The Battlefield Is A Scene Of

Attributed to Napoleon in various collections of his military maxims, though no verbatim match has been confirmed in the canonical 78-maxim collection compiled by General Burnod and translated by Sir George D'Aguilar. Napoleon's battlefield brilliance — demonstrated most famously at Austerlitz (1805), where he deliberately lured the Allied armies into attacking a concealed weakness — was consistently noted by contemporaries and historians as resting on exactly this capacity to read, control, and exploit the disorder of battle.