Pangur Bán;11343429 said:
It's that context that tells you what significance a battle has in relation to a question like this. It'd be like judging how good an Age of Empires player was based on a couple of games where you didn't know how many trees, how many mines, pop limit, and so on the player (or those against him) was working with.
Well, yeah, but I don't really see the relevance of social history to determining the significance of the battle. I'm only seizing on social and economic history because they were specifically mentioned, mind.
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My own opinion on Napoleon as general - as opposed to Napoleon as *cough* "statesman" - is that he was both an excellent gambler and a lucky one, and generally a fine officer that I would have wanted nowhere near the command of an army fighting for a cause I support. He wasn't the epochal man that people too close to his time - like Clausewitz or Jomini - thought he was, and he didn't fundamentally change the way people make war, but then, no general has. Much like Alexander, he took an army that had been largely built for him already (the work of Carnot, the
loi Jourdan, and such) and expended it building a massive empire; unlike Alexander, he was unable to die before his empire failed, and his empire failed because of military defeats that
he personally sustained and mistakes that
he personally made.
Is that the work of a "greatest ever"? Meh.
I've already said that I have little truck with this "greatest general ever" nonsense, and that I usually treat these sorts of threads as ways to list "good generals that I, personally, think were pretty cool". None of whom are, in fact, on the Pole.
