CHAPTER 9
Hotspur: But I remember, when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword …
Henry IV, Part I, I, iii, 33–35
HOTSPUR HAS JUST SURVIVED A BATTLE, WHICH (WITH SIEGES) ARE the most intense experiences that war inflicts upon its participants. He is extremely dry for, as a veteran of the Battle of Kohima (1944) recalled, ‘fighting is the most dehydrating experience known to man.’1 Thus, during the Four Days’ Battle (1666), Lieutenant Thomas Browne had a stock of beer handy so he could grab a bottle as needed.2 Hotspur is physically exhausted, breathless, even to the point of fainting, because combat is hard labour, demanding intense physical effort. ‘It was very hot work for about two hours,’ Colonel Blackadder told his wife about Ramillies.3 Hotspur is also exhausted with a rage that goes beyond sanity. So great is the chasm between battle and normal human behaviour that William Manchester, who fought as a US Marine in the South Pacific, concluded ‘No man in battle is really sane.’4 In battle, observed Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist, ‘frenzy had been openly let loose’. In Martin Parker's ballad ‘The Maunding Souldier’ (1629), a veteran, reflecting on his experience in combat confessed, ‘I laid about me as I were mad.’ A British officer remembered that at Culloden, ‘Our lads fought more like devils than men.’5 Perhaps this explains why just before the Battle of Edgehill, Sir Jacob Astley, a veteran of the Thirty Years War, prayed, 'O Lord. Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget thee do not forget me.’6
Battle: The Epitome of War
As General S. L. A. Marshall rightly observed, the experience of battle is ‘the epitome of war’.7 Battle deserves this designation not just because it is so intense and terrifying, transporting men into ‘an epidemic of insanity’ so violent that those who fail to make the transition usually fail to survive.8 Battles are decisive because they are invariably consensual. By agreeing to fight, both sides believe that it is greatly in their interest to do so. Battles are extremely confusing, and hard to reconstruct. Between 1485 and 1746 they normally took place over a day between dawn and dusk. The only major battle to last longer was Preston (17–19 August 1648), which was more a long drawn-out, large-scale ambush. It was not consensual since the Scots did not want to fight, but were trying to escape back home. Battles took place in a cycle with stages. They started when both sides agreed to fight; in the second stage they approached one another, choosing their ground and drawing up their forces; in the third they came into contact, fought it out, until one side usually broke and ran; the final stage, pursuit, was the bloodiest. In battle the three main arms, infantry, cavalry and artillery, played different roles, which changed during the early modern period mostly due to improved weapons.
‘The battle decides all,’ declared Field Marshal Montgomery. Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, agreed in 1677 that they ‘are the most Glorious and commonly the most important Acts of War, wherein usually the moments to obtain the victory are so few’. Unless they cannot help it, generals only commit their forces to battle when they believe they will win. As George Monck wrote, ‘I should have such to know that soldiers go into battle to conquer and not be killed.’9 In his Treatise on Modern War (1639), John Cruso, the best-selling military author, affirmed that ‘Of all the actions of war the most glorious and most important is to give battle.’10 That is why commanders staked as many forces as they could afford on a battle, since they were convinced that the benefits from winning were considerable. Conversely, the costs of losing were as great, if not greater, for not only have the losers hazarded all the men they can afford, but in the rout that normally follows a victory, many, if not most, of their troops are killed, wounded or captured.
Battles are extremely risky. ‘There is nothing,’ declared John Taylor, poet and veteran of the 1596 Cadiz and 1597 Azores expeditions, ‘more unsure than the success of a battle.’11 In battle everything is at hazard. ‘The loss of a battle is many times the loss of a kingdom,’ noted James Touchet, earl of Castlehaven. Thus Charles, Lord Cathcart, a brigade major who fought in the War of the Spanish Succession, observed in 1710 that ‘when there's a battle our all's at stake.’12
Even the most experienced soldiers had difficulty making sense of intense combat, which, as General George S. Patton put it, ‘is an orgy of disorder’.13 Wellington agreed. ‘The History of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball!’ the duke admitted after Waterloo, ‘Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle lost or won: but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred.’14 ‘It is not an easy thing to describe a battle,’ Lord George Murray wrote about Falkirk (1746), ‘Springs and motions escape the eye …add to this, the confusion, the noise, the concern that the people are in.’ William Patten recalled the fighting in 1547 was ‘terribly confused’.15 After the Battle of the Boyne (1690), Captain John Stevens, a Jacobite, wrote, ‘I shall not presume to write all the particulars of this unfortunate day's transactions, the confusion being such that few can pretend to do it.’16 Sir Richard Bulstrode came to the same conclusion when he tried to make sense of his own experiences at Edgehill:17
There is always great difference in relation of battles, it is certain that in a battle, the next man can hardly make a true relation of the actions of him that is next to him; for in such a Hurry and smoke of a Set Field, a man takes notice of nothing but what relates to his own safety. So that no man can give a clear account of particular passages.
Even today, when there are far better records (the first organized collection of personal memories was after Waterloo), it is still hard to make sense of battles. Peter Paret, the distinguished military historian, tried to trace the stages of an engagement in which he had fought as a staff sergeant in the American Army near Luzon in the Philippines, ‘but found that as a participant I could never fully reconstruct so much as a skirmish’.18
Why is combat so confusing?
First of all, people are frightened and concentrating on their own survival in the milieu William Patten remembered at Pinkie in 1547:19
Herewith waxed it very hot, on both sides with pitiful cries, horrible roars, and terrible thundering of guns besides. The day darkened above head, with smoke of shot. The danger of death on every side, the bullets, pellets and arrows flying each were so thick and so uncertainly lighting, that nowhere was there any surety of safety.
Finding out what was happening in such an environment, particularly for troops experiencing it for the first time, is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Jammed in ranks, neighbours blocked one's view, as did helmets and raised weapons. Sometimes men could not see the enemy until they were almost upon them. Gunpowder smoke from muskets and cannon limited visibility: it was a rolling white stinking fog, interspersed with red and orange flashes of exploding weapons. When the enemy emerged from this fog they seemed to be taller and thus more threatening. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries armies adopted tall hats, which added to this impression. So commanders tried to stay up wind of the other side. The noise of weapons firing was intense and dis-orientating, particularly when discharged by ranks, with the muskets of the men behind going off almost beside one's ear. Innocent of I-pods, rock bands, jet planes and jackhammers, our ancestors lacked our familiarity with such ear-drum shattering noises. Captain John Campbell could not remember recapturing his regimental colour at Ramillies (which today would have won him a Victoria Cross), ‘the fire and smoke being so thick’.20
Battle is both literally and figuratively a fog. Little wonder mistakes occur. At Aughrim (1691), William III's left wing mistook a bog for firm ground, sinking into the mud up to their buttocks (none the less they won the battle). Fourteen years later, during the assault on Barcelona ‘our guides mistook the way’, recalled Colonel John Richards, ‘The Grenadiers went one way, the musketeers another, and the Prince and My Lord [Peterborough] the third.’21 Modern soldiers might call such an event a ‘SNAFU’ since confusion is the norm in combat. Clausewitz used another ‘F’ word, ‘friction’, to describe this. In war, he explained, even the simplest things are difficult. Unforeseen obstacles—the weather, miscommunications, misunderstanding, fear, stress, a failure to reason why—all slow things down, degenerating the impact of an operation over time.
The historian is also trying to understand what combat was really like during a dissimilar age hundreds of years ago. Now everyone admits to being frightened: then hardly anyone did so. Today men and women use the first-person singular frequently: then it was rarely employed. Hardly anyone wrote autobiographies (the word was not coined until 1806), which were invariably religious self-examinations. Early modern men were very concerned for their ‘public face’, which they were loathe to lose by, for example, admitting to fear. In his preface to Captain Roger Williams's Actions in the Low Countries (1618), his comrade John Hayward praised the author, for using the third-person singular: ‘he hath wrote so modestly of himself, that some might happily esteem him a looker on.’22 Military diaries, particularly before the last third of the seventeenth century, tended to be day-to-day descriptions of what happened with hardly any analysis or personal details.23
The Cycle of Battle
Battles usually start when both sides agree to fight. Sometimes there can be a ritual to them. The Battle of the Spurs (1513) resembled the fights of the New Guinea Stone Age tribesmen, where many insults are exchanged, and perhaps a few spears and arrows are thrown, until someone gets hurt and the proceedings end. If one side withdrew there could be no battle. For instance, on the morning of 4 May 1704 at Dursburg Hill, Sergeant Millner remembered that the French advanced, but after coming within allied cannon range pulled back. The two sides stood staring at each other until four o'clock, when the enemy withdrew, ‘leaving us the Honour of the day,’ the sergeant bragged.24
As both sides approached each other they would send out scouts, usually cavalry, to discover the other's position and strength, and a good site for engaging him. Once the sides had implicitly agreed on a place, they had to draw up their forces in what was known as the ‘close order battlefield’. This compact area, usually a mile wide and a mile deep, revealed itself slowly, as each side deliberately arranged their positions.25 The process could be agonizingly slow. At Ramillies on 11 May 1706 the allied scouts were sent out at one in the morning. Two hours later the main body marched off in a heavy fog, which cleared at about ten to reveal the enemy. At noon cannon opened sporadic fire, which by two in the afternoon had become fairly sustained. At three the infantry advanced, pausing frequently to dress their lines, to ensure they were straight. Fighting continued until just before sunset (9.19 p.m.), when the enemy was routed. It took twenty hours to arrange the forces for Malplaquet (11 September 1709). The night before that engagement the English and French camped so close to each other that they had many frequent and friendly communications. ‘But at last each man being called to his respective post,’ remembered Sergeant Millner, ‘our commerce was turned to and swallowed up and drowned in Blood.’ George Hamilton, earl of Orkney, thought that ‘it really was a noble sight to see so many different bodies marching’ into battle at Malplaquet.26 Colonel Blackadder thought Malplaquet ‘the most deliberate, solemn and well ordered battle I ever saw’. Every man was in his place and boldly advanced with speed, resolution and a cheerfulness that showed confidence in victory. ‘I never had such a pleasant day in all my life,’ concluded Blackadder about an action in which 35 per cent of the participants died or were wounded.27
Few soldiers possessed such sangfroid. As they waited for battle to begin, men would have to relieve themselves as they remained within their positions, because it was too risky to let them break ranks to nip behind a convenient bush. Officers might try to steel their men with a pep-talk. ‘Gentlemen you are come this day to fight … for … your king, your religion, your country,’ Viscount Dundee told his troops before Killiecrankie (1689), adding that he expected them to behave ‘like true Scotsmen’.28 Waiting men might smoke or talk, tell jokes, or sleep or eat—all good means of calming nerves. Alcohol was another way of doing so. Donald MacBane greatly appreciated the dram he was served before Malplaquet. Most were very tired. Before the Battle of Roundway Down (1643), Captain Edward Harley had not slept in a bed for twelve days. Before the fighting began at Culloden fifteen hundred Highlanders were reported ‘nodding with sleep in the ranks’. Often men had no food. Henry Fowler had not eaten for forty-eight hours before the Battle of Selby (1644), while the London Trained Bands were so hungry that halfway through the assault on Basing House they paused to loot a barn containing vittles: as they stuffed and drank themselves silly, they were massacred. Before Malplaquet the Cameronians had had nothing to eat for five days. Nonetheless they went into action cheerfully singing psalms.29
Infantry were the key: they were the ‘Queen of Battles’, not just because before mass artillery and air power they tended to decide battles, but because there were so many of them. Foot soldiers were easier to recruit and draft, and cheaper to equip and train than were cavalry or artillery.30
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the normal practice was to line up the infantry, several ranks deep in the centre of the formation, with cavalry on the flanks and artillery scattered throughout between infantry battalions. Infantry consisted of pikemen and musketeers. Heavily armoured pikemen would hold their sixteen-foot iron-tipped weapons out, with the end clamped to the earth by a boot. The pikemen's job was to protect the musketeers from cavalry as they reloaded their slow-firing weapons. Matchlock muskets, which used a glowing match cord to light the charge, were especially dangerous, since the cord could ignite the bandoleers of gunpowder charges that musketeers hung around their chests, burning them alive. In the early seventeenth century the musket, or harquebus, was so heavy that it required a forked stand on which to rest the barrel as it was pointed at the enemy. As muskets got lighter, and cheaper, the proportion of musketeers to pikemen increased from a third to two thirds.
Once lined up facing each other, the infantry opened fire, supported by slow-firing light cannon, whose balls were lucky to kill a man or two. Infantry fire was ponderous (and the pikemen could not fire at all), so first volleys produced few casualties, even though the wound that a heavy, slow-moving musket ball inflicted was appalling, with an exit hole perhaps a foot in diameter. After a few desultory rounds, one or, rarely, both lines would advance. As they came into contact, in what was known as a ‘push of pike’, the pikemen did not impale each other like suicidal hedgehogs, but lifted their weapons up, and drew their swords. Musketmen reversed their weapons, turning them into clubs. Matchlocks were so slow and inaccurate that it has been suggested they were far more lethal as cudgels than as muskets.
In a huge heaving, screaming, smoke-filled, acrid, broiling, bloody scrum the two ranks of infantry hacked and slammed each other. They did not break into small groups independent of each other (as films often suggest), but remained within their ranks. In this ghastly experience they were helped by a disposition common to many animals who, when frightened, tend to ‘incline much to crowd in upon another’,31 as the earl of Castlehaven, a veteran of the Irish and French wars, noted in 1680. In the Arte of Warre (1591) William Garrard reported that in combat ranks of infantry could press so hard upon each other that it was impossible for a wounded or dead soldier to fall down. Today bunching together is dangerous, for it allows a single shell to kill many. In the early modern period this tendency to keep together was used so men would stay in ranks and lines, supporting each other as a unit. To survive units had to remain united: they must not become a mob. The purpose of hand to hand combat was to disintegrate an enemy formation, turning it into a mob of individuals to be killed at will. ‘Whatsoever may cause fear in your enemy, ought not to be omitted by you,’ advised Roger Boyle in his Treatise on the Art of War (1677). ‘Fear is truly said to be a Betrayer of that Succor which reason also might afford.’ In other words, Boyle urged creating ‘a panic fear’.
Panic Fear
Panic fears often started after lines of infantry had been fighting each other in hand to hand combat, usually within a quarter of an hour, for this sort of fighting was as terrifying as it was tiring. The front rank of each line pressed one against the other, as those behind pushed forward. Units about to break would start oscillating, ranks moving in waves, as individuals on the sides and rear of the formation started to run away. At a certain tipping point all panicked. Illustration 5 shows how this process took place at the Battle of Pinkie (1547).
Once a unit broke, the true horror of battle began. Men ran, being pursued by cavalry who hacked them down. Arthur Trevor recalled the madness of the rout after Naseby:32
In the fire, smoke and confusion of that day I knew not for my soul wither to incline. The runaways on both sides were so many, so breathless, so speechless, and so full of fears that I should not have taken them for men.
James Ure, who ran in the panic fear after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge (1679), confessed, ‘The Lord took both courage and wisdom from us.’ In other words fear had made them foolish, for it was well known that staying to fight rather than running away was a far less dangerous option. As the earl of Castlehaven explained, ‘For though man in his reason be the most excellent of creatures on earth, yet having lost it by the passions of fear, is one of the least.’ Most of the 179 casualties the Cameronians took at Steenkirk in 1692 occurred as they ran. Their chaplain, Alexander Shields, noted that at Lander the following year ‘there were more killed by running than by standing.’33 Statistics bear this out. Of a sample of eleven battles in the early modern period, the winning side lost 4 per cent of its men, compared to the defeated who lost 16.7 per cent—over four times as many. In a drawn battle, such as Edgehill, each side lost 13 per cent, as they fought one another to a stalemate, neither side breaking in a panic fear.34
For pursuers a panic fear was a killing spree, a binge of elation, of blood lust; it was an orgasm of carnage. Unable to see his fleeing victim's face, the horseman could swing his sword down against his back, neck or head, usually with fatal results. Perhaps the origins of this blood lust go back to man's earliest roots as hunter-gatherers, when we chased some huge beast, to relish its capture, death and consumption. Certainly there were links between combat and hunting. As Thomas Dekker observed in his poem, ‘The Artillery Garden’ (1615):
Of war hunting is but the Ape,
Doing her tricks in less fearful shape.
After Flodden in 1513, where hundreds of fleeing Scots were murdered in hot blood, an English poet boasted ‘we killed them like cattle.’35 An English officer described how Colonel Jean Martinet's regiment ran in 1706 ‘like lost sheep’.36 Gideon Bonnivert remembered how after the Boyne ‘we killed but an abundance of their men, and pursued the rest until nine o'clock.’ Sergeant Millner wrote in his diary how after Oudenarde (1708), ‘We drove the enemy from ditch to ditch, from hedge to hedge … in great Hurry, Disorder and Confusion,’ until nightfall ended the slaughter.37 ‘Our men,’ William Patten wrote about the rout at Pinkie, ‘with an universal cry “They Fly! They Fly!” pursued and thereunto so eagerly and with such fervours that they overtook many and spared indeed but a few.’ Looking back on his own and his comrades murderous behaviour, Patten marvelled ‘we had used so much cruelty, and that we had killed so many’. With dry humour he described the enthusiasm with which they looted the enemy corpses stark naked: ‘Many hands make light work.’38
Humour has always served as a means of dealing with our fears—hence jokes about AIDS or mothers-in-law. It steadies men, helping them to brush aside the awful sights and sounds of combat. Humour often relied on understatement. ‘I went to visit Monsieur Hallard,’ Sir Thomas Coningsby wrote in his diary of the Siege of Rouen, ‘and beheld the dressing of his wound, which in common opinion is not deadly, but will mar his dancing.’39 Humour was often sardonic, almost to the point of cruelty—which can be characteristic of the best jokes. The Reverend William Dillingham described the death of the lord of Chatillon at the Siege of Ostend (1601), when a cannon ball hit his teeth, cutting his head off and spraying his brains all over his colonel, as ‘an unhappy mischance’. After the French opened fire at Blenheim early in the morning, Sergeant Hall of the Coldstream Guards told his friend Sergeant Cabe, ‘We had an indifferent breakfast, but the Mounseers never had such a dinner in their lives.’40 During the Siege of Derry in 1689, the Reverend George Walker recalled that the defenders were so short of food that some suggested cannibalism, much to the concern of ‘a certain fat gentleman’ who, noticing that ‘several of the garrisons look on him with a greedy eye, thought fit to hide himself’.41
Scottish fighting tended to be less regimented, especially with troops who were more independent and, although brave, inadequately trained. In the ‘Highland Charge’, the Scots, after exchanging a round or two, discarded their muskets—and sometimes their clothes—and with drawn claymores charged the enemy, screaming blood-curdling Caledonian curses. They did not do so in ranks, but as individuals, which lessened their effectiveness particularly against soldiers trained to fire rapid accurate volleys. ‘They came with cries and sound of Drums and Bagpipes,’ Fynes Moryson wrote of a fight that took place in Ireland in 1601, where General Mountjoy ‘had lodged in a trench some four hundred shot [musketeers], charging them not to shoot till the rebels approached near. And after that our own men had given them such a volley in the teeth, they drew away and we heard no more of their Drum and Bagpipes.’ When the Highland charge worked, as it did at Killiecrankie in 1689, where the Williamite infantry could not remove the bayonets that plugged into and not around the barrels of their muskets, the resultant sounds were very different. ‘Nothing was heard,’ wrote Sir Ewen Cameron of Lockiel, ‘but the sullen and hollow clashes of broadswords, with the dismal groans and cries of dying and wounded men.’42 When the Highland Charge failed, as it did at Culloden, the groans and crying were on the other side.
The Thin Red Line
Culloden was the culmination of military changes that took place in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for three reasons, helping produce what would become known as the ‘thin red line’.43 First, the invention of the bayonet meant the musketeers now could defend themselves, and no longer needed pikemen. Second, the development of a flintlock musket, which used a flint on steel to strike a spark that ignited the weapon, increased reliability and rates of fire. With the steps needed to reload decreased by almost a half, a well-trained infantryman could fire five shots a minute. Flintlocks, which were first issued to the guards regiments between 1670 and 1683, were universal by 1708, and over the next century and a half nearly eight million of these sturdy weapons were manufactured (see ill.19). They had a long triangular-shaped bayonet, which made a wound that was hard to stitch closed.44 Third, improvements in discipline and training meant that ranks of the long service professional infantry of a standing army stood unflinching, taking huge casualties before breaking. At Blenheim, recalled Sergeant Millner, ‘We stood within sixty paces of the enemy, neither side making any motion.’ He explained that ‘The whole burden of the battle fell chiefly and solely on our Foot, as it often and commonly happened,’ adding, with more than a hint of bitterness, that ‘our Horse and Dragoons sustained very little or no Loss throughout the whole war.’45 Compared to the Civil Wars, bodies of infantry were less liable to close with each other to fight hand to hand. For three hours during the Battle of Oudenarde ‘we were obliged to stand in cold blood, exposed to the enemy's shot,’ recalled Colonel Blackadder, who kept up his morale by silently singing Psalm 103 over and over again:46
As for man, his days are like grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and is gone: and the place thereof shall know it no more.
The much increased firepower of infantrymen meant that units tended to break before coming into hand to hand combat. This explains why bayonets inflicted only 2.2 per cent of wounds at Malplaquet. Breaking was especially common when an advancing unit was ordered to withdraw. An Irish captain in French service described how at Ramillies ‘We had not gone forty yards in our retreat when the words sauve qui peut went through the great part, if not the whole army, and put all to confusion.’47
Infantry versus Cavalry
The job of the cavalry was twofold. First, scouting for intelligence or provisions, when they might stumble across another patrol and skirmish with each other. Second, pursuing an enemy who had broken in panic fear. Occasionally, cavalry charged each other; even more rarely were they able to break infantry. One such occasion was at the Boyne. ‘The horse came on so unexpected and with such speed, some firing their pistols,’ Captain Stevens recalled, that ‘all took to their heels’.48
So long as well trained infantry stood they won. Horses will not charge a standing object, be it a wall or a line of determined foot soldiers, shying aside at the last moment. ‘And having received their fire without much damage,’ recalled Private John Deane of the Grenadiers at Oudenarde in 1708, ‘we gave them a merry salute firing directly at the enemies’ faces, which caused them to immediately turn tail.’ Deane, however, was outraged because there was no allied cavalry to exploit the rout, and the ‘poor bloody infantry’ had to mop up the enemy from hedge to hedge, breast work to breast work. ‘The fighting was very desperate,’ the Grenadier sergeant concluded.49
It would be nice to think that this triumph at Oudenarde confirms the view that ‘of all the world's great heroes, there's none that can compare … To the British Grenadiers.’ But statistics, not patriotic songs, really explain why infantry beat cavalry. On a line of equal length there were many more foot than horse soldiers, the latter usually charging in ranks at least two deep, against as many as six of the former. Even packed so close to each other that one man's knee was tucked behind that of the comrade beside him, horse troopers were spread at least twice as wide apart than infantry, and with their mounts presented large targets. Thus, if in the early seventeenth century on a sixty-foot front, 30 horsemen in two ranks charged 150 infantry (half of whom were musketeers), during the twenty seconds it would have taken the cavalry to trot two hundred yards (the effective musket range), each side would have been able to fire a single volley. The infantry would have shot five bullets at each horseman, while the cavalry fired one at every five foot soldiers. Or to put that another way, the ratio of bullets fired at the enemy favoured the infantry 12.5 to one. If we take into account the fact that the infantry fired much heavier rounds from a stable position, not a moving horse, the figure could be at least twice as high.
These estimates are for the middle of the seventeenth century when infantry used slow-firing matchlocks. By the end of that century and the start of the next, three developments augmented the infantry's advantage. First, the introduction of the flintlock meant that infantry, who were becoming much better trained, could fire two instead of one round at the approaching cavalry, the number of steps for reloading being reduced from 43 to 26. Flints reduced misfires by 40 per cent. Second, as just mentioned, the bayonet made pikemen redundant, increasing the number of musketeers. Third, the combination of flintlock, bayonet and rote training permitted much thinner and thus longer lines, three or even two ranks deep.50 Together these quadrupled the infantry's fire ratio from one in 12.5 to perhaps as high as one in fifty.
What do all these numbers mean? Well, to put it crudely they explain why during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the infantry came to dominate the battlefield. If the British Civil Wars had taken place half a century later, it is hard to see how a cavalry commander, such as Oliver Cromwell, could have risen to preeminence or how his radicalized horse troopers could have become so politically important.
Sieges
Sieges are one of the oldest forms of total warfare. The earliest fortifications that archaeologists have discovered are at Jericho, built seven thousand years before the birth of Christ, and perhaps five and a half millennia before Joshua and the Israelites made the walls come tumbling down.51 Forts are built to guard places of key strategic importance, such as river crossings or mountain passes: they are sited on features such as hills, river bends or cliffs, which give the defenders an advantage. Soldiers, like all human beings, are drawn to the comfortable and familiar, which means they are attracted to fighting from forts and castles. Being protected behind walls, firing through slits, they are far less exposed than the attackers, who must approach in the open with their whole bodies vulnerable. They can get trapped in killing zones as they assault a heavily defended and geographically well located site. Shakespeare instinctively grasped Clausewitz's adage that ‘the defensive is the stronger form of war’, when he has Macbeth boast from the walls of Dunsinane:52
Our castle's strength
Will laugh a siege to scorn: here let them lie
Till famine and the ague eat them up.
Sieges did not require the consent of both parties, for the defenders were confined within their positions. This gave the initiative to the attackers: cut off, defenders tended to react. It also meant that sieges could be long drawn out—for weeks, even months—with disease and starvation costing far more lives than combat. That can become the defenders’ objective: to hold a place not just because of its strategic importance, but to wear the enemy down. As General Monck observed in 1671, ‘Long sieges ruin armies.’53
Sieges took place in a cycle that was in many ways less flexible than that of battles. The cycle began with reconnaissance. Joshua started his Siege of Jericho by sending two spies to the city to discover the strength of the defences and the enemy's morale. On the basis of such surveillance, and after ensuring that he had enough resources and that reinforcements could not break the siege, a general would start the process by surrounding the fort. He would then invite the defenders to surrender. At this stage few took up the offer, since doing so would be utterly dishonourable. For ceding Bristol prematurely in 1643, Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes was widely denounced as ‘that bloody Coward’, court-martialled and sentenced to death.54
If the enemy refused to surrender, the attackers had three options. First, they could mount an immediate attack. Second, they could make a breach in the walls through which they could storm. Third, they could invest the fort, starving the defenders into capitulation. At any time, of course, they could give up, and march away.
The first option, an immediate attack, had the advantage of catching the defenders unprepared. On the other hand, the attackers might be similarly situated. Scaling ladders, as we have noted, were sometimes too short and too weak. At Burick, Rhine-Westphalia, in 1590, as Sir Francis Vere's troops started to climb, the rungs broke, scattering the English to the ground. Vere was desperate to avoid a long and costly siege, such as the one he had waged at nearby Litkenhoven, after which he had executed the 350-man garrison. So when he reminded Burick's defenders of that fate, they surrendered.55 Because of their slow, deliberate nature, sieges were rife with such calculations, which altered as a siege progressed. Attackers had to balance the costs of a siege with its chances of success. Defenders had to offset the likelihood of holding out until relieved, or of having their surrender accepted, with the likelihood of being put to the sword.
The second option in a siege was to breach the walls. This required huge resources. Marlborough's siege train consisted of eighteen heavy cannon and twenty mortars, drawn by three thousand wagons and sixteen thousand horses, which occupied thirty miles of road.
Engineers and gunners were the keys during an investment. In order to bring guns within range to batter a breach in the wall, as well as provide cover so the infantry did not have too much open ground to charge across, engineers built trenches. They were zigzagged to thwart enfilading fire, and constructed with a sense of inevitability as infantrymen advanced towards the breach. The other contribution engineers made was to strengthen the design of forts. Star-shaped forts, which subjected attackers to enfilading fire, as well as sloping earthen walls that deflected or absorbed cannon balls, became dominant towards the end of the eighteenth century. So much so that in 1677 Roger Boyle observed that ‘Battles do not decide national quarrels, and expose countries to the pillage of conquerors as formerly. For we make war more like foxes than lions, and you will have twenty sieges for every one battle.’56 Although the British Army won four major battles in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14)—Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet—it also took part in eighteen sieges, with the average regiment fighting in three of them. A typical siege lasted from forty to sixty days (that at Liège in 1702 dragged on for 120), with most resulting in a victory for the besiegers.57
Once the trenches had been completed, gunners had to breach the walls. Artillery, to be sure, had a fearsome reputation. Miguel de Cervantes called cannon ‘devilish instruments’. Ben Jonson thought that ‘From the devil's arse did guns beget.’ John Milton agreed they were ‘a devilish machination’. So in keeping with the wicked image of artillery, Sir John Meldrum's roundheads nicknamed their heaviest piece, a twelve-feet-long thirty-two pounder, ‘Sweet Lips’ after a notorious whore from Hull.58 In fact, the impact of artillery could be limited. During the Siege of Pontefract from 17 to 21 January 1645, the roundheads fired 1,359 rounds killing only eight defenders. Rates of fire were slow, artillery was heavy to transport, and thus more suited to long sieges than pitched battles. Nonetheless, given time cannon invariably made a breach.
At this point, as the infantry were poised to storm, the defenders were given one last chance to surrender and avoid the horrors of a sack: ‘shrill-shrieking daughters …naked infants spitted on pikes … mad mothers with howls confused’.59 The surrender terms could be generous: at best the defenders could march out, bands playing, colours flying, and keep their own weapons and possessions. At worst they gave up unconditionally, with the hope that the lives of soldiers and civilians might be spared.
Unlike most battles, civilians were caught up in sieges. Sometimes they actively supported the soldiers, helping dig fortifications, cook food, nurse the wounded, even reload snipers’ weapons. They might demand that soldiers keep on fighting. When Barnard Duffield urged the garrison to surrender during the Siege of Exeter (1547), his daughter Frances, ‘contrary to the modesty and shamefastness required of a woman, especially young and unmarried, runs most violently upon him and struck him in the face’.60 More often, civilians favoured surrender, for most modest and shamefast maids knew only too well the awful consequences of a successful storm.
Soldiers knew equally well its dangers. ‘He must wade to it in blood,’ wrote Colonel John Hutchinson about storming castles. It was so horrible that the storm troops, known as the ‘Forlorn Hope’, were often paid a bonus, or plied with alcohol.61 They would advance, heads down, as if they were walking into a blizzard. Often the assault failed, for the attackers were crammed into a narrow, rubble-strewn breach, as the defenders fired and hurled grenades down on them. In August 1632 at Venlo six to seven thousand Italians assaulted the British defenders, charging through a churchyard to the top of the trenches, where they stabbed with their swords and pushed the enemy with their sixteen-foot pikes. ‘But our men gave them such a welcome, and did so repulse them, that some were slain upon the breast work, and tumbled down into the ditch, and together were knocked down,’ Captain Henry Hexham, Vere's quartermaster, gloated, ‘and had their brains beaten out.’62 In another failed storm at Maastricht in 1676, the English soldiers suddenly leapt out of their trenches and charged across a hundred yards of open ground to the breach, as their cannon fired in support. When they reached the top of the breach the enemy replied with grenades and a small cannon. ‘Everyone was struck with a panic fear,’ confessed George Carleton, as they bolted pell-mell back to their own trenches, losing in the rout more men than they had in the assault.63 Even successful storms were chaotic. The earl of Essex described the one he led on Cadiz in 1596 as being executed ‘with more courage than order’.64
The best description of a full-fledged storm is from Major John Blackadder, who commanded the Cameronians, plus four hundred Grenadiers, in the assault of Lille in September 1708. On receiving his orders ‘I was easy and calm, committing myself to God.’ The attack was postponed for twenty-four hours, allowing the assault troops to rest on the hospital beds prepared for the wounded. Blackadder drifted off to sleep, thinking of those ‘groaning with wounds and broken bones’ who would fill his berth on the morrow. At noon he went into the trenches to brief his men. They did not attack until seven that evening, when, without warning, they went over the top, scattering grenades at the enemy. The first wave was beaten back in confusion. So Blackadder led the second. Hit in the arm, with all the other officers wounded, ‘I thought it my duty to stay a while and encourage the Grenadiers to keep their warm post.’ After quarter of an hour's fighting, which grew more intense by the minute, Blackadder was hit in the head. It took him three hours to get through the trenches, which were jammed with men and supplies hustling forward and the wounded and broken trudging back, before the major found a house and bed to rest for the night and allow his wounds to stop bleeding.65
No wonder those who survived a successful storm took their fears and relief out on the defenders. ‘Three hours plundering is the shortest rule of war,’ Marshal Tilly said of the Siege of Magdeburg in 1633, adding that ‘A soldier must have something for all his toil and trouble.’66 What did he get? Once the order ‘havoc’ was given, the dogs of war enjoyed unlimited rape, pillage and mindless vandalism without restraint, untold murder and torture, as much liquor as fetid brains could stand, as much loot as spent bodies could carry, and sights that would haunt men who possessed but a shred of decency until their dying days. In 1691 a diarist described Athlone after its sack:67
I think there was never a more tragical scene in so short a time and small a place. One could not set foot at the end of the Bridge or the Castle, but on Dead Bodies. Many laid half buried under the rubbish, and more under faggots … the stink is insufferable.
The sack of Leicester in May 1645 was notably vicious, especially because it was inflicted against fellow countrymen. The royalists hanged Mr Raynor, ‘an honest religious gentleman’. They killed Mr Sawyer in cold blood. They massacred many prisoners of war, and they ‘put diverse women inhumanly to the sword’. Perhaps seven hundred died and uncounted more bore the scars of abuse. William Summers declared that having lost her son and all her possessions his ‘wife hath been distracted ever since’.68 By nightfall, remembered Captain Richard Symonds, one of the attackers, there was ‘scarce a cottage unplundered … and no quarter given to any in the heat’.69 Over the next few days the royalists left the city carrying their loot in a couple of hundred wagons.
If a storm failed, or could not be mounted, the attackers could either raise the siege or else resort to the third option, starving the defenders into surrendering. The latter was a desperate course. Both sides got little rest, constantly alert for an enemy attack. ‘We slept like hares, with open eyes,’ recalled Sir Thomas Coningsby of the Siege of Rouen.70 ‘Am very heartily fatigued,’ Captain Nicholas Haddock wrote to his father from the Siege of Alicante (1706). Two years later during the eight-week Siege of Lille, James Cathcart spent only six nights in bed, took part in eight assaults and was one of only twenty-two of his 212-man company to survive unhurt.71 Artillery, particularly mortars, also sapped the enemy's morale, inflicting gruesome damage. Elis Gruffudd recalled that the smell of dead rotting horses killed during the Siege of Boulogne (1544) made the air loathsome to breathe, and promulgated pestilence. Disease ran rampant. During the five weeks’ Siege of Le Havre (1563), 2,600 of the 7,500 defenders died of sickness: death rates during the Siege of Dieppe (1591) ranged from 40 per cent to 56 per cent.72 Limerick in 1690 was one of the nastiest of sieges. The Williamites catapulted corpses and dead horses into the city to spread infection. Crows and ravens flew from the surrounding counties to grow fat on decaying bodies, and on amputated limbs from the field hospital, becoming so contemptuous of human beings that they would walk among them like domesticated chickens. After artillery set the hospital on fire, charred bodies could be seen strewn all over the place, some by the doors to which men, women and children had desperately crawled to escape the flames.73 Soon afterwards Limerick surrendered.
Even if after all their suffering a garrison surrendered on conditions, there was no guarantee that the victors would keep their promises, so intense were the feelings on both sides. After parliamentary forces surrendered at Bristol in 1643 and at Lostwithiel in 1644, royalist troops and outraged civilians ignored the terms, assaulting and plundering the enemy. ‘I saw them strip a woman,’ an eyewitness at Lostwithiel wrote, ‘she had lain in but three days before. They took her by the hair of her head and threw her into the river, and there almost drowned her. The woman died within twelve hours.’74 When the Carrickfergus garrison surrendered in 1689, William III's forces granted James's troops the privilege of marching out, colours flying, drums beating, permitting them to enter French mercenary service. A mob of locals had other ideas. Irate at the damage the Jacobite artillery had inflicted on the town, they attacked the garrison, stripping them of their clothes.75 Such hatred was all too much part of the insanity of intense combat.