Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  Yet, there is another side to their history, one which has rarely been told and which shows that technology developed for one purpose can so easily be harnessed for another, one which might surprise or even appal its creators. Railways were first conceived as a way of transporting goods. Early ‘railways’, such as the Stockton & Darlington completed in 1825, were primarily mineral lines with the principal task of taking coal from a mine to the nearest waterway. However, railway companies soon found it profitable to carry passengers, and it was the Liverpool & Manchester, a far more sophisticated enterprise, which truly inaugurated the railway age. Opened in 1830, the Liverpool & Manchester was the first railway in the modern sense of the word as it was a double-track line operated by locomotive haulage and linked two major towns with traffic, passenger and freight, flowing in both directions. The concept of hauling freight wagons and passenger carriages on permanent metal tracks using locomotives soon spread around the world, reaching the United States, France, Belgium and Bavaria by 1835, and a dozen other countries, including the far-flung Spanish colony of Cuba, by the end of the decade.

  Most of these early lines were experimental but were developed with the knowledge that they would be the start of a network. Already, ambitious schemes to create country-wide and transcontinental systems were being put forward and, while no one quite realized just how fast this new invention would spread, the railways’ early sponsors soon became aware of their potential. So did governments and, notably, their military leaders. Almost as soon as the Liverpool & Manchester was opened, troops despatched to quell unrest in Ireland were being carried on its trains. While in Britain the development of the railway system was a haphazard process in which the government did not play an active role, elsewhere there was an immediate awareness of the railways’ potential for military use. In Belgium, the development of the railways was seen as a key means of protecting the country against invaders, while in Prussia, as early as the 1830s, there was already discussion of their military value. According to a history of the role of railways in French-German relations, ‘the potential of railroads to alter the nature of warfare was quickly recognized… The first reflex in the 1830s was to assume that railways would bring a decisive edge for the defense; interior connections would enable a national army to concentrate its forces swiftly against any offensive thrust by an invading foe.’2 Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the railways were an invention for which the military had been waiting for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. They would become a key development in the technology of warfare because of their ability to shift unprecedented amounts of matériel and huge numbers of people. It was, therefore, not so much that they could be used as a weapon, though armoured trains would play a significant role in several conflicts, but that they allowed a step change in the scale of warfare. Once railways became involved, the very nature of warfare changed, and wars increased in length, intensity, and destructiveness. However, as with other innovations, it took a long time for the military to understand their importance and exploit them fully.

  Wars have been waged by human beings ever since they formed themselves into tribes or other groups and the history of warfare is one of growth in the scale of conflict nourished by technological progress, not just in weaponry but in the means of logistical support. To understand how railways affected the ways in which wars were pursued, it is essential briefly to examine how they were conducted before the dawning of the railway age. The earliest people developed weapons in order to kill animals both to protect themselves from predators and to obtain food, and, as they formed into tribes, to use in battles with neighbouring groups. Spears and arrows were initially made by sharpening wood and later became stone-tipped. When first soft and then harder metals were discovered, these were quickly used to improve the effectiveness of weapons. Otzi, the iceman shepherd who lived 5,300 years ago, was discovered in the Alps in 1991 with a copper axe, a flint knife and flint-tipped arrows and a bow, suggesting that weaponry was already well developed. It was around then that societies were becoming more economically advanced and thus increasingly militarized as they sought to protect themselves. Weapons were important but large-scale wars were only made possible by the establishment of settled societies that fed themselves through agriculture and were able to produce a surplus of food; as Jeremy Black, author of War: A Short History, explains, once certain groups became more affluent, they invariably had to protect themselves against those who were less well-off: ‘Social change helped alter the nature of war. This change was linked to economic transformation with the move from hunter-gatherer societies to those focussing on specialized agriculture, both pastoral and arable.’3

  Thanks to the surplus of food that could be used to supply warriors, settled societies were able to raise armies to fight in battles where mobility and speed became crucial assets. Horses were first domesticated as early as 4000 BC but it took another couple of thousand years before someone got the idea of using them in conflicts by hitching them to chariots carrying armed men into battle. Around 1700 BC, the Hittites, using chariots with spoked rather than solid wheels, which made them far lighter than previous versions, were able to dominate Anatolia and establish a kingdom in a large swathe of modern-day Turkey and Syria. Thanks to their efficient and manoeuvrable vehicles, these charioteers became the elite and the decisive force in battles. This is just one early example of the way that the progress of the techniques of war was to prove decisive in many conflicts. The three great empires of Classical times – Han China, Persia and Imperial Rome – all created standing armies but eventually found themselves vulnerable to tribal groups or invaders adept at waging mobile warfare using the horse with the minimum of support. Harnessing the speed and size of horses changed the nature of warfare. While initially they were unprotected and vulnerable, at some point between the fifth and tenth centuries – the precise date is difficult to determine because of the absence of contemporary sources in the Dark Ages – the horses began to wear light armour, which by the thirteenth century had become heavier and thicker. Massed charges of such heavy cavalry were the blitzkrieg of the early years of the second millennium. There were also developments in the technology of archery, notably the longbow, which was decisive in several battles of what became known as the Hundred Years War (which actually lasted very intermittently from 1337 to 1453), and later the use of gunpowder and cannons became vital in enabling sieges to be broken far more easily.

  Technology, therefore, determined the success of warfare with improvements first to bows, and later guns, often proving crucial to the outcome. As ever, it always took time for soldiers and their leaders to understand how to use these new weapons and the decisive factor would frequently prove to be organization rather than technology. Well-disciplined and drilled infantry, for example, could see off cavalry even before the development of the machine gun. Black suggests the equation between weaponry and equine forces half a millennium ago was in balance: ‘In Europe, it was unclear that enhanced firepower would change the nature of war. Instead, there was an emphasis on horse armies, while Swiss pikemen acquired a formidable reputation in the late fifteenth century, routing Charles the Bold of Burgundy at Granson, Murten and Nancy in 1476-7.’4 In what has become known as the ‘military revolution’ between 1560 and 1660, the increasing sophistication of weapons required, in turn, the training of the soldiers using them and their incorporation into permanent armies. And once a country establishes such an army, transport requirements come to the fore. Whereas previously armies had consisted of perhaps a few thousand men, their numbers now increased exponentially. Louis XIV of France, for example, raised an army of 120,000 in 1673 to see off the Dutch and even in peacetime he had a standing force of 150,000 men, though only a proportion were actually permanently in garrisons.

  This is where a hitherto neglected aspect of war, logistics – the science of managing the movement of men and matériel – begins to enter the equation to a much greater extent. Larger armies needed more skill and p
lanning to move around. The very word ‘logistics’, derived from the French logistique, initially referred only to military transport since, in pre-capitalist days, there was little movement of goods on anything like a military scale5 and the ability to develop expertise in logistics was as important as introducing new types of weapons. Compared to the fleet forces of previous generations, armies in the second half of the sixteenth century became massive lumbering enterprises that kept growing in size as they increased in complexity. According to Martin van Creveld, who has chronicled the logistics of battles between the Thirty Years War in the early seventeenth century and the Second World War, ‘a force numbering, say, 30,000 men, might be followed by a crowd of women, children, servants and sutlers [suppliers] of anywhere between 50 and 150 per cent of its own size and it had to drag this huge “tail” behind it wherever it went’.6 Armies largely consisted of uprooted men who had no other home and consequently their baggage, especially that of officers, assumed monumental proportions. Van Creveld suggests that an army in the early seventeenth century might have one wagon, hauled by two or four horses, for every fifteen men and the proportion could, at times, be double that. However, even such a large fleet of wagons was not sufficient to keep an army, and especially the horses, provided with food. There was no question of supplying armies from a base, given the slowness of any method of transport and the huge volume of fodder required. This did not present a particularly great problem when moving through friendly territory since the army would establish a supply system using local markets to buy produce (although armies could be notoriously bad payers and undisciplined even in friendly territory). For the most part, soldiers were expected to buy their own food, and while there was plenty of scope for this system to break down or be subject to corruption, for the most part it worked reasonably well.

  The difficulties really started when an army began moving through hostile territory. As van Creveld puts it, ‘from time immemorial the problem had been solved simply by having the troops take whatever they required. More or less well organized plunder was the rule rather than the exception.’7 Consequently, armies ‘were forced to keep on the move in order to stay alive’.8 The choice of which town to besiege, therefore, was made not necessarily as a result of a particular location’s strategic importance, but rather the availability of local supplies of food. The best defence against being besieged was to have been the victim of a previous assault in which the attackers had eaten up everything in the immediate vicinity!

  Once armies expanded in the early seventeenth century, relying on plunder or living off the land no longer became feasible for any length of time since the number of men was too great to allow them to obtain sufficient supplies. Either the armies had to be on the move the whole time or a reliable supply system to provide men with the basic requirements of food and shelter had to be created. Rivers initially proved to be the vital line of communication and the most successful armies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to be those that made best use of navigable waterways or, like the British, Dutch and Swedes, of the seas.

  These wars in pre-capitalist times were of a completely different nature to those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examined in detail in this book, which would be prolonged and involve large numbers of players on both sides. Such lengthy conflicts would only be made possible, as we shall see, by the use of the railways. That the heyday of the railway age would also become the era of total war was no coincidence. The railways would give rise to a new style of war, with particularly long, bloody and damaging conflicts between countries lasting several years and involving much of the population of whole nations. In contrast, these wars of the pre-industrial age were really a series of short battles, invariably conducted in the spring and summer months to ensure the armies could live off the land and interspersed with lengthy peaceful periods. Even though they were, in hindsight, given names like the Hundred Years War or Thirty Years War, the actual fighting in each battle would normally be over in a matter of a day or even just a couple of hours, followed by a lengthy respite before the next one. Sometimes sieges lasted much longer but the limiting factor was not only, as one would assume, the supplies available to those being besieged, but also those available to the attackers. Even where there were prolonged sieges, there were no lengthy fronts of the type established in later wars to separate the combatants, as the attackers largely ignored the areas between the towns which they were besieging.

  Improvisation was crucial to these mobile armies. For example, much ammunition could be produced in the field. There was ribaldry among soldiers who were required to urinate in designated areas so that the urea could be used for gunpowder production, while cannonballs were made from any old scrap melted down in field forges. However, the moving of artillery, especially siege ‘trains’ – which, of course, were simply strings of heavily laden carts and carriages – was a massive enterprise requiring large numbers of oxen, which are even slower than horses, and consequently covering even five miles in a day was a great achievement. Bigger artillery needed very specialized facilities, such as massive carriages and special teams of horses, to move it around.

  Armies, according to conventional wisdom, march on their stomachs, but actually, far more importantly, horses do and the availability of fodder was for a long time the limiting factor in the ability of armies to stay in one place. Feeding an army on the move was far easier than preventing a static one from starving. Armies were like those irritating flies buzzing tirelessly around in the summer, never able to rest or stay in one place for very long through fear of running out of food and forage.

  Gradually, the more innovative military commanders began establishing networks of magazines, essentially supply depots of mostly ammunition but also some other provisions such as uniforms and blankets, to the rear of their battle lines. There was, though, no question that whole armies could be supplied for long periods from these magazines since the sheer scale of an army’s requirements and the inadequacy of pre-industrial transport systems made this impossible. Van Creveld provides a precise calculation which shows the scale of the task. The biggest army brought together before the advent of the railways was the one raised by Louis XIV to fight the Dutch. Say it was divided into two for strategic reasons and each army (the expression ‘army’ is actually used by the military to describe a force led by a general which could number anything from 50,000, in the seventeenth century, to 200,000 or more in the First World War) consisting of 60,000 men would have 40,000 horses and need a combined total of around one million pounds (nearly 450 tons) of food per day. Effectively, very little – van Creveld estimates just over 10 per cent – could be supplied from magazines some distance away. He finds no examples of seventeenth-century armies being supplied solely from distant bases and suggests that it would have been impossible to do so even for a modest-sized army. The transport of ammunition, interestingly, was never a crucial issue until the development of far bigger guns in the late nineteenth century. Van Creveld asserts: ‘So small were the quantities [of ammunition] required that armies normally took along a single supply for the entire campaign, resupply from base being effected only on comparatively rare occasions – most frequently, of course, during sieges.’9 Food though was the limiting factor: ‘From beginning to end [of the wars of Louis XIV], the most difficult logistic problem facing Louvois [Louis’s Secretary of State for War], his contemporaries and his successors was much less to feed an army on the move than to prevent one that was stationary from starving.’10

  During the eighteenth century armies grew bigger and bigger and by its end Napoleon’s Grande Armée peaked at a remarkable 2.5 million. But because these enormous groups of men lived largely off the local land, ‘taking the bulk of their needs away from the country’,11 they were unable to stay in one place for any length of time. Van Creveld’s back-of-the-envelope calculation demonstrates this unequivocally: ‘Had an army of, say, 100,000 men, wanted to bring up all its supplies for the duration of t
he campaign – usually calculated as 180 days [spring and summer] – from base, the resulting burden on the transportation system would have been so great as to make all warfare utterly impossible.’ Consequently war before the nineteenth century was to be waged as cheaply and quickly as possible and armies were expected to live at the expense of their enemies by exploiting their territories.

  Napoleon’s surge through Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries marked a different kind of warfare, with an even greater emphasis on mobility and an end to the notion of sieges. Napoleon recognized the importance of logistics. His armies did suffer supply problems whenever they got bogged down, such as in Mantua in 1796 and before the battle of Austerlitz, his greatest triumph, in 1805, but his true military genius was in ensuring that he never stayed anywhere long enough to get into trouble. According to the historian David A. Bell, Napoleon personally took ‘charge of matters ranging from the number of carts needed to carry a regiment’s paperwork to the amount of munitions carried by soldiers’.12 He had an almost photographic memory and was able to work out the logistical needs of his army down to the minutest detail, yet that did not negate the simple fact that his huge armies could never be fed through supply lines but still relied on living off the land.

  Napoleon’s belief in the importance of mobility was the key to his success. As van Creveld puts it, ‘the French armies [were able to do] what their predecessors had normally failed to do, namely to march from one end of Europe to the other, destroying everything in their way’.13 There were several factors that allowed him to do this. Under the corps d’armée system, his armies were dispersed, making it easier to feed themselves from the countryside. He lightened the loads of his armies, dispensing with the large amounts of baggage and the vast numbers of hangers-on that had hampered the movement of troops in the past and he was helped by various external factors, such as the higher density of the population, which ensured there were more farms to plunder. He was, too, as van Creveld emphasizes, a unique military genius whose abilities were a key component of his success. It was only when he became bogged down in long-running campaigns such as in Spain or in the Tyrol, or reached out beyond the relative richness of the European heartland into Egypt and Russia, that his system collapsed and the troops began to starve.