Combat syntax: infantry, cavalry, artillery
The regulations gave the French infantry a vocabulary of formations and a grammar of transitions between them. But a battalion with flawless command of all formations is still doomed on its own, because every formation has an opponent who specifically attacks it. The battlefield knows no universal solution. It knows only a cycle of vulnerabilities that must be managed. Individual words here form phrases, and this syntax is the interaction of infantry, cavalry, and artillery — decided the outcome of the day.
The cycle of threats: rock, paper, scissors
The strength of Napoleon's army rested on the mutual support of all three branches of the armed forces, not on the superiority of any one. This is most easily explained this way: each infantry formation is good against one threat and defenseless against another.
A line provides maximum fire along the front and is therefore terrifying for enemy infantry, but its exposed flanks and extended nature make it prey to cavalry, which can simply outflank or break through the formation. To escape cavalry, a battalion forms into a square: a square has no vulnerable flank, and a horseman can find no breach. But this salvation comes at a double price. First, a square fires along the front from only one side, wasting most of its firepower. Second, and more importantly, it becomes a dense, crowded target, the best an artilleryman could find; we'll return to this trap later. A column is more mobile than both a line and a square, and is convenient for maneuver, but within its narrow front, only a few front ranks can return fire.
It's a vicious circle: like a game of rock-paper-scissors, no formation protects against all threats at once, and saving one opens the way to another. Cavalry forces the infantry to form squares. The square is exposed to artillery and skirmishers, who fire on the dense square, forcing it to disintegrate or melt under fire. Having scattered or deployed into a line to answer the artillery, the infantry once again exposes itself to the cavalry. The circle closes. Each rescue resulted in a new death, and this cycle of threats constituted the syntax of the battle.
Circle tools
To manipulate this cycle to your advantage, it wasn't enough to have infantry, cavalry, and cannons in general—you needed specialized varieties. Artillery was divided into foot artillery, also known as battery or position artillery, and horse artillery. The difference wasn't just in name. Horse artillery moved at the speed of cavalry and kept pace with its maneuvers, advancing to places where foot batteries simply couldn't. The artillery's job was to prepare for an attack, breaking through the enemy line before infantry or cavalry could reach it. At close range, cannons switched to grapeshot, and against dense formations, this was especially devastating: a single shot could clear entire clearings in the ranks.
The cavalry was divided in two in exactly the same way. The heavy shock cavalry (primarily cuirassiers) was intended for ramming attacks and saved itself for the decisive moment. The light cavalry consisted of hussars and mounted rangers (chasseurs à cheval) — conducted reconnaissance, pursued retreating troops, and covered flanks and marches. But even the formidable heavy cavalry had a severe limitation. An attack was truly effective only against infantry that was already disordered or hadn't had time to prepare. A fresh, closed square was almost impossible to take with a frontal assault: the horses refused to face the bristling bayonets, and the riders were dashed against the immobile square.
Herein lies the cruelest aspect of this entire mechanic. The square saved the battalion from sabers, but it was precisely this stationary target that the horse artillery, which managed to get close, awaited. The square stood shoulder to shoulder, not daring to open up while the cavalry loomed nearby, and at that very moment, grapeshot was methodically pounding it. The formation devised for safety became the cause of death: opening up meant being killed by the cavalry, remaining there meant melting under fire. The choice between two deaths is a precise illustration of the cycle of threats.
Artillery upsets, cavalry finishes off
The issue, then, isn't the guns, horses, or bayonets themselves, but the order in which they are deployed. The classic combination of the era was simple: artillery disrupts formations, cavalry finishes them off. First, the batteries breach a gap, forcing the infantry to seek safety in squares or suffer losses in line; then, at a precisely chosen moment, the cavalry enters the fray and finishes off the already broken enemy. Coordinating this in time and space—advancing the guns, pausing, and deploying the cavalry not a second too soon or a second too late—was the essence of tactical art in those years.
But both of these roles worked only because the infantry held the front. It's easy to dismiss it as a passive presence, simply standing at the rear of the formation. In fact, it was its axis. Its stability gave the artillery time to move up and aim, and the cavalry time to bide its time; its lines and squares themselves forced the enemy to reform under attack. Without infantry clinging to the terrain and holding the line under fire, neither batteries nor squadrons had time to accomplish anything. Artillery disrupted, cavalry finished off, but it was the infantry that held and forced the battle.
Napoleon mastered this coordination like few others. He didn't disperse his forces across the entire front, but concentrated his troops at the decisive point. Hence the "grand battery" technique: dozens of guns were grouped together and fired at a single section of the enemy line until it gave way. This was the case at Wagram in 1809, and at Borodino in 1812, where huge, concentrated batteries plowed through the positions before the decisive blow. Cavalry reserves were kept nearby, ready to exploit the success or complete the breakthrough at the right moment.
Ideal and friction
All this was easy to sketch out as a neat diagram, but far more difficult to execute. The communications and command systems of the era placed a severe limit on any coordination: orders arrived late, smoke obscured the field, and the commander on a distant flank couldn't see the big picture. Bringing the three branches of the armed forces together in a single plan was an intention, not a guarantee. Military thinkers later found a name for this gap between the plan and its execution: Carl von Clausewitz called it the friction of war. Real combat remained a series of imperfect approximations to the ideal: coordination would sometimes develop, sometimes disintegrate, and the winner was often the one with the most approximations and the least costly setbacks.
We've seen the same friction at every step before. Conservatism, which hindered organizational reform at the outset of the Revolutionary Wars; a shortage of trained soldiers, which impoverished the formation by 1813; sluggish communications, which prevented the timely deployment of batteries and the deployment of cavalry—all of this points to the same thing. A paper plan and the field never coincide, and the gap between them was precisely the commander's field of work. On paper, the regulations and the commander's plan all converged flawlessly. On the field, it converged in smoke and haste, with losses and delays, but still, it converged.
The enemy knew each of these things individually as well as the French: formations, regulations, and even the branches of the armed forces themselves. The difference began where they had to be brought together. Everyone built lines and squares, everyone had cannons and cuirassiers, the cycle of threats hung over every field equally. Everyone had the same arsenal. There was no new idea of war behind it—only an old language that everyone knew. The whole difference came down to a person who could speak it without hesitation here and now, at the right moment and at the right point.
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