A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  They made, nevertheless, stalwart efforts to enhance their effectiveness against military methods that were not their own, notably by incorporating along with their mounted forces sizeable numbers of foot-soldiers who, with edged weapons, bows and eventually mechanical crossbows, presented a fierce face to light horsemen whenever they surged forward to divide and pick off in detail a body of knights. Foot-soldiers had counted for little in the wars against the Magyars and Vikings, least of all in the wars over rights that were the obsession of feudal Europe; in Europe mounted men positively discouraged the horseless from carrying arms, since they might thereby — particularly if they were the inhabitants of towns — defend and even claim rights to which the warriors did not concede their entitlement. In the Holy Land, however, foot-soldiers had value, especially to protect the baggage trains, without which Crusaders could not campaign, as well as the vulnerable flanks of the mounted body when drawn up in order of battle.

  Historians have long argued that the Crusaders’ Muslim opponents fixed on the stratagem of dividing horse from foot as their chief tactical principle and, though this is now disputed, it proved often the case that such a separation did lead to the Crusaders’ defeat.82 There were such separations at Ramla in 1102, at Marj’Ayyun in 1179, at Cresson in 1187 and in the disaster of Hattin in the same year, a victory for Saladin that returned to him much of the territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. What underlay the Crusaders’ failure in all these and other defeats was not, however, tactical accident but a structural defect in their method of warmaking: dependence on the armoured charge as a means to victory against an enemy whose main intention was not to stand and receive it. The Crusaders believed that success lay in choosing ‘the moment at which to deliver their charge with the certainty of striking into the main body of the enemy’.83 In Europe it was becoming a matter of honour for a warrior not to flinch from the shock of such an attack — a continuation, in an elaborated form, of the code of the phalanx fighter. On the Crusades, the western warrior met an opponent whose tradition was quite other, and who saw no dishonour in fighting at a distance and manoeuvring to avoid the critical blow. Over time the Crusaders adapted to the unfamiliar challenge, by enlisting increasing numbers of local infantrymen and by choosing where possible, in accordance with local practice, to fight in locales where their flanks were protected by obstacles; meanwhile the Muslims moved closer to western practice also — there is evidence that, in the thirteenth century, they began to imitate the western ceremony of the joust.

  The principal response of the Crusaders to the strains of warmaking in the Holy Land was, however, cultural, an ever closer assimilation of the code of warriordom by which they lived with the appeal to Christian service that drew them across the Mediterranean in the first place. Already during the eleventh century, the outline of this chivalric idea was discernible in Europe; it was no longer enough for a man to be a warrior that he should have a horse, a coat of mail and a lord to follow. The basis of fidelity was passing from the purely material enjoyment of a grant of land, by which he supported the military capability his lord expected of him, to the forging of a ceremonial and religious relationship between the two. The old oath of fealty, by which the Church had solemnised a vassal’s dutiful acceptance of a benefice from a great man, was transformed into one by which a knight bound himself in personal service to his lord and swore not merely to obey but also to behave in knightly fashion, which meant to lead an honourable and even virtuous life.

  It was no long step for the focus of the knightly ideal to be transferred, in the Crusading world, from the person of the lord to that of the Church itself. At the end of the twelfth century, a number of new monastic orders were founded which, though originally dedicated to such traditionally pious works as the maintenance of hospitals for pilgrims to the Holy Land and their welfare on the journey, quickly took on another function: that of fighting to defend the Holy Land itself. These knightly orders, the Hospitallers and Templars, soon became both a mainstay of the Crusading effort as well as powers in their own right, great builders of castles in Palestine and Syria and recruiters and fund-raisers for the Crusading effort in Europe.84 Their influence was infectious, for

  their way of life turned them into exemplary warriors. They were obedient and showed discipline in battle, whilst displaying frugality and asceticism in communal life, from which women and children were excluded. They all lived under the same roof, received from their leaders clothing and nourishment and had no private possessions. They were never inactive. When they were not fighting, they were doing manual tasks … Their hierarchy was founded not on nobility but on merit. They had repudiated the pleasures and prestige proper to secular chivalry — love of fine arms, exaggerated care for the body and coiffure, passion for games and hunting — [in exchange for] a new order founded on poverty, communal life and devotion to Christ.85

  In the founding of the military orders we may perceive the origins of the regimented armies that arose in Europe in the sixteenth century; there is certainly a strong case to be argued that the dissolution of the monastic orders in the Protestant lands during the Reformation carried into the state armies — through warrior-monks who secularised themselves to become lay soldiers — the system of hierarchy, of commanders and their subordinate units, that had made the orders the first autonomous and disciplined fighting-bodies Europe had known since the disappearance of the Roman legions. That, however, lay in the future. The immediate influence of the Hospitallers and Templars on the battlefield was to prompt other Christian warriors elsewhere, notably those fighting the Muslims in Spain but also the Germans waging war against the pagan Prussians and Lithuanians, to found similar orders of their own. Of these the most important was that of the Teutonic Knights who, in conquered Prussia, founded a military regime from whose secularised estates Frederick the Great, 500 years later, recruited the nucleus of his officer corps.

  The decline and eventual extinction of the Crusading kingdoms at the end of the thirteenth century was too gradual to mark a watershed in European warmaking; too many Crusades had been launched for the Muslim triumphs to provoke a climactic retaliation, and in any case the European kings had their hands full with wars of their own at home. Nevertheless, the Crusades left changes in the European military world that were never effaced. They re-established the presence of Latin (Roman Catholic) states in the eastern Mediterranean, not only in Palestine and Syria but more lastingly in Greece, Crete, Cyprus and the Aegean, through which staging-places the northern Italian cities, notably Venice (where town life and commerce had never wholly died), were enabled to reopen a prosperous trade with the Middle and eventually Far East, and to revive the safe transportation of goods between ports throughout the Mediterranean itself; the money they made thereby fuelled most of the wars fought during the fifteenth century between themselves and later by France against the Habsburgs of the Holy Roman empire for dominance south of the Alps. They sent a powerful impulse to fortify the liberation of Spain from Islam (the Reconquista), as well as the eastward extension of the Christian frontier toward Russia and the steppe. Having undermined the strength of the Byzantines, they did nothing to check the advance of the Ottoman Turks into the Balkans; by the beginning of the fifteenth century they had reached the Danube, overwhelming in the process the Christian kingdom of Serbia and menacing that of Hungary. By way of compensation, however, the Crusaders had confronted the warring kings of Europe and their turbulent vassals with the idea of a larger purpose to warfare than that of their interminable quarrel over rights; they reinforced the authority of the Church in its efforts to contain the warrior impulse within some ethical and legal framework; and, paradoxical as it may seem, in schooling the European knightly class to the disciplines of purposive warmaking, they laid the basis for the rise of effective kingdoms. By the assertion of central power within their own borders, these eventually gave birth to a Europe where conflict ceased to be the endemic condition of everyday life and became an occasional and then exter
nal undertaking.

  The development of this pattern would have been difficult for contemporaries to perceive in the troubled fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the great dispute over rights that led to the Hundred Years’ War between France and England (1337–1457), in the wars between Habsburgs, Wittelsbachs and Luxembourgs for the crown of the Holy Roman empire, and of the emperors to do down their rebellious subjects in Bohemia and Switzerland, and in the Italian city wars, any thought that the social and political, let alone military, dominance of the man on horseback might be reaching its conclusive term would have seemed fanciful. Nevertheless, such was the case. Mounted warfare between armoured men, fought in the belief that to shrink from the blow in the line of battle was an offence not merely against legal duty but against personal honour, ultimately proved as self-defeating as had the code of phalanx warfare in classical Greece. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that, even in its heyday in the fifteenth century, knightly warfare was not what it seems to us or what its devotees believed it ought to be at the time. The ever heavier and more impenetrable armour worn by mounted warriors (plate rather than mail after the mid-fourteenth century) was better suited not to the exigencies of the battlefield — despite the appearance of more and more foot-soldiers handling the long- and crossbows in that century, the lethality of warfare did not much advance — but to the artificialities of the joust.86 Just as the modern warfare of lightning armoured thrusts and pinpoint airstrikes achieves its theoretical perfection only on an army’s training-grounds, so it may well have been that the shining suit of the fifteenth-century warrior achieved its theoretical purpose of protection rather from an opponent’s lance in a tourney than from an arrow or sword-blow on the battlefield. Common sense, the quality that allowed Victor Hanson to unravel the mystery of phalanx warfare, should persuade us of the improbability of any other case.

  Medieval battles, as R.C. Smail, the master of Crusader historiography, has pointed out, defy reconstruction from the evidence.87 But in the three battles of the Hundred Years’ War of which we do have detailed knowledge, Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415), the English knights in all three cases fought dismounted, and supported by archers, and the bulk of the French dismounted in the second and third. The idea that armoured knights, riding knee to knee with couched lances in dense waves of successive ranks, could have charged home against each other without instantaneous catastrophe to both sides at the moment of impact defies belief.

  The iron warfare of the Middle Ages, like that of the Greeks, was a bloody and ‘horrible affair’, made all the worse by its relentless regularity and the bloodthirsty courage of those who bound themselves to it. For all the higher motivation involved — civic independence among the Greeks, fealty and chivalry with the knights — a certain ‘hard primitivism’ lurked beneath the surface. The Greeks fought themselves to exhaustion by the logic of their own methods; the eclipse of the knightly way of warmaking had an external cause, the coming of gunpowder. But, in either case, the power of iron, that delusively cheap and common metal, had run its course.

  Interlude 4

  Logistics and Supply

  Stone, bronze and iron furnished the instruments of combat, which is the central act of warfare, from its beginnings until its nature was transformed by gunpowder a mere twenty generations ago. Combat may only be joined, however, if the combatants find the means to meet on a battlefield, and to supply them on their way to such meetings has always presented difficulties second only to those of achieving success in combat itself. The horse peoples alone escaped such difficulties but, historically, they were a minority among warriors. The majority depended upon the power of legs and shoulders to carry them and their necessaries about any theatre of campaign, a restriction that limited both the range and endurance of fighting-forces, whether acting offensively or defensively, very severely. Indeed, most warmaking on land, until the most recent times, was a short-term and short-distance activity.

  For that there is the simplest explanation. When a body of men join together to perform a day’s task, they will need at the very least to eat once between sunrise and sunset. If the task protracts beyond a single day, and the men move from the place where they keep their food, they will have to carry their meals with them. Since all but the most primitive operations of war entail protraction and movement, warriors necessarily burden themselves with rations as well as weapons. Experience, however, borne out by modern field trials, has established that the soldier’s load cannot on average be made to exceed seventy pounds’ weight — of which clothes, equipment, arms and necessaries will form at least half; as a daily intake of solid food by a man doing heavy work weighs at least three pounds, it follows that a marching soldier cannot carry supplies for more than ten or eleven days, and of course the burden is only worth the effort if the food is provided in imperishable form. These figures have not varied over centuries: Vegetius, the Roman military theorist of the fourth century AD, urged that ‘the young soldiers must be given frequent practice in carrying loads of up to sixty pounds, and marching along at the military pace, for on strenuous campaigns they will be faced with the necessity of carrying their rations as well as their arms’;1 the British soldiers who attacked in the Somme on 1 July 1916, carrying with them several days’ rations in case of a break in the line of supply, were burdened on average with sixty-six pounds;2 and, though the British parachutists and marines who ‘yomped’ across the Falklands in 1982 briefly carried, for lack of helicopter lift to supply them, loads equal to their own body weight, they were exhausted by the effort, though they were picked men in exceptional physical condition.3

  Soldiers may ‘live off the country’, of course, by which is meant taking the food of the civil population, a familiar depredation that explains why, until the most recent times, the approach of even the best-disciplined army often caused the inhabitants to hide every portable consumable. Occasionally, if an army organised a market, as Wellington always took care to do in Spain, the effect might be the opposite, as peasants flocked to bring goods to sell, but Wellington was in the unusual position of having cash to spend.4 Historically most armies have either lacked money, sought to pay by promissory notes or, if operating in enemy territory, simply taken what they wanted. It is not a policy that works for long. Even if food can be found where it has been hidden, the army must disperse to squirrel it out, thus diluting its fighting-power, and in any case soon eats out its area of operations; cavalry armies, except on extensive grasslands (where human food lacks, a complicating difficulty), will graze out an area even more quickly.

  Cavalry armies, because their power derives from the speed at which they strike and then decamp, and because, too, of the noted frugality of the nomadic horsemen who most often formed them, generally escaped the constraint of overgrazing, as long as they kept to or near a grassland region. Marching armies had no such freedom of action. Moving at twenty miles a day, the very best speed to be achieved with regularity by men on foot — it was that of the legions on the Roman internal lines of communication and of Von Kluck’s army on the advance from Mons to the Marne in the French campaign of 1914 — they progressed too slowly to find untouched stores close enough to their line of advance to supply their daily needs.5 In consequence they had either to stop at intervals so as to gain time to forage at a distance, or to transport their bulk supplies with them.

  The transport of bulk supplies requires access to a waterway close to the line of march — a river or coastal sea route — or else the use of wheels; pack animals, though much used in the ancient world and in difficult terrain in modern times (the Russians in their conquest of Khiva in Central Asia in 1874 employed 8800 camels to feed 5500 men), are a poor substitute.6 Water transport has been the mainstay of many campaigns — Marlborough’s advance to Bavaria in 1704, provisioned down the Rhine, is a famous example — but the axis of supply then determines that of the campaign: it may be that if a river leads in the wrong direction, the decisive battle cannot be fought
. Roads for wheeled transport, if the road network is of any density, give more logistic flexibility, but until road engineering was undertaken on a major scale in Europe from the eighteenth century onward, first in France, later in Britain and Prussia, few regions furnished such a network (the lengths per thousand of population in 1860 were: 5 miles in Britain, 3 in France, 2⅓ in Prussia, only ¾ in Spain); and, until the development of macadamisation in the early nineteenth century, roads generally lacked an all-weather surface.7

  The exception to this state of affairs prevailed only within the Roman empire and in part also in China (though Chinese waterways, particularly the Grand Canal, begun AD 608, served the main purpose of internal communication), and it was Rome’s roads that made the legions who built them so effective an instrument of imperial power. Within the Roman province of Africa alone, which stretched from modern Morocco to the Nile basin, archaeologists have identified some 10,000 miles of road of greater or lesser width; and Gaul, Britain, Spain and Italy were similarly served, making it possible for Roman commanders to calculate marching-times very precisely between the military storehouses and barracks that served as revictualling stops: from Cologne to Rome sixty-seven days, from Rome to Brindisi fifteen days, from Rome to Antioch (including two days at sea) 124 days.8 There were, however, no equivalents to the Roman roads in any of the neighbouring empires, not even in the comparatively easily engineered plains of Mesopotamia and Persia (the ‘royal road’ used by Alexander was not of Roman standard), and once Rome’s administration collapsed in the fifth century, its magnificent roads regularly decayed also. That decay spelt an end to strategic marching everywhere for more than a thousand years. In England the Hardway, for example, by which Alfred the Great laboriously brought his army out of Somerset to fight the Danes in the middle of the ninth century, was a muddy track aligned on no route used by the Romans, though several excellent Roman roads had run near to it 400 years earlier.