![]() His early mastery of the art of war may cer- tainly be attributed to a careful study of the works of Marshal Saxe, Pierre de Bottrcet, Guibert and Gribeauval the regiments he com- manded had already begun to adapt themselves to the new style of warfare which had been imposed upon them first by the defeats of the Seven Years' War and then by the levee en masse of the French Republic. ![]() To give credit to the sources of Napoleon's inspiration is not, however, to deny his genius. A painstaking and perceptive student, he took over the best ideas of the eighteenth century masters-as he took over armies which had been created by the ancien regime and transformed by the Revolution-and he adopted them as his own. Napoleon was not an original military thinker. No two of those battles had been fought in exactly the same way yet not only do the first cam- paigns in Piedmont contain the essential characteristics of every other campaign, but the principles of war which gave rise to Napoleonic strategy are the principles of an earlier age. ![]() The Campaigns of Napoleon David Chandler (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 6 gns) One day at St Helena, while fashioning his legend for the benefit of posterity, Napoleon announced, 'I have fought sixty battles, and I have learned nothing which I did not kno‘i, at the beginning.' The assertion contained more of the truth, perhaps, than he had intended. ![]()
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