Masters of War

When the Emperor dictated in the small hours of the morning, it was Berthier who caught the words. When seven corps had to cross a flooded river in darkness, it was Berthier who drafted the orders. When Napoleon’s operational genius needed to become the coherent movement of two hundred thousand men across four hundred miles of Germany in three weeks, it was Berthier who made it possible. He was present at every campaign from the Ligurian Alps to Moscow, from the Egyptian desert to the plains of the Marchfeld. He was, by Napoleon’s own admission at Saint Helena, the most indispensable man in the Grande Armée. History has not remembered him that way. Louis-Alexandre Berthier, prince, marshal, cartographer’s son from Versailles, served Napoleon Bonaparte as chief of staff for eighteen consecutive years, organising and administering the most formidable military enterprise in the history of modern Europe. He created the Grand Quartier Général: the intelligence system that gave Napoleon his informational advantage, the order-writing discipline that translated volcanic operational genius into coherent military action, the logistical architecture that moved armies at speeds that shattered every assumption of the age. He was the invisible architect of Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram, the man without whom none of those masterpieces could have been accomplished, and the man whom the masterpieces’ fame has consistently eclipsed. This book tells his full story for the first time: from his formation in the royal court of Versailles and his American Revolutionary War service under Rochambeau at Yorktown, through his survival of the Terror and his emergence as the essential professional partner of history’s most extraordinary military commander, to the campaigns of Russia and the final decline, the Restoration, the Hundred Days he could not bring himself to join, and the mysterious death at Bamberg on the first of June 1815, nineteen days before Waterloo, at a window through which the armies of a coalition he had spent his life opposing were marching past. Drawing on operational records, campaign dispatches, and the memoirs of those who served alongside him, Berthier: Napoleon’s Indispensable Architect of War makes the case for a fundamental reassessment, of Berthier’s place in the history of the Napoleonic campaigns, of the administrative and organisational dimensions of military genius that conventional military history has always undervalued, and of what it means to be, in the fullest and most exacting sense of the phrase, a master of war. 'Bonaparte’s plan was audacity itself. But audacity without Berthier was a plan without legs. It was Berthier who moved the divisions, who fed the men, who ensured that the order given at midnight was in the hands of the commander who needed it before dawn. Napoleon struck the blow; Berthier had already aimed it.' - Marshal Marmont, Mémoires