Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
The Last Full Measure (13 page)
By the late fifteenth century there had been a coming together of powder and ordnance technologies. From about the 1430s, gun
barrels grew longer (to maximize the effect of the gas expansion behind the ball); improvements in cast-iron technology meant that run-of-the-mill guns could be made more cheaply and that brass was now reserved for premium ordnance. Barrels became more resilient, which, in turn, meant that guns could take a more potent charge, and iron cannonballs replaced stone. Later, the corning of powder would become more refined. Peter Whitehorne, in 1562, describes the sieving process, an essential part of corning: “The manner of cornyng all sorts of powder is with a Seeve made, with a thicke skinne of Parchement, full of little rounde holes, into whiche seve the powder must be put, while it is danke [moist], and also a little bowle, that when you sifte, maie rolle up and doune, upon the clottes of powder, to breake them, that it may corne, and runne through the holes of the Seeve.”
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And this, in principle but scaled up to an industrial level, is how gunpowder has been corned ever since.
With a now relatively inexpensive source of gunpowder, the fifteenth century saw a proliferation of gun types—culverins and
veuglaires, serpentines, crapaudeaux, basilisks, fauçons, passé-volantes, courtaux
, bombards, and, on a smaller scale, handguns such as
hacquebuses
and arquebuses. At first the small arms were less lethal than the bow and crossbow, but they were noisy—and noise has always been a potent factor on the battlefield, both raising or reducing morale depending on whose side was creating the din. Guns were also a product of the fledgling Industrial Revolution and would become a relatively inexpensive way to kill warriors by warriors who were, in their turn, relatively inexpensive to train. By the 1520s a handgun cost about 40 percent less than a crossbow.
History, in that inconvenient way it has, does not develop in reassuringly straight lines. There are serpentine loops and oxbow bends that can leave pools of the past, forlornly trapped, as the river meanders on. It takes a while for things to show themselves.
The knight was not one day in full and glorious gallop and the next shot out of his saddle by newfangled weaponry. With the advent of firearms the mounted warrior responded in two ways. He could embrace the new technology, or he could stubbornly stick with the old notion of cold steel.
In any event, he had to find a way to counteract the mutually supporting threats of massed pikes interspersed with shooters—arquebusiers—armed with matchlocks, which, although cumbersome and unreliable (a fairly undependable smoldering piece of cord had to be touched to the powder pan, itself susceptible to damp, to fire a gun so heavy that it had to be supported on a rest), represented a tactical bridge between the ancient and medieval world of muscle weaponry and the “modern” world of technological killing. As firearms became lighter and more plentiful, they in their turn would destroy the massed pikes at such sixteenth-century battles as Marignano, La Bicocca, and Pavia.
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In Japan there was a parallel to the European experience. The gun had been introduced there by the Chinese and Portuguese during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It made its debut at the battle of Uedahara in 1548, but the first significant victory that can be attributed to the arquebus was the siege of Kajiki the following year. And at the battle of Nagashino in 1575 the great general Oda Nobunaga deployed three thousand lowly
ashigaru
firing their matchlocks in rotating volleys to destroy the mounted samurai of Takeda Katsuyori. As the bullets took their toll,
ashigaru
pikemen moved in to thrust up at those samurai who remained mounted. Takeda left ten thousand dead on the field, a staggering 67 percent fatality rate. Fifty-four of ninety-seven named Takeda-clan samurai were killed.
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In Italy, at the river Sesia in 1524, the old French chivalry, finely armored and gloriously confident, were shot out of their saddles. One of them was Pierre Terrail, Seigneur de Bayard, the legendary
chevalier sans peur et sans reproche
. Born in 1473, he was a
holdover from another era and was killed by an arquebusier—
sans peur et sans cérémonie
. The valiant Bayard, wedded to a compelling mythology of aristocracy and obligation, had done what was expected; almost every head of his family, going back centuries, had been killed in combat. It was an obligation to death in battle and a defining characteristic of the knightly class.
At Pavia in 1525 the French knights, led by their king, Francis I, were killed in great numbers by Spanish musketeers. The heavy shot “penetrated not only one man-at-arms, but often two, and two horses as well. Thus the field was covered with the pitiful carnage of dying noble knights as well as with heaps of dying horses.” They lay, according to a contemporary commentator, “like dung upon the face of the earth, and like the corn after the reaper, which none gathereth.”
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Francis survived but was captured and ransomed.
In Europe the old chivalric order at first tried to adapt to firearm technology by arming itself with the matchlock and then the slightly more advanced wheel-lock pistols, but wellborn warriors could never quite escape the idea that guns were unheroic and therefore unfit for noble combat. François de La Noue, a Huguenot cavalier of the sixteenth century, writes disparagingly in his
Discours politiques et militaires
that pistols were “devilish, invented in some mischevious workshop to turne whole realmes … into desolation and replenish the graves with dead carcases. Howbeit man’s malice hath made them so necessarie that they cannot be spared.”
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As though in compensation and defiance of the sheer ugliness of gun-based combat, the horsemen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed an elaborate set of maneuvers that seem to have more in common with the intricacies of the aristocratic dances of the period than with the exigencies of gun battles. Named after a courtly dance, the caracole, lines of horsemen rode up to the enemy, discharged their pistols usually at too great a
distance to be effective, and then peeled away to permit the next line to repeat the slightly farcical exercise.
Even as late as the eighteenth century, cavalrymen were all too aware of the inadequacy of firearms for mounted troops: “At a range of more than fifty paces a pistol shot and a well-thrown stone have just about the same effect. In a mêlée a discharged pistol is useless for parrying, and the only thing you can do is cast it away, for if you replace it in its holster and draw your sword you will receive a cut over your ear for your pains.”
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Against enemy cavalry the problem was accentuated by the fact that both mounted shooters were delivering their fire from highly unstable platforms: “Troopers usually fire at long range when the horses are galloping and the men are shaken about, and the target itself is moving so fast that it is quite impossible to take proper aim.” A British artillery officer at Waterloo, Cavalié Mercer, records in his journal:
Two double lines of skirmishers extended all along the bottom—the foremost of each line were within a few yards of each other constantly in motion, riding backwards and forwards, firing their carbines or pistols, and then reloading, still on the move. This fire seemed to me more dangerous for those on the hills above than for us below; for all, both French and English, generally stuck out their carbines or pistols as they continued to move backwards and forwards, and discharged them without taking any particular aim, and mostly in the air. I did not see a man fall on either side.
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As the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries progressed, and the experience with pistol and carbine (a shorter and lighter version of the musket) proved less than stellar, European cavalry tended to respond to the challenge of infantry by reverting to an old tactical role: using the horse as a shock weapon and, armed
with sword or saber, attempting to break up blocks of infantry. As it was invariably true that disciplined and compact bodies of infantry, whether they were pike and arquebus configurations of the earlier part of the black-powder era or the bayonet-fitted musketeers of the later part, could hold off most cavalry, frontal charges were to be avoided.
For infantry, cohesion was everything. If it was broken down, perhaps because a flank was vulnerable or enemy artillery had disordered the formation, or—and this was particularly lethal—if the infantry were fleeing, then the cavalry could penetrate, and infantrymen could be killed in large numbers and with terrible speed. During the Seven Years’ War, at the first battle of Lutterberg in 1758, the French cavalry fell on the broken and demoralized Anglo-German infantry and “carried everything before it, and killed almost all the enemy among scenes of terrible carnage.”
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At Quatre Bras (the battle ten days before Waterloo) the British Sixty-Ninth Regiment was caught before it could form itself into a defensive square and was terribly mauled by French cavalry.
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By lying down and allowing the cavalry to ride over him, an infantryman might just possibly escape, but Captain John Kincaid was disgusted to see “the [French] cuirassiers in their retreat stooping and stabbing at our wounded men as they lay on the ground.”
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Nothing quite ignited the nascent savagery of the
arme blanche
as the prospect of riding down disorganized infantrymen. The Prussian hussars at Hohenfriedeberg in 1745 were itching to get at the Saxon infantry. One of the Prussian officers records: “I heard some commotion and loud chatter among the hussars standing behind me. This was an infraction of our strict standards of discipline, and I asked an NCO what was happening. ‘The lads are beside themselves with joy,’ he answered. ‘They have been ordered to give no quarter to the Saxons.’ … I cannot recall having seen another battle in which we displayed more enthusiasm or burning anger.”
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One hundred thirty-four years later, at the battle of
Ulundi, fleeing Zulu warriors were subjected to British cavalry on a rampant spree:
The 94th and the 2nd/21st edged aside, and the blue-jacketed lancers … moved out in column of fours.… Then, as the lines straightened, “Form line—Gallop—Cha-a-arge!”
A roaring cheer burst from the square as the lances lowered.…
It was a riding-school exercise. Hardly breaking formation, the lancers rode down the slope through the retreating Zulus, picking their men from the ruck. The momentum from the horses spitted the warriors on the points, and as they passed, a strong outward flick of the wrist cleared the weapon, which swung back, up and forward again to point. [The movement was] almost too fast for the eye to follow, as lance after lance flipped through its deadly arc. One or two of the lances fouled in a shield, which would not drop off, and the lancers slowed and tried to slough them off against their horses.
… The men jammed the lance butts into the leather sockets on their right stirrups, thrust their arms past the elbow through the haft loops and drew their sabers to continue the slaughter.
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The charge of cavalry against cavalry tended to be not the grand head-on, crash-dummy collision of popular imagination but something altogether messier. The charging horses, unlike some of their riders, were not inclined to suicidal daftness and sought to avoid slamming into their counterparts. The Comte de Guibert describes the usual model of a cavalry-on-cavalry clash: “When, however, the two squadrons are made up of men and mounts which are equally experienced in war and are equally well-trained, the charge proceeds as follows—the ranks run at
each other, the horses seek the intervals [the spaces between] of their own accord … the forces are so completely intermingled that the two squadrons cross and emerge in the other’s rear.”
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Mercer at Waterloo observed something similar:
Amongst the multitudes of French cavalry continually pouring over the front ridge, one corps came sweeping down the slope entire … when suddenly a regiment of light dragoons (I believe of the German Legion) came up from the ravine at a brisk trot on their [the French] flank. The French had barely time to wheel up to the left and push their horses into a gallop when the two bodies came into collision. They were at very short distance from us, so that we saw the charge perfectly. There was no check, no hesitation on either side; both parties seemed to dash on in a most reckless manner and we fully expected to have seen a horrid crash—no such thing! Each, as if by mutual consent, opened their files on coming near, and passed rapidly through each other, cutting and pointing, much in the same manner one might pass the fingers of the right hand through those of the left. We saw but few fall. The two corps reformed afterwards, and in a twinkling both disappeared, I know not how or where.
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Captain L. E. Nolan, a British cavalryman, pointed out that in most cases the heroic fury of the cavalry charge was undermined by the instinct for self-preservation:
Cavalry seldom meet each other in a charge executed at speed; the one party generally turns before joining issue with the enemy, and this often happens when their line is still unbroken and no obstacles of any sort intervene.
The fact is, every cavalry soldier approaching another at speed must feel that if they come in contact at that pace
they both go down, and probably break every limb in their bodies.
To strike down his adversary, the dragoon must close, and the chances are he receives a blow in return for the one he deals out.
There is a natural repugnance to close in deadly strife … the cavalry soldiers, unless they feel confident in their riding, can trust to their horse, and know that their weapons are formidable, will not readily plunge into the midst of the enemy’s ranks.
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In the hurly-burly it was comparatively easy to allow the horse to take the rider out of the danger zone—not to be wondered at when one considers the anything-but-heroic hacking match of a cavalry mêlée. Francis Hall, an officer of the British Fourteenth Light Dragoons, describes just such an action at Fuentes de Oñoro in Spain in 1811:
