by John Keegan
The officers in these royal armies, too, surrendered much of the personal freedom that their real or imagined knightly ancestors had enjoyed. From the early seventeenth century onward, ‘the riotousness and restlessness of younger members of noble families’ had prompted Venice to set up a number of military academies to inculcate some discipline and professional learning among what would soon be recognised as, if not actually named, ‘the officer class’. The reforms of Maurice, John and William of Nassau accelerated the process. Their deliberate return to the sources of classical military teaching, which resulted in a conscious effort to revive the spirit and structure of the Roman legions, led both to the emergence of a body of professional drillmasters, ready, like the fortification-engineers, to sell their knowledge on the international market, and to the establishment of military schools, designed to teach hot-headed young aristocrats parade-ground drill, fencing and advanced equitation and, in the process, to educate, even civilise them.
John of Nassau’s schola militaris at Siegen, which existed only between 1617 and 1623, is reckoned to have been the first true military academy in Europe; ‘its chief emphasis was in turning out technically competent infantry officers’. Professor John Hale has identified five other military academies founded in France and Germany between 1570 and 1629, and, while none can be counted as the ancestor of those which survive to our own day — St Cyr, Sandhurst, Breda, the Maria-Theresianer and Modena, which date from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — their creation marks the coming of an idea, or at least its rebirth: that leadership in war, as the Romans had believed, required civic as well as military virtues.33 This was a more significant development than the parallel trend to train young men from the emergent middle-class in artillery and engineer academies, the first of which was founded by Louis XIV at Metz in 1668. A mastery of mathematics was clearly essential to future gunners and sappers. The imposition of rote-learning, examination in the classical texts and the threat of the rod on young bloods were innovations of a different order. They spelled the end to the days when falconry, hunting and the joust were reckoned the only upbringing of which a warrior stood in need.34
Drill, discipline, mechanical tactics, scientific gunnery all worked to make eighteenth-century warmaking quite different in character from the chaotically experimental style of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By 1700 the weapons with which battles were fought had assumed a form that did not alter for 150 years. The infantry was armed with a musket which, though almost harmless to combatants at ranges much above a hundred yards, could be used in mass volley-firing to create a deadly killing-zone immediately to the front of the battle line. Increasingly mobile and quick-firing field artillery offered the only certain means of shaking the solidity of drilled infantry formations; its safe deployment, however, could be threatened by the timely unleashing of cavalry, which was increasingly committed to that subordinate activity, and to charging against infantry disorganised by artillery fire or harrying fugitives driven to flight.
The opposed properties of these three elements of eighteenth-century armies, musketry, artillery, cavalry, thus brought about a strange equilibrium on pitched battlefields, leading to what Professor Russell Weigley has identified as a persistent indecisiveness in the succession of struggles fought by the dynastic monarchies in western Europe, usually over rights of succession, between the last Dutch wars at the end of the seventeenth century and the outbreak of the French Revolution. Time and again, the liveried musketeers arrayed themselves in dense formation, fired their volleys, reeled under artillery fire, repelled or more infrequently ran from cavalry, but at the end of the day parted from each other on the battlefield with their power to fight again still intact. The ‘great’ battles of the heyday of dynastic warfare — Blenheim (1704), Fontenoy (1745), Leuthen (1757) — were notable rather for the number of casualties suffered among the docile ranks of the participants than for any permanency of outcome achieved. It was an exhaustion of reserves of money and manpower that brought eighteenth-century wars to an end rather than decision by clash of arms.
In an effort to diminish the indecisiveness of their warmaking, European armies turned increasingly to the enlistment of traditional warrior peoples as the century drew on, hoping that their irregular methods would sharpen the offensive qualities of the liveried masses. Magyar light cavalrymen — hussars — were recruited from Hungary, sharpshooters from the forests and mountains of central Europe, and Christian refugees (loosely known as ‘Albanians’) from the Ottoman Balkans; the plot of Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte turns on the allure these exotic strangers could exert on the civilised imagination. In practice, they could be found in numbers too small to shift the balance of advantage either way, and, though their recruitment set a pattern that persisted into the nineteenth century, when the opportunity to lead units of North African Zouaves, Bosnian Muslims, Tyrolese Jäger, Punjabi Sikhs and Nepalese Gurkhas would appeal to the instincts of the most dashing among young French, Austrian and British officers, their appearance on the flanks of the regulars made more for visual spectacle — the ‘Turkish’ costume of the Zouaves was one of the most potent sartorial influences of the nineteenth century — than for objective effect. Exotic irregulars were most useful in ‘small wars’ overseas; German light infantry in British service gave as good as they got against the riflemen of the American Revolutionary armies, while native Americans — ‘Red Indians’ — armed with European weapons humiliated regulars in the depths of the great forests.
Yet, paradoxically, armies drilled to European standards came off best in wars in which traditional warrior peoples formed the bulk of the enemy. By the end of the seventeenth century the Ottoman offensive into Europe had reached its term largely because the Habsburgs had succeeded in creating a regular army of a quality good enough to meet the Sultan’s janissaries on equal terms. The janissaries — the word came from the Turkish for ‘new soldiers’ — were enslaved on the Mameluke pattern but, unlike them, were recruited in the Balkans through a forced levy (the devsirme) of Christian children who were trained as infantry.35 ‘New soldiers’ the janissaries may originally have been by comparison with their Western equivalents, but by the end of the seventeenth century their discipline and steadfastness in battle were matched by that of the European regulars, whose drill, moreover, was superior to theirs. At the siege of Vienna in 1683 the janissaries made Europe tremble; twenty-five years later they had been driven out of southern Hungary and northern Serbia and their master was forced to sign a peace, that of Karlowitz (1699), which marked the beginning of the great Ottoman retreat to Constantinople that ended with the Balkan wars of 1911–12.
In the Islamic lands beyond Europe, particularly the Moghul domains in India, no local army had been brought to a janissary level of efficiency. India had been full of Turkish mercenary artillerists and siege-engineers since the beginning of the sixteenth century — the Turks, as their magnificent citadel at Belgrade still testifies, built fortifications as impressive as any in the West — and from the seventeenth century by English, Dutch, French and Swiss gunnery experts as well. In the eighteenth century the Moghuls began to want drillmasters, whom the French largely supplied, but the Moghul ethos, rooted in the steppe tradition, nullified their efforts. Babur (1483–1530), the founder of the Moghul dynasty, believed that a ‘cavalry army could fight set-piece battles successfully without having an infantry “core” ’. Sir Thomas Roe, English ambassador to the Moghul court between 1615 and 1619, accordingly thought its forces ‘an effeminat army, fitter to be a spoyle than a terror to enemys’, and told his colleagues at Constantinople, ‘I see no souldiers, though multitudes entertayned in that quality.’36 ‘Quality’ versus ‘multitudes’ proved the Moghuls’ undoing: when the British in the mid-eighteenth century began to recruit and train Hindus, untouched by steppe attitudes, they rapidly produced an army whose standard of infantry drill compensated for its small numbers. At Plassey (1757), the victory on which British empire over Indi
a was to be raised, Clive’s 1100 Europeans and 2100 Hindu sepoys, encircled by 50,000 Moghul infantry and cavalry, easily dispersed them with steady musketry and chased them as fugitives from the field. Drill and legionary organisation there achieved everything to which the Nassau cousins had looked forward 150 years earlier, but only because their effects came as a shock, in the true sense, to soldiers of an alternative tradition who were unprepared to withstand it.
POLITICAL REVOLUTION AND MILITARY CHANGE
Drill, and the ethos that underlay it, won spectacular victories in India, even against soldiers armed with muskets and cannon identical to those of their European opponents: Plassey and a dozen similar battles continued to lend weight to the arguments of those who held that moral factors outweigh material ones in war by three to one — Napoleon’s estimate — or more. In other battles overseas, where the opponents were technically matched, notably those between the British and the American colonists and the Spanish and theirs, drill was outweighed as a determinant of outcomes by another moral factor altogether: the sense of legitimacy felt by European emigrants in fighting for what they regarded as their right to self-taxation and so to self-government. The North American colonists’ war with Britain, which inspired that of the South Americans against Spain, was the first truly political war, a war detached from the traditional motivations of religious difference or usurpation of legal rights, fought to achieve recognition of abstract principles and to win not merely independence but the freedom to found a new and, it was hoped, superior society. The struggle for freedom was not short. Perhaps only a third of the colonists were actively committed; another third remained neutral and the remaining third held loyal to the old order. The army that the revolutionaries raised was at first weak and poorly armed. Based on the colonial militias, raised to defend the original colonies against attack by the native Americans and later by the French of Canada, it was hard pressed to stand against the discipline of the British regulars and achieved success largely by its ability to confront them with threat at many different points inside the vast space of the North American theatre of war. The colonists, moreover, had the confidence to take the offensive to the enemy whenever the chance offered — in 1775 they actually invaded Canada to strike at the stronghold of Quebec — while in 1779 and 1781 they transferred operations to the interior, campaigning as far away as the Ohio River and the central Carolinas. This strategy caused the British to disperse their efforts and robbed them of their chief advantage, which was the ability to deploy force against the main coastal centres of population by sea. That advantage was further eroded by the intervention of the Spanish and the French, Britain’s European enemies; the despatch of a French expeditionary force and of a large fleet in 1780 was what eventually turned the tide, leading to the surrender of the main British army at Yorktown in October 1781.
Yet, despite foreign assistance, the victory was unquestionably the Americans’ own and the example they gave was a major stimulus to the demands laid by the French constitutionalists against Louis XVI when, in 1789, he was finally compelled to summon his subjects, unassembled for more than a century, to agree a new system of taxation. French revenues had been exhausted, and the French fiscal system overborne, by the demands of incessant royal warmaking throughout the eighteenth century; the costs of French naval and military support to the American colonists in their war with the British had been the final straw.37 Warmaking, except for outright predators in the steppe tradition, had always been costly, had bankrupted states before and had often enforced the succession of one dynasty by another. The threat of bankruptcy through warmaking had never yet, however, ushered in an entirely new philosophy of government. That, nevertheless, was the outcome of the summoning of the Estates General, which in rapid succession resolved that France’s separate bodies of nobility, clergy and commoners should vote by head count, not rank, then that they should sit together, finally that they should remain in permanent session until the King vested his powers in a democratic constitution. Louis XVI’s inept attempts to overawe by force the Estates, now calling themselves the National Assembly, led to revolt in Paris, in which units of the royal army, notably the Gardes françaises, joined; when the King, after a period of temporising with the Revolution, sought but failed to flee the country, he was suspended from executive office, while the Assembly warned France’s neighbours, Prussia and Austria foremost among them, that it would regard their continued sheltering of anti-republican emigrés, who were organising counter-revolutionary forces, as a provocation to war. In April 1792 Louis XVI, at the instigation of the Assembly, declared war with Austria, which was quickly joined by Prussia and Russia as co-belligerents and, in 1793, by Britain. The invasion of France began in July 1792.
The wars of the French Revolution, perpetuated by Napoleon Bonaparte after he became head of government as First Consul in 1799, lasted until 1815; fought defensively at the outset by the French, who renounced wars of conquest in May 1790, they rapidly swelled into the most sustained and extensive offensive yet known in European history. Motivated at first by a desire to carry revolutionary freedoms to the subjects of neighbouring kingdoms, the French ended by committing themselves to a permanent military programme of national aggrandisement. By 1812 Napoleon had more than a million men under arms, distributed across the continent from Spain to Russia, and he directed an economy and an imperial administration whose sole object was to keep his armies in the field. The major powers of continental Europe, Russia apart, had been defeated in their own territory, the soldiers of the smaller states had been incorporated outright in the French army, and able-bodied men everywhere lived either under military discipline or in fear of the recruiting-sergeant. In the span of twenty years a European society in which only those men existing at the economic margin risked incorporation into the ranks, had become militarised from top to bottom, and the grandeurs and servitudes of the soldier’s life, hitherto known only to a willing or more usually unwilling minority, had become the common experience of many in a whole generation. How had it been done?
The French did not set out to make ‘every man a soldier’; the founding ideals of their Revolution were anti-militarist, rational and legalistic. To defend the sway of reason and the role of just laws — those that abolished the feudal privileges of an aristocratic class which, even if Actively, dated the winning of its place in society to its warrior past — the citizens of the Revolution had, however, sprung to arms. The American colonists had done the same thing fifteen years earlier;38 but while the English colonists in America had turned an existing military system — that of militias maintained to defend their settlements against the Indians and the French — to their own purposes, the French had to create a new instrument of their own. The royal army was politically suspect and, moreover, had lost many of its trained officers, who were among the first to leave France in protest at the indignities the Revolution had inflicted on the King. Enthusiastic volunteers came forward to form a National Guard to defend the revolutionary institutions against the remaining royalist troops; but the legislators of 1789–91, like those of classical Greece’s city states, were at first anxious to limit the right of arms-bearing to responsible, by which they meant propertied, men. The original National Guard, therefore, both lacked sufficient numbers and contained too high a proportion of home-loving bourgeois to form an effective military force. While the threat was internal, that did not much matter; ad hoc crowds could always be assembled in the streets to outface troops loyal to the King. After July 1792, when the threat became one of invasion, France needed a large and effective army in a hurry. By then the anti-militarism of 1789 had been forgotten; the logic of the American constitutional ‘right to bear arms’ had been widely accepted, possession of a firearm had come to be seen as a guarantee of a citizen’s freedom, the property qualification for membership of the National Guard was hastily abolished (30 July) and an appeal for 50,000 men to join the 150,000 remaining in the regular army was issued on 12 July. Early in 1793, 300,
000 men were called for, to be conscripted if they would not volunteer, and on 23 August the decree of the levée en masse, putting all fit males at the disposal of the Republic, was promulgated; it had already been ordered that regular and National Guard units should be amalgamated in brigades in the proportion of one to two, the regulars to provide stiffening to the volunteers until they had learned their trade.
Here was a wholly new sort of army. Discipline was enforced not by corporal punishment (though drunkards were gorged with water) but by tribunals composed of soldiers and officers. Officers, following the practice of the National Guard, were elected; pay was fixed at the comparatively generous rates allotted to revolutionary volunteers. Under the pressure of war, the election of officers was soon abolished (1794) and the disciplinary councils suppressed (1795), but by then the social transformation of the army had gone too far for these afterthoughts to be reversed. The initial impulse to volunteering among respectable men might have slowed, but the character of the officer corps had been altered out of recognition. While in 1789, more than ninety per cent of officers had been noblemen (often, admittedly, very petty noblemen whose title to heraldic arms conferred almost the only social position they enjoyed), by 1794 only three per cent remained.39 The vacant places were taken by civilians or, more often, by former non-commissioned officers of the royal regiments to whom the Revolution did indeed offer ‘a career open to talents’; of Napoleon’s twenty-six marshals, Augereau, Lefebvre, Ney and Soult had been sergeants before 1789. More remarkably, Victor had been a bandsman, and three others had been private soldiers, Jourdan, Oudinot and Bernadotte (who, trumping any of Alexander’s generals, ended his career as king of Sweden). These were men of large ability to whom the old army had offered no opportunities at all; as late as 1782, officers had secured the restriction of grants of commissions to candidates whose great-grandparents had been noble. Trained to arms, they drew on the self-confidence brought them by the social liberation of 1789 to become outstanding commanders.40