Napoleon was the man to put mass infantries on the battlefield. Thjis kind of warfare led to the huget slaughters of 18th and 20th century wars. The Iraq war may signal a turn away from that method. Hopefully, also Bush foreign policy turns us away from the "realist" foreign policy that supported the status quo from the Congress of Vienna until 9/11.
From Victor Hugo -Les Miserables
Volume II Book First.--Waterloo
Chapter IX. The Unexpected:
"Odd numerical coincidence,--twenty-six battalions rode to meet twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen squares, two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders, taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm, mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse, the alternate and symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the jingling of the cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand and savage breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once, a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads with gray mustaches, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!" All this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an earthquake.
All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,-- a trench between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.
It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning, directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms deep between its double slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming the riders; and there being no means of retreat,-- the whole column being no longer anything more than a projectile,-- the force which had been acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled there pell-mell, grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss.
This began the loss of the battle."
This is specifically why there were so many casualties during the War Between the States. The generals at that time studied, and used, Napoleonic battle strategies. The problem was, the firearms were revolutionized at the same time, and produced terrible carnage at close range.
Actually, the size of militaries has been on a steady decline since Korea worldwide, and the numbers of deaths due to "war, terrorism, and conflict" as measured by the (get this) STOCKHOLM PEACE INSTITUTE has declined sharply since . . . the U. S. became the world's sole superpower in the early 1990s.
The Romans did it before him. As did the Magyars, the Egyptians, and the Mongolians, to name a few.