Napoleon's command method was nearly as revolutionary as his strategy. The Emperor ran his campaigns from a portable office his staff called the Cabinet — saddle-mounted boxes full of maps, dispatches, and reports that traveled with him on every march — and worked from it with a speed and personal control that no commander before him had matched. Aides-de-camp memorized his orders verbally, secretaries took down dispatches he dictated while reading, dispatch-riders called estafettes carried his decisions to his marshals across the theater of war. Marshal Berthier, his chief of staff for nearly twenty years, translated the Emperor's rapid verbal commands into the written orders the army actually executed; lesser staff officers like General Gourgaud, who would later become his St. Helena memoirist, carried his particular messages to subordinate commanders. The result was an army that turned and reformed faster than any opponent could match, and a command system whose center was the Emperor himself, often working at a campaign table just like this one in the predawn hours before a battle.

This three-figure King & Country vignette puts Napoleon at the center of his command staff, hunched over the campaign table with a senior ordnance officer at left and a Général de Brigade of the Imperial Guard at center, the printed map spread between them. Napoleon wears his diagnostic dress: dark green Chasseur de la Garde colonel's coat with red facings and gold lace, white waistcoat, white breeches, black tall boots, the small bicorne worn athwartships in his personal habit. The Général de Brigade's tall fur colpack of the Imperial Guard cavalry, with red feather, marks him as senior Guard staff; the ordnance officer's heavy gold lace and white feather plume identify him as a senior administrative figure of the Maison Militaire. The map-strewn table is the set's anchor piece, suggesting any battle Napoleon ever directed — from Austerlitz in 1805 to Waterloo in 1815. It pairs naturally with the standing Napoleon Bonaparte figure for additional Emperor poses in the same display, the General Gourgaud figure of one of the actual aides-de-camp at the Emperor's campaign table, and General Jean-Baptiste Bessières commanding the Imperial Guard cavalry the staff orders are sending into action.

Set Number: NA448 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 3 figures + campaign table