Infantry Comes Back
Infantry weapons began their comeback on the battlefield in the latter stage of the Hundred Years’ War (early 15th century), when English longbowmen dug outward-pointing stakes into the ground to protect themselves from charging horses and repeatedly decimated French formations of heavily armoured cavalry.
The arrows from the longbows (and the new crossbows) could penetrate chain mail at a considerable distance, so the mounted knights were forced to use plate armour carefully designed with ridges and oblique facets that would deflect arrows, but they couldn’t protect their horses with similar armour. The weight was simply too great. In the last battles of the Hundred Years’ War, like Agincourt in 1415, dismounted French knights wearing about sixty pounds of plate armour charged on foot; or rather, they died trying.
The lesson was learned: what we need is real infantry, not dismounted horsemen in metal clothing. By the 16th century, combat once again centred on clashes of heavy infantry, fighting in a style that would have been familiar to Alexander the Great. He could have taken command of either side when two armies clashed at Ceresole, not far from Turin, towards the end of the Italian wars in 1544 – as long as he’d learned the right languages, and taken a short course on firearms.
Now with Guns
The infantry phalanxes were essentially the same, carrying pikes that were no more than glorified spears, but the French side placed a rank of arquebusiers (men armed with heavy matchlock muskets that fired a half-ounce bullet) behind the first rank of pikemen. As Captain Blaise de Montluc explained:
In this way we should kill all their captains in the front rank. But we found they were as ingenious as ourselves, for behind their first line of pikes they had put pistoleers. Neither side fired till we were touching – and then there was wholesale slaughter. Every shot told: the front rank on each side went down. The second and third ranks met over the corpses of their comrades in front, the rear ranks pushing them forward. And as we pushed harder, the enemy tumbled over.1
16th-century musket-wielding infantry on the march during the Italian wars
Despite the firearms, it was still basically the same old shoving match: the ‘push of pike’, as men of the 16th century called it. The French and their Swiss mercenary allies had the advantage of pushing downhill, and when French cavalry hit their German infanty opponents, the Landsknechte, in the flank, their formation folded up, and they were herded into a tightly packed mob where they had no space to use their pikes. Out of seven thousand Landsknechte, nearly five thousand were slaughtered. The Italian infantry on the left of the line had already marched off the field to save itself, but when the Spanish veterans on the Imperial right tried to retreat through a small wood in their rear, they were quickly cut off by the French cavalry, with the French infantry close behind.
And when they descried us only 400 paces away, and with our cavalry ready to charge, they threw down their pikes and surrendered to the horsemen. You might see fifteen or twenty of them around a man at arms, pressing about him and asking for quarter, for fear of us of the infantry who were wanting to cut all their throats. A great many – perhaps half – got killed, the rest were accepted as prisoners.
Blaise de Montluc2
It was full circle: what happened at Ceresole was indistinguishable, except in minor details, from what had happened under the walls of Umma four thousand years before, or at Issus halfway between the two.
The Age of Mercenaries
Blessed be those happy ages that were strangers to the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor I am satisfied is now in hell, receiving the reward of his cursed invention, which is the cause that very often a cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
In the 16th century the most powerful weapons in the world, the great siege cannons, were capable of killing perhaps half a dozen people (if they stood close together) at a range of a few hundred yards. Today, less than five centuries later, the modern counterparts of those weapons, the intercontinental ballistic missiles, can kill several million people at a range of seven or eight thousand miles. But only the very last phase of the process that delivered us from there to here was dominated by technology.
Until the last 150 years, the weapons used by the West were nothing special. Indeed, the so-called ‘gunpowder empires’ of the Islamic world, Ottoman, Safavid (Persian) and Moghul, were quicker off the mark with firearms, making both arquebuses and cannon central to their battle tactics at an earlier date: the first standing infantry force equipped with firearms in the world was the Janissaries of Mehmed II’s Ottoman army in the 1440s.3
What happened in 15th- and 16th-century Europe was the creation of modern centralised states by ambitious monarchs who sought absolute power. To succeed they had to destroy the military power of the old feudal aristocracy, which was mainly based on providing the kingdom with cavalry. The solution was to reinvent the classical armies of antiquity, which were more effective in combat. More importantly, the nobility, who had hitherto been able to blackmail the king by threatening not to fight or provide horsepower in times of war, now lost a vital instrument of leverage. The switch to infantry was very much in the monarch’s political interest.
On the other hand, the monarchs were not interested in arming their ordinary subjects and giving them military training. The subjects might then use their new skills and their numbers to challenge the monarchs’ absolute power. So the kings and queens chose instead to hire mercenaries who sold their loyalty to any government willing to pay them. In the poorer parts of Europe like Switzerland, exporting companies of trained mercenary soldiers became a national industry4 – and because mercenaries cost so much, armies stayed small. The average 16th-century battle involved only about ten thousand men per side.
Armies all over Europe followed the model adopted by the Spaniards, the most successful military power of the age, right down to the early 17th century. They had solid tercios (phalanxes) of pikemen, sixteen, twenty, or even thirty ranks deep. There were musketeers at the corners of the formation and heavy, barely mobile field artillery across the front of the line, but gunpowder weapons played a distinctly secondary role.
Even these cumbersome firearms, however, were more effective than those in China, where the explosive results of mixing saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal had first been discovered. As early as 1232 Chinese troops defending the city of Luoyang against the Mongols had used a ‘thunder bomb’, an iron vessel filled with gunpowder and launched from a catapult. Within twenty-five years, they were using the ‘fire-lance’, a primitive gun consisting of a bamboo tube stuffed with gunpowder that would fire a cluster of pellets about 250 yards. It was probably Mongol armies, having copied the Chinese weapons, who brought them to Europe, where the first real metal guns were cast in the 1320s.5
Thunder bombs away: earliest known image of a Chinese fire lance.
Why China never developed firearms any further is a major historical puzzle, for the country’s other technologies, from printing to seagoing ships, remained abreast or ahead of European technologies as late as 1500. It may just be that China’s main adversaries, the Mongols and other pastoral peoples, did not push the technology any further themselves (pastoralists tend not to). At any rate, China never independently went beyond ‘fire-lances’, while both in Europe and in the Muslim empires firearms developed within two centuries into giant cannons able to hurl an iron shot weighing 1,125 pounds at city walls, and into portable arquebuses (early muskets) firing half-ounce bullets to an effective range of one hundred yards.
These new firearms had a bigger role in sieges than in battles, and more at sea than on land. It was the Turkish army’s massed cannons that breached the walls of Constantinople, for most of the previous millennium the world’s greatest city, in 1453: they just banged away and dug a deeper and deeper groove at the base of the walls until they fell under their own weight. At sea the broad-beamed, ocean-going sailing ships of western Europe proved to be ideal artillery platforms. By the early 1500s the cannons were mounted to fire broadsides at close range, and artillery duels between cannons ranged on two or even three decks would decide most battles at sea for the next three hundred years. On the battlefield itself, however, gunpowder weapons took much longer to come into their own.
Early firearms like arquebuses had the same range as crossbows, took less training to use, and they made a satisfactory bang, but the arquebusiers remained a secondary element in battle up to the 17th century. The core of the army was still the massed ranks of disciplined pikemen who could defend themselves (and the arquebusiers) from cavalry charges, and whose clashes with the other side’s similarly equipped phalanxes of pikemen were generally decisive.
But this unwieldy, slowed-down version of classical warfare was to change in the cataclysm known as the Thirty Years’ War.
Thirty Years, Eight Million Dead
From the mid-16th century the Protestant Reformation set off local religious wars in Europe like a string of firecrackers – notably ten civil wars in France that killed an estimated three million people in 1562–1598, and an 80-year uprising against Spanish rule in the Netherlands beginning in 1568. In the years after 1618, however, these local quarrels merged into the first war in which all the European powers were involved. By the time the Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, battles had assumed the form they would retain until little more than a century ago, and eight million people were dead.
The religious passions were real, but it was governments, not churches, that fought the war. Unintended but inevitable, a unified system of European states was emerging, in which everybody was playing in the same continent-wide game: a balance-of-power system where every increase in might for one state was automatically a loss of security for all the others. Countries as far apart as Sweden and Spain, with no concrete reasons for fighting each other, ended up killing each other’s troops on the battlefields of Germany – and in the end, religion was less important than the zero-sum game of power. That is why, towards the end of the war, when the Catholic Hapsburg dynasty (Spain and Austria) seemed to be getting too strong, Catholic France allied itself with the weakening Protestant powers and prolonged the war until the ‘balance of power’ was restored.
It was Germany, where most of the battles of the Thirty Years’ War were fought, that paid the price for this policy.
Drunk with victory, the troops defied all efforts to control them… Towards midday flames suddenly shot up at almost the same moment at twenty different places. There was no time for (generals) Tilly and Pappenheim to ask whence came the fire; staring in consternation, they rallied the drunken, disorderly, exhausted men to fight it. The wind was too strong, and in a few minutes the city was a furnace, the wooden houses crashing to their foundations in columns of smoke and flame. The cry was now to save the army and the imperialist officers struggled in vain to drive their men into the open. Rapidly whole quarters were cut off by walls of smoke so that those who lingered for booty or lost their way, or lay in a drunken stupor in the cellars, alike perished.
C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years’ War6
Tilly’s entry into the destroyed city of Magdeburg, 25 May 1631
Magdeburg’s sack and destruction in 1631, with the death of some forty thousand inhabitants, was just another incident in a seemingly endless war. Mercenary armies marched across Germany season after season, spreading disease in their wake. Starving groups of refugees and lawless bands of deserters roamed the countryside, stealing food from the peasants who were still working their land. There were cases of cannibalism. By the time the Peace of Westphalia ended the slaughter in 1648, Germany’s population had fallen by over one third: from twenty-one million to only thirteen million.
Then, quite abruptly, the steady escalation in the scale of European wars stopped. No subsequent war in Europe caused deaths on anything like the same scale until the early 19th century, and civilian losses never outnumbered military casualties again until the mid-20th century. But the new restraint shown by Europe’s rulers after 1648 was not a response to the huge casualty toll. The overwhelming majority of the war’s victims had been German peasants, about whom nobody powerful really cared. The 350,000 soldiers killed were a bigger concern, for they were very expensive to train and maintain. But what really persuaded the surviving rulers to impose limits on their future wars was the painfully learned lesson that if war got too badly out of hand, whole states and dynasties could disappear (as many did during the Thirty Years’ War).
The primary goal of any dynasty is survival, and the Thirty Years’ War taught the monarchs who survived that they had to cooperate – at least a little bit. They could fight wars against each other, seize border provinces and overseas colonies, undermine and betray each other to their hearts’ content, but no member of the rulers’ club would ever again be allowed to lose so badly as to disappear from the game entirely (except Poland, which was partitioned by the unanimous agreement of all its powerful neighbours.) An age of far more limited warfare was coming.
Swedish Innovation
Firearms finally took over the battlefield during the Thirty Years’ War, but this wasn’t due to any great improvement in the weapons. It was the tactics that changed, and the man responsible was King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. His kingdom had only a million and a half people, leaving it at a permanent disadvantage against the stronger countries surrounding, so he tried to compensate by changing the way the weapons were used. In doing so, he created the first army that Alexander the Great would not have known how to command.
Solid formations of pikemen standing shoulder to shoulder still ruled the battlefields of Europe, but Gustavus Adolphus realised that they were ideal targets for gunfire, if you could concentrate enough of it onto them. No doubt others had the same insight, but they lacked either the courage or the authority to make the radical tactical changes needed to take advantage.
Gustavus Adolphus had both, so he turned two-thirds of his pikemen into musketeers, ranged in ranks only three deep and trained to fire in volleys (one line standing, one crouching and one kneeling). He also dumped the cumbersome field artillery that needed twenty-four horses to move it, and substituted lighter guns that could be pulled by only one or two horses and used a prepared cartridge – so they could be moved around the battlefield much faster, even under fire, and they fired far more often.
The Swedish king’s army could shatter a formation of pikemen from a hundred yards away with no need for physical contact; just musket volleys and cannon fire. Then, once the bullets and cannon-balls had torn enough holes in the enemy’s formation, his cavalry would charge and turn disorder into rout.
When the Swedes arrived in Germany in 1630 to rescue the failing Protestant cause, they easily demolished the old-style armies of their ‘imperial’ (i.e. Spanish and Austrian) opponents. Gustavus Adophus himself was killed in battle in 1632, and in the end the Swedish intervention there was not decisive – but every other army in Europe rapidly adopted the revolutionary tactics originated by the Swedish king.
Drill
Firearms and not cold steel now decide battles.
J. F. Puysegur, 17487
By 1700 pikemen had disappeared and all infantrymen carried flintlock muskets, much improved firearms that could be loaded and fired twice a minute. The muskets were inaccurate even at a hundred yards, but that was not a problem because they were not intended for use against individual targets. An infantry battalion’s job was only to deliver volleys of fire. It was a sort of human machine gun with several hundred moving parts (the soldiers), able to deliver a single burst of fire every thirty seconds.
During the battle of Fontenoy in 1745, the British Guards Brigade, emerging from a sunken road, found itself only a couple of hundred yards from a large formation of French infantry. The French officers invited the British commander, Lord Charles Hay, to open fire, but he replied: ‘No, sir, we never fire first. After you,’ and continued to advance until the French finally let off their volley. While they reloaded, the surviving British troops marched on to a distance of only thirty paces and fired an answering volley that killed or wounded nineteen officers and six hundred men of the French regiment in a single second – whereupon the rest broke and fled. The famous command given to the American revolutionary troops at Bunker Hill – ‘Hold your fire until you see the whites of their eyes’ – was not bravado. It was the standard tactical doctrine of the time.
The job of a private soldier in an 18th-century battle was essentially to carry out the several dozen complicated movements necessary to load and aim his musket while facing what amounted to a firing squad only a hundred yards away. To get men to do this took years of training and utterly ruthless discipline: Prussian army regulations stated that ‘if a soldier during an action looks as if about to flee, or so much as sets foot outside the line, the non-commissioned officer standing behind him will run him through with his bayonet and kill him on the spot.’8
Musket drill from L’Art Militaire pour l’Infanterie by von Wallhausen, 1630
‘It never entered my mind that we were at war’
The casualties in an 18th-century battle rivalled anything in ancient warfare: at Blenheim in 1704 the victors lost 12,500 men (24 percent of their force), and the losers suffered 20,000 killed and wounded (40 percent of their force) in five hours of fighting on a single day. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) the Prussian army lost 180,000 dead, three times the number it started out with.9 And yet the century and a half between the Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution (1648–1789) truly was an era of limited war.
The actual battles got bigger – from an average of ten thousand men to thirty thousand soldiers on each side in the course of the Thirty Years’ War, and up again to the hundred thousand mark in the biggest battles of the 18th century – but their political and economic impact on civilian society was very small. Some distant territory might change hands or a different candidate might gain a throne somewhere, but population, prosperity, and industry continued to grow across most of Europe and the wars barely registered in the consciousness of the average civilian. At the height of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the Anglo-Irish novelist Laurence Sterne left London for Paris without getting the necessary passport to travel in an enemy country (‘it never entered my mind that we were at war with France’), but nobody stopped him at the French coast, and the French foreign minister courteously sent him a passport after he had arrived at Versailles.10
Nobles and Vagabonds
By 1700, almost every kingdom of Europe had created a standing army made up of ‘regular’ soldiers paid directly by the government. Unlike mercenaries, regular troops had to be paid even in peacetime, but they were more reliable and they freed the monarchs from having to rely on ordinary citizens for military help in a crisis. Instead, the armies of Europe ended up being composed almost everywhere of ‘nobles and vagabonds’.
The newly centralised monarchies bought off the old aristocratic class by giving them a monopoly on officers’ jobs in the new regular armies: they were losing their real power as the source of wealth shifted steadily from land to trade, but they got to keep their prestige. Their soldiers came from the other extreme of the social spectrum: the best were landless peasants; the worst were drunks and outright criminals. It was generally believed that keeping control of such men required the regular use of the lash and the hangman’s noose: ‘In general, the common soldier must fear his officers more than the enemy,’ said Frederick the Great11, and Wellington remarked of his troops: ‘I don’t know if they frighten the enemy; but by God they frighten me!’ Yet the trained soldier, though despised as an individual, was an expensive commodity whose life the state was reluctant to squander in battle.
Limitations
Countries fought their wars mainly with the troops they had available at the start, since it took several years of repetitive training accompanied by physical violence as punishment for the slightest error, to instil the complex drills and instant, blind obedience that would make their soldiers useful in battle. That meant the armies had to be kept up to full strength even in peacetime, which added to the expense. And the soldiers were still likely to desert, especially if battle seemed imminent.
European armies of this era could not ‘live off the land’: if the soldiers were allowed to forage for themselves the army would simply melt away. So there had to be some central magazine near the area of operations, prepared long beforehand, which stored huge amounts of food for the troops. The field ovens could advance up to sixty miles from the magazine in order to bake the bread, and the bread wagons could deliver it another forty miles to the army, but that was the limit. In theory, no army could advance more than a hundred miles into enemy territory without setting up an intermediate magazine. Despite the tight control under which they were kept (and the meticulous catering arrangements) 80,000 men managed to desert from the Russian army during the Seven Years’ War, and 70,000 from the French.12
The Duke of Marlborough’s siege train at the Battle of Schellenberg, 1704
Moreover, armies could only campaign when there was grass in the fields (May to October), because an army of 100,000 men was typically accompanied by 40,000 animals. Those 40,000 animals went through eight hundred acres of grass a day, so armies spent much of their time just moving to new grazing grounds.13 Wars were therefore fought mostly in well-defined border areas that were full of fortresses, and consisted mainly of sieges. In 1708 Marlborough’s siege train of eighteen heavy guns and twenty siege mortars required 3,000 wagons and 16,000 horses to move it and took thirty miles of road. Armies manoeuvred to threaten each other’s supply lines and force a withdrawal, but actual battles were relatively rare because soldiers were too expensive to waste. As France’s Marshal Saxe remarked in 1732: ‘I do not favour pitched battles… and I am convinced that a skilful general could make war all his life without being forced into one.’14
All these practical limitations on war were reinforced by the fact that the players were living in a balance-of-power system: no great power could suffer total defeat, because the others would pile in to stop the big winner from taking over the whole system. The down-side of this system, however, is that it draws every major power into any war involving the biggest players: it becomes a ‘world war’. The term is relatively new, but the concept is not. For over 350 years, ever since the Thirty Years’ War, almost every one of Europe’s major wars, whatever its specific origin, has rapidly spread to involve all the great powers of the time.
By the 18th century, with European empires running most of the rest of the planet as well, they were also world wars in the purely geographical sense. During the Seven Years’ War, for example, not only were the European powers of France, Austria, Sweden and Russia ranged against Great Britain, Prussia and Hanover, but there was also fighting in every continent except Australia. In the peace settlement, Britain, the biggest winner, gained Canada, Senegal, and some West Indian islands. It also retained most of the fruits of Clive’s military victories in India, but had to return Cuba, the Philippines, and Argentina to Spain. The only respects in which the Seven Years’ War didn’t match the modern definition of a world war were the lethality of the killing systems and the scale of the casualties.
‘Conquering the World’
Europe did ‘conquer the world’, so to speak, but it happened in two different phases, and the first was dead easy. The European conquest of the Stone Age peoples of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries did not require technology and organisation of a very high order. The array of quick-killer epidemic diseases, evolved over ten thousand years in the crowded cities of Eurasia, devastated the native populations even before a shot was fired. The human population of the Americas dropped by at least 90 percent in the course of the 1500s due to epidemic diseases, and when the forests reclaimed their abandoned farms (the native peoples were almost all farmers), the new trees extracted so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that it helped to trigger the ‘Little Ice Age’.15
The actual conquests still required military violence, of course, but the Europeans’ horses and their iron weapons overawed the natives, and the methodical Eurasian ruthlessness of the invaders shocked them into passivity. However, any other civilised domain – the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, the Moghul Empire in India, or the Chinese Empire – could have subjugated the peoples of the Americas just as easily, had they possessed the ocean-going ships and the commercial drive to take them there. On land, the Muslim world was certainly powerful enough: its armies were still roughly comparable to those of Christian Europe, and as late as 1683 an Ottoman army was able to besiege Vienna, more than halfway from Istanbul to Paris.
At that point, European power in other parts of Eurasia, and even in Africa, rarely extended inland beyond the range of a cannon shot: their ships were unbeatable, but their armies were less so. The second phase of the conquest (1700–1900), when the British conquered most of India, the Ottoman borders began to contract under Austrian and Russian pressure, and Africa was finally brought under colonial rule, was militarily more demanding, and only at the very end of that period did European weapons technology make any significant advances. But the rigid discipline and ruthlessly efficient organisation that the Europeans brought to the use of these weapons, backed by their rapidly growing wealth, could not be matched by their opponents elsewhere.
To a European of the last generation before the French Revolution, therefore, war would have seemed at worst a bearable evil. One by one the other parts of the Old World were falling under European rule, while in Europe itself cities were not sacked, civilians did not face intolerable demands for their taxes and their sons in order to fight wars, and whole countries did not disappear or dissolve into chaos as a result of war. The institution of war had been brought under control, limited and rationalised (as that extremely rational age might have put it).
But in the 18th century, few realised how fragile all these limitations were.
Notes
1. Charles C. Oman, The Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1937), 237–38.
2. Ibid., 240.
3. Douglas E. Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Philadelphia: Westview Press, 2011), 83.
4. Andre Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe 1494–1789 (Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1979), 28.
5. J.J. Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 197–98.
6. C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years’ War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 288–89.
7. J.F. Puysegur, L’art de la guerre par principes et par règles (Paris, 1748), I.
8. Edward Mead Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (New York: Atheneum, 1966), 56.
9. Hew Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 8.
10. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), 85.
11. Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (London: David and Charles, 1974), 62.
12. Strachan, op. cit., 9.
13. Martin van Crefeld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 38.
14. Maurice, Comte de Saxe, Les Réveries, ou Mémoires sur l’Art de la Guerre (Paris: Jean Drieux,1757) 77.
15. Koch, Alexander; Brierley, Chris; Maslin, Mark M.; Lewis, Simon L. (2019). ‘Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492’. Quaternary Science Reviews, 207: 13–36.