I know that straight swords deal a more deadly blow, but they are not nearly as effective in combat. If you need convincing, I will explain the mechanism of the two kinds of weapon. When he is at a full gallop and a cavalryman attacks his enemy with the point, he will inevitably pierce him. But he must stop and break off his part in the action, so as to pull the sword out. During an equivalent amount of time a dragoon with a curved saber will have wounded three or four enemy, without having to stop his horse or stop fighting. The enemy will not be mortally wounded, but at least they will be disabled, which is what we ought to look for in battle.22
And there is no doubt that the saber could inflict grotesque injury. At the battle of the Waxhaws in South Carolina during the American War of Independence, in May 1780, the infamous British cavalry commander, the swaggering Banastre Tarleton, surprised and routed an American force. Dr. Robert Brownsfield recorded the results:
A furious attack was made on the rear guard, commanded by Lieut. Pearson. Not a man escaped. Poor Pearson was inhumanely mangled on the face as he lay on his back. His nose and upper lip were bisected obliquely; several of his teeth were broken out in the upper jaw, and the under completely divided on each side.…
Capt. John Stokes … was attacked by a dragoon, who aimed many deadly blows at his head, all of which by the dextrous use of the small sword he easily parried; when another on the right, by one stroke, cut off his right hand through the metacarpal bones. He was then assailed by both, and instinctively attempted to defend his head with his left arm until the forefinger was cut off, and the arm hacked in eight or ten places from the wrist to the shoulder. His head was then laid open almost the whole length of the crown to the eye brows. After he fell he received several cuts on the face and shoulders.23
Despite being also bayoneted and having his wounds dressed by a less-than-sympathetic British surgeon who filled his head wounds with “rough tow, the particles of which could not be separated from the brain for several days,” John Stokes, miraculously, survived.
If a breakdown of cohesion spelled doom for infantry at the hands of cavalry, a tight formation and stalwart resistance could turn the tables. Mercer at Waterloo described how French cavalry swarmed around British infantry squares like “an enormous surf bursting over the prostrate hull of a stranded vessel, and then running, hissing and foaming up the beach,” filling the spaces between the squares. Horses are sensitive creatures and could be easily spooked by a resolute display of bayonet points. Gunfire would bring down many horses and riders of the first ranks, leaving those behind to negotiate a writhing barricade of screaming beasts and men. In addition, many mounted frontal charges were delivered at nothing more than a trot or even a walk. At Waterloo, an officer of the Ninety-Fifth Foot, whose regiment was drawn up in a defensive square, describes being attacked by French cuirassiers. First, the infantrymen withheld their fire until the French were within thirty yards or so. “I fired a volley from my Company which had the effect, added to the fire of the 71st, of bringing so many horses to the ground, that it became quite impossible for the Enemy to continue their charge. I certainly believe that half of the Enemy were at that instant on the ground; some few men and horses were killed, more wounded, but by far the greater part were thrown down over the dying and the wounded. These last after a short time began to get up and run back to their supporters, some on horseback, but most of them dismounted.”24
THE SOLDIER OF the premodern age (prior to about 1850 and what might be called the era of “high technology”) had an intimate relationship with death and killing on the battlefield that the modern warrior rarely experiences. It was an intimacy dictated, to a large extent, by the inadequacies of the weapons with which he fought. The French cavalry knocked over by the Ninety-Fifth Foot at Waterloo came within thirty yards of their enemy. They had to get close because they were fighting mainly with swords; the infantry had to let them get close because the smoothbore muskets with which they defended themselves were grossly inaccurate at distances much beyond 50 yards. The protagonists were drawn closely together and the agency of death was never far away.
Before the age of industrial replication (as far as guns are concerned circa 1825), warfare was a handmade business. There were of course templates that laid out the design of firearms, but there was scant means by which the idea of standardization could be transferred into the actuality of exact uniformity. So, although most soldiers died anonymously, chewed up and spat out by the great maw of war, every combat death was individually crafted. Each gun, cannon, sword, and bayonet was unique. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a tension between the particular and the general became increasingly acute. It was an era that saw a dramatic movement away from the particularization of the feudal, where each nobleman armed his own contingent, toward the increasing standardization of the nation-state.
Designs of gunpowder firearms all face the same basic challenge: A way has to be found to ignite the powder in order to project the missile, and the powder posed problems. The earliest firearms of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries required a lighted wick (“match”) to make direct contact with the powder in the pan, which would flash and ignite the main powder charge in the barrel. (Sometimes the powder would flash without igniting the main charge—hence the phrase “a flash in the pan” for something showy but ultimately useless.) Carrying a lighted wick in the vicinity of gunpowder was not only potentially dangerous but also highly inconvenient. Rain was obviously a problem, and the lighted match advertised any movement at night. The wheel-lock mechanism of the seventeenth century applied a more sophisticated solution (overdesigned, as it turned out) to the ignition problem. A hammer that gripped a piece of iron pyrite was cranked back against a spring (“spanning,” the same word used for arming a crossbow) using a tool (from which we get the word spanner). When the trigger was pulled, the pan cover moved to expose the powder and the pyrite sparked against a serrated wheel to ignite the priming charge. The gun was expensive to make and the wheel lock particularly prone to jamming or breaking if cocked for too long; it was, according to a seventeenth-century soldier, “too curious and too soone distempered with an ignorant hand.”25
In contrast, the flintlock, which became the standard infantry gun for about 150 years (roughly 1700–1850), was a model of simplicity. As the name suggests, the firing mechanism was based on the relatively simple mechanics of a lock. The mechanism was derived from the German-Dutch hunting piece known as a snaphance (the name means “pecking cock,” describing the action of the hammer, or “cock”). The cock was pulled back against a spring that in turn engaged with a restraining cog, the “sear.” When the sear was released by a trigger, the cock “pecked” down and automatically opened the pan cover to expose the priming powder. The flint in the cock struck against a steel plate (“frizzen”) to send a spark into the priming-powder pan and thence through a firing hole into the base of the barrel, which held the main powder charge. A sliding cover, manually closed after loading but automatically opened on firing, protected the priming charge from spilling or becoming wet. Another advantage was the introduction of a “half-cock,” which to some extent mitigated the danger of carrying a loaded weapon at full cock.26 Even so, accidents happened and men were killed. The sear that held the cock could become dangerously worn. Richard Holmes in Redcoat relates: “At Waterloo Lieutenant Strachan of the 73rd, who had just joined the regiment and was anxious to see action, was marching in front of a line of men with their muskets at the trail carried horizontally, muzzle forwards. A corn-stalk got entangled with the trigger of a half-cock musket, which went off, hitting Strachan in the back and killing him instantly.”27
The flintlock musket, although a huge improvement on the wheel-lock, was in some respects hardly more lethal than the bow (in fact, during the American War of Independence, Benjamin Franklin strongly advocated reintroducing the longbow), but unlike the bow, it could be mastered by almost any soldier. The drill stages (“evolutions,” as they were called) see
m to us quite extraordinarily complicated (even though the forty-four stages for the matchlock were reduced by about half for the flintlock). Nevertheless, the soldier had an imposing number of things to do before his musket was ready to fire. Priming powder had to be poured into the pan, and then a coarser powder, along with the ball, poured into the barrel, followed by a wad of paper or cloth to hold the charge in place; then all had to be tamped down with a ramrod. As the eighteenth century progressed, ball and powder were amalgamated into paper cartridges that the soldier broke open (usually by biting off one end) to enable him to pour powder and ball into the barrel to be followed by the empty paper cartridge, which acted as the wad.
In combat, understandably, much of the fancy rigamarole was dropped in favor of shortcuts. Very often, instead of going through the official loading procedure, soldiers under pressure would pour in the powder, roll in the ball, and give the butt a good whack on the ground to settle the powder and seat the ball on top.
All of these actions took a good deal of dexterity, and it is no wonder that in the heat of battle soldiers fumbled and panicked. Guns were loaded multiple times but not fired (usually because the ball had been put into the barrel before the powder); they became fouled from gunpowder residue; the ramrods bent or broke. To save time between loadings, soldiers stuck their ramrods into the earth, which caused their guns to become fouled with dirt. Some soldiers inadvertently fired off their ramrods because they had forgotten to remove them from the barrel, sometimes with fatal consequences for a man in a row in front.
In order to facilitate speedy loading, the ball was significantly smaller than the bore of the barrel. The resultant space between the ball and the barrel was termed “windage” (in flintlocks of the later eighteenth century, the windage was about .05 inches). Windage may have made loading easier, but there was a price to pay in the loss of gas (from the exploding gunpowder) that escaped around the ball rather than propelling it. The buffeting deformation of the flight of the ball as it traveled up the barrel affected accuracy also. Like a rifle bullet, the smoothbore ball left the barrel with a spin, but neither its axis nor its speed of rotation was controlled, and as it traveled, air resistance further deflected its flight in the same way that a sliced golf shot reacts.28 Yet if windage was reduced, it caused extensive fouling with the resinous after-burn residue of the powder. It also increased what was already a fairly hefty recoil that could leave a badly bruised shoulder after a period of firing. (The recoil could be powerful enough to kill. A Lieutenant I. Bangs of the American Continental Army in the Revolutionary War records that as a man lowered his gun to cock it, it went off prematurely and the recoiling butt “kicked” him in the chest, “producing instant death.”)29
The anticipation of the recoil and pan flash of the priming powder caused involuntary flinching, which also affected accuracy.30 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.”31
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.”32 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.33 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.34 As many as one in four discharge attempts were unsuccessful.35 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.36 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.37 (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.”38 Some historians of the Napoleonic period put the hit rate as low as .3 percent,39 others as high as 5–30 percent.40
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 400.41 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.42 “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.”43 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.”44 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.45
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 tha
t 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.”46 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.”47
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