Of the Battle of Dreux

The battle of Dreux, which I was old enough to have heard spoken of by men who had fought in it, furnishes a lesson that students of war would do well to ponder. Both commanders — the Prince of Condé on one side, the Constable Montmorency on the other — were at different hours of the same afternoon taken prisoner. The same battle that saw one army seemingly routed saw that army’s enemy broken in its turn before evening. Victory and defeat shifted so rapidly, and on such slender contingencies, that those who wrote their accounts of the day were obliged to describe two entirely different battles that had somehow occupied the same ground and the same hours.

This is the nature of fortune in war, and it is a nature that military writers do not sufficiently acknowledge. They reconstruct battles with a clarity of cause and effect that the men who fought them never possessed. The captain who ordered a charge to the left did not know what we know now — that the ground there was firmer, that the enemy’s horse was already fatigued, that a small wood concealed a reserve. He guessed, or he followed instinct, or he acted on information that was half wrong. And then fortune took his decision and made of it either genius or disaster.

“We judge a commander’s decisions by their results — which is to say, we judge him not on what he knew and chose, but on what he could not have known and did not choose. This is our ordinary injustice toward men of action.”

I do not say this to excuse bad commanders. There is real skill in war, real knowledge, real courage, real preparation — and they matter. But they do not determine the outcome, only improve the odds. The Constable Montmorency was not a fool, and he was captured. The Prince of Condé was not without ability, and he was captured too. The man who took them prisoner was fortune herself, distributing her gifts with the impartiality she always maintains. She owes allegiance to no one. She makes victors and prisoners of both sides in a single afternoon, and then leaves the historians to explain why it had to be so.