The Last Full Measure (14 page)

There were two schools of thought about the most effective weapon for cavalry. One favored the straight sword held pointed forward with the arm fully extended in almost a reconstruction of the medieval knight’s lance. The lethality came at the point, as Grandmaison, a French cavalry specialist writing in the mid-eighteenth century, emphasizes: “A single thrust into the body with the point will kill a man, which frequently cannot be achieved with twenty cuts with the edge.” There were those, however, who advocated the heavy curved saber. Writing at the same time as Grandmaison, a Hungarian cavalry officer countered the theory of the superiority of the thrust:

And there is no doubt that the saber could inflict grotesque injury. At the battle of the Waxhaws in South Carolina during the American War of Independence, in May 1780, the infamous British cavalry commander, the swaggering Banastre Tarleton, surprised and routed an American force. Dr. Robert Brownsfield recorded the results:

Despite being also bayoneted and having his wounds dressed by a less-than-sympathetic British surgeon who filled his head wounds with “rough tow, the particles of which could not be separated from the brain for several days,” John Stokes, miraculously, survived.

If a breakdown of cohesion spelled doom for infantry at the hands of cavalry, a tight formation and stalwart resistance could turn the tables. Mercer at Waterloo described how French cavalry
swarmed around British infantry squares like “an enormous surf bursting over the prostrate hull of a stranded vessel, and then running, hissing and foaming up the beach,” filling the spaces between the squares. Horses are sensitive creatures and could be easily spooked by a resolute display of bayonet points. Gunfire would bring down many horses and riders of the first ranks, leaving those behind to negotiate a writhing barricade of screaming beasts and men. In addition, many mounted frontal charges were delivered at nothing more than a trot or even a walk. At Waterloo, an officer of the Ninety-Fifth Foot, whose regiment was drawn up in a defensive square, describes being attacked by French cuirassiers. First, the infantrymen withheld their fire until the French were within thirty yards or so. “I fired a volley from my Company which had the effect, added to the fire of the 71st, of bringing so many horses to the ground, that it became quite impossible for the Enemy to continue their charge. I certainly believe that half of the Enemy were at that instant on the ground; some few men and horses were killed, more wounded, but by far the greater part were thrown down over the dying and the wounded. These last after a short time began to get up and run back to their supporters, some on horseback, but most of them dismounted.”
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THE SOLDIER OF
the premodern age (prior to about 1850 and what might be called the era of “high technology”) had an intimate relationship with death and killing on the battlefield that the modern warrior rarely experiences. It was an intimacy dictated, to a large extent, by the inadequacies of the weapons with which he fought. The French cavalry knocked over by the Ninety-Fifth Foot at Waterloo came within thirty yards of their enemy. They had to get close because they were fighting mainly with swords; the infantry had to let them get close because the smoothbore
muskets with which they defended themselves were grossly inaccurate at distances much beyond 50 yards. The protagonists were drawn closely together and the agency of death was never far away.

Before the age of industrial replication (as far as guns are concerned circa 1825), warfare was a handmade business. There were of course templates that laid out the design of firearms, but there was scant means by which the idea of standardization could be transferred into the actuality of exact uniformity. So, although most soldiers died anonymously, chewed up and spat out by the great maw of war, every combat death was individually crafted. Each gun, cannon, sword, and bayonet was unique. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a tension between the particular and the general became increasingly acute. It was an era that saw a dramatic movement away from the particularization of the feudal, where each nobleman armed his own contingent, toward the increasing standardization of the nation-state.

Designs of gunpowder firearms all face the same basic challenge: A way has to be found to ignite the powder in order to project the missile, and the powder posed problems. The earliest firearms of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries required a lighted wick (“match”) to make direct contact with the powder in the pan, which would flash and ignite the main powder charge in the barrel. (Sometimes the powder would flash without igniting the main charge—hence the phrase “a flash in the pan” for something showy but ultimately useless.) Carrying a lighted wick in the vicinity of gunpowder was not only potentially dangerous but also highly inconvenient. Rain was obviously a problem, and the lighted match advertised any movement at night. The wheel-lock mechanism of the seventeenth century applied a more sophisticated solution (overdesigned, as it turned out) to the ignition problem. A hammer that gripped a piece of iron pyrite was cranked back against a spring (“spanning,” the same word used for arming a crossbow) using a tool (from which we get the word
spanner
).
When the trigger was pulled, the pan cover moved to expose the powder and the pyrite sparked against a serrated wheel to ignite the priming charge. The gun was expensive to make and the wheel lock particularly prone to jamming or breaking if cocked for too long; it was, according to a seventeenth-century soldier, “too curious and too soone distempered with an ignorant hand.”
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In contrast, the flintlock, which became the standard infantry gun for about 150 years (roughly 1700–1850), was a model of simplicity. As the name suggests, the firing mechanism was based on the relatively simple mechanics of a lock. The mechanism was derived from the German-Dutch hunting piece known as a
snaphance
(the name means “pecking cock,” describing the action of the hammer, or “cock”). The cock was pulled back against a spring that in turn engaged with a restraining cog, the “sear.” When the sear was released by a trigger, the cock “pecked” down and automatically opened the pan cover to expose the priming powder. The flint in the cock struck against a steel plate (“frizzen”) to send a spark into the priming-powder pan and thence through a firing hole into the base of the barrel, which held the main powder charge. A sliding cover, manually closed after loading but automatically opened on firing, protected the priming charge from spilling or becoming wet. Another advantage was the introduction of a “half-cock,” which to some extent mitigated the danger of carrying a loaded weapon at full cock.
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Even so, accidents happened and men were killed. The sear that held the cock could become dangerously worn. Richard Holmes in
Redcoat
relates: “At Waterloo Lieutenant Strachan of the 73rd, who had just joined the regiment and was anxious to see action, was marching in front of a line of men with their muskets at the trail carried horizontally, muzzle forwards. A corn-stalk got entangled with the trigger of a half-cock musket, which went off, hitting Strachan in the back and killing him instantly.”
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The flintlock musket, although a huge improvement on the
wheel-lock, was in some respects hardly more lethal than the bow (in fact, during the American War of Independence, Benjamin Franklin strongly advocated reintroducing the longbow), but unlike the bow, it could be mastered by almost any soldier. The drill stages (“evolutions,” as they were called) seem to us quite extraordinarily complicated (even though the forty-four stages for the matchlock were reduced by about half for the flintlock). Nevertheless, the soldier had an imposing number of things to do before his musket was ready to fire. Priming powder had to be poured into the pan, and then a coarser powder, along with the ball, poured into the barrel, followed by a wad of paper or cloth to hold the charge in place; then all had to be tamped down with a ramrod. As the eighteenth century progressed, ball and powder were amalgamated into paper cartridges that the soldier broke open (usually by biting off one end) to enable him to pour powder and ball into the barrel to be followed by the empty paper cartridge, which acted as the wad.

In combat, understandably, much of the fancy rigamarole was dropped in favor of shortcuts. Very often, instead of going through the official loading procedure, soldiers under pressure would pour in the powder, roll in the ball, and give the butt a good whack on the ground to settle the powder and seat the ball on top.

All of these actions took a good deal of dexterity, and it is no wonder that in the heat of battle soldiers fumbled and panicked. Guns were loaded multiple times but not fired (usually because the ball had been put into the barrel before the powder); they became fouled from gunpowder residue; the ramrods bent or broke. To save time between loadings, soldiers stuck their ramrods into the earth, which caused their guns to become fouled with dirt. Some soldiers inadvertently fired off their ramrods because they had forgotten to remove them from the barrel, sometimes with fatal consequences for a man in a row in front.

In order to facilitate speedy loading, the ball was significantly smaller than the bore of the barrel. The resultant space between the ball and the barrel was termed “windage” (in flintlocks of the later eighteenth century, the windage was about .05 inches). Windage may have made loading easier, but there was a price to pay in the loss of gas (from the exploding gunpowder) that escaped around the ball rather than propelling it. The buffeting deformation of the flight of the ball as it traveled up the barrel affected accuracy also. Like a rifle bullet, the smoothbore ball left the barrel with a spin, but neither its axis nor its speed of rotation was controlled, and as it traveled, air resistance further deflected its flight in the same way that a sliced golf shot reacts.
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Yet if windage was reduced, it caused extensive fouling with the resinous after-burn residue of the powder. It also increased what was already a fairly hefty recoil that could leave a badly bruised shoulder after a period of firing. (The recoil could be powerful enough to kill. A Lieutenant I. Bangs of the American Continental Army in the Revolutionary War records that as a man lowered his gun to cock it, it went off prematurely and the recoiling butt “kicked” him in the chest, “producing instant death.”)
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