The Abilene reflector. [volume] (Abilene, Kan.) 1883-1888, 1886-02-18
THE GREAT NAPOLEON.
How He Executed the Movements of His
Troops.

How He Executed the Movements of His
Troops.
An example of a good system of To-
gistics is the wonderful concentration
of the French army in the plains of
Gera in 1906. Another is the entrance
of the army upon the campaign of 1915.
Says Jomini: In each of these cases
Napoleon possessed the ability to make
such arrangements that his columns,
starting from points widely separated,
were concentrated with wonderful pre-
cision upon the decisive point of the
zone of operations; and in this way he
insured the successful issue of the cam
paign. The choice of the decisive
point was the result of a skillful appli-
cation of the principles of strategy; and
the arrangements for moving the troops
gives us an example of logiStics which
originated in his own closet. 1t has
been long claimed that Berthier framed
those instructions which were con-
ceived with so much precision and usu-
ally transmitted with so much clear
ness, but have had frequent oppOrtu-
mites of knowing that such was not the
truth. The Emperor was his own chief
staff officer. Provided with Il pair of
dividers opened to distance by The
scale of from seventeen TO twenty miles
in a straight line (Which made from
twenty-five to twenty-five miles, taking
into account the windingS of the roa1s),
bending over and sometimes stretched
at full length upon his map, where the
positions of his corps and the supposed
positions of the enemy were
marked by pins of different colors,
he was able to give orders for extensive
movements with a certainty and pre-
cision which were astonishing. Turn
ing his dividers about from point to
point on the map, he decided in a mo-
ment the number of marches necessary
for each of his columns to arrive at the
desired point by Il certain day; then
placing pins in the new positions and
bearing in mind the rate of marching
that he must assign to each column and
the hour of its setting out. he dictated
these instructions which are alone
enough to make any man famous. Ney
coming from the shores of Lake Con-
stance, Lannes from upper Suabia,
Soult and DavouSt from Bavaria and the
Palatinate, BernadOtte and Augereau
from Franconia, and the Imperial
Guard from Paris, were all thus ar
ranged in line on three parallel roads,
to debouch simultaneously between
Saalfed, Gera and Plauen, few per-
sons in the army or in Germany hav-
ing any conception of the object of
these movements, which seemed so
very complicated In the same man.
ner in 1915, when Blucher had his
army quietly in cantonment between
the Sambre and the Rhine, and We'll
lington was attending fetes in Brussels,
both waiting a signal for the invasion of
France, Napoleon, who was supposed
to be at Paris entirely engrossed with
diplomatic ceremonies, at the head of
his guard, which had been but recently
formed in the capital. fell like a thun-
derbolt upon Charlcroi and Blucher's
quarters, his columns arriving from all
points of the compass, with rare pune
tuality, on the 18th of June, in the
plains of Beaumont and upon the banks
of the Sambre. Napoleon did not
leave Paris until the 18th. The COM
binations described above were the re-
suits of wise strategic calculations, but
their execution was undoubtedly mas
terpiece of logistics. Boston Herald