The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene Read Free Book Online Page A

There the mind can use its innate talents to capacity, combining them all so as to seize on what is right and true as though this were a single idea formed by their concentrated pressure--as though it were a response to the immediate challenge rather than a product of thought.

    O N W AR , C ARL VON C LAUSEWITZ , 1780-1831

    THE LAST WAR
    No one has risen to power faster than Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821). In 1793 he went from captain in the French revolutionary army to brigadier general. In 1796 he became the leader of the French force in Italy fighting the Austrians, whom he crushed that year and again three years later. He became first consul of France in 1801, emperor in 1804. In 1805 he humiliated the Austrian and Russian armies at the Battle of Austerlitz.
    For many, Napoleon was more than a great general; he was a genius, a god of war. Not everyone was impressed, though: there were Prussian generals who thought he had merely been lucky. Where Napoleon was rash and aggressive, they believed, his opponents had been timid and weak. If he ever faced the Prussians, he would be revealed as a great fake.
    Among these Prussian generals was Friedrich Ludwig, prince of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen (1746-1818). Hohenlohe came from one of Germany's oldest aristocratic families, one with an illustrious military record. He had begun his career young, serving under Frederick the Great (1712-86) himself, the man who had single-handedly made Prussia a great power. Hohenlohe had risen through the ranks, becoming a general at fifty--young by Prussian standards.
    To Hohenlohe success in war depended on organization, discipline, and the use of superior strategies developed by trained military minds. The Prussians exemplified all of these virtues. Prussian soldiers drilled relentlessly until they could perform elaborate maneuvers as precisely as a machine. Prussian generals intensely studied the victories of Frederick the Great; war for them was a mathematical affair, the application of timeless principles. To the generals Napoleon was a Corsican hothead leading an unruly citizens' army. Superior in knowledge and skill, they would outstrategize him. The French would panic and crumble in the face of the disciplined Prussians; the Napoleonic myth would lie in ruins, and Europe could return to its old ways.
    In August 1806, Hohenlohe and his fellow generals finally got what they wanted: King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, tired of Napoleon's broken promises, decided to declare war on him in six weeks. In the meantime he asked his generals to come up with a plan to crush the French.
    Hohenlohe was ecstatic. This campaign would be the climax of his career. He had been thinking for years about how to beat Napoleon, and he presented his plan at the generals' first strategy session: precise marches would place the army at the perfect angle from which to attack the French as they advanced through southern Prussia. An attack in oblique formation--Frederick the Great's favorite tactic--would deliver a devastating blow. The other generals, all in their sixties and seventies, presented their own plans, but these too were merely variants on the tactics of Frederick the Great. Discussion turned into argument; several weeks went by. Finally the king had to step in and create a compromise strategy that would satisfy all of his generals.
He [ Baron Antoine-Henri de Jomini ] --often quite arbitrarily--presses [ the deeds of Napoleon ] into a system which he foists on Napoleon, and, in doing so, completely fails to see what, above all, really constitutes the greatness of this captain--namely, the reckless boldness of his operations, where, scoffing at all theory, he always tried to do what suited each occasion best.

    F RIEDRICH VON B ERNHARDI , 1849-1930
    A feeling of exuberance swept the country, which would soon relive the glory years of Frederick the Great. The generals realized that Napoleon knew about their plans--he had excellent spies--but the Prussians