In each of these cases Napoleon possessed the ability to make such arrangements that his columns, starting from points widely separated, were concentrated with wonderful precision upon the decisive point of the zone of operations; and in this way he insured the successful issue of the campaign. The choice of the decisive point was the result of a skillful application of the principles of strategy; and the arrangements for moving the troops give us an example of logistics which originated in his own closet. It has been long claimed that Berthier framed those instructions which were conceived with so much precision and usually transmitted with so much clearness; but I have had frequent opportunities of knowing that such was not the truth. The emperor was his own chief staff officer. Provided with a pair of dividers opened to a distance by the scale of from seventeen to twenty miles in a straight line, (which made from twenty-two to twenty-five miles, taking into account the windings of the roads,) bending over and sometimes stretched at full length upon his map, where the positions of his corps and the supposed positions of the enemy were marked by pins of different colors, he was able to give orders for extensive movements with a certainty and precision which were astonishing. Turning his dividers about from point to point on the map, he decided in a moment the number of marches necessary for each of his columns to arrive at the desired point by a certain day; then, placing pins in the new positions, and bearing in mind the rate of marching that he must assign to each column, and the hour of its setting out, he dictated those instructions which are alone enough to make any man famous. Ney coming from the shores of Lake Constance, Lannes from Upper Swabia, Soult and Davoust from Bavaria and the Palatinate, Bernadotte and Augereau from Franconia, and the Imperial Guard from Paris, were all thus arranged in line on three parallel roads, to debouch simultaneously between Saalfeld, Gera, and Plauen, few persons in the army or in Germany having any conception of the object of these movements which seemed so very complicated. In the same manner, in 1815, when Blücher had his army quietly in cantonments between the Sambre and the Rhine, and Wellington was attending _fêtes_ in Brussels, both waiting a signal for the invasion of France, Napoleon, who was supposed to be at Paris entirely engrossed with diplomatic ceremonies, at the head of his guard, which had been but recently reformed in the capital, fell like a thunderbolt upon Charleroi and Blücher's quarters, his columns arriving from all points of the compass, with rare punctuality, on the 14th of June, in the plains of Beaumont and upon the banks of the Sambre. (Napoleon did not leave Paris until the 12th.)