The Last Full Measure (15 page)

The anticipation of the recoil and pan flash of the priming powder caused involuntary flinching, which also affected accuracy.
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In addition, there was a tendency to let the musket rise during aiming, so that many shots went high. The experienced officer or NCO would have his men aim low, around the knee, so that any rising might result in a torso or head hit. Colonel Charles Scott instructed his Virginia musketeers at the second battle of Trenton in December 1776: “Now I want to tell you one thing. You are all in the habit of shooting too high. You waste your powder and lead, and I have cursed you about it a hundred times. Now I tell you what it is, nothing must be wasted, every crack must count. For that reason boys, whenever you see them fellows first
begin to put their feet upon this bridge do you shin ’em. Take care now and fire low. Bring down your pieces, fire at their legs.”
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Flintlocks were notoriously inaccurate at anything over about 50 yards. An eighteenth-century officer writes: “A soldier’s musket, if not exceedingly ill-bored as many are, will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards … but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aims at him, and as for firing at 200 yards you might as well fire at the moon.”
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Modern tests under laboratory conditions (that is, the guns were not fired by humans but clamped and electrically ignited) on actual eighteenth-century muskets have shown 60 percent hits on target at 75 yards; at 100 yards it was pretty much a fifty-fifty proposition. With some guns the deviance was so great that the test had to be halted for safety reasons.
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Misfiring was also a significant problem. The hydroscopic nature of gunpowder was obviously a major contributory factor, and flint wear also played a part, with each flint being good for about sixty firings.
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As many as one in four discharge attempts were unsuccessful.
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These were just some of the technical shortcomings of the weapon itself, and they were, of course, greatly compounded by the complexities of human stress under battle conditions.

The inaccuracy of individual muskets could be compensated for to some degree by reducing the range to target. Men had to get close to maximize the lethality of their weapon. If weapons were discharged at more than 80–100 yards, the chances of a hit were so greatly reduced that the expenditure of lead per casualty inflicted was massively inefficient. The Prussians at Chotusice (1742), for example, loosed off about 650,000 rounds to make 2,500 kills and about the same number of wounded. Some of those fatalities (perhaps as many as half) would have been caused by artillery and some (probably only a very small number, for reasons that will be discussed later), by bayonet. Assuming, therefore, that about
1,200 men were killed by musketry, it took approximately 540 balls or roughly 33 pounds of lead to extinguish one Austrian soldier’s life.
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At the battle of Vitoria (1813) during the Peninsular War, contemporaries estimated that the British fired 60 rounds per man (usually the total allocation) for an expenditure of 3.5 million rounds or 450 per French casualty.
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(In modern warfare we have far exceeded the shots-to-kill ratio of the early modern period.) The great French general Maurice de Saxe, in his
Reveries on the Art of War
(1757), passes the judgment that “powder is not as terrible as believed. Few men in these affairs are killed from the front while fighting. I have seen whole salvoes fail to kill four men.”
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Some historians of the Napoleonic period put the hit rate as low as .3 percent,
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others as high as 5–30 percent.
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But mortality rates in combat become misleading when they are expressed as a percentage of total combatants or casualties vis-à-vis total rounds expended. Battle is not fought in the statistical median but at the hot spots of localized violence. In these hot spots, casualties could be far higher. At Fontenoy in 1745 the Welsh Regiment of Fusiliers (it became the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1920) had 200 killed out of a total casualty list of 322 (a massive 62 percent). At the battle of Brooklyn in 1776, 256 Marylanders were killed and 100 wounded out of a total complement of 400.
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At Salamanca in 1812, Leith’s division (about 3,000 strong) took 367 wounded and 51 killed in the front line of the attack (14 percent casualties, of which 1.7 percent were killed), but it was localized. Some battalions, such as the British 1/4th Foot (“1/4” means 1st Battalion of the 4th Regiment), lost only 3.9 percent, while others, such as the 3/1st Foot, lost 21 percent.
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“It was by no means unusual,” writes Major General B. P. Hughes, for a unit to suffer 30 percent casualties in the close combat of the eighteenth century.”
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And the majority of those casualties would usually be taken among the first two ranks at distances of less than 50 yards, and probably within a few seconds of the opening volley,
when muskets had been preloaded in the calm before what one combatant called “the smoky, tormented, thunder-shaken vortex of the great fight.”
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Rain could be lethal. A downpour quenched the muskets of Colborne’s brigade at the battle of Albuera, allowing the French cavalry to sweep in. The British took 76 percent casualties with a massive killed-to-wounded ratio: 319 killed, 460 wounded.
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To compensate for the inaccuracy of individual muskets, men were packed together into a firing formation that theoretically would be able to put out a formidable wall of fire in a concentrated blast. The problem was that they also offered a nicely compacted target that was not only convenient for opposing infantry but particularly tasty to field artillery. For the infantry this would be a devilish contract that lasted well into the modern period. It is sometimes tempting to be smug about the past, and the idiocy of two opposing armies in the eighteenth century blasting away at 30 yards (as they did, for example, at Fontenoy in 1745, where both sides lost about 20 percent of their combatants within the first few minutes of engagement) appears to us to be crazy; but this kind of bloody necessity to try and overwhelm the enemy with massed small-arms firepower brought to bear at close range and at great risk to the attacker would mark infantry warfare throughout the later modern period, of which the American Civil War is a prime example.

Timing was a crucial factor in black-powder combat. The first volley was important, but it could also be hazardous to the firer if it was not effective; for in the time it took to reload, the enemy could deliver a devastating countervolley. Frederick the Great declared: “Battles will be won through superior firepower … the infantry that can load the fastest will always defeat those that are slower to reload.”
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In parade-ground conditions a musket could be loaded and fired five times a minute, but in the “thunder-shaken vortex” of battle nothing approaching that rate could be hoped for. Men
were sometimes killed by those in the ranks behind them. An Austrian officer at the battle of Kolin in 1757 observed that it “was the first and only action I have ever seen where our troops kept up an orderly and aimed fire in tightly closed ranks, and yet many a brave lad fell dead of wounds inflicted from the back, without having turned tail to the enemy.… The surgeons were later ordered to inspect the battlefield, and it transpired that these mortal wounds had been delivered by men of the rearward ranks, who carelessly mishandled their muskets in the heat of fire.”
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A musket ball weighed about 1 ounce, and a hit at anything up to, say, 100 yards could inflict an appalling wound. Modern conoidal-shaped bullets make a clean entry but tend to tumble when they enter the body, leaving a trail of horrific damage, and create a large exit wound. A heavy round ball does not tumble but creates what in wound ballistics is known as “crushing” on initial impact. “Elastic” tissue such as muscle and skin is good at absorbing the kinetic energy of the projectile. A high-velocity bullet is not necessarily more lethal than a slower, heavier ball because kinetic energy is a function of mass. (In fact, the muzzle velocity of the black-powder period—1,200–1,500 feet per second—compares quite favorably with some modern firearms. For example, a Colt .357 Magnum fires a bullet at 1,200 feet per second, and even modern assault rifles, “beneficiaries of more than three centuries of technical development, were only double those of early muskets.”)
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An infantryman was most likely to be hit on his left side, as this was most often presented to the enemy (a right-handed shooter turns slightly to the right, exposing his left side).
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A full-velocity shot to the head or stomach invariably proved fatal. Stomach wounds were particularly feared (due in part to the almost inevitable death from peritonitis if the soldier was not killed outright). Rifleman Harris, in the Peninsular War, describes a comrade who had been gut-shot:

Men hit by a musket ball did not always drop neatly. A soldier of the Napoleonic era describes the macabre death dance: “I have observed a Soldier, mortally wounded, by a shot through the head or heart, instead of falling down, elevate his Firelock with both hands above his head, & run round & round, describing circles before he fell, as one frequently sees a bird shot in the air.… Men, when badly wounded, seek the shelter of a stone or a bush, to which they betake themselves, before they lie down, for support & security, just as birds, or hares do, when in a similar state of suffering.”
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Prolonged firefights at relatively close ranges could produce high casualties for little gain. A French witness at the slugfest of Kloster Kamp (1760) recalls: “The battlefield was strewn with dead, but we did not notice a single enemy uniform on our ground, or a single French uniform on that of the enemy.”
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Commanders, understandably, tried to prevent this. The model they aspired to was the volley followed by a bayonet charge. Major Macready of
the Thirtieth Foot at Waterloo remarks: “All firing beyond one volley in a case where you must charge, seems only to cause a useless interchange of casualties, besides endangering the steadiness of a charge to be undertaken in the midst of sustained file fire, when a word of command is hard to hear.”
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Sometimes there was to be no firing at all and an entire reliance on the bayonet. Marshal Ney at Montmirail in 1814 had the Guard empty their muskets of priming powder. Before the British bayonet attack on Anthony Wayne’s sleeping troops at Paoli in 1777, “no soldier … was suffered to load; those who could not draw their pieces [extract the charge] took out the flints.” Failure to do so could have its own fatal consequences. When Wayne, in revenge for Paoli, attacked the British garrison at Stony Point in 1779 he ordered it be done at the point of the bayonet, guns unloaded, but one unfortunate “insisted on loading his piece—all was now a profound silence—the officer commanding the platoon ordered him to keep on; the soldier observed that he did not understand attacking with his piece unloaded; he was ordered not to stop [in order to load], at his peril; he still persisted, and the officer instantly dispatched him.”
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In terms of percentages of men killed by the bayonet, the British at Paoli seemed to have had a slight margin. Of 1,500 Americans at Paoli, 200 (13.3 percent) were killed; at Stony Point, of 600 British, the Americans killed 63 (10.5 percent).
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The bayonet became something of an idée fixe of the black-powder era and, indeed, way beyond. Its supposed powers were invoked well into the twentieth century. But hard evidence suggests its effectiveness was more in the anticipation than the use, for no other weapon was held in such horror.

The “plug” bayonet had been introduced around the middle of the seventeenth century but by the end of the century was supplanted by the socket version (which, unlike the plug, permitted firing because it was attached to the outer rim of the musket by a
ring). Its introduction is one of those innovations that seems, on the face of it, relatively minor, but in fact it condemned a whole class of warrior—the pikemen—to oblivion. No longer did musketeers need the pike for protection, for the bayonet now gave them the means to defend themselves.

There are many eyewitnesses to the warfare of the period who state that the bayonet was rarely employed. Dominique-Jean Larrey, Napoleon’s surgeon-in-chief, encountered only five cases of bayonet wounds throughout his career. Although commanders were constantly urging men to withhold fire and charge with the bayonet, actual bayonet fighting seems to have been rare. At the battle of Maida (Italy, 1806), according to the British commander Sir John Stuart, his troops, having exchanged a volley, moved in “awful silence towards [the French] … until their bayonets began to cross.” However, a British combatant saw it somewhat differently: “I have heard … it is stated that the bayonets of the contending forces actually crossed during the charge. They may have done so, in some parts of the line—but
so far as I could see
they did not do so, and I have never heard any one who was in the action say that the bayonets actually crossed.”
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