless, there were occasions when even Berthier's staff could not move quickly enough. These were the times when the Emperor needed to act with utmost haste. The solution to the problem was one of the simplest yet effective methods ever used in command and control operations-Napoleon's Imperial Aides de Camp.

Essentially, it worked like this. When time was critical, the Emperor would take one of these trusted generals, personally brief him on the mission to be accomplished, and then, bypassing Berthier's staff altogether, send him on his way. This ADC would then gallop off to some corps and, in the name of the Emperor, physically assume command of a combat formation and lead it in battle. No doubt the affected marshal was sometimes dumbfounded or resentful (you had to be tactful with Ney), but the practice seemed to work.

At Wagram (5-6 July, 1809), the Emperor used ADC Count Alexandre Law de Lauriston to halt a massive Austrian flank attack. Here Napoleon ordered his reliable artillery general to strip the guns from several formations, combine them with those of the Guard, and deploy them as a massed battery. In little more than an hour, Lauriston had not less than 112 guns firing.

When taken together, Berthier's General Staff and Napoleon's ADC's were powerful battlefield weapons in their own right. They enabled Napoleon to control the entire battle, not just a portion of it. Further, they also enabled Napoleon to institute one of the riskiest, yet for him amazingly successful planning concepts ever seen on a battlefield, one that would have appalled the great Frederick.

In short, Napoleon's idea was simply not to have a plan. Instead, the Emperor issued only general guidance for the upcoming battle. Then, when the time was right, he utilized his superior staff system, along with his own unique abilities, to take advantage of the enemy's mistakes and defeat him. This battlefield command theory, labeled "intuitive generalship" by the U.S. Army War College, may seem haphazard, but it gave the French army untold flexibility when confronting adversaries like Austria or Prussia during the "glory years."

As Napoleon himself said, "First we give battle, then we see how it goes." If only Kutusov and Alexander had known! There was no spy within their camp. Instead, at 8:45 a.m., Napoleon simply turned to Marshal Soult and asked, "How long will it take you to move your divisions to the top of the Pratzen Heights?" Soult replied that he would only need 20 minutes. Napoleon smiled, nodded and said, "In that case, we will wait another quarter of an hour." From that moment on, the art of controlling troops in battle would never be the same.

The Allies Try to Imitate Success

Austria and Russia tried to adopt Napoleon's staff system, but with poor results as lack of experience and a refusal to disregard an officer's lineage impaired their efforts.

It was Prussia which suffered most during the Napoleonic wars and, thus, learned the most from the French. The Prussians eventually took the GQG concept one step further with the creation of their Grossen Generalstab, a peacetime command and contingency planning institution. The French idea of a trained, well-organzied staff would be used against them by the Germans with vengeance in 1870, 1914, and 1940.

By their very imitation of the French army's organization and staff system, the Allies acknowledged its superiority for posterity. It may not have been perfect, and certainly it was not the only factor that would decide the outcome of Napoleonic wars, but it represented a vast improvement over what had gone before.

In fact, Napoleon's system contained practically all the organizational and functional features of modern U.S. Army staff practice. Historian Brigadier General J. D. Hittle summed up the French achievement when he wrote, "There can be little doubt that the Napoleonic era was the culture in which the germ of staff theory and technique developed rapidly and attained considerable effectiveness."

About the author:

Lt. Col. Wilbur E. Gray currently serves as the Army National Guard Military Intelligence Officer. He received undergraduate degrees from Clemson University in both History and Political Science, as well as an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California. Gray is a graduate of the U. S. Army Command and General Staff College, and earned an M.S. in Strategic Intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency's Joint Military Intelligence College. He is also a member of the Napoleonic Society of America.

Select Bibliography:

Bowden, Scott, and Tarbox, Charles, Armies on the Danube 1809, Chicago, 1989.
Chandler, David G., Austerlitz 1805, London, 1990 [Osprey Series].
Chandler, David G., Jena 1806: Napoleon Destroys Prussia, London 1993 [Osprey Series].
Clausewitz, Karl von, "Nachrichten uber Preussen in seiner Grossen Katastrophe in 1806," Kreigsgeschichtlichen Einzelschriften, Vol. II, No. 10, 1888.
Davout, Louis Nicholas, Operations du 3eme corps 1806-1807, rapport diu marechal Davout, duc d'Auerstaedt, Paris, 1896.
Derrecagaix, Victor, Le marechal Berthier, prince de Wagram et de Neuchatel, Paris, 1904.
Duffy, Christopher, Russia's Military Way to the West, London 1985.
Elting, John R. Swords Around a Throne, New York, 1988.
Foucart, Paul Jean, Campagne de Prusse (1806), Paris, 1890.
Goerlitz, Walter, History of the German General Staff, New York, 1953.
Goltz, Colmar, translated by Atkinson, C.F., Jena to Eylau: The Disgrace and Redemption of the Old Prussian Army, London, 1913.
Heymar, Neil M., "France Against Prussia, The Jena Campaign of 1806," Military Affairs, Winter 1966-1967.
Hittle, J.D., The Military Staff, Harrisburg, PA, 1962.
Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, Kraft Prinz zu, Strategishe Briefe, Berlin, 1887.
Luvaas, Jay, Frederick the Great on the Art of War, New York, 1966.
Thiebault, Paul, Manuel des adjutants generaux et des adjoints employes dans les etats-major divisionaires des armees, Paris, 1800.
Vachee, jan Baptiste, Napoleon en campagne, Paris, 1913.
Van Creveld, Martin, Command in War, London, 1985.