He added that he believed this to have been ‘the closest and most protracted musketry contest almost ever witnessed’ and indeed it appears to have continued for some hours on end. Not the least significant aspect of this fight was the great length of time during which it continued.
It is clear from Leach’s report that both sides in this duel were using cover – the hedge on the British side, and the hill crest on the French. It is also likely that the troops on each side were in a fairly loose formation, since the British rifle regiments were always accustomed to fighting in this way, while the French were firing from a kneeling position. It is impossible to conduct a kneeling fire in any very dense formation, and it would appear that in this case the French must have had a depth of no more than one rank. When they did make forward rushes it was only in small groups, so they cannot have been arrayed in anything like the solid masses used in the earlier attack by D’Erlon’s divisions or the later attacks by the Imperial Guard. The French force was probably composed of tired and defeated troops who had regrouped from D’Erlon’s first abortive assault, who wanted to keep up the fight, but who lacked the cohesion or unity of a fresh massed formation.
What Leach gives us is nothing less than an account of an empty battlefield in the Napoleonic period. The range was perhaps rather short by late nineteenth-century standards, because the smooth-bore musket could not reach much further than one or two hundred yards. By comparison with encounters between fresh masses, however, the range was great enough to allow the combat to drag on for a long time. Sufficient casualties were inflicted at a distance to deter attackers from pressing home; yet they were not enough to produce a decisive result. This was a genuine firefight in which both sides tried to kill the enemy rather than merely to scare him off: the ‘battle of killing’ had already begun in this part of the field. We have the testimony of another rifleman, Captain Kincaid, that Waterloo seemed extraordinary because it had the aura of a ‘battle in which everybody was killed’.4 Compared to many other Napoleonic battles he felt that there was an excessive proportion of dead to fugitives at the end.
We must ask whether Leach’s combat at Waterloo was really as exceptional as he seemed to think. Was it no more than a unique oddity, or does it reflect a type of activity which had been going on unnoticed in many other Napoleonic fights? To what extent was the battle of killing an important part of all the warfare of the age?
To find an answer to these questions we must look at the ‘Eastern Front’, where the French fought Prussians, Russians and Austrians, rather than at the Peninsular campaigns where they faced the British. In the Peninsula there was certainly a great deal of skirmishing, and some of it was highly professional on both sides. The British rifle regiments, in particular, were celebrated for their skill in maintaining flexible screens ahead of the main fighting line, and in picking off French officers at long range. In the Peninsular battles, however, there seem to have been relatively few sustained firefights compared with the head-on collisions of formed bodies. The skirmishers were an auxiliary arm, designed merely to pester and confuse the enemy as he marched into the contest at close range. There were some notable exceptions to this rule, as at Arcangues church in 1813, or in Craufurd’s defence of the Coa bridge in 1810; but by and large the battles seem to have been decided in fields which were less than ‘empty’.
In Eastern Europe after about 1808 on the other hand, conditions were rather different. On average the opposing soldiers tended to be less hardened to campaigning than those of the Peninsula, and more reliant upon their artillery and skirmishers. Armies were bigger, contained a higher proportion of raw levies and were capable of less precision in manoeuvres. In these circumstances it was often more difficult to bring massed bodies into close combat, so an alternative method of defeating the enemy had to be found. That method turned out to be fire combat.
Clausewitz, one of the most eminent veterans of the ‘Eastern Front’, suggested that there was a clear distinction to be drawn between the fire combat and close combat phases of a battle. He said that the first was designed primarily for the physical destruction of the enemy, whereas the second was for the destruction of his morale. The fire combat should therefore be seen as an effective and essential preparation for the decisive bayonet charge, and should preferably be conducted by different troops from those who would be sent into the charge itself. It should not be seen only as a perfunctory auxiliary, but had to be a serious and protracted business, since significant physical destruction of an enemy’s force could not be achieved quickly with the weapons of the day. Of especial interest to us here, he added that this firing or destructive phase of the battle would take a length of time proportional to the size of the forces engaged; thus a big army would require a much longer firefight than a small one. In the conditions of Eastern Europe, in other words, the preliminary exchange of fire would be conceived on a much greater scale than in the relatively small battles of the Peninsula
Clausewitz drew a vivid picture of what happened to the soldiers involved in a firefight of this type:
After a fire combat of several hours’ duration, in which a body of troops has suffered severe loss (for instance, a quarter or one-third of its numbers) the debris may, for the time, be looked upon as a heap of burnt-out cinders, for – (a) The men are physically exhausted; (b) they have spent their ammunition; (c) their arms want cleaning; (d) many have left the field with the wounded, although not themselves wounded; (e) the rest think they have done their part for the day, and if once they get beyond the sphere of danger do not willingly return to it; (f) the feeling of courage with which they started has had the edge taken off, the longing for the fight is satisfied; (g) the original organisation and formation are partly destroyed, or thrown into disorder.5
He said that troops in this state would be in a condition neither to deliver nor to receive a bayonet charge. For them the battle would have been entirely a matter of fire action with an attritional rather than a decisive aim. He went on to suggest that in this phase of the combat a good general would try to put as few soldiers as possible into the firing line, since a relative advantage might be gained by exposing only a few dispersed musketeers against a larger but more concentrated body. Both sides might lose the same number of casualties in such a fight; but the larger force would have more men exhausted by the end. It would have burnt up its potential reserves, while its opponent might still have fresh supports waiting for the decisive moment in a covered position further back.
Clausewitz does not claim that all Napoleonic fighting was conducted by fire, let alone decided by it; but he does imply that the firing phase could drag on for much longer and involve more troops than was normal in the battles between British and French in the Peninsula. He stresses the need to maintain and feed a skirmish line during extended periods of deadlock between bayonet onsets. As if in confirmation of his view, we do indeed find that in some central European battles entire divisions of infantry were broken down to skirmish, while in all armies after about 1808 there was a much increased provision of troops allocated to skirmishing duty. The Prussians in particular took this matter seriously, and allocated over a third of all their infantry as skirmishers.6 Some of the Eastern European battles lasted for two or even four days on end, of which only a small proportion can have been taken up by bayonet attacks. Much of the interval must have been given over to the firefight.
Skirmishing infantry was not the most destructive source of firepower on the Napoleonic battlefield, however, because artillery was starting to be used regularly in very dense formations. Sometimes batteries of up to a hundred guns would be concentrated, which could sweep the ground in front of them of all opposition.7 Many of the biggest battles were to a very considerable extent ‘artillery battles’ and it would certainly be misleading to think of this particular feature as an original invention of the First World War. For contemporary commentators, however, even the appearance of massed artillery seemed to be overshadowed by the massed use of skirm
ishers. For a variety of reasons it was this, and not the artillery, which most seized the imaginations of military theorists.
There cannot have been anything particularly surprising in the fact that artillery firepower was gradually increasing. The artillery was a self-consciously technical arm, and in most countries it had committees, test ranges and factories dedicated to the task of improving performance. With the infantry, on the other hand, there was none of this scientific paraphernalia. The infantry was generally thought to require the least technical training of any arm, and was not felt to be susceptible to radical developments.8 It was judged to be good or bad purely on the basis of its resilience on campaign and its mastery of the close-order drill book. Beyond that there seemed little to say.
With the arrival of massed skirmishers, however, the intriguing possibility of an ‘infantry science’ seemed to be opened. A specialist skirmisher needed a number of qualities which the traditional line infantryman apparently had not. The skirmisher had to be able to aim his piece at the target, so the whole science of ballistics and marksmanship became relevant to him. He had to be able to move quickly around the battlefield, so the nascent science of gymnastics was important. Of particular interest, he had to be able to make his own decisions. He was no longer under the close control of a solid rank of NCO’s and officers: he was on his own. This meant that ways had to be found for developing the intelligence and understanding of every single skirmisher. Education, moral instruction and even political consciousness were invoked as necessary aspects of a skirmisher’s training. Such soldiers would not be mere ‘automata’ like the members of Frederick the Great’s mechanically-drilled line. Instead, they would be what the French called ‘baionettes intelligentes’. They had to be able to think for themselves.
In Britain Sir John Moore had already taken some important steps along this path with his light infantry training programme at Shorncliffe after the Egyptian expedition. He stressed not only the importance of firepower and a dispersed formation, but also the need for a more humane discipline which would give free rein to the personal qualities of each soldier. He treated his men as individuals, and encouraged the development of their personal initiative.9
All these arguments suggested a complete revolution in the role of infantry, and indeed in Prussia the skirmishing lobby even came to be associated with the idea of revolution in the political sense.10 Far from being the most reactionary and authoritarian arm, the infantry now seemed to require an influx of progressive, liberal and scientific ideas. It was perceived as a veritable spearhead of development in the military field, and junior officers of ambition were delighted to find that it could offer them something more than an endless round of drill.
In technical terms, also, this period saw a number of important developments. The British rifle regiments with their Baker rifles, as well as the rifle guilds of the Tyrol, proved that accurate marksmanship in battle was possible at greater ranges than had been practicable with smooth-bore muskets. After a steady series of improvements from 1815 onwards, the Minié bullet and the percussion rifled musket were brought together in the 1850s to make a cheap but very effective weapon for mass use.
There was also talk of a military breech-loader. Such a weapon had actually been used by Colonel Ferguson in the American Revolutionary War, although it had finally been judged too fragile and specialised for general adoption.11 Between 1814 and 1822 the French conducted a series of tests with another model, which was finally rejected by only a narrow margin – again on the grounds of fragility.12 In 1841 the Prussian army actually did start to deploy breech-loaders, in the shape of what Mr. Punch laughingly called the ‘death-defying Needle-gun’. Under campaign conditions the Dreyse Needle-rifle, like its predecessors, proved to be less than totally soldier-proof; but in 1864 and 1866 it did give certain tactical advantages to its users. The decisive defeat of the Austrians at Sadowa, in particular, was thought by some observers to be due largely to the prone firing posture which the new breech-loaders made possible.
As if all these improvements were not enough, there was also the realisation that a practical machine-gun was just around the corner. In his important book De l’Armée Selon la Charte (1829), General Morand discussed the uses to which existing steam-driven machine-guns (e.g. the Perkins model) could be put. He admitted that the encumbrance of their boilers would render them unsuitable for mobile warfare; but he suggested that their smokeless discharges would be ideal for defending towns. An enemy could be lured forward down an apparently deserted line of approach, and then ambushed with automatic fire from concealed positions covered by extensive obstacles:
Bombardment (of the town) need not be feared, since the defence would be conducted at a distance, hidden in the ground, in casemates or dug-outs. Because these automatic weapons would produce neither noise nor explosion, would operate with hardly anyone to man them, and would be concealed by tufts of grass or bushes, the enemy would be unable, in his emotion, to identify the source of their invisible shots.13
Having achieved the initial killing surprise, the defender could then send infantry forward from their trenches to finish off the business with a counter-attack.
The above description comes from the pen of a leading tactical writer of the immediately post-Napoleonic period. In essence he is advocating a genuinely empty battlefield, in which machine guns and camouflaged trenches replace the massive masonry ramparts of existing fortress architecture. Strong echoes of the Western Front resound throughout this passage, and we are forced to admit that more famous prophecies of the First World War such as H. G. Wells’ The Land Ironclads (1903) actually came rather late into the field.
If we now return to the way in which the Napoleonic skirmish line was viewed by contemporaries, we can start to appreciate the full scope of the revolution which it promised. The front line of infantry would in future be dispersed, individually self-reliant and able to kill the enemy at a much greater range than hitherto. It would even be able to defeat artillery by its fire, in circumstances where the gunners had previously enjoyed the upper hand. More than one writer called the new generation of rifles ‘hand artillery’, insofar as a battalion armed with them could lay down a greater number of bullets in a given time than could a battery of artillery at the same ranges.14
If the battlefield supremacy of artillery was being called into question by improved infantry weapons, so also was the role of cavalry. An important element in the ‘skirmish lobby’s’ arguments turned on the rapidity of infantry movement around the battlefield. Whereas Napoleonic infantry had walked everywhere until the final charge, the new infantry would run. This would give it a mobility almost equal to that of the cavalry, but with considerably greater firepower and at a dramatically smaller cost to the taxpayer. It would also be able to shoot down attacking cavalry at long range and could safely rely upon small rallying squares for close-range protection, rather than the ponderous battalion or brigade squares of the past. For the champions of light infantry the cavalry was already an outdated weapon as early as 1840, and by the time of the American Civil War some infantry units were starting to be called ‘foot cavalry’. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 Sir Ian Hamilton noticed that Japanese infantry seemed able to attack at no less than four times the speed of their European counterparts:
This combination of infantry tactics with cavalry speed of movement; which might, as I have said, demoralise second rate troops, might also considerably disconcert even the very best of marksmen.15
The new infantry was supposed to fight a ‘battle of killing’ dispersed and at long range, which they might then follow up with a very rapid charge across no-man’s-land. They would move so fast that they would be exposed to relatively few of the enemy’s shots, and would demoralise him by their onset to the extent that his aim would be spoiled. Colonel Le Louterel summed up this effect when he wrote in 1848 that ‘… in front of the enemy, the emotion and internal misgivings which are inseparable from a real combat will always prev
ent a soldier from shooting accurately’.16 Whereas fire with modern rifles could be destructive at long range, there was normally little to fear from a firing line which was being attacked violently at close range.
All these ideas were brought together during the late 1830s in the French Army, when the first units of ‘Chasseurs à Pied’ (originally ‘Chasseurs de Vincennes’ and then ‘Chasseurs d’Orleans’) were formed. This was to be ‘an infantry which is truly light’.17 It was to be capable of sustained movement at the ‘gymnastic pace’ or jog, yet at the same time it was to be trained in accurate shooting with the rifle. The Chasseurs would also be encouraged to develop individual initiative and education. Their champions saw them as a veritable blueprint for the army of the future, and predicted that they would soon put all other types of soldier out of business.
By 1853 there were no less than twenty battalions of Chasseurs, and they regarded themselves as a separate arm of the service. They attracted many of the more promising officers of the infantry, an exceptionally high proportion of whom later rose to become generals. It was even true that certain elements of Chasseur training came to be adopted by the army as a whole. Education for personal improvement, gymnastic exercises and target practice all came to be generally accepted; and around this period the rifle was itself starting to be distributed to the troops of the line. Foreign observers were mightily impressed, and indeed no less an authority than Friedrich Engels waxed almost lyrical about the individual freedom, firepower and mobility which this new and democratic weapon seemed to embody.18
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