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Rh them: 'You will find your battalion at such a halting-place.' At this time the army numbered 200,000 men."

And here is another passage, which also gives an idea of the immense and practical grasp of this intense mind:

There is nothing relating to warfare that I cannot make myself. If nobody knows how to make gunpowder, I do. I can construct gun-carriages. If cannon must be cast, I will see that it is done properly. If tactical details must be taught, I will teach them.' Hence his competency at the outset—general in the artillery, major-general, diplomatist, financier, and administrator, all at once and in every direction. Thanks to his fecund apprenticeship, beginning with the Consulate, he shows Cabinet clerks and veteran Ministers who send in their reports to him what to do. 'I am a better administrator than they are: when one has been obliged to rack his brains to find out how to feed, maintain, control, and animate with the same spirit and will two or three hundred thousand men, a long distance from their country, one soon gets at the secrets of administration.' He takes in at a glance every part of the human machine. He fashions and manipulates each in its proper place and function; the generators of power, the organs of its transmission, the extra working gear, the composite action, the speed which ensues, their final result,