Towards the end of his career he also ordered artillery charges and took redoubts with cavalry. This manoeuvre which suited him was in accord with French aggression but it produced scant success with less impetuous and agile troops. He moved all his forces to one point, and then gathered in an arc the isolated corps whose lines he had scattered. He was never concerned with retreat he travelled straight ahead like those Roman roads that cross mountains and precipices without a detour. He despised fortresses, which he was content to ignore adventured into countries he had invaded, and won everything by dint of battle. Military science changed like everything else as a result of the Revolution Bonaparte invented war on a grand scale, the victories of the Republic having furnished him with the idea through their mass requisitions.

In my youth, people read commentaries by Folard and Guischardt, Tempelhof and Lloyd, on Frederick II's campaigns they studied ordre profond and ordre mince on my second-lieutenant's desk I manoeuvred plenty of little squares, of wood. Four days afterwards they gathered up, amongst the wheat, soldiers who had died in the sunlight beneath the trampled crop, lying there, sticky with blood: maggots had already infested the wounds of the riper corpses.

In one charge alone, Lauriston trots towards the enemy at the head of a hundred cannon. Nine hundred mouths of bronze roar the plain and the cornfields are in flames whole villages vanish the action lasts twelve hours. It was then, at the moment when the battle was thought lost, that, alone judging to the contrary from the enemy manoeuvres, he shouted: 'The battle is won!' He sets his mind against a half-hearted victory he brings things back to the boil as Caesar dragged his astonished veterans back to the fight by the throat. Napoleon immediately returns to the left flank and repairs the damage incurred by MassГ©na. General CГ©sar de Laville, ordered to prevent disaster striking the left flank, finds him on the right flank directing Marshal Davout's attack. The Battle of Wagram (5th-6th of July 1809) continues the run of battles executed in Germany: Bonaparte deploys all his genius there. Bonaparte spoke to him and then forgot him: human relationships cool as quickly as the cannonball that strikes them. The account of Archduke Charles reports that, on the first day, two hundred and eighty eight Austrian cannon fired fifty-one thousand rounds, and that, on the next day, more than four hundred cannon took part on both sides.

On the 21st and 22nd of May the dreadful affair of Aspern-Essling takes place. At Abensberg, he defeated Archduke Louis, at EckmГјhl Archduke Charles: he cuts the Austrian Army in two, and achieves the passage of the Salza. Happy to have left Spain, Bonaparte hastened to Bavaria he set himself at the head of the Bavarians without waiting for the French: any soldiers would do for him. The Austrians, complaining of the violation of previous treaties, all at once crossed the River Inn at Braunau: they have been reproached for their tardiness, they wanted to do a Napoleon but speed was not their style. On the 9th of April 1809, the Fifth Coalition between England, Austria and Spain, was declared, silently relying on the discontent of other nations.

Les memoires d outre tombe