Peter the Great (57 page)

Although Vauban's art has never been excelled, then, as now, the greatest commanders of the era—Marlborough, Charles XII, Prince Eugene—were practitioners of the war movement. Of these, the greatest unquestionably was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who commanded the armies of Europe against Louis XIV from 1701 to 1711 and who never fought a battle he did not win or besieged a fortress he did not take. In ten years of war, fighting against one marshal of France after another, he defeated them all, and when political change in England cost him his command, he was driving relentlessly through Vauban's great fortress barrier toward Versailles itself. Marlborough was not interested in the conventional, limited warfare of the time; it was not a single town or fortress that he sought. His belief was in decisive, major action, even at great risk. His objectives were the annihilation of the French army and the humbling of the Sun King in a great open-field battle. He was ready to stake a province, a campaign, a war, even a kingdom, on the outcome of a single afternoon. Marlborough was the most successful all-around soldier of the age. He acted simultaneously as field commander, allied commander-in-chief and England's foreign minister and

*
Although when the King himself was present at a siege, the credit had to be shared. As Louis put it: "Monsieur de Vauban proposed to me the steps which
I
thought best."

virtual prime minister. In terms of our own most recent major war, it was as if he combined the functions and duties of Churchill, Eden, Eisenhower and Montgomery.

But Marlborough's command always had a certain balance, a blend of grand strategy and tactical purpose. The most daring and aggressive soldier of the age was Charles XII of Sweden. Charles, it seemed to his enemies and to a watching Europe, was anxious for battle, at any time and at any odds. He was utterly devoted to rapid movement and shock tactics. His impetuosity and eagerness to attack have brought the charge of rashness, even of fanaticism, and it is true that his tactics were those of George S. Patton: Always attack! But it was not attack based on madness; rather, the Swedish attack was based on rigid training and iron discipline, on total dedication and belief in victory, and on excellent battlefield communications. Informed by drums and messengers, subordinate commanders always knew what was expected of them. Any weakness in their own army was quickly covered; any weakness in the enemy's ranks was rapidly exploited.

Charles was willing to break the seasonal tradition of warfare— the hard frozen ground was easier for his wagons and cannon, and perhaps his troops were more used to the freezing weather—and was ready to campaign in winter. Obviously, in a war of movement the army with the greater mobility had the advantage. Campaigns were as often decided by transportation and logistics as by pitched battles. Thus, anything which improved mobility was important; the French were enormously pleased by the development of a new portable baking oven which could be set up, fired and produce fresh bread within hours.

Although field commanders were always wary when an enemy army was nearby, few battles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fought unless both sides were willing to fight. It was difficult to find suitable terrain and to arrange the necessary elaborate array of men, horses and guns. A commander reluctant to fight could usually avoid battle by remaining in rough, scrubby, broken ground. Should one general begin the hours of preparation necessary to ready his lines for battle, the other, if unwilling, could march away. Thus, two armies could exist in reasonable proximity for days without a major engagement.

When both commanders had compelling reasons to fight—to contest a river crossing or a strong position on a main road—the armies wheeled into position 300 to 600 yards apart. If there was time, the army which expected to be on the defensive—usually the Russians when confronted by Charles XII or the French when faced by Marlborough—erected barriers of sharpened stakes called chevaux de frise planted in the ground before the infantry lines to give some protection against advancing enemy cavalry. At points along the line, artillery officers sited their guns, ready to fire cannonballs weighing three, six, eight pounds or even sixteen and twenty-four pounds for the heaviest guns, 450 to 600 yards into the enemy ranks. A set-piece battle usually began with an artillery bombardment; a long pounding could be damaging, but was rarely decisive against experienced and disciplined troops. To an astonishing degree, the men simply stood waiting in ranks while cannonballs whistled through the air or bounded along the ground, tearing bloody lanes through their lines.

The greatest advances in field artillery during the seventeenth century had been made by Sweden. Gustavus Adolphus had standarized field-artillery calibers so each gun would not need its own supply of balls and, in the heat of battle, the same ammunition could feed any gun. Then, as artillery became almost an end in itself, Swedish generals realized that artillerymen often were forgetting the need to support their own infantry. To compensate, they attached light cannon directly to the infantry battalions, two guns per battalion, which could give close support by firing directly at the enemy infantry opposing that battalion. Later, Swedish artillery was attached even to cavalry. This highly mobile horse artillery could unharness, fire into enemy cavalry formations and be away in a matter of minutes.

The decisive arm, however, was not the artillery or the cavalry but the infantry, and the great battles of the age were won by infantry battalions advancing or standing in line, fighting each other with muskets, flintlocks, pikes and, later, bayonets. The seventeenth century had been a time of rapid transition in infantry equipment and tactics. For centuries, the ancient pike—a heavy steel-tipped lance fourteen to sixteen feet long—had been the all-conquering "Queen of Battles." Rows of pikemen, their long lances extended, advanced on each other, and the thrust of a wall of pikes brought the decision. But the development of firearms gradually made this famous weapon obsolete. When pikemen faced a line of musketeers, the musketeers could stand at a distance and fire musket balls into their ranks, dropping them one by one. By the end of the century, only a few pikemen still appeared on the battlefield, assigned exclusively to defending the musketeers from hostile cavalry. It still was a fearsome thing for a horseman to ride into a wall of long, sharp pikes, but when the pikeman was not under immediate attack at close qaurters, there was no one more useless or less dangerous on the battlefield. He simply stood in ranks, holding his long pike, being battered by enemy artillery and killed by enemy musket balls, while waiting for someone to approach and impale himself on his pike.

The solution was the bayonet, a device which enabled the musket to serve two purposes: It could be fired until the enemy got very close, and then, with a knife blade attached to the end, could be used as a short pike. At first, this was done by fitting a blade into the barrel. But this restricted firing and was soon succeeded by the permanent ring-held bayonet, which continued in use into the present century. The infantryman could fire until his enemy was on top of him and was still able to greet his foe with a gleaming blade. The bayonet arrived just as the Great Northern War was beginning. The Drabants, the Swedish Guards, were equipped with the bayonet in 1700, and within a few years most armies, including the Russian, had it in use.

Over the latter part of the seventeenth century, the musket itself had been greatly improved. The old matchlock was a cumbersome weapon weighing fifteen pounds or more. In order to lift and use it, the musketeer carried a long, forked stick which he planted in the ground, resting the barrel in the crotch while he aimed and fired. The process of loading and firing a single ball required twenty-two separate motions, among them loading the powder, ramming home wad and bullet, priming, raising to shoulder, aligning on the wooden stick, lighting the match and applying it to the touch hole in the weapon. All too often, because of dampness, the musketeer sighting down his long barrel and waiting for it to fire was disappointed—or worse than disappointed if enemy infantry or cavalry was fast approaching.

The replacement for the matchlock was the flintlock, in which a spark was produced automatically by a piece of steel striking against a piece of flint, the spark then dropping directly into the powder chamber. The weapon was lighter, although only relatively, weighing ten pounds, but it needed no forked stick, and the number of loading and firing motions was cut in half. A good rifleman could loose off several rounds a minute. The flintlock quickly became the standard infantry weapon in all Western armies. Only the Russians and Turks continued to issue old, heavy matchlock muskets, to the detriment of their infantry firepower.

Equipped with this new weapon—the flintlock with attached bayonet—infantry became a highly effective, dangerous and, before long, dominant force on the battlefield. The bayonet not only made two weapons of one, but made the new weapon much less clumsy than the pike, thus giving far greater battlefield mobility to infantry soldiers. The greater speed in firing muskets also demanded new tactics and new formations to make the most of this increased firepower. Cavalry, which had dominated battlefields for centuries, became secondary. Marlborough's contribution was in understanding and using the new firepower of the infantry. English soldiers were trained to deploy rapidly from column into line and to deliver steady, disciplined fire, platoon by platoon. As a smaller number of men could now deliver the same volume of fire, the size of battalions was reduced to make them easier to handle. Command became easier, quicker, more responsive. In order to allow larger numbers of muskets to be aimed at the enemy, and also to reduce the depth of the target presented to enemy artillery, infantry lines were extended on the flanks, thus increasing the width of the battlefield itself. Everything was practiced over and over in peacetime, in hope that by repetition it would become flawless habit. The test would come in the heart-shaking moments when the musketeers had fired, with no time for another shot before a wave of enemy horsemen, swords in hand, fell upon them.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the enormously increased firepower of the infantry had made the battlefield a more dangerous place than ever before. It was far easier to kill men by standing off and cutting them down with devastating volleys of musket fire than it was to move in and kill them hand to hand as had been required in all previous centuries. In earlier battles, ten percent of. the armies engaged might become casualties; now the rates soared higher. Yet, despite its new predominance, infantry still depended for its own safety in battle on keeping perfect order. With their great firepower, if they could hold ranks and not be forced to break, infantrymen could inflict great damage on cavalry which came too close. But they had to depend on strict array when all around swirled enemy cavalry squadrons which, on the slightest hint of disorder, could ride them down, crumple their ranks and trample them into the dust.

The organization of a battle—keeping thousands of men in ranks, arriving in proper formations at the proper moment, under enemy fire—was in itself a stupendous task. Nature conspired against commanders; there was always a copse of trees, a ditch or even a hedge which could impede or disrupt the columns of moving men. Even so, nothing could be hurried. An advance into the most murderous enemy fire had to be slow and sure; haste could jeopardize the balance and timing of an army. Frequently, even with men dropping on all sides, an attacking column would be halted to dress the ranks into better alignment or to allow a parallel column to catch up.

With the rarest exceptions, successful commanders were those who attacked. Marlborough's unvarying tactic was to begin a battle by attacking the strongest part of the enemy line. Habitually, he used his own superbly trained, red-coated English infantry for this purpose.
As
the worried enemy commander fed more and more of his reserves into this area of the battle, Marlborough maintained and even increased the pressure, accepting whatever casualties he must. Then, when other segments of the enemy line were weakened, Marlborough unleashed his own reserves, usually a mass of cavalry, against a denuded point of the enemy front. Repeatedly, a breakthrough occurred and the Duke rode a victor across the field.

In the sheer dynamism of their attack, however, the finest infantry and cavalry in Europe were not the English but the Swedes. Swedish soldiers were trained to think only in terms of attack, no matter what the odds. If an enemy somehow seized the initiative and began to advance toward Swedish lines, the Swedes immediately charged forward to break the attack with a counterattack. Unlike the English under Marlborough, whose infantry tactics were based on making the most of its devastating firepower, the basis of the Swedish attack remained the "armes blanches"—cold steel. Both infantry and cavalry deliberately sacrificed the firepower of their muskets and pistols in favor of closing with sword and bayonet.

It made an awesome sight. Slowly, steadily, silently except for the beating of their drums, the Swedish infantry advanced, holding its own fire until the last minute. At close range, the columns deployed out into a long wall of blue and yellow four ranks deep, halted, poured in a single volley and then erupted with a bayonet charge into the reeling enemy lines. It was many years before Peter's Russian levies could stand before this kind of fierce attack. The unexcelled momentum of the Swedish attack derived from two sources; religious fatalism and constant training. Each soldier was taught to share the King's belief that "God would let no one be killed until his hour had come." This produced a calm courage which was anchored in months and years of practice in marching, wheeling, halting, firing, which gave the Swedish infantry maneuverability and cohesion second to none.