Marshal Turenne (e-book) (used book) | Thomas Longueville | bookbook.eu

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"Read and re-read the campaigns of the great captains," said the greatest of all captains, and fore-most among those of modern times he placed Turenne. But did he not practically contradict this " Maxim" by gathering in the threads of thought and action of all previous leaders and reweaving them in the loom of his powerful and almost omniscient mind into lessons of warfare for all time? For all time certainly, so far as we can see, as regards the greater lessons of strategy, even allowing for the infinite possibilities of the future. Tactics, however, have altered so much that the Napoleonic battlefields are to us little more instructive than those of the Thirty Years' War and the Fronde, much less so than the battles of Turenne were to
Napoleon himself, who practically swept away the old methods. Even strategy may in some degree now be said to be affected.

Had Turenne undertaken the passage of the Alps, science would have aided him little more than it did Hannibal. When Napoleon performed that wonderful feat, with the exception of rather better roads than Turenne would have had to deal with, the mechanical means at his disposal were little greater than those on which the great Carthaginian could count. Were a general, however, to attempt a like invasion in these days, he would have all the accessories of iron, steam and electricity to materially forward his project.

As regards the weapons and equipment of the Napoleonic wars, armour had practically ceased to be worn. The pike, the harquebuss and the wheel-lock had given place to the musket and bayonet, pike and wheel-lock in one. Cavalry had ceased to charge at the trot, and the firing of "piece and pistol before setting on with the sword" had yielded to shock tactics proper. In fact the highly trained infantry of the age of Napoleon had considerably curtailed the liberties taken by cavalry in the age of Turenne, and certain modifications in mounted tactics were the inevitable consequence. The conqueror of Austerlitz and Jena, the victor on a hundred fields, remodelled the tactics and altered the system of war, from that which had prevailed in the time of his predecessor, to suit the different conditions under which he led the armies of France into nearly every country in Europe.

But although he might alter the conditions of attack and defence, although he no longer laid his armies up in winter quarters, nor sat down before fortresses when there yet remained an army in the field to defeat, still with all the momentous changes he made, he could not alter the great principles of strategy. On the other hand, his campaigns exemplify every principle upon which Turenne acted, and with the wider field in which he exercised his greater ambitions, he not only mirrored to us all that Turenne thought and said and did, but added to them the fire of his own genius for war. But the great principles of strategy as affected by the configuration of frontiers, the necessity for a secure base, the command of the sea, and the strokes of attack and defence, which these demanded, must remain immutable for all time. The great principles of Turenne are the same as those under which Von Moltke and Oyama worked, and although it may be better worth the time and the study of the military student to read and re-read the campaigns of Napoleon and the great masters of the art that have lived since, than to turn to the pages of a biography of Turenne, still there may be much there that even the most advanced of modern soldiers will find of value.


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