It would also have meant admitting that perfidious Albion had *ever come up with an idea to rival that of the magnifique French! This stubborn weakness in later wars was to also hold them back in such patently ineffective troop movements as the massed column so loved by Napoleon, and so regularly shredded by the spread lines of English guns... but Napoleon had fielded the world's first mass armies, so what were a few thousand more dead peasants...? La gloire, la belle France!

Could have *something to do with the fact that the French have never won a single war in what, about 500 years?