Tuesday 20 May 2014
There's an interesting thing I came across, John Lynn's partial criticism of the Duke of Luxembourg. He states that Luxembourg defeated Waldeck at Fleurus in July of 1690, in a brilliant envelopment battle that all but destroyed the Dutch and certainly swept them off the field like a tornado.
This was doubly advantageous because the leader of the Dutch, William III of Orange, a competent and daring commander himself who boldly attacked Luxembourg at Saint-Denis in 1678 and defeated him to relieve the siege of Mons, was not present. King Billy, as he was by then known, was in Ireland to secure his control of the British Isles.
John Lynn states that Fleurus was a victory "Napoleonic" in conception and result. The Dutch were annihilated, and Lynn suggests that Luxembourg could have pursued the beaten Dutch and eliminated them from the war in Napoleonic fashion before King Billy could return to shore up the defences.
But there's a very good reason for the indecisive character of pre-Napoleonic warfare, which Lynn of course admits. Which is essentially the logistical factor. Armies moved too slow, their supplies were dependent upon cumberous wagons and bad roads. Luxembourg, if he had pursued the Dutch, would not have caught them in time to compel their capitulation. Withdrawing along the Dyle they could have thrown a garrison into Louvain, which Luxembourg would have no choice but to take, and if he took that the Dutch could throw a garrison in Antwerp, or at Breda.
By the time the French reduced these fortresses William of Orange would have had plenty of time to reach the Netherlands with powerful reinforcements and the French may well have engaged in a battle disadvantageous to themselves. Especially if it were a repeat of Saint-Denis, with the French besieging Louvain or Breda when the Dutch erupted into their flanks.
What allowed Napoleon to decisively win campaigns was a culmination of two factors. One the logistics were much better in his time, supplies were organised, and living off the land became an art he was particulary adept at. This contributed to the second factor, the large increase in armies.
The advantage the French possessed in this was that they, in the times of Napoleon, had the numbers to both besiege a fortress and pursue a beaten enemy. Napoleon also could not leave unguarded enemy fortresses in his line of advance, but he had the fortune of possessing the numbers to guard them while he continued with his main body. Luxembourg had not that advantage in 1690. The French under Luxembourg were not numerous enough to both blockade a fortress, and there were plenty Waldeck could have chosen to garrison, and pursue the defeated Dutch.
Since Luxembourg could not blockade a fort while continuing his advance, he thus could not advance beyond it. He'd have to halt his pursuit until it were taken. Which meant that even if he attempted to pursue Waldeck that pursuit would immediately stop at the first fortress it ran into. Though the fortress would probably fall, that was of little consequence to Dutch strategy as it would have served its purpose, to buy time for the Dutch to reconstitute their army and retake the field in good order. Thus, as was often the case in the Low Countries (see the Spanish campaigns there), a tactical success in defeating an enemy in the field or capturing a fortress usually was barren of strategic results.
Clausewitz writing after the Wars of Napoleon identified the primary strategic priority of an aggressive war to be to bring the enemy to action and destroy him, pursuing him relentlessly so that he cannot reform and thus cause his army to disintegrate from lack of cohesion or compel his total capitulation. This was the method employed by Napoleon, and by the Prussians in 1870. It was not an option for armies before Napoleon's time. Even Frederick the Great, who won impressive battles, could not hope to pursue the Austrians, much less the French or the Russians, to their conclusive elimination.
Which is why early modern wars seem boring in retrospect. Whereas if Napoleon or Moltke won a single battle, that could lay vast areas open to foreign occupation and result in dramatic losses of territory, single battles before Napoleon, even if sometimes approaching the scale of Austerlitz or Jena, often resulted in hardly any change at all.
Luxembourg's victory over the Dutch at Fleurus, from a purely tactical standpoint, was devastating, but it did not give France the Spanish Netherlands, it did not even allow the French to enter Dutch territory. What it did achieve is allowing the French to retain all of their fortresses in Belgium for that year, and to shore up other fronts.
Because really in that period one could only hope for very limited gains, and these could only be secured by retention of strong places. Reversing Clausewitz, because his methods were impossible at the time, the armies of pre-Napoleonic times were concerned with acquiring territory in the form of seizing fortresses, and field armies had the two-fold purpose of capturing the enemy's and defending their own. Decisive destruction of the enemy army was never a goal and could not be achieved anyway.
A good example of this is the Great Condé's attempt to pursue the Bavarians under Franz von Mercy after the Battle of Freiburg in 1644.
In this engagement the French sought to dislodge the Bavarians from the mountainous highground behind the fortress, and at last succeeded by occupying the valleys behind them leading through the Black Forest.
Fearing being trapped, Mercy abandoned the fortress of Freiburg, leaving all his artillery and wagons with the garrison there, and ran through the narrow paths of the Black Forest hoping to escape to Wirtemberg.
Condé desperately wished to pursue, and sent cavalry to follow the retreating Bavarians. But this proved ineffective as the Bavarians with their pikes and muskets were able to parry the French cavalry and given the French reliance on wagons and artillery, their main body moved too slowly to catch them.
The fighting around Freiburg and the pursuit lasted for a total of three days, after which Condé abandoned the pursuit and returned to invest Freiburg having concluded that catching the Bavarians was impossible and that leaving Freiburg in his rear was too dangerous.
Pictured is Prince Louis de Condé at Rocroi.
- Kaiser
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