Chapter VII: Act 1890: , the effect of which is explained in the article Insanity. Any (3)

The wars in which this system was evolved were wars for prestige and aggrandizement. They were waged, therefore, by mercenary soldiers, whose main object was to live, and who were officered either by men of their own stamp, or by nobles eager to win military glory. But the Wars of Religion raised questions of life and death for the Frenchmen of either faith, and such public opinion as there was influenced the method of operations so far that a decision and not a prolongation of the struggle began to be the desired end of operations. Hence in those wars the relatively immobile "battalion" of pikes diminishes in importance and the arquebusiers and musketeers grow more and more efficient. Armies, too, became smaller, and marched more rapidly. Encounter-battles became more frequent than "pitched" battles, and in these the musketeer was at a great advantage. Thus by 1600 the proportions between pikes and musketeers in the French army had come to be 6 pikes to 4 muskets or arquebuses, and the _bataillon de combat_ or brigade was normally no more than 1200 strong. In the Netherlands, however, the war of consciences was fought out between the best regular army in the world and burgher militias. Even the French _fantassins_ were second in importance to the Spanish _soldados_. The latter continued to hold the pre-eminent position they had gained at Pavia.[7] They improved the arquebus into the musket, a heavier and much more powerful weapon (fired from a rest) which could disable a horse at 500 paces.

Alva.

At this moment the professional soldier was at the high-water mark of his supremacy. The musket was too complicated to be rapidly and efficiently used by any but a highly trained man; the pike, probably because it had now to protect two or three ranks of "shot" in front of the leading rank of pikemen, as well as the pikemen themselves, had grown longer (up to 18 ft.); and drill and manoeuvre had become more important than ever, for in the meantime cavalry had mostly abandoned the massive armour and the long lance in favour of half-armour and the pistol, and their new tactics made them both swifter to charge groups of musketeers and more deadly to the solid masses of pikemen. This superiority of the regular over the irregular was most conspicuously shown in Alva's war against the Netherlands patriots. Desperately as the latter fought, Spanish captains did not hesitate to attack patriot armies ten times their own strength. If once or twice this contempt led them to disaster, as at Heiligerlee in 1568 (though here, after all, Louis of Nassau's army was chiefly composed of trained mercenaries), the normal battle was of the Jemmingen type--seven _soldados_ dead and seven thousand rebels.

Infantry in 1600.

As regards battles in the open field, such results as these naturally confirmed the "Spanish system" of tactics. The Dutch themselves, when they evolved reliable field armies, copied it with few modifications, and by degrees it was spread over Europe by the professional soldiers on both sides. There was plenty of discussion and readjustment of details. For example, the French, with their smaller battalions and more rapid movements, were inclined to disparage both the cuirass and the pike, and only unwillingly hampered themselves with the long heavy Spanish musket, which had to be fired from a rest. In 1600, nearly fifty years after the introduction of the musket, this most progressive army still deliberately preferred the old light arquebus, and only armed a few selected men with the larger weapons. On the other hand, the Spaniards, though supreme in the open, had for the most part to deal with desperate men behind fortifications. Fighting, therefore, chiefly at close quarters with a fierce enemy, and not disposing either of the space or of the opportunity for "manoeuvre-battles," they sacrificed all their former lightness and speed, and clung to armour, the long pike and the heavy 2½ oz. bullet. But the principles first put into practice by Gonsalvo de Cordoba, the combination, in the proportions required in each case, of _fire_ and _shock_ elements in every body of organized infantry however small, were maintained in full vigour, and by now the superiority of the infantry arm in method, discipline and technique, which had long before made the Spanish nobles proud to trail a pike in the ranks, began to impress itself on other nations. The relative value of horse and foot became a subject for expert discussion instead of an axiom of class pride. The question of cavalry _versus_ infantry, hotly disputed in all ages, is a matter affecting general tactics, and does not come within the scope of the present article (see further CAVALRY). Expert opinion indeed was still on the side of the horsemen. It was on their cavalry, with its speed, its swords and its pistols that the armies of the 16th century relied in the main to produce the decision in battle. Sir Francis Vane, speaking of the battle of Nieupoort in 1600, says, "Whereas most commonly in battles the success of the foot dependeth on that of the horse, here it was clean contrary, for so long as the foot held good the horse could not be beaten out of the field." The "success" of the foot in Vane's eyes is clearly resistance to disintegration rather than ability to strike a decisive blow.

DREUX--1562.

(_From Hardÿ de Périni's Batailles Françaises, by permission._)

LÜTZEN--1632.]

PRUSSIAN VOLLEYS, 1740. EVOLUTIONS OF THE COLUMN AND SKIRMISHERS.
WELLINGTON.

VIONVILLE DE CISSEY'S COUNTER-ATTACK (SEEN FROM REAR OF PRUSSIAN 38th
BRIGADE).

APPROACH-MARCH UNDER ARTILLERY FIRE, FRENCH PRINCIPLES (FROM ENEMY'S
ARTILLERY POSITION).

(_From Revue d'Infanterie, 1909._)]

It must be remembered, however, that Vane is speaking of the Low Countries, and that in France at any rate the solidity which saved the day at Nieupoort was less appreciated than the _élan_ which had won so many smart engagements in the Wars of Religion. Moreover, it was the _offensive_, the decision-compelling faculty of the foot that steadily developed during the 17th century. To this, little by little, the powers of passive resistance to which Vane did homage, valuable as they were, were sacrificed, until at last the long pike disappeared altogether and the firearm, provided with a bayonet, was the uniform weapon of the foot-soldier. This stage of infantry history covers almost exactly a century. As far as France was concerned, it was a natural evolution. But the acceptance of the principle by the rest of the military world, imposed by the genius of Gustavus Adolphus, was rather revolution than evolution.

Gustavus Adolphus.

In the army which Louis XIII. led against his revolted barons of Anjou in 1620, the old regiments (_les vieux_--Picardie, Piedmont, &c.) seem to have marched in an open chequer-wise formation of companies which is interesting not only as a deliberate imitation of the Roman legion (all soldiers of that time, in the prevailing confusion of tactical ideas, sought guidance in the works of Xenophon, Aelian and Vegetius), but as showing that flexibility and handiness was not the monopoly of the Swedish system that was soon to captivate military Europe. The formations themselves are indeed found in the Spanish and Dutch armies, but the equipment of the men, and the general character of the operations in which they were engaged, probably failed to show off the advantages of this articulation, for the generals of the Thirty Years' War, trained in this school, formed their infantry into large battalions (generally a single line of masses). Experience certainly gave the troops that used these unwieldy formations a relatively high manoeuvring capacity, for Tilly's army at Breitenfeld (1631) "changed front half-left" in the course of the battle itself. But the manoeuvring power of the Swedes was higher still. Each party represented one side of the classical revival, the Swedes the Roman three-line manipular tactics, the Imperialists and Leaguers those of the Greek line of phalanxes. The former, depending as it did on high _moral_ in the individual foot-soldier, was hardly suitable to such a congeries of mercenaries as those that Wallenstein commanded, and later in the Thirty Years' War, when the old native Swedish and Scottish brigades had been annihilated, the Swedish infantry was little if at all better than the rest.

But its tactical system, sanctified by victory, was eagerly caught up by military Europe. The musket, though it had finally driven out the arquebus, had been lightened by Gustavus Adolphus so far that it could be fired without a rest. Rapidity in loading had so far improved that a company could safely be formed six deep instead of ten, as in the Spanish and Dutch systems. Its fire power was further augmented by the addition of two very light field-guns to each battalion; these could inflict loss at twice the effective range of the shortened musket. Above all, Gustavus introduced into the military systems of Europe a new discipline based on the idea of exact performance of duty, which made itself felt in every part of the service, and was a welcome substitute for the former easy-going methods of regimental existence.[8] The adoption of Swedish methods indeed was facilitated by the disrepute into which the older systems had fallen. Men were beginning to see that armies raised by contract for a few months' work possessed inherent vices that made it impossible to rely upon them in small things. Courage the mercenary certainly possessed, but his individual sense of honour, code of soldierly morals, and sometimes devotion to a particular leader did not compensate for the absence of a strong motive for victory and for his general refractoriness in matters of detail, such as march-discipline and punctuality, which had become essential since the great Swedish king had reintroduced order, method and definiteness of purpose into the conduct of military operations. In the old-fashioned masses, moreover, individual weaknesses, both moral and physical, counted for little or were suppressed in the general soldierly feeling of the whole body. But the six-deep line used by Gustavus demanded more devotion and exact obedience in the individual and a more uniform method of drill and handling arms. So shallow an order was not strong enough, under any other conditions, to resist the shock of cavalry or even of pikemen. Indeed, had not the cavalry (who, after Gustavus's death, were uninspired mercenaries like the rest) ceased to charge home in the fashion that Gustavus exacted of them, it is possible that the new-fashioned line would not have stood the test, and that infantry would have reverted to the early 16th-century type.

The Great Rebellion.

The problem of combining the maximum of fire power with the maximum of control over the individual firer was not fully solved until 1740, but the necessity of attempting the problem was realised from the first. In the Swedish army, before it was corrupted by the atmosphere of the Thirty Years' War, duty to God and to country were the springs of the punctual discipline, in small things and in great, which made it the most formidable army, unit for unit, in the world. In the English Civil War (in which the adherents of the "Swedish system" from the first ousted those of the "Dutch") the difficulty was more acute, for although the mainsprings of action were similar, the technical side of the soldier's business--the regimental organization, drill and handling of arms--had all to be improvised. Now in the beginning the Royalist cavalry was recruited from "gentlemen that have honour and courage and resolution"; later, Cromwell raised a cavalry force that was even more thoroughly imbued with the spirit of duty, "men who made some conscience of what they did," and throughout the Civil War, consequently, the mounted arm was the queen of the battlefield.

The Parliamentary foot too "made some conscience of what it did," more especially in the first years of the war. But its best elements--the drilled townsmen--were rather of a defensive than of an offensive character, and towards the close of the struggle, when the foot on both sides came to be formed of professional soldiers, the defensive element decreased, as it had decreased in France and elsewhere. The war was like Gustavus's German campaign, one of rapid and far-ranging marches, and the armoured pikeman had either to shorten his pike and to cast off his armour or to be left at home with the heavy artillery (see Firth's _Cromwell's Army_, ch. iv.). Fights "at push of pike" were rare enough to be specially mentioned in reports of battles. Sir James Turner says that in 1657, when he was commissioned with others to raise regiments for the king of Denmark, "those of the Privy Council would not suffer one word to be mentioned of a pike in our Commissions." It was the same with armour. In 1658 Lockhart, the commander of the English contingent in France, specially asked for a supply of cuirasses and headpieces for his pikemen in order to impress his allies. In 1671 Sir James Turner says, "When we see battalions of pikes, we see them everywhere naked unless it be in the Netherlands." But a small proportion of pikes was still held to be necessary by experienced soldiers, for as yet the socket bayonet had not been invented, and there was still cavalry in Europe that could be trusted to ride home.

Disuse of the pike.

While such cavalry existed, the development of fire power was everywhere hindered by the necessity of self-defence. On the other hand the hitherto accepted defensive means militated against efficiency in many ways, and about 1670, when Louis XIV. and Louvois were fashioning the new standing army that was for fifty years the model for Europe, the problem was how to improve the drill and efficiency of the musketeers so far that the pikes could be reduced to a minimum. In 1680 the firelock was issued instead of the matchlock to all grenadiers and to the four best shots in each French Company. The bayonet--in its primitive form merely a dagger that was fixed into the muzzle of the musket--was also introduced, and the pike was shortened. The proportion of pikes to muskets in Henry IV.'s day, 2 to 1 or 3 to 2, and in Gustavus's 2 to 3, had now fallen to 1 to 3.

The day of great causes that could inspire the average man with the resolution to conquer or die was, however, past, and the "shallow order" (_l'ordre mince_), with all its demands on the individual's sense of duty, had become an integral part of the military system. How then was the sense of duty to be created? Louis and Louvois and their contemporaries sought to create it by taking raw recruits in batches, giving them a consistent training, quartering them in barracks and uniforming them. Henceforward the soldier was not a unit, self-taught and free to enter the service of any master. He had no existence as a soldier apart from his regiment, and within it he was taught that the regiment was everything and the individual nothing. Thus by degrees the idea of implicit obedience to orders and of _esprit de corps_ was absorbed. But the self-respecting Englishman or the quick ardent Frenchman was not the best raw material for quasi-automatic regiments, and it was not until an infinitely more rigorous system of discipline was applied to an unimaginative army that the full possibilities of this enforced sense of duty were realized.

Methods of fire before 1740.

The method of delivering fire originally used by the Spaniards, in
which each man in succession fired and fell back to the rear of the
file to reload, required for its continued and exact performance a
degree of coolness and individual smartness which was probably rarely
attained in practice. This was not of serious moment when the "shot"
were simple auxiliaries, but when under Gustavus the offensive idea
came to the front, and the bullets of the infantry were expected to do
something more than merely annoy the hostile pikemen, a more effective
method had to be devised. First, the handiness of the musket was so
far improved that one man could reload while five, instead of as
formerly ten, fired. Then, as the enhanced rate of fire made the
file-firing still more disorderly than before, two ranks and three
were set to fire "volews" or "salvees" together, and before 1640 it
had become the general custom for the musketeers to fire one or two
volleys and then, along with the pikemen, to "fall on." It was of
course no mean task to charge even a disordered mass of pikes with a
short sword or a clubbed musket, and usually after a few minutes the
combatants would drift apart and the musketeers on either side would
keep up an irregular fire until the officers urged the whole forward
for a second attempt.

The bayonet.

With the general disuse of the lance, the disappearance of the
personal motives that formerly made the cavalryman charge home, the
adoption of the flintlock musket and the invention of the socket
bayonet (the fixing of which did not prevent fire being delivered),
all reason for retaining the pike vanished, and from about 1700 to the
present day, therefore, the invariable armament of infantry has been
the musket (or rifle) and bayonet. The manner of employing the
weapons, however, changed but slowly. In the French army in 1688, for
instance (15 years before the abolition of the pike), the old
file-fire was still officially recognized, though rarely employed, the
more usual method being for the musketeers in groups of 12 to 30 men
to advance to the front and deliver their volleys in turn, these
groups corresponding in size to one of the musketeer wings (_manches_)
of a company or double company. But the fire and shock action of
infantry were still distinct, the idea of "push of pike" remained, the
bayonet (as at Marsaglia) taking the place of the pike, and musketry
methods were still and throughout the War of the Spanish Succession
somewhat half-hearted and tentative. Two generals so entirely
different in genius and temperament as Saxe and Catinat could agree on
this point, that attacking infantry ought to close with the enemy,
bayonets fixed, without firing a shot. Catinat's orders to his army in
1690, indeed, seem rather to indicate that he expected his troops to
endure the enemy's first fire without replying in order that their own
volley, when it was at last delivered at a few paces distance, should
be as murderous as possible, while Saxe, who was a dreamer as well as
a practical commander of troops, advocated the pure bayonet charge.
But the fact that is common to both is the relative ineffectiveness of
musketry before the Prussian era, whether this musketry was delivered
by groups of men running forward and returning in line or even by
companies in a long line of battle.

This ineffectiveness was due chiefly to the fact that _fire_ and
_movement_ were separate matters. The enemy's volley, that Catinat and
others ordered their troops to endure without flinching, was sometimes
(as at Fontenoy) absolutely crushing. But as a rule it inflicted an
amount of loss that was not sufficient to put the advancing troops out
of action, and experienced officers were aware that to halt to reply
gave the enemy time to reload, and that once the fight became an
interchange of partial and occasional volleys or a general
_tiraillerie_, there was an end to the attack.

Linear tactics.

Meanwhile, the tactics of armies had been steadily crystallizing into the so-called "linear" form, which, as far as concerns the infantry, is simply two long lines of battalions (three, four or five deep) and gave the utmost possible development to fire-power. The object of the "line" was to break or beat down the opposing line in the shortest possible time, whether by fire action or shock action, but fire action was only decisive at so short a range that the principal volley could be followed immediately by a charge over a few score paces at most and the crossing of bayonets. Fire was, however, effective at ranges outside charging distance, especially from the battalion guns, and however the decision was achieved in the end, it was necessary to cross the zone between about 300 yds. and 50 yds. range as quickly as possible. It was therefore the business of the regimental officer to force his men across this zone before fire was opened. If, as Catinat recommended, decisive range was reached with every musket loaded and the troops well in hand, their fire when finally it was delivered might well be decisive. But in practice this rarely happened, and though here and there such expedients as a skirmishing line were employed to assist the advance by disturbing the enemy's fire the most that was hoped by the average colonel or captain was that in the advance fire should be opened as late as possible and that the officers should strive to keep in their hands the power of breaking off the fire-fight and pushing the troops forward again. Theorists were already proposing column formations for shock action, and initiating the long controversy between _l'ordre mince_ and _l'ordre profonde_, but this was for the time being pure speculation. The linear system rested on the principle that the maximum weight of controlled fire at short range was decisive, and the practical problem of infantry tactics was how to obtain this. The question of _fire versus shock_ had been answered in favour of the former, and henceforward for many years the question of _fire versus movement_ held the first place. The purpose was settled, and it remained to discover the means.

This means was Prussian fire-discipline, which was elaborated by Leopold of Dessau and Frederick William I., and practically applied by Frederick the Great. It consisted first in the combination, instead of the alternation, of fire and movement, and secondly in the thorough efficiency of the fire in itself. But both these demanded a more stringent and technically more perfect drill than had ever before been imagined, or, for that matter, has ever since been attained. A hundred years before the steady drill of the Spanish veterans at Rocroi, who at the word of command opened their ranks to let the cannon fire from the rear and again closed them, impressed every soldier in Europe. But such drill as this was child's play compared with the Old Dessauer's.

Prussian fire discipline, 1740.

On approaching the enemy the marching columns of the Prussians, which
were generally open columns of companies 4 deep, wheeled, in
succession to the right or left (almost always to the right) and thus
passed along the front of the enemy at a distance of 800-1200 yds.
until the rear company had wheeled. Then the whole together (or in the
case of a deployment to the left, in succession) wheeled into line
facing the enemy. These movements, if intervals and distances were
preserved with proper precision, brought the infantry into two long
well-closed lines, and parade-ground precision was actually attained,
thanks to remorseless drilling and to the reintroduction of the march
in step to music. Of course such movements were best executed on a
firm plain, and as far as possible the attack and defence of woods and
villages was left to light infantry and grenadiers. But even in
marshes and scrub, the line managed to manoeuvre with some approach to
the precision of the barrack square.[9] Now, this precision allowed
Frederick to take risks that no former commander would have dared to
take. At Hohenfriedberg the infantry columns crossed a marshy stream
almost within cannon shot of the enemy; at Kolin (though there this
insolence was punished) the army filed past the Imperialist
skirmishers within less than musket shot, and the climax of this
daring was the "oblique order" attack of Leuthen. With this was bound
up a fire discipline that was more extraordinary than any perfection
of manoeuvre. Before Hohenfriedberg the king gave orders that
"pelotonfeuer" was to be opened at 200 paces from the enemy and
continued up to 30 paces, when the line was to fall on with the
bayonet. The possibility of this combination of fire and movement was
the work of Leopold, who gave the Prussian infantry iron ramrods, and
by sheer drill made the soldier a machine capable of delivering (with
the flintlock muzzle-loading muskets, be it observed) five volleys a
minute. This _pelotonfeuer_ or company volleys replaced the old fire
by ranks practised in other armies. Fire began from the flanks of the
battalion, which consisted of eight companies (for firing, 3 deep).
When the right company commander gave "fire," the commander of No. 2
gave "ready," followed in turn by other companies up to the centre.
The same process having been gone through on the left flank, by the
time the two centre companies had fired the two flank companies were
ready to recommence, and thus a continuous series of rolling volleys
was delivered, at one or two seconds' interval only between companies.
In attack this fire was combined with movement, each company in turn
advancing a few paces after "making ready." In square, old-fashioned
methods of fire were employed. Square was an indecisive and defensive
formation, rarely used, and in the advance of the deployed line, the
offensive and decision-seeking formation _par excellence_, the special
Prussian fire-discipline gave Frederick an advantage of five shots to
two against all opponents. The bayonet-attack, if the rolling volleys
had done their work, was merely "presenting the cheque for payment" as
a modern German writer puts it. The cheque had been drawn, the
decision given, in the fire-fight.

Leuthen.

For some years this method of infantry training gave the Prussians a decisive superiority in whatever order they fought. But their enemies improved and also grew in numbers, while the Prussian army's resources were strictly limited. Thus in the Seven Years' War, after the two costly battles of Prague and Kolin (1757) especially, it became necessary to manoeuvre with the object of bringing the Prussian infantry into contact with an equal or if possible smaller portion of the enemy's line. If this could be achieved, victory was as certain as ever, but the difficulties of bringing about a successful manoeuvre were such that the classical "oblique order" attack was only once completely executed. This was at Leuthen, December 5th, 1757, perhaps the greatest day in the history of the Prussian army. Here, in a rolling plain country occasionally broken by marshes and villages, the "oblique order" was executed at high speed and with clockwork precision. Frederick's object was to destroy the left of the Austrian army (which far outnumbered his own) before the rest of their deployed line of battle could change front to intervene. His method was to place his own line, by a concealed flank march, opposite the point where he desired to strike, and then to advance, not in two long lines but in échelon of battalions from the right (see LEUTHEN). The échelon was not so deep but that each battalion was properly supported by the following one on its left (100 paces distance), and each, as it came within 200 yds. of the Austrian battalion facing it, opened its "rolling volleys" while continuing to advance; thus long before the left and most backward battalions were committed to the fight, the right battalions were crumbling the Austrian infantry units one by one from left to right. It was the same, without parade manoeuvres, when at last the Austrians managed to organize a line of defence about Leuthen village. Unable to make an elaborate change of front with the whole centre and right wing for want of time, they could do no more than crowd troops about Leuthen, on a short fighting front, and this crumbled in turn before the Prussian volleys.

One lesson of Leuthen that contemporary soldiers took to heart was that even a two-to-one superiority in numbers could not remedy want of manoeuvring capacity. It might be hoped that with training and drill an Austrian battalion could be made equal to a Prussian one in the front-to-front fight, and in fact, as losses told more and more heavily on Frederick's army as years went on, the specific superiority of his infantry disappeared. From 1758 therefore, to the end of the war, there were no more Rossbachs and Leuthens. Superiority in efficiency through previous training having exhausted its influence, superiority in force through manoeuvre began to be the general's ideal, and as it was a more familiar notion to the average Prussian general, trained to manoeuvre, than to his opponent, whose idea of "manoeuvre" was to sidle carefully from one _position_ to another, Prussian generalship maintained its superiority, in spite of many reverses, to the end. The last campaigns were indeed a war of positions, because Frederick had no longer the men available for forcing the Austrians out of them, and on many occasions he was so weak that the most passive defensive and the most elaborate entrenchments barely sufficed to save him. But whenever opportunity offered itself, the king sought a decisive success by bringing the whole of his infantry against part of the enemy's--the principle of Leuthen put in practice over a wider area and with more elastic manoeuvre methods. The long échelon of battalions directed against a part of the hostile line developed quite naturally into an irregular échelon of brigade columns directed against a part of the enemy's position. But the history of the "cordon system" which followed this development belongs rather to the subject of tactics in general than to that of infantry fighting methods. Within the unit the tactical method scarcely varied. In a battle each battalion or brigade fought as a unit in line, using company volleys and seeking the decision by fire.

Controversies and developments, 1760-1790.

In this, and in even the most minute details of drill and uniform, military Europe slavishly copied Prussia for twenty years after the Seven Years' War. The services of ex-Prussian officers were at a premium just as those of Gustavus's officers had been 150 years before. Military missions from all countries went to Potsdam or to the "Reviews" to study Prussian methods, with as simple a faith in their adequacy as that shown to-day by small states and half-civilized kingdoms who send military representatives to serve in the great European armies. And withal, the period 1763-1792 is full of tactical and strategical controversies. The principal of these, as regards infantry, was that between "fire" and "shock" revived about 1710 by Folard, and about 1780 the American War of Independence complicated it by introducing a fresh controversy between _skirmishing_ and _close order_. As to the first, in Folard's day as in Frederick's, fire action at close range was the deciding factor in battle, but in Frederick's later campaigns, wherein he no longer disposed of the old Prussian infantry and its swift mechanical fire-discipline, there sprang up a tendency to trust to the bayonet for the decision. If the (so-called) Prussian infantry of 1762 could be in any way brought to close with the enemy, it had a fair chance of victory owing to its leaders' previous dispositions, and then the advocates of "shock," who had temporarily been silenced by Mollwitz and Hohenfriedberg, again took courage. The ordinary line was primarily a formation for fire, and only secondarily or by the accident of circumstances for shock, and, chiefly perhaps under Saxe's influence, the French army had for many years been accustomed to differentiate between "linear" formations for fire and "columnar" for attack--thus reverting to 16th-century practice. While, therefore, the theoreticians pleaded for battalion columns and the bayonet or for line and the bullet, the practical soldier used both. Many forms of combined line and column were tried, but in France, where the question was most assiduously studied, no agreement had been arrived at when the advent of the skirmisher further complicated the issues.

In the early Silesian wars, when armies fought in open country in
linear order, the outpost service scarcely concerned the line troops
sufficiently to cause them to get under arms at the sound of firing on
the sentry line. It was performed by irregular light troops, recruited
from wild characters of all nations, who were also charged with the
preliminary skirmishing necessary to clear up the situation before the
deployment of the battle-army, but once the line opened fire their
work was done and they cleared away to the flanks (generally in search
of plunder). Later, however, as the preliminary manoeuvring before the
battle grew in importance and the ground taken into the manoeuvring
zone was more varied and extended than formerly, light infantry was
more and more in demand--in a "cordon" defensive for patrolling the
intervals between the various detachments of line troops, in an attack
for clearing the way for the deployment of each column. Yet in all
this there was no suggestion that light troops or skirmishers were
capable of bringing about the decision in an armed conflict. When
Frederick gained a durable peace in 1763 he dismissed his "free
battalions" without mercy, and by 1764 not more than one Prussian
soldier in eleven was an "irregular," either of horse or foot.[10]

Light Infantry.

But in the American War of Independence the line was pitted against
light infantry in difficult country, and the British and French
officers who served in it returned to Europe full of enthusiasm for
the latter. Nevertheless, their light infantry was, unlike
Frederick's, _selected line infantry_. The light infantry
duties--skirmishing, reconnaissance, outposts--were grafted on to a
thorough close-order training. At first these duties fell to the
grenadiers and light companies of each battalion, but during the
struggle in the colonies, the light companies of a brigade were so
frequently massed in one battalion that in the end whole regiments
were converted into light infantry. This combination of "line"
steadiness and "skirmisher" freedom was the keynote of Sir John
Moore's training system fifteen years later, and Moore's regiments,
above all the 52nd, 43rd (now combined as the Oxfordshire Light
Infantry) and 95th Rifles (Rifle Brigade), were the backbone of the
British Army throughout the Peninsular War. At Waterloo the 52nd,
changing front in line at the double, flung itself on the head and
flank of the Old Guard infantry, and with the "rolling volleys"
inherited from the Seven Years' War, shattered it in a few minutes.
Such an exploit would have been absolutely inconceivable in the case
of one of the old "free battalions." But the light infantry had not
merely been levelled up to the line, it had surpassed it, and in 1815
there were no troops in Europe, whether trained to fight in line or
column or skirmishers, who could rival the three regiments named, the
"Light Division" of Peninsular annals. For meantime the infantry
organization and tactics of the old régime, elsewhere than in England,
had been disintegrated by the flames of the French Revolution, and
from their ashes a new system had arisen, which forms the real
starting-point of the infantry tactics of to-day.

The French Revolution.

The controversialists of Louis XVI.'s time, foremost of whom were Guibert, Joly de Maizeroy and Menil Durand (see Max Jähns, _Gesch. d. Kriegswissenschaften_, vol. iii.), were agreed that shock action should be the work of troops formed in column, but as to the results to be expected from shock action, the extent to which it should be facilitated by a previous fire preparation, and the formations In which fire should be delivered (line, line with skirmishers or "swarms") discussion was so warm that it sometimes led to wrangles in ladies' drawing-rooms and meetings in the duelling field. The drill-book for the French infantry issued shortly before the Revolution was a common-sense compromise, which in the main adhered to the Frederician system as modified by Guibert, but gave an important place in infantry tactics to the battalion "columns of attack," that had hitherto appeared only spasmodically on the battlefields of the French army and never elsewhere. This, however, and the quick march (100 paces to the minute instead of the Frederician 75) were the only prescriptions in the drill-book that survived the test of a "national" war, to which within a few years it was subjected (see FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS). The rest, like the "linear system" of organization and manoeuvre to which it belonged (see ARMY, §§ 30-33; CONSCRIPTION, &c.) was ignored, and circumstances and the practical troop-leaders evolved by circumstances fashioned the combination of _close-order columns and loose-order skirmishers_ which constituted essentially the new tactics of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic infantry.

Tactical evolution in France 1792-1807.

The process of evolution cannot be stated in exact terms, more especially as the officers, as they grew in wisdom through experience, learned to apply each form in accordance with ground and circumstances, and to reject, when unsuitable, not only the forms of the drill-book, but the forms proposed by themselves to replace those of the drill-book. But certain tendencies are easily discernible. The first tendency was towards the dissolution of all tactical links. The earlier battles were fought partly in line for fire action, partly in columns for the bayonet attack. Now the linear tactics depended on exact preservation of dressing, intervals and distances, and what required in the case of the Prussians years of steady drill at 76 paces to the minute was hardly attainable with the newly levied ardent Frenchmen marching at 100 to 120. Once, therefore, the line moved, it broke up into an irregular swarm of excited firers, and experience soon proved that only the troops kept out of the turmoil, whether in line or in column, were susceptible of manoeuvre and united action. Thus from about 1795 onwards the forms of the old régime, with half the troops in front in line of battle (practically in dense hordes of firers) and the other half in rear in line or line of columns, give way to new ones in which the skirmishers are fewer and the closed troops more numerous, and the decision rests no longer with the fire of the leading units (which of course could not compare in effectiveness with the rolling volleys of the drilled line) but with the bayonets of the second and third lines--the latter being sometimes in line but more often, owing to the want of preliminary drill, in columns. The skirmishers tended again to become pure light infantry, whose rôle was to prepare, not to give, the decision, and who fought in a thin line, taking every advantage of cover and marksmanship. In the Consulate and early Empire, indeed, we commonly find, in the closed troops destined for the attack, mixed line and column formations combining in themselves shock and controlled close-order fire--absolutely regardless of the skirmishers in front.

In sum, then, from 1792 to 1795 the fighting methods of the French infantry, of which so much has been written and said, are, as they have aptly been called, "horde-tactics." From 1796 onwards to the first campaigns of the Empire, on the other hand, there is an ever-growing tendency to combine skirmishers, properly so called, with controlled and well-closed bodies in rear, the first to prepare the attack to the best of their ability by individual courage and skill at arms, the second to deliver it at the right moment (thanks to their retention of manoeuvre formations), and with all possible energy (thanks to the cohesion, moral and material, which carried forward even the laggards). Even when in the long wars of the Empire the quality of the troops progressively deteriorated, infantry tactics within the regiment or brigade underwent no radical alteration. The actual formations were most varied, but they always contained two of the three elements, column, line and skirmishers. Column (generally two lines of battalions in columns of double-companies) was for shock or attack, line for fire-effect, and skirmishers to screen the advance, to scout the ground and to disturb the enemy's aim. Of these, except on the defensive (which was rare in a Napoleonic battle), the "column" of attack was by far the most important. The line formations for fire, with which it was often combined, rarely accounted for more than one-quarter of the brigade or division, while the skirmishers were still less numerous. Withal, these formations in themselves were merely fresh shapes for old ideas. The armament of Napoleon's troops was almost identical with that of Frederick's or Saxe's. Line, column and combinations of the two were as old as Fontenoy and were, moreover, destined to live for many years after Napoleon had fallen. "Horde-tactics" did not survive the earlier Revolutionary campaigns. Wherein then lies the change which makes 1792 rather than 1740 the starting-point of modern tactics?

Napoleon's infantry and artillery tactics, 1807-1815.

The answer, in so far as so comprehensive a question can be answered from a purely infantry standpoint, is that whereas Frederick, disposing of a small and highly finished instrument, used its manoeuvre power and regimental efficiency to destroy one part of his enemy so swiftly that the other had no time to intervene, Napoleon, who had numbers rather than training on his side, only delivered his decisive blow after he had "fixed" all bodies of the enemy which would interfere with his preparations--i.e. had set up a physical barrier against the threatened intervention. This new idea manifested itself in various forms. In strategy (q.v.) and combined tactics it is generally for convenience called "economy of force." In the domain of artillery (see ARTILLERY) it marked a distinction, that has revived in the last twenty years, between slow disintegrating fire and sudden and overpowering "fire-preparation." As regards infantry the effect of it was revolutionary. Regiments and brigades were launched to the attack to compel the enemy to defend himself, and fought until completely dissolved to force him to use up his reserves. "On s'engage partout et puis l'on voit" is Napoleon's own description of his _holding attack_, which in no way resembled the "feints" of previous generations. The self-sacrifice of the men thus engaged enabled their commander to "see," and to mass his reserves opposite a selected point, while little by little the enemy was hypnotized by the fighting. Lastly, when "the battle was ripe" a hundred and more guns galloped into close range and practically annihilated a part of the defender's line. They were followed up by masses of reserve infantry, often more solidly formed at the outset than the old Swiss masses of the 16th century.[11] If the moment was rightly chosen these masses, dissolved though they soon were into dense formless crowds, penetrated the gap made by the guns (with their arms at the slope) and were quickly followed by cavalry divisions to complete the enemy's defeat. Here, too, it is to be observed there is no true shock. The infantry masses merely "present the cheque for payment," and apart from surprises, ambushes and fights in woods and villages there are few recorded cases of bayonets being crossed in these wars. Napoleon himself said "Le feu est tout, le reste peu de chose," and though a mere plan of his dispositions suggests that he was the disciple of Folard and Menil Durand, in reality he simply applied "fire-power" in the new and grander form which his own genius imagined.

The problem, then, was not what it had been one hundred and fifty years before. The business of the attack was not to break down the passive resistance of the defence, but to destroy or to evade its fire-power. No attack with the bayonet could succeed if this remained effective and unbroken, and no resistance (in the open field at least) availed when it had been mastered or evaded. In Napoleon's army, the circumstance that the infantry was (after 1807) incapable of carrying out its own fire-preparation forced the task into the hands of the field artillery. In other armies the 18th-century system had been discredited by repeated disasters, and the infantry, as it became "nationalized," was passing slowly through the successive phases of irregular lines, "swarms," skirmishers and line-and-column formations that the French Revolutionary armies had traversed before them--none of them methods that in themselves had given decisive results.

The British Peninsular infantry.

In all Europe the only infantry that represented the Frederician tradition and prepared its own charge by its own fire was the British. Eye-witnesses who served in the ranks of the French have described the sensation of powerlessness that they felt as their attacking column approached the line and watched it load and come to the present. The column stopped short, a few men cheered, others opened a ragged individual fire, and then came the volleys and the counter-attack that swept away the column. Sometimes this counterstroke was made, as in the famous case of Busaco, from an apparently unoccupied ridge, for the British line, under Moore's guidance, had shaken off the Prussian stiffness, fought 2 deep instead of 3 and was able to take advantage of cover. The "blankness of the battlefield" noted by so many observers to-day in the South African and Manchurian Wars was fully as characteristic of Wellington's battles from Vimeiro to Waterloo, in spite of close order and red uniforms. But these battles were of the offensive-defensive type in the main, and for various reasons this type could not be accepted as normal by the rest of Europe. Nonchalance was not characteristic of the eager national levies of 1813 and 1814, and the Wellington method of infantry tactics, though it had brought about the failure of Napoleon's last effort, was still generally regarded as an illustration of the already recognized fact that on the defensive the fire-power of the line, unless partly or wholly evaded by rapidity in the advance and manoeuvring power or mastered and extinguished by the fire-power of the attack, made the front of the defence impregnable. There was indeed nothing in the English tactics at Waterloo that, standing out from the incidents of the battle, offered a new principle of winning battles.

Infantry methods, 1815-1870.

Nor indeed did Europe at large desire a fresh era of warfare. Only the French, and a few unofficial students of war elsewhere, realized the significance of the rejuvenated "line." For every one else, the later Napoleonic battle was the model, and as the great wars had ended before the "national" spirit had been exhausted or misused in wars of aggrandizement, infantry tactics retained, in Germany, Austria and Russia, the characteristic Napoleonic formations, lines of battalion or regimental columns, sometimes combined with linear formations for fire, and always covered by skirmishers. That these columns must in action dissolve sooner or later into dense irregular swarms was of course foreseen, but Napoleon had accustomed the world to long and costly fire-fighting as the preliminary to the attack of the massed reserves, and for the short remainder of the period of smooth-bore muskets, troops were always launched to the attack in columns covered by a thin line of picked shots as skirmishers. The moral power of the offensive "will to conquer" and the rapidity of the attack itself were relied upon to evade and disconcert the fire-power of the defence. If the attack failed to do so, the ranges at which infantry fire was really destructive were so small that it was easy for the columns to deploy or disperse and open a fire-fight to prepare the way for the next line of columns. And after a careful study of the battle of the Alma, in which the British line won its last great victory in the open field, Moltke himself only proposed such modifications in the accepted tactical system as would admit of the troops being deployed for _defence_ instead of meeting attack, as the Russians met it, in solid and almost stationary columns. Fire in the attack, in fact, had come to be considered as chiefly the work of artillery, and as artillery, being an expensive arm, had been reduced during the period of military stagnation following Waterloo, and was no longer capable of Napoleonic feats, the attack was generally a bayonet attack pure and simple. Waterloo and the Alma were credited, not to fire-power, but to English solidity, and as Ardant du Picq observes, "All the peoples of Europe say 'no one can resist our bayonet attack if it is made resolutely'--and _all are right_.... Bayonet fixed or in the scabbard, it is all the same." Since the disappearance of the "dark impenetrable wood" of spears, the question has always turned on the word "resolute." If the defence cannot by any means succeed in mastering the resolution of the assailant, it is doomed. But the means (moral and material) at the disposal of the defence for the purpose of mastering this resolution were, within a few years of the Crimean War, revolutionized by the general adoption of the rifle, the introduction of the breech-loader and the revival of the "nation in arms."

Thirty years before the Crimea the flint-lock had given way to the percussion lock (see GUN), which was more certain in its action and could be used in all weathers. But fitting a copper cap on the nipple was not so simple a matter for nervous fingers as priming with a pinch of powder, and the usual rate of fire had fallen from the five rounds a minute of Frederick's day to two or three at the most. "Fire-power" therefore was at a low level until the general introduction[12] of the rifled barrel, which while further diminishing the rate of fire, at any rate greatly increased the range at which volleys were thoroughly effective. Artillery (see ARTILLERY, § 13), the fire-weapon of the attack, made no corresponding progress, and even as early as the Alma and Inkerman (where the British troops used the Minie rifle) the dense columns had suffered heavily without being able to retaliate by "crossing bayonets." Fire power, therefore, though still the special prerogative of the defence, began to reassert its influence, and for a brief period the defensive was regarded as the best form of tactics. But the low rate of fire was still a serious objection. Many incidents in the American Civil War showed this, notably Fredericksburg, where the key of the Confederate position was held--against a simple frontal attack unsupported by effective artillery fire--by three brigades in line one behind the other, i.e. by a _six-deep_ firing line. No less force could guarantee the "inviolability of the front," and even when, in this unnatural and uneconomical fashion, the rate of fire was augmented as well as the effective range, a properly massed and well-led attack in column (or in a rapid succession of deployed lines) generally reached the defender's position, though often in such disorder that a resolute counterstroke drove it back again. The American fought over more difficult country and with less previous drill-training than the armies of the Old World. The fire-power of the defence, therefore, that even in America did not always prevail over the resolution of the attack, entirely failed in the Italian war of 1859 to stop the swiftly moving, well-drilled columns of the French professional army, in which the national _élan_ had not as yet been suppressed, as it was a few years later, by the doctrine that "the new arms found their greatest scope in the defence." The Austrians, who had pinned their faith to this doctrine, deserted their false gods, forbade any mention of the defensive in their drill-books, and brought back into honour the bayonet tactics of the old wars.

The need of artillery support for the attack was indeed felt (though the gunners had not as yet evolved any substitute for the case-shot preparation of Napoleon's time), but men remembered that artillery was used by the great captain, not so much to enable good troops to close with the enemy, as to win battles with masses of troops of an inferior stamp, and contemporary experience seemed to show that (if losses were accepted as inevitable) good and resolute troops could overpower the defence, even in face of the rifle and without the aid of case shot. But a revolution was at hand.

The breech-loading rifle.

In 1861 Moltke, discussing the war in Italy, wrote, "General Niel attributes his victory (at Solferino) to the bayonet. But that does not imply that the attack was often followed by a hand-to-hand fight. In principle, when one makes a bayonet charge, it is because one supposes that the enemy will not await it.... _To approach the enemy closely, pouring an efficacious fire into him_--as Frederick the Great's infantry did--_is also a method of the offensive_." This method was applicable at that time for the Prussians alone, for they alone possessed a breech-loading firearm. The needle-gun was a rudimentary weapon in many respects, but it allowed of maintaining more than twice the rate of fire that the muzzle-loader could give, and, moreover, it permitted the full use of cover, because the firer could lie down to fire without having to rise between every round to load. Further, he could load while actually running forward, whereas with the old arms loading not only required complete exposure but also checked movement. The advantages of the Prussian weapon were further enhanced, in the war against Austria, by the revulsion of feeling in the Imperial army in favour of the pure bayonet charge in masses that had followed upon Magenta and Solferino.