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different and totally, lethally correct: An interlocking set of murderous gears that could be set loose by his artillery®. In the course of the French victory the next day Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel was first blinded by French musket shot and then bled to death. It was a poetic end. He had been, like so many of the Generals who would tumble before Napoleon in coming years, absolutely blind to forces perfectly clear and visible and usable to the revolutionary upstart. Napoloen’s European opponents would come to fear and admire nothing so much as the Emperor’s specific, almosty mystical sort of battlefield vision. He could look at a battlefield and see possibilities —- certanties, in fact - that eluded older, famous men. They named his masterful insight the “Coup d’Oeil”: an instant, apprehending glimpse of power waves®. He saw forces and facts in war that were obscured from his enemies by their own habits of mind and the limits of their creativity. The great Prussian military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz, who was made prisoner by Napoleon during the massacre at Jena, used his time locked up to begin compiling notes for his classic work of Western strategy, On War. “Genius,” he later wrote, “rises above the rules.” Mastery of strategy, Von Clausewitz explained, was not merely the result of steely courage, geometric calculation or even luck, as earlier writers had figured it. Rather, it was derived from the ownership ofa sensibility that could discern the secretly running lines of power that made the old ways instantly irrelevant and appallingly dangerous. Historians who mark out and consider the really long, century by century movement of humanity, often divide time into “historic” eras where fundamental, tsunami-like changes wipe clean old orders and other, more sedate periods where time dawdles like a quiet lake. This is the difference between living in Warsaw in, say, 1339 or 1939. The first period was sober and silent; the second was awfully awake. Historic moments like 1939 are marked by the fact that change comes to find you. It is often unavoidable. Your children are pulled into a World War. Your village is torn down. Your health is remade by science. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called the march of these snapping changes “punctuated equilibrium,” as the world is jumped from one state to another - and never turns back. He was largely considering the extinction of the dinosaurs, but we find the idea useful in thinking about history too. The Revolution of 1789 in France, for instance, which enabled the massive, volunteer armies Napoleon later brought to his wars, which were of unprecedented size. “Looking at the situation in this conventional manner, people at first expected to have to deal only with a seriously weakened French army,” Von Clausewitz explained later. “But in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination.”” The 5 An interlocking set of gears: David Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1974), 464; For a discussion of this generational mismatch, see the essay “YJ: A304 eT AK SOY 2" or Dai Xu, “Reconsidering the military aspect of great power rise and fall from a cultural perspective” PLA Daily, June 8, 2015 6 They named his masterful insight: Carl von Clausewitz, Howard, Michael, trans. Clausewitz On War, (Washington: Library of Congress, 1998) 102 7 But in 1793: On War, p 591 (1984) 15 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018247