Napoleon's activity we never find anything resembling an
expression of that wish, but find a series of orders, or expressions of
his will, very variously and indefinitely directed. Amid a long series
of unexecuted orders of Napoleon's one series, for the campaign of 1812,
was carried out--not because those orders differed in any way from the
other, unexecuted orders but because they coincided with the course of
events that led the French army into Russia; just as in stencil work
this or that figure comes out not because the color was laid on from
this side or in that way, but because it was laid on from all sides over
the figure cut in the stencil.

So that examining the relation in time of the commands to the events,
we find that a command can never be the cause of the event, but that a
certain definite dependence exists between the two.

To understand in what this dependence consists it is necessary to
reinstate another omitted condition of every command proceeding not from
the Deity but from a man, which is, that the man who gives the command
himself takes part in the event.

This relation of the commander to those he commands is just what is
called power. This relation consists in the following:

For common action people always unite in certain combinations, in which
regardless of the difference of the aims set for the common action, the
relation between those taking part in it is always the same.

Men uniting in these combinations always assume such relations toward
one another that the larger number take a more direct share, and the
smaller number a less direct share, in the collective action for which
they have combined.

Of all the combinations in which men unite for collective action one of
the most striking and definite examples is an army.

Every army is composed of lower grades of the service--the rank and
file--of whom there are always the greatest number; of the next higher
military rank--corporals and noncommissioned officers of whom there are
fewer, and of still-higher officers of whom there are still fewer,
and so on to the highest military command which is concentrated in one
person.

A military organization may be quite correctly compared to a cone, of
which the base with the largest diameter consists of the rank and file;
the next higher and smaller section of the cone consists of the next
higher grades of the army, and so on to the apex, the point of which
will represent the commander in ch