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By Root 2388 0

50,000 men apiece. This gives an average of 142,000 combatants in each battle, which does not compare unfavourably with the figures for the Napoleonic epoch quoted below. In the second place, the slaughter was just as bad as anything seen on the battlefields of Napoleon, Wellington and the Archduke Charles. At Almansa, for example, the Allies lost 17,000 casualties out of the 22,000 men they had engaged, while at Blenheim the losses of the French and Bavarians came to 38,000. Bloodiest of all these combats, however, was Malplaquet where the losses of the two sides combined reached 42,000. On a number of occasions, then, the War of the Spanish Succession saw battle reach a pitch of intensity that was the equal of anything seen in the Napoleonic Wars.

Nor could the Napoleonic Wars lay claim to being unique in their geographical reach. Whilst they were fought out on a stage that was truly worldwide - not counting the serious conflicts that were sparked off in both North and South America, minor forces of the combatants directly clashed with one another as far afield as Java, the Cape of Good Hope, Buenos Aires and the West Indies - the Seven Years War of 1756-63 witnessed colonial campaigns of a scope that the struggle of 1803-15 had nothing to match. Indeed, it might even be said that if there was a great leap forward in warfare at this time, it came not in 1803 nor even in 1792, but rather in 1756: whereas the major conflicts of the reign of Louis XIV and the forty years that followed had all been largely European affairs, it was the Seven Years War that turned Europe’s colonies in Asia, Africa and the New World into a battlefield - indeed, on occasion, the main battlefield.

What, then, marks out the Napoleonic Wars from what had gone before? Head of the list must come the idea that, just as the Seven Years War made conflict in Europe a global affair, so the struggle that began in 1803 was the first one waged by nations-in-arms. This concept had been invented by the French in 1793, but it now took its place on the other side of the lines as well: universal conscription was introduced in Spain in 1808, Sweden in 1812 and Prussia in 1813, while in Britain the continual absence of conscription to the army was countered by a number of Acts of Parliament laying down that all men should tender some form of military service even if it was only in part-time reserve forces designed to meet the needs of home defence. And even in states whose systems of recruitment remained unreformed-agood example here is Russia - the demand for men was at times so great that it is difficult to believe that many more troops could have been called up even had a French-style system been introduced. Hence, in part at least, the new stress on the role of propaganda, and hence too the fact that field armies suddenly got much bigger. In testimony to the War of the Spanish Succession’s somewhat exceptional character, the number of combatants in the twelve battles of the Seven Years War fought by Frederick the Great amounted to an average of 92,000 men, while, somewhat surprisingly, the same figure for the six greatest battles of the French Revolutionary Wars comes to only 87,000. Yet put together the battles of Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Tudela, Aspern-Essling and Wagram - the combats that established Napoleon’s hegemony in the period 1805-1809 - and the same total comes to 162,000. And looking at the battles of the years of Napoleon’s decline in 1812-1813 - Borodino, Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden and Leipzig - produces another leap forward to 309,400.

The military consequences of this development were immense. Whereas in the eighteenth century the considerable investment represented by the individual soldier ensured that the generals of Europe sought wherever possible to avoid battle and to win their campaigns by manoeuvre, it was now possible to fight far more battles. In the War of the Spanish Succession, it is possible to come up with perhaps a dozen major battles, but in the Napoleonic Wars the number is at least forty. Meanwhile, the armies had