the Napoleonic wars

[...]... follow their leaders than from élan The Russian artillery arm was greatly admired throughout Europe Their guns were plentiful and packed a good punch The artillerists would doggedly defend their pieces, in many cases to the death, rather then abandon them to the enemy While fierce, the gunners lacked the skill needed to get the most out of their guns On many occasions the French out-dueled the Russians... meant that the best units saw continual service in battle The command of Bagration would see more combat than the standard line division They always responded well, but it meant that it was always the pick of the army that was taking casualties It was with this brave but flawed army that Kutusov took the field 34 The Napoleonic Wars Prussia The Prussian army of the Napoleonic Wars was the direct descendant... prudent policies The army itself started the campaign dispersed throughout Prussia They gathered slowly and were still assembling in 1806 when the French thunderclap fell on them The 200,000 men were well trained and efficient Such was their level of training that only the French of the Grande Armée were better The structure of the army was similar to every other ancien régime army There was no permanent... Primarily through marriages they had acquired many provinces with varied ethnic and racial populations Therefore, no universal language existed in the army Further, many of these provinces owed no loyalty to the Austrians, just to the Emperor personally This meant that the Hungarians, for example, believed they could decide among themselves how much they would support the war effort As the Empire was teetering... during the Napoleonic Wars owed its origins to Peter the Great It had grown and matured under the Tsarina Elizabeth and had nearly wrecked Frederick the Great's army during the Seven Years War Under Catherine the Great and her son Paul, there had been a number of reforms and counter-reforms, depending on the political winds But throughout there was a history of almost unbroken successes Only during the. .. stages of the wars of the French Revolution did the Russians suffer any serious reverses These the Tsar and his nobility blamed on their allies, the British and Austrians, and by and large it was a fair assessment The army was a typical ancien régime army, organized upon the regimental basis There was no standing formation above the regiment and regiments were switched from one brigade to another on... notice The inhaber or commanding officer rarely took to the field The drudgery of command was left to his subordinate The life of the typical Russian soldier was brutal even by the standards of the time He was beaten on a regular basis, and while this was not unusual in ancien régime armies, the capricious nature of it was The junior officers were of the mind that the majority of the men were animals The. .. order He reorganized the laws of the land, the economy and the education system Earlier in the year he had established freedom of religion, and his treaty, or Concordat, with the Pope had finally brought religious peace The Treaty of Amiens, 1802 The Treaty of Amiens between France and Britain ended the last of the wars of the French Revolution It represented a defeat for William Pitt the Younger, but... 31 August the well-oiled military machine turned its back on the Channel and marched towards the Austrian and Russian threat Austria The Austrian army that awaited Napoleon was in a state of confusion, still reeling from the debacles of the First and the Second Coalitions In these wars, the armies of the French Revolution and Consulate continually outperformed their Habsburg counterparts The problems... from the Balkans with a 31 traditional duty of military service), but there were never enough to counter the French swarm of skirmishers To compound the problem, the Austrians were introducing greater discipline into the Grenzer to ensure their political reliability and make them more compatible with the rest of their army, but suppressing their old flair for irregular warfare The problems faced by the . the irresistible Imperial Guard met the immovable redcoats. It was the climax of the Napoleonic Wars and a moment when history trembled in the balance. The Guard could not know it, but they. Empire and twenty-two years of warfare. That warfare had started in 1793, and the Napoleonic Wars are the second half of the long struggle that was sparked by the French Revolution. During. name to the titanic struggles that ended on Waterloo's ridge. The story of the Napoleonic Wars begins in 1802 with the Peace of Amiens, known to some in Britain as 'the peace which