If the labor of staff officers was diminished by this method of camping and marching by lines, it must be evident that if such a system were applied to an army of one hundred thousand or one hundred and fifty thousand men, there would be no end to the columns, and the result would be the frequent occurrence of routs like that of Rossbach. The French Revolution introduced the system of divisions, which broke up the excessive compactness of the old formation, and brought upon the field fractions capable of independent movement on any kind of ground. This change was a real improvement,--although they went from one extreme to the other, by returning nearly to the legionary formation of the Romans. These divisions, composed usually of infantry, artillery, and cavalry, maneuvered and fought separately. They were very much extended, either to enable them to subsist without the use of depots, or with an absurd expectation of prolonging the line in order to outflank that of the enemy. The seven or eight divisions of an army were sometimes seen marching on the same number of roads, ten or twelve miles distant from each other; the head-quarters was at the center, with no other support than five or six small regiments of cavalry of three hundred or four hundred men each, so that if the enemy concentrated the mass of his forces against one of these divisions and beat it, the line was pierced, and the general-in-chief, having no disposable infantry reserve, could do nothing but order a retreat to rally his scattered columns. Bonaparte in his first Italian campaign remedied this difficulty, partly by the mobility of his army and the rapidity of his maneuvers, and partly by concentrating the mass of his divisions upon the point where the decisive blow was to fall. When he became the head of the government, and saw the sphere of his means and his plans constantly increasing in magnitude, he readily perceived that a stronger organization was necessary: he avoided the extremes of the old system and the new, while still retaining the advantages of the divisional system. Beginning with the campaign of 1800, he organized corps of two or three divisions, which he placed under the command of lieutenant-generals, and formed of them the wings, the center, and the reserve of his army.[40]