Some hours later, Markus and I held a long rambling conversation over a late-night game at the hotel, "Hostellerie du Royal-Lieu." He reminded me ... You would look for a theme and focus in each of your games. The theme of "La Guerre" was negotiation and player interaction. The theme of "Last Days" and most of the others was operational maneuvre. This focus is reflected in the very name of your company, and you felt this was the most important focus, certainly more so than the tactical and strategic levels, for understanding Napoleon's methods. The Operational Art of War Napoleon was the first to really work with the operational level. With the large armies of the French revolution it was no longer just a matter of meeting for battle, lining up opposite each other and blasting away. This is what you called the chessboard perspective; although I must say, in fairness to Frederick and others who preceeded Napoleon, they tried to (a) maneuvre for the enemy's line of communications in order to force a battle on favourable terms, and (b) maneuvre during the battle; for example, Frederick at Leuthen. Napoleon was the first to perfect the art of assembling his forces just at the battlefield, which is why we so often see large bodies of troops showing up during his battles - ref. Eylau, Marengo... or Waterloo. The term "operational" was coined by von Moltke the elder in the late 19th century. You were definitely going to include these ideas about the Operational art of war on the Waterloo CD. We talked about the historiography of Waterloo: ten thousand books all copying the same generally accepted "truths" from each other. J.P. Tondeur's new book on Hougoumont really does bring this home. ... Back to OSG News October 1999 Table of Contents Back to OSG News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Operational Studies Group. 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