RascalPuff's Blog

Anthological notes and narrative on the causes and effects of war, continued:

“ As time went on, various military leaders tinkered with this basic formula for military success in order to make it more flexible. The Romans were best at it. In over two centuries of almost constant war in which they first subjugated all the other city states of Italy and then conquered the other great power of the time, Carthage, they evolved a far more sophisticated version of the phalanx. The unwieldy mass of the phalanx gave way gave way to the more open battle formation of the legion, in which the troops were broken up into mini-phalanxes (‘maniples’) of about 150 men in three ranks (waves), the maniples being distributed checkerboard fashion in three overlapping lines. it gave them far more manueuverability, especially on broken ground. At the battle of Zama (202 BC) during the Second Punic War, when the Carthaginians tried to rout the Roman legions by massive elephant charge, Scipio Africanus was even able to move the maniples of his middle line sideways in order to create straight corridors through all three lines of his formation, down which Hannibal’s elephants were herded quite harmlessly.

“The weapons grew more sophisticated too In the Roman legions the sixteen foot spear gave way to two shorter throwing spears (pilums), one lighter and of longer range than the other, which the legionaries threw in succession as they advanced, plus a short sword for close-in work when they had made physical contact with the enemy. Battles became less of a mere shoving match, and all manner of tactical stratagems flourished, but the basic logic of the battlefield remained: masses of armed men in highly disciplined formations, equipped only with edged weapons powered by their own muscles, have very limited alternatives for effective fighting, and infantry ruled the battlefields or the third century A.D. as confidently as it had the battlefields of the thirty third century BC.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 36-39


Sea Warfare
‘Straightaway, ship struck ship with brazen beak. The attack was started by a Greek ship which sheared off the whole prow of her Phoenician foe, and others aimed their onslaught on different opponents. At first the flood tide of the Persian fleet held its own but when the ships became jammed and crushed in one place, they could bring no help to each other. Ships began to strike their own friends with their bronze jawed rams, and to shatter the whole bank of oars (*extended, sometimes in tiers of three to five levels, from the port and starboard sides). The Greek ships, in careful plan, began to press round us in a circle, and ships’ hulls gave in. You could no longer see the water, so full was it of wrecked vessels and dead men, while the beaches and rocks were thick with corpses.’ - Aeschylus, describing the battle of Salamis, 480 BC. (This sea battle forced Xerxes to retreat from predominantly Athenian Greece.)

“Navies have always been far more dependent on technology than armies: a ship is a kind of machine, even if it is a galley whose oars are powered by human muscles. The sea is an alien environment for human beings, and it was never possible for them to survive there without technology. Neither did significant numbers of people have any need to be able to operate in this environment until civilization was well established.

“Armies were centrally important to the creation of civilized societies, but navies became possible and necessary only after those societies already existed. Precivilized peoples used small boats for fishing and for crossing narrow waters, but the extensive use of the sea for trade had to await the emergence of civilizations that produced a variety of specialized goods, such as grain, minerals, and manufactured products, worth trading in bulk. Once trade of this sort did become desirable, however, it was inevitable that most of it would be conducted by sea. Ships are by far the most economical means of transporting large volumes of goods over long distances even today, and were virtually the only means until the invention of railways only 150 years ago.

“Attacking the maritime commerce of states that derived much of their wealth from trade was an obvious (and highly profitable) tactic in war, and undoubtedly the first specialized warships were developed for this purpose. Moreover the transport by ships of whole armies was an especially attractive military option in the Mediterranean, where the sea was more often than not the quickest route between any two points. Given such valuable targets, naval warfare in the Mediterranean soon grew into an affair of large fleets of warships whose first purpose was to destroy the other side’s navy, after which the enemy’s merchant shipping could be destroyed (or contrabanded) with impunity. The most striking fact, however, is that through the whole of the middle passage, maritime technology scarcely changed at all, complex though it was by the standards of the time.

“There was extensive maritime commerce more than four thousand years ago on the inland seas like the Mediterranean, and it was already beginning to expand outward along the coasts and rivers to northern Europe at one extreme and India at the other. Then, and for three and a half millennia afterward, the merchant ships employed a combination of sails and oars, but the warships which needed to move rapidly in any direction regardless of wind, depended mainly on muscle power: at high speed. The need for discipline and coordination was as great as in the (infantry land bound) phalanx, whether the crews were free or slaves.

“Naval warfare in classical terms was a simple affair, sometimes virtually the aquatic version of a land battle. The two opposing forces of galleys, often numbering in the hundreds, would line up facing each other off some stretch of coastline (for galleys hugged the coasts whenever possible - such ships were not very seaworthy, neither were their captains capable of accurate navigation out of sight of land), and charge at each other. The ships would endeavor to hole (‘spike’) each other head-on with their bronze rams or at least shear off the oars on one side of the opposing ship (crushing most of the oarsmen on that side in the process) and then turn back and ram the disabled enemy from astern. More often than not, however, they would end up lying alongside each other (dispensing and/or repelling boarders), with the soldiers each galley carried fighting it out along the decks of one or the other ship, as in the battle of Syracuse harbor, 413 BC... ‘and the great din of all these ships crashing together was not only frightening in itself, but also made it impossible to hear the orders given by the boat swains.’ - Thucydides

“The greatest naval battles of classical times were fought between Rome, essentially a land power at the beginning of the Punic Wars in 264 BC, and Carthage, a maritime power with possessions or allies in Spain, Sardinia, Sicily and southern Italy. The naval harbor of Carthage (near modern Tunis) was an entirely man-made construction approached through the commercial port, which was itself protected by a series of heavy iron chains across the entrance. Inside the naval harbor, a circular space over a thousand yards across, with a central island, there were sheds for working on two hundred galleys at once - and a standard Carhaginian quinquireme (five banked galley) bore a crew of 270 rowers, 30 officers, and 120 marines for fighting. Carthage’s shipyards were able to build as many as sixty galleys in a month.

“In the generations of war from 264 to 146 BC that convulsed the western Mediterranean before Rome finally defeated Carthage, the Romans learned to build a navy too. Once again, the rate of production was remarkable: soon after the outbreak of the war, realizing they would need a navy, the Romans adapted a Carthaginian design and produced a fleet of a hundred quinquiremes (five banks of oars per side) and twenty triremes (three banks of oars per side) in less than two months. In the naval battles that followed, and even more so in the sudden storms that sometimes overtook the fleets of flimsey galleys in open waters, the losses were remarkably heavy.

“At Ecnomus off the coast of North Africa in 256 BC, a Roman fleet of 330 galleys routed a Carthaginian fleet of equal size, sinking 30 and capturing 64, a loss to the Carthaginians of between thirty and forty thousand men. And on its return to Italy the Roman fleet was caught in a great storm off the west coast of Sicily and 270 of its ships were sunk or driven ashore, drowning about a hundred thousand men. There has not been a comparable loss in naval warfare since the beginning of the modern era.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 39 - 42
......................

‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ - Cato the elder.
“...the conflict between Rome and Carthage (Northerneastern Egypt) was as close as classical civilization ever got to the concept of total war...
Although they never got the technology side of things going, the Romans did know about total war. For over sixty years, with a break of two decades in the middle, the Romans fought a life-and-death struggle with Carthage wherein the degree to which they mobilized their resources of manpower and production compares with the world wars of this century. And the reason their conflict grew to such monstrous proportions was also essentially the same.

“The Mediterranean was big enough for both Carthage and Rome, just as it is big enough to contain both Tunisia and Italy today. There was no deep rooted historical or racial hatred between that two peoples before the Punic wars began (though there certainly was by the end, over a century later). The basic cause of the wars was no more (and no less) than the anxiety of two rising imperial powers over the existence of a rival that possessed enough power to pose a serious threat. The potential for war became the reason for war, and once begun, the conflict escalated rapidly to a war of annihilation, because neither side was willing to back down.

“Although Rome was eventually victorious, 10 percent of its entire male population was killed in battle during the final two decades of the war. The Carthaginian casualties were total: by the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC, not only was their empire gone, but Carthage itself was razed, and those Carthaginians left alive were sold into slavery - not even their language survived. A nuclear strike on Carthage would have ended their agony more quickly, but the result would not have differed much.

“The Punic Wars are the outstanding case - or at least the best documented case - of an approach to total war between civilized states before modern times. In terms of the three elements that make our kind of total war possible today - the ability to mobilize the entire population for war, the resources that make that degree of mobilization possible, and the technology - only the technology was obviously missing in the Punic Wars; it took longer to utterly destroy Carhage than total destruction would take these days.

“Rome was a complex and sophisticated civilization, but it was fundamentally different in certain key respects from our own. Its organizational ability was great, as was its aptitude for large scale civil engineering projects, but its interest in technological innovation was very low. The tradition of rational and dispassionate analysis that the Romans inherited from Greece was consistently applied to political, legal, military and cultural topics but very rarely to the economic or scientific subjects that were the key to changing the age old terms of the argument and setting rapid technological change loose in the world. Throughout its history the Roman empire remained a mostly illiterate peasant society in which the availability of a huge and flowing slave population made any departures from existing political and economic arrangements unattractive to the few million people who had a say in things. Rome lived - and died - in the mold of a classical civilization, without every showing any sign of being able to get off the treadmill: it was a fully adapted inhabitant of ‘the middle passage’.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 42 - 43

“The actual size of the Roman army in later times, when Rome ruled the entire Mediterranean and had legions guarding borders as far away as Scotland and Sudan, is a more accurate measure of the size of military forces a premodern agrarian society - even one with a highly developed commerce - could sustain over the long run. At the turn of the millennium AD 1 or thereabouts, the population of the Mediterranean region was around sixty million, and the total size of the army, including not only legionary troops but all the cavalry and auxiliary forces, was not much above three hundred thousand. Even in the late third century AD, when the population had risen to one hundred million and the pressure of the barbarians on the frontiers was becoming acute, the Roman army never exceeded three quarters of a million. And in the end, the empire, and most of Europe’s civilization, went under.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p. 44
.................

“In AD 378 the combined forces of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths (Germanic barbarians), having spent decades wandering along the Vistula and Dniester rivers, crossed the frontier into the Roman empire with over a hundred thousand men. As usual they were accompanied by their families, and the wagons formed a vast encampment eight miles from the city of Adrianople while the bulk of the riders raided through central Thrace (Greece). The Roman Emperor Valens marched out from Constantinople with sixty thousand soldiers, two thirds of them were infantry, and reached Adrianople on 9 August.

“Just as the Roman army began to rush the camp, tens of thousands of Visigothic horsemen swept down from the flank, swamped the Roman cavarly, and swarmed around the unprotected sides and rear of the Roman legions. Forty thousand of them were slaughtered in a couple of hours, including the emperor (*Valens) himself.

“The barbarians had destroyed a Roman army for the first time since Varus had led three legions too far into the forests of Germany over three and a half centuries previously - and this time it was not an isolated incident: it was the turning point. The first sack of Rome (by the same Germanic barbarians) came only thirty three years later.

“The classic world took a long time dying: western and southern Europe went down with the barbarian invasions in the fourth and fifth centuries (AD), but most of North Africa and the Fertile Crescent kept a version of the old civilization alive until they were overrun by Arab nomads fired by the new faith of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries (*AD). The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire preserved a Christian and Greek speaking version of Roman civilization in the Balkans and Asia Minor until the destruction of the main Byzantine army by Turkish nomads at Manzikert in AD 1071, after which it was reduced to a small area around Constantinople (now Istanbul) in little more than a century. The Dark Ages - or rather the latest dark age - had arrived.

“The history of civilization cannot be explained only in terms of war, any more than it can be seen soley in terms of climatic change or monetary policy or even the spread of infectious diseases (though all of such explanations have been attempted). But we, who live amid constant change, feel the need for an explanation of why change was so slow until the recent past - why ‘the middle passage’ took so long - and what we overlook is how vulnerable earlier civilizations were. They did quite enough damage to themselves with their incessant wars, but they faced a greater peril from outside.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 44-45

“Happiness lies in conquering one’s enemies, in driving them in front of oneself, in taking their property, in savoring their despair, in outraging their wives and daughters.”
- Genghis Khan (paraphrased), 1215 AD

“By now we have forgotten the terror, and nomads are picturesque, dying cultures to be preserved and patronized. But for most of recorded history the civilized societies of the (Euroasian) world were relatively small areas - China, northern India, the Middle East, south Russia and Europe - fringing the vast five thousand mile sweep of open (generally untillable) grasslands - from southern Russia to Mongolia - that nurtured the nomad peoples. And periodically the nomads erupted outwards from the Eurasian heartland to smash those civilizations or drive them back to a lower level. They also guaranteed that all survivors would be thoroughly militarized states (*Under the ‘Mongol Yoke’ - the reason Russia, Hungary and Poland did not celebrate ‘the Rennaissance - ‘1400 - 1600 AD ’ - with Western Europe).

“... Nomad economy was not based on agriculture but on herds of animals, and nomads were the envious enemies of peoples who had learned to farm more fertile lands, built cities, and grown comparatively rich.

“What made the nomads so dangerous was that they were not savages (*with regard to the art of war)...

“... It is still not entirely clear what periodically set the pastoral peoples into motion en masse toward the borders of civilization. The leading edge of of the ‘great migrations’ that actually hit the frontiers was often made up of tribes in flight from other, more powerful peoples behind them, who were in turn refugees from some other group back in the Central Asian heartland of the nomads’ territory. Population pressure and periodic decreases in rainfall over the finely balanced ecology of the grasslands (steppes) probably provided the initial push as a rule, but there was also the attraction of the rich plunder to be had in the settled lands. And when the nomads came up against civilized armies, they had considerable advantages.

“... a pastoral nation that can put 100 percent of its young men into highly mobile raiding parties can take on a peasant society of ten times its population with a good prospect of success, if its weapons are comparable - and very often the nomads did succeed.

“The dark age that Europe remembers, when successive waves of nomadic invaders - Goths, Vandals, Huns and Magyars (‘Horsepeople’ - mounted archers) - overran the Western Roman world in the fourth century and kept coming until the ninth (then returning with Genghis Khan, his children, and grandchildren, in the 13th century), was at least the third such upheaval to devastate and disrupt the civilizations based around the Mediterranean since 2000 BC. Each time it took centuries to put the pieces back together - especially since it was often the victorious nomads who had to do the job of reconstructing civilization. Of all the areas where civilizations emerged in the Old World, only China still speaks of the language it started out with: elsewhere, the Indo-European, Turkish and Arab languages of various waves of nomadic conquerors have blotted out the old tongues.

“Although China’s language and culture survived the nomads, its people often didn’t: the Great Wall was not a lasting military success. The Huns overran northern China in AD 304 (some seventy years before Visigoth-Ostrogoth leader, Fritigern, destroyed the Roman legions at Adrianople), initiating an era of complete chaos that lasted four centuries.

“The Mongols in the thirteenth century were even worse. Though they were eventually absorbed by Chinese culture, it was not before they had carried out the greatest genocide in history: an estimated forty million Chinese were systematically slaughtered by Genghis Khan’s soldiers to depopulate the northern areas of the country and free them for nomadic herding. And Iraq, which was visited by the Mongols for only two years, 1258 -60 AD (refer, The Sieges Of Samarkand, Bokura and Baghdad), was so thoroughly devastated that its population did not recover to the pre-Mongol level until this century.

“The delays, setbacks and lost chances suffered by civilization through most of its history because of these sporadic but overwhelming catastrophes cannot be calculated precisely, but they must go a long way toward explaining why ‘progress’ is a relatively recent concept.

It is, after all, only seven centuries since Mongol troops were operating only a day’s ride from Vienna (Capital of Austria) - and if they had overrun Western Europe at that time, it is hard to believe that the process of cumulative and accelerating change that arose in that region over the following centuries to produce the modern world would ever have begun at all. But when Hungary and Poland were already in the Mongol’s grasp, Ogatai Khan (son of Genghis) died, and they turned back to deal with the succession struggle within the Mongol Empire. Western Europe got its chance, and the style of civilization it produced has now pushed the nomads to the borders of irrelevance. It (liberation from Mongol dominance to practice European autonomy) has also delivered us to the brink of the abyss.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 45-46

Cavalry warfare methods increased throughout the Medieval ‘Dark Ages’ of Feudal Europe as a result of its experiences with nomadic cavalry warriors and tactics. But the warhorses used by Europeans were husbandried (scientifically bred) to be much larger (than the steppe ponies of the nomadic horsearchers), so as to carry heavily armored knights. - KBR

“The first signs of the shift back to infantry came during the Hundred Years War (England vs France -14th to 15th centuries) in which Engish longbowmen protected themselves from cavalry charges by patterns of holes (*entrenchments) dug in front of their lines to break the legs of charging horses, and with pointed stakes dug into the ground (the equivalent of the Greek phalanx employed hedge of spears), and repeatedly decimated (or successfully repelled) French formations of heavily armored cavalry.

“In an attempt to deal with the threat posed by longbows (and crossbows), which propelled an arrow with enough force to penetrate chain mail at a considerable distance, the mounted knights were first driven to the use of plate armor: the classic iron pajamas worn by the last few generations of European chivalry. Their plate armor was carefully designed with ridges and oblique facets that would deflect arrows - to pierce plate armor effectively, an arrow had to strike it at an angle of nearly ninety degrees within a distance of two hundred yards - but they could not protect their horses all over with similar armor; the weight was simply too great.

“The last battles of the Hundred Years War, like Agincourt in 1415, saw the pathetic spectacle of dismounted (traumatically unhorsed) knights, wearing about sixty pounds of plate armor each, attempting to charge on foot like infantry (and how easy they were to dispatch, with clubs or rocks or whatever came to hand). Chivalry, in the most literal sense, was dead.

“The early advent of pyrotechnically activated, projectile throwing firearms, now added to the distance at which an armored knight could be dispatched with a longbow. Peasant farmers with a minimum of training, were triumphing over Templar Knights who had studied and practiced the martial arts all their lives.

“The lesson was taken: if infantry was really the most effective element on the battlefield, then it ought to be real infantry, and not dismounted horsemen in metal clothing. By the sixteenth century, despite the advent of gunpowder weapons on the battlefields of Western Europe, combat once again centered on clashes of heavy infantry fighting in a style that (disregarding the recently introduced, increasing usage of pyrotechnic firearms) would have been entirely familiar to Alexander the Great...

“In the end, it came to the same old (sixteen foot spear point, short and long killing sword wielding) shoving match that the Hoplites knew: the ‘push of the pike’ (poleaxes, with spearpoints; among the favored weapons of the formidable Swiss army), as men of the 16th century called it.” - Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 49 - 51

THE ROAD TO MASS WARFARE
“The Sung Dynasty was a period of remarkable technological innovation in China, and as early as 1232, chinese troops defending the city of Loyang against Mongols used a ‘thunder bomb’, an iron vessel filled with gunpowder and hurled among the besiegers by catapult. The explosion blew those nearby to pieces, and splinters from the casing pierced metal armor and those who were ineffectively protected by it.

“Within twenty five years Chinese technicians had developed the ‘fire lance’, a primitive gun consisting of a bamboo tube stuffed with gunpowder which, when ignited, would fire a cluster of pellets about 250 yards. Their Mongol enemies adopted the new weapon and probaby transmitted it to Europe, where Mongol armies were also active. As early as the 1320s, the first real metal guns were beng cast in Europe.

“From that point onward, the lead in developing firearms passed entirely into European hands. Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was an area of rapidly growing wealth and population, straining against the confines of its medieval straitjacket - and also a continent divided into dozens of separate states and torn by constant wars (among the Feudal - post Roman empirical - ‘warlords’). Any new weapon was welcome and within two centuries, firearms had been elaborated at one extreme into giant cannons able to hurl an iron shot weighing 1,125 pounds at city walls, and at the other into a arquebuses (early muskets) that fired half ounce bullet to an effective range of a hundred yards.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 54 -55

The Infantry Standardization Of The Firearm:
“King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, ruled a kingdom whose population of less than a million and a half left it in permanent difficulties against the stronger countries that surrounded it - Russia, Poland and Denmark. Lacking the numbers he needed to fight his neighbors on an equal basis in the standard ‘push of pike’, he set out in 1611 to remedy Sweden’s military problems by tactical innovation - and created the first army that Alexander the Great would not have known how to command.

“Gustavus Adolphus realized that the solid formations of pikemen modeled on the Spanish tercios (and the Greek phalanxes), which then dominated European battlefields, were ideal targets for gunfire, if only he could get enough of it. So he had the standard Swedish musket redesigned until it was light enough to be used without a wooden rest propping up the front and fitted a wheel lock to it to make it fire more reliably. He then converted two thirds of his infantry into musketeers, operating in ranks only six deep, and took almost all their armor away to make them more mobile.
“He wrought the same transformation in artillery, abandoning the usual heavy field pieces drawn by twenty four horses for light, quick-firing guns using a prepared cartridge that could be pulled by only one or two horses - and so could be moved around on the battlefield, even under fire.

“The result of both changes was to make firepwer highly effective on the battlefield for the first time. The musket volleys and cannon fire of Gustavus Adolphus’s army could shatter a formation of pikemen from a hundred yards away, without ever coming into physical contact with it. And once the enemy formations were disordered by gunfire, his cavalry was trained to charge home with the sword and turn disorder into rout.

“In addition to all this, his army was made up not of mercenaries but mostly of Swedes animated by genuine religious and national fervor, thanks to the military reforms of his father, who had required each district of Sweden to furnish a fixed number of men to a standing army. When this army arrived in Germany to rescue the failing Protestant cause in 1630, it demolished the old style mercenary armies of its imperial (Spanish and Austrian) opponents with convincing efficiency. Gustavus Adolphus himself was killed in battle in 1632, and the Swedish intervention was in the end only one more episode in a seemingly endless war, but every other army in Europe rapidly adopted the revolutionary tactics originated by the Swedish king.
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 61 -62

“Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Prussian army even conducted field experiments with their muskets, setting up a canvas target one hundred feet long and six feet high to simulate an enemy unit and having a battalion of Prussian infantry fire volleys at it from various ranges. At 225 yards only 25 percent of the bullets struck this huge target, but at 150 yards 40 percent hit, and at 75 yards, 60 percent of the shots told - which simply confirmed what every practical soldier already knew: Fighting had to be done at as close a range as possible.

During the battle of Fontenoy in 1745 for example, the British Guards Brigade, emerging from a sunken road, caught sight of the French infantry. The French officers called out to the British commander, Lord Charles Hay, inviting him to open fire, to which he replied with impeccable courtesy: ‘No sir, we never fire first. After you.’ The British continued to advance (a guardsman in the ranks called out, ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful’.) until the French finally let off their volley. And then while they were reloading, the surviving British troops marched on into the distance of only thirty paces and fired an answering volley that killed or wounded nineteen officers and six hundred of the French in a single second - whereupon the rest understandably broke and fled. The famous command given to the revolutionary troops at Bunker Hill - ‘Hold your fire until you see the whites of their
eyes” - was not bravado, but the standard tactical doctrine of the time.

(As the science of firearms progressed, the ‘rifled’ - ‘lands and grooves’ machined into the internal barrel - in handguns or long guns ((rifles)), would stabilize rocket shaped - instead of round balled - missiles and allowed for a much longer range, and a much more accurate projectile thrower, by imparting a co-axial spin and consequent centrifugally induced stabilization to each bullet ((preventing it from tumbling, end over end, which reduced the ballistic coefficient, range and accuracy); enabling killing at a distance to be carried out much more accurately; at much greater distances. - K.B.R.)

“The discipline required for soldiers to stand up to this sort of battle was of a new order: the soldier had to go through the several dozen complicated movements necessary to load and aim his *musket (*smooth bored barrel without ‘rifling’ - ‘lands and grooves that impart a co-axial spin to each fired projectile; thereby imparting longer range and greater accuracy. K.B.R.) while facing what amounted to a firing squad a hundred yards away, without even the emotional release of violent exertion and physical contact with the enemy. Standing in the ranks for hours under steady fire from artillery only five or six hundred yards away, which was often the lot of battalions not directly engaged in the fighting - they could even watch the gunners loading - must have been even worse. To keep men in the lines under such conditions took the most severe discipline: Prussian (*early German) army regulations stated that ‘if a soldier during an action looks as if about to flee, or so much as sets foot outside the llne, the non-commissioned officers standing behind him will run him through with his bayonet and kill him on the spot.

“The armies grew larger (in the †century and a half between the Thirty Years War and the French Revolution, †1648 - 1789) - the average number of soldiers present on each side had risen from ten thousand to thirty thousand during the Thirty Years War, and it jumped again to hover around the hundred thousand mark in the biggest battles of the eighteenth century - but they also grew more steadily isolated from civilian society both in their social composition and in their operations: mostly they fought each other and left the civilians alone.”
- Gwynne Dyer, WAR, p.p. 62 - 63
_______________

“In 1789 the revolution arrived in France the impact of that upheaval can only be compared to what would be the effect today if Maoists seized power in the United States, for France was then the intellectual and cultural center of Western Civilization and by far the biggest country in Europe: even Russia did not overtake France in population until the mid-nineteenth century. Almost all the monarchies of Europe launched their armies against France to stamp out the sacrilegious revolutionaries, and when what was left of the old royal army, aided by volunteers, proved unable to stem the attacks, the National Convention decided on conscription: the levee en masse.

“The first levy, in Feburary 1793 demanded a quota of men from each district - each local battalion to be united under a banner bearing the inscription ‘The French People risen against tyranny’ - but as the military situation continued to worsen, the convention issued the call for a levee en masse in August. By New Year’s Day, 1794, the French armies numbered about 770,000 men, and the wars of mass armies that ensued ravaged Europe for the next two decades.

“The ‘nation in arms’ produced poorly trained soldiers (by eighteenth-century standards) who had no time to master the intricate drill of close order formations, but their enthusiasms and numbers made up for it: attacking in clouds of skirmishers and disorderly columns, they often simply overwhelmed their better-trained adversaries. The new French armies moved far faster than before, having abandoned most of the baggage that encumbered the armies of the old regime. Soldiers no longer had tents, but only greatcoats, and if there was no bread they could dig in the fields for potatoes (whose cultivation had spread across Europe in the preceding decades). Battles rarely ended in draws any more - Carnot of the Committee of Public Safety instructed the French armies in 1794 ‘to act in mass formations and take the offensive... Give battle on a large scale and pursue the enemy till he is utterly destroyed’.

“The basic principle underlying all this was that, whereas the prerevolutionary regular soldiers had been scarce and expensive, the lives of conscripts were plentiful and cheap. The disdain for casualties grew even greater once Napoleon had seized control of France in 1799. ‘You cannot stop me’, he boasted to Count Metternich, the Austrian diplomat: ‘I spend thirty thousand men a month.’ It was not an idle boast: the losses of France in 1793 - 1814 amounted to 1.7 million dead - almost all soldiers - out of a population of 29 million.

“Not much was said about the democratic ideals of the revolution after Napoleon made himself emperor in 1804: the war’s aim was simply to establish French domination over all of Europe (and thus, in effect, to create a world empire). ‘Troops are made to get killed’, he once said, though as time went on, the conscripts became less willing - by 1810, 80 percent of the annual quota of conscripts failed to appear voluntarily.

“If troops had become much cheaper in France, the weapons they used had not, but the revolutionary regime quickly discovered how easy it was for a truly centralized government with dictatorial powers to get more out of the economy than the old monarchy had ever dared to demand. State-owned arms factories multiplied, in which prices and wages were strictly controlled; equipment, food, and horses could simply be requisitioned, with payment made later at government-set prices, or never. And after the conquest began to accumulate, there was so much money coming in from abroad that for a time the wars actually paid for themselves.

“It was far more difficult for the opponents of the French, who had to match the size of the revolutionary armies but did not dare to introduce universal conscription for fear that it would destroy the precarious structure that underpinned the monarchies in their countries too. That meant the troops had to be paid for, which imposed an awesome burden on their treasuries. Britain, the richest of the allies, which had to subsidise most of the others, introduced the world’s first income tax in 1799 to meet its commitments.

“Yet the other countries of Europe had to do whatever was necessary to stop the French, for the rules of war had been changed drastically; the revolutionary armies spread republicanism wherever they went, and Napoleon simply annexed entire kingdoms or turned them into satellites and placed his own relatives or marshals on the thrones. For the governments who fought the French, it was a war for sheer survival, and they would take almost any risk in order to survive - even to the extent of arming its people.

“Arming the people became much safer after Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French and the remaining revolutionary credibility drained away from the French cause. Now the French armies were simply foreigners attacking the motherland, and the monarchs could exploit the national feeling of their own people to mobilize resistance against them. Even Austria, a multinational empire, experimented with a popular militia in 1807 as being the only way ‘to remedy... the paucity of our resources’. In Spain, which was under French occupation for half a decade, nationalist guerrillas fighting in the name of the exiled king, backed by a regular British army based in Portugal, inflicted as many casualties on the French over the years as the disastrous Russian campaign did. (The word ‘guerrilla’ was coined in that struggle.)

“And when Napoleon, having temporarily managed to subdue every other country on the continent, finally invaded Russia in 1812 with 440,000 men, the Russian response was similar. The campaign is known in Russian history as the ‘Great Patriotic War’, a term revived by the Soviets to describe the struggle against Hitler, and the fighting was made more pitiless by a national antagonism that had simply not existed back in the time of limited wars and professional armies.

“Napoleon won all the battles, including the crucial battle of Borodino, and even occupied Moscow, but the Russians refused to acknowledge that they were beaten, and he was eventually forced to retreat in the dead of winter through lack of supplies. The Russians had destroyed their own crops and food stocks rather than leave them to the French. Only a few thousand of the French (*out of nearly a half million) made it out of Russia alive.

“By calling up the class of 1814 a year early and drafting all those who had previously had exemptions, Napoleon managed to assemble another large army by the spring of 1813, when he rightly expected all the powers of Europe to attack him in an attempt to exploit his Russian disaster. But he was scraping the bottom of the barrel for manpower by then, and some of the new recruits got as little as a week’s training before being thrown into battle. Even more seriously, the Prussians had finally decided to bring in conscription too.
There was no kingdom in Europe more autocratic, more riddled with class privileges and inequalities, than Prussia, in the regular army upon reaching twenty, followed by two years in the active reserve and fourteen years in the Landwehr (territorial army).

“‘Get me a national army’, Marshal Blucher had begged the Prussian reformers, and in 1813 he had one: the Landwehr battalions of conscripts tripled the size of his army and played a major part in the two decisive defeats of Napoleon at Leipzig in 1813 and at Waterloo in 1814. ‘The Landwehr battalions were so-so at first.’ Blucher said, ‘but after they had tasted plenty of powder, they did as well as the battalions of the Line’.

“The battles of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were fiercer than those of the eighteenth century and somewhat larger on average - on one or two occasions Napoleon may have had close to two hundred thousand troops on or near the battlefield, though he had great difficulty controlling so many - but they were fundamentally the same sort of battles. The weapons were virtually identical, and the tactics not very much changed. Indeed, a typical Napoleonic battle was still not all that different from one of Alexander the Great’s battles, except that firearms had replaced edged weapons for most purposes: about the same number of men arrayed themselves in roughly comparable formations in approximately the same compact space, fought for a similar length of time (perhaps a few hours more, by the nineteenth century), and left about the same proportion dead on the field.

To be continued