A Greater than Napoleon by Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart

There is perhaps no military dictum so universally quoted as Napoleon's "Read and reread the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Cesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Eugène, and Frederick; take them for your model, that is the only way of becoming a great captain, to obtain the secrets of the art of war. " In another of his maxims he said, "Knowledge of the great operations of war can only be acquired by experience and by the applied study of all the great captains. Gustavus, Turenne, and Frederick, as well as Alexander, Hannibal, and Cesar, have all acted on the same principles."

Here Napoleon appears to single out a list of six, or possibly seven, commanders who stand out as supreme in the history of warfare. Whether consciously or unconsciously, there has been a general tendency among students of war to accept Napoleon's list as a standard classification of merit-not merely a haphazard mention-when completed by the addition of his own name. True, some have felt the absurdity of counting Eugène as worthy to the exclusion of Marlborough, and others have dropped Turenne because of a perhaps mistaken idea that greatness is synonymous with vastness of destruction, or for the rather better reason that his record lacked the decisive results gained by his compeers. In this way one finds that not a few commentators have arrived at a list of three ancient commanders-Alexander, Hannibal, and Cesar-and three modern-Gustavus, Frederick, and Napoleon-as the Himalayan peaks of military history. That Frederick, with his gross blunders and most unoriginal "oblique order," should receive preference over such consummate artists as Turenne and Marlborough must remain one of the mysteries of military criticism. This is not the place to deal with the fallacy. Here we are concerned with the great captains of the ancient world, and so far as we desire a comparison with the modern, Napoleon himself affords it, since his supremacy is hardly questioned.