The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  A musket ball weighed about 1 ounce, and a hit at anything up to, say, 100 yards could inflict an appalling wound. Modern conoidal-shaped bullets make a clean entry but tend to tumble when they enter the body, leaving a trail of horrific damage, and create a large exit wound. A heavy round ball does not tumble but creates what in wound ballistics is known as “crushing” on initial impact. “Elastic” tissue such as muscle and skin is good at absorbing the kinetic energy of the projectile. A high-velocity bullet is not necessarily more lethal than a slower, heavier ball because kinetic energy is a function of mass. (In fact, the muzzle velocity of the black-powder period—1,200–1,500 feet per second—compares quite favorably with some modern firearms. For example, a Colt .357 Magnum fires a bullet at 1,200 feet per second, and even modern assault rifles, “beneficiaries of more than three centuries of technical development, were only double those of early muskets.”)48

  An infantryman was most likely to be hit on his left side, as this was most often presented to the enemy (a right-handed shooter turns slightly to the right, exposing his left side).49 A full-velocity shot to the head or stomach invariably proved fatal. Stomach wounds were particularly feared (due in part to the almost inevitable death from peritonitis if the soldier was not killed outright). Rifleman Harris, in the Peninsular War, describes a comrade who had been gut-shot:

  A man near me uttered a scream of agony, and looking from the 29th, who were on my right, to the left, whence the screech had come, I saw one of our sergeants, named Fraser, sitting in a doubled-up position, and swaying backwards and forwards as though he had got a terrible pain in his bowels. He continued to make such complaint that I arose and went to him, for he was rather a crony of mine.

  “Oh, Harris,” said he, as I took him in my arms, “I shall die! I shall die! The agony is so great that I cannot bear it.”

  It was, indeed dreadful to look upon him; the froth came from his mouth, and the perspiration poured from his face. Thank Heaven! he was soon out of pain, and, laying him down, I returned to my place. Poor fellow! He suffered more for the short time that he was dying than any man I think I ever saw in the same circumstances.50

  Men hit by a musket ball did not always drop neatly. A soldier of the Napoleonic era describes the macabre death dance: “I have observed a Soldier, mortally wounded, by a shot through the head or heart, instead of falling down, elevate his Firelock with both hands above his head, & run round & round, describing circles before he fell, as one frequently sees a bird shot in the air.… Men, when badly wounded, seek the shelter of a stone or a bush, to which they betake themselves, before they lie down, for support & security, just as birds, or hares do, when in a similar state of suffering.”51

  Prolonged firefights at relatively close ranges could produce high casualties for little gain. A French witness at the slugfest of Kloster Kamp (1760) recalls: “The battlefield was strewn with dead, but we did not notice a single enemy uniform on our ground, or a single French uniform on that of the enemy.”52 Commanders, understandably, tried to prevent this. The model they aspired to was the volley followed by a bayonet charge. Major Macready of the Thirtieth Foot at Waterloo remarks: “All firing beyond one volley in a case where you must charge, seems only to cause a useless interchange of casualties, besides endangering the steadiness of a charge to be undertaken in the midst of sustained file fire, when a word of command is hard to hear.”53

  Sometimes there was to be no firing at all and an entire reliance on the bayonet. Marshal Ney at Montmirail in 1814 had the Guard empty their muskets of priming powder. Before the British bayonet attack on Anthony Wayne’s sleeping troops at Paoli in 1777, “no soldier … was suffered to load; those who could not draw their pieces [extract the charge] took out the flints.” Failure to do so could have its own fatal consequences. When Wayne, in revenge for Paoli, attacked the British garrison at Stony Point in 1779 he ordered it be done at the point of the bayonet, guns unloaded, but one unfortunate “insisted on loading his piece—all was now a profound silence—the officer commanding the platoon ordered him to keep on; the soldier observed that he did not understand attacking with his piece unloaded; he was ordered not to stop [in order to load], at his peril; he still persisted, and the officer instantly dispatched him.”54 In terms of percentages of men killed by the bayonet, the British at Paoli seemed to have had a slight margin. Of 1,500 Americans at Paoli, 200 (13.3 percent) were killed; at Stony Point, of 600 British, the Americans killed 63 (10.5 percent).55

  The bayonet became something of an idée fixe of the black-powder era and, indeed, way beyond. Its supposed powers were invoked well into the twentieth century. But hard evidence suggests its effectiveness was more in the anticipation than the use, for no other weapon was held in such horror.

  The “plug” bayonet had been introduced around the middle of the seventeenth century but by the end of the century was supplanted by the socket version (which, unlike the plug, permitted firing because it was attached to the outer rim of the musket by a ring). Its introduction is one of those innovations that seems, on the face of it, relatively minor, but in fact it condemned a whole class of warrior—the pikemen—to oblivion. No longer did musketeers need the pike for protection, for the bayonet now gave them the means to defend themselves.

  There are many eyewitnesses to the warfare of the period who state that the bayonet was rarely employed. Dominique-Jean Larrey, Napoleon’s surgeon-in-chief, encountered only five cases of bayonet wounds throughout his career. Although commanders were constantly urging men to withhold fire and charge with the bayonet, actual bayonet fighting seems to have been rare. At the battle of Maida (Italy, 1806), according to the British commander Sir John Stuart, his troops, having exchanged a volley, moved in “awful silence towards [the French] … until their bayonets began to cross.” However, a British combatant saw it somewhat differently: “I have heard … it is stated that the bayonets of the contending forces actually crossed during the charge. They may have done so, in some parts of the line—but so far as I could see they did not do so, and I have never heard any one who was in the action say that the bayonets actually crossed.”56

  Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman believes that “bayonet combat is extremely rare … wound statistics from nearly two centuries of battle indicate that what is revealed here is a basic, profound, and universal insight into human nature. First, the closer the soldier draws to his enemy the harder it is to kill him, until at bayonet range it can be extremely difficult.”57

  One American Civil War veteran, interviewed by Sidney George Fisher, certainly would have agreed: “I said it seemed to me that the most terrible thing in battle must be a charge of bayonets, that a confused melee of furious men armed with such weapons, stabbing each other & fighting hand to hand in a mass of hundreds, was something shocking even to think of. He said it was so shocking that it very rarely happened that bayonets are crossed, one side always giving way before meeting.”58

  Killing with the bayonet may have been rare but it has always appealed to a certain strain of martial bloodlust. Again, the defeated soldier throughout history seems to trigger a psychopathological itch the bayonet scratches. At the battle of Brooklyn in 1776, Scots and Hessians caught units of the American patriot forces in a deadly pincer. A British officer reveled in the use of the bayonet: “The Hessians and our brave Highlanders gave no quarter, and it was a fine sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the Rebels with their bayonets after we had surrounded them so they could not resist.… It was a glorious achievement.”59 As an American officer noted after Brooklyn: “Capt: Jewett had Rc’d: two Wounds with a Bayonet after he was taken, & Strip’d of his Arms & part of his Clothes, one in the Brest & the other in the Belly, of which he Languished with great pain until the Thursday following when he Died; Sargt: Graves was also Stab’d in the Thigh with a Bayonet, after he was taken.”60

  EVERY MILITARY SPECIALTY has its own dedicated and evocative vocabulary. Take, for example, the artillerists’ term grazing. Te
chnically it describes the bounces a cannonball makes during its flight. However, the word also evokes an animal feeding, which describes quite accurately the relationship between smoothbore artillery and the infantry and cavalry on which it preyed. The inadequacies of the individual musket resulted in a dependence on massed infantry arrayed in tight ranks to achieve anything approaching adequate firepower, and those same inadequacies placed a great emphasis on getting close to the enemy. Infantry tactics, therefore, provided large targets ideally suited to cannon that, although not particularly accurate, could cause much havoc on densely packed soldiers. The cannon was a beast of omnivorous and indiscriminate appetite, guzzling greedily on the herds of men conveniently marching toward its muzzle. It is fitting that the open end of a cannon is referred to as its mouth.

  There were three main categories of shot used in the black-powder era. The first and most important (accounting for about 70 percent of the ammunition carried) was solid iron ball. The second was canister, sometimes called “case,” or “grape” (although grape, strictly speaking, was a naval munition), which has been described as the machine gun of the era. Tinned galvanized-iron cans filled with small iron balls (usually about sixty per can) burst when they left the cannon’s mouth, spraying their payload in a shotgun pattern, which at close range (anything less than 200 yards) could create terrible slaughter. At Fontenoy in 1745 the French gunners allowed the English foot to come close and then ripped it apart with canister: “There was not a single shot from those cannon which failed to produce a dreadful carnage, and the first two discharges threw the enemy into such disorder that they rapidly betook themselves to the rear.”61 The Prussian colonel Eckhart witnessed the destruction of the Kalckstein Regiment at Kolin in 1757: “It was the enemy canister fire in particular which hit the second battalion, leaving not a single survivor among the lieutenants who commanded the platoons.”62 The artillerist Captain Mercer at Waterloo was attacked by French cavalry: “I saw through the smoke the leading squadrons of the advancing column coming on at a brisk trot, and already not more than one hundred yards distant.… I immediately ordered the line to be formed for action—case shot! … making terrible slaughter … in an instant covering the ground with men and horses.” They were piled up on one another, remembered another, “like cards, the men not even having been displaced from the saddle.” A Frenchman who viewed the same action observed: “Now, I thought, those gunners would be cut to pieces; but no, the devils kept firing with grape, which mowed them down like grass.”63

  In the third category were the exploding shells often fired from short-barreled howitzers and mortars. The gunner’s art lay in setting the trajectory and trimming the fuse (which was ignited by the cannon flash) to achieve an airburst that showered troops with balls and bits of the shell case or bounced the spherical shell in among the enemy. And although gunnery as a whole was not particularly accurate, some artillerists showed considerable skill, as witnessed by Dr. James Thacher at Yorktown (1781), who described some American and French gunners: “It is astonishing with what accuracy an experienced gunner will make his calculations, that a shell shall fall within a few feet of a given point, and burst at the precise time, though at a great distance. When a shell falls, it whirls round, burrows, and excavates the earth to a considerable extent, and, bursting, makes dreadful havoc around. I have more than once witnessed fragments of the mangled bodies and limbs of the British soldiers thrown into the air by the bursting of our shells.”64

  Black-powder artillery engaged its target by “direct” fire: The target had to be visible (“indirect” fire at out-of-sight targets relying on mathematical calculation would come later in the nineteenth century). A six-pounder (a cannon firing a 6-pound ball), a workhorse of eighteenth-century artillery, had a range of approximately 1,200 yards. William Müller, of the King’s German Legion (a British regiment), did extensive gunnery testing, which he published in The Elements of the Science of War in 1811. Firing at a cloth target 6 feet high and 30 feet wide (roughly the frontage of a battalion in line), he found that a six-pounder would make 100 percent hits at up to 520 yards, dropping precipitously to 31 percent at 950 yards, and to only 17 percent at its maximum range of 1,200 yards. The ball, however, had several phases of lethality over its trajectory. At zero degrees elevation (parallel to the ground), its first bounce (graze) would be about 400 yards out; the second graze grounded about 800 yards out; the third, 900 yards from the muzzle. To maximize its destructive potential the gunner attempted to pitch the ball just in front of the first rank of the enemy and have it ricochet and rise, hitting men in several ranks as it ascended, creating what one historian calls “tunnels of carnage.”65 Different infantry dispositions offered different tunnels. Against soldiers arrayed in line, the most lethal artillery placement was to fire round shot in enfilade: from the side, so that the ball would travel down a row. Against column, a head-on shot would have much the same effect, potentially making multiple kills during its brief but bloody careen (and on stony ground secondary splinters would add to the shot’s destructiveness).

  A 6- or 9-pound cannonball traveling at up to 900 feet per second could, obviously, inflict horrendous damage on a soldier. At Bunker Hill in 1776, British warships caught American militia as they crossed the Neck onto Charlestown Peninsula. Peter Brown, a patriot, recalls that “one cannon [ball] cut off three men in two [cut them in half].” Sir John Moore, the British commander in the early stages of the Peninsular War, was mortally wounded by a ball: “The shock threw him from his horse with violence.… The dreadful nature of the injury he had received was then noticed; the shoulder was shattered in pieces, and the muscles of the breast were torn into long strips, which were interlaced by their recoil from the strain and dragging of the shot.”66

  Bizarrely, even near misses could be fatal. “I was sitting on the side of the trench,” writes the American soldier Joseph Plumb Martin at Yorktown, “when some of the New-York troops coming in, one of the sergeants stepped up to the breastwork to look about him … at that instant a shot from the enemy (which doubtless was aimed for him in particular, as none others were in sight of them) passed just by his face without touching him at all; he fell dead into the trench; I put my hand on his forehead and found his skull was shattered all in pieces, and the blood flowing from his nose and mouth, but not a particle of skin was broken.”67 There are several such accounts of men being killed by a nimbus of pressurized air created by the flying ball.

  Even a seemingly spent ball could be lethal. Many soldiers were maimed or killed by trying to stop what seemed to be a benignly rolling cannonball. In fact the heavier the shot, the more kinetic energy it retained. John Trumbull was with the American army besieging Boston in 1776 when rewards were offered for the retrieval of British cannonballs. The results, however, could be unfortunate, “for when the soldiers saw a ball, after having struck and rebounded from the ground several times (en ricochet), roll sluggishly along, they would run and place a foot before it, not aware that a heavy ball long retains sufficient impetus to overcome such an obstacle. The consequence was that several brave lads lost their feet, which were crushed by the weight of the rolling shot.”68

  Messing about with spent ordnance could literally blow up in your face, as Captain Kincaid reported from Spain in 1812: “Among other things carried from Ciudad Rodrigo, one of our men had the misfortune to carry his death in his own hands, under the mistaken shape of amusement. He thought that it was a cannon ball, and took it for the purpose of playing at the game of nine-holes, but it happened to be a live shell. In rolling it along it went over a bed of burning ashes, and ignited without his observing it. Just as he had got it between his legs, and was in the act of discharging it a second time, it exploded, and … blew him to pieces.”69

  Loading smoothbore cannon was a fairly complicated maneuver usually involving a minimum of five men. After each shot the barrel had to be swabbed with a soaked sheepskin “mop” to extinguish any embers before a new cartridge (a linen bag
filled with powder and ball) was rammed home. Lieutenant John Peebles of the Royal Highland Regiment fighting in America in 1780 describes the perils: “An artillery man lost an arm and an assistant killed by one of our own guns hanging fire and going off when they put in the spunge [sic].”70 Given the volatility of the materials and the pressure of loading in battle conditions, disasters were waiting to happen. At Waterloo, Captain Mercer recalled:

  One of, if not the first man who fell on our side was wounded by his own gun. Gunner Butterworth was one of the greatest pickles in the troop, but at the same time a most daring, active soldier; he was No. 7 (the man who sponged etc) at his gun. He had just finished ramming down the shot, and was stepping back outside the wheel when his foot stuck in the miry soil, pulling him forward at the moment the gun was fired. As a man naturally does when falling, he threw out both his arms before him, and they were blown off at the elbows. He raised himself a little on his two stumps, and looked up most piteously in my face. To assist him was impossible—the safety of all, everything, depended on our not slackening our fire, and I was obliged to turn from him. The state of anxious activity in which we were kept all day, and the numbers who fell almost immediately afterwards, caused me to lose sight of poor Butterworth; and I afterwards learned that he had succeeded in rising, and was gone to the rear; but on inquiring for him next day, some of my people … told me that they saw his body lying by the roadside … bled to death.71

  The killing power of artillery in this period was debated then, just as it has been by modern historians. In the sixteenth century, field artillery was clumsy, difficult to move, and slow to fire—only about eight shots an hour. As a French commentator of the first half of the sixteenth century puts it, “Il fait plus de peur, que du mal” (it frightens more than it hurts).72 It was a sentiment repeated 150 years or so later by a witness of the battle of Vitoria in 1813: “Several of our officers remarked, & I think it just, that cannon make more noise and alarm than they do mischief. Many shots were fired at us but we suffered little from them. A young soldier is much more alarmed at a nine pounder shot passing within 4 y[ar]ds of his head than he is of a bullet at a distance of as many inches, although one would settle him as effectively as the other.”73