The insurgents’ first important victory in the open field, that of Rymenant near Malines (1577), was won by the skill of “Bras de Fer,” de la Noue, a veteran French general, and the stubbornness of the English contingent of the Dutch army—for England, from 1572 onwards, sent out an ever-increasing number of volunteers. This battle was soon followed by the great defeat of Gembloux (1578), and William the Silent was not destined to see the rise of the Dutch army. Maurice of Nassau was the real organizer of victory. In the wreck of all feudal and burgher military institutions, he turned to the old models of Xenophon, Polybius, Aelian and the rest. Drill, as rigid and as complicated as that of the Macedonian phalanx, came into vogue, the infantry was organized more strictly into companies and regiments, the cavalry into troops or cornets. The Reiter tactics of the pistol were followed by the latter, the former consisted of pikes, halberts and “shot.” This form was generally followed in central Europe, as usual, without the spirit, but in Holland it was the greater trustworthiness of the rank and file that allowed of more flexible formations, and here we no longer see the foot of an army drawn up, as at Jemmingen, in one solid and immovable “square.” In their own country and with the system best suited thereto, the Dutch, who moreover acquired greater skill and steadiness day by day, maintained their ground against all the efforts of a Parma and a Spinola. Indeed, it is the best tribute to the vitality of the Spanish system that the inevitable débâcle was so long delayed. The campaigns of Spinola in Germany demonstrated that the “Dutch” system, as a system for general use, was at any rate no better than the system over which it had locally asserted its superiority, and the spirit, and not the form, of Maurice’s practice achieved the ultimate victory of the Netherlanders. In the Thirty Years’ War, the unsuccessful armies of Mansfeld and many others were modelled on the Dutch system,—the forces of Spinola, of Tilly and of Wallenstein, on the Spanish. In other words, these systems as such meant little; the discipline and spirit behind them, everything. Yet the contribution made by the Dutch system to the armies of to-day was not small; to Maurice and his comrades we owe, first the introduction of careful and accurate drill, and secondly the beginnings of an acknowledged science of war, the groundwork of both being the theory and practice of antiquity. The present method of “forming fours” in the British infantry is ultimately derived from Aelian, just as the first beats of the drums in a march represent the regimental calls of the Landsknechts, and the depots and the drafts for the service battalions date from the Italian wars of Spain.
25. The Thirty Years’ War.—Hitherto all armies had been raised or reduced according to the military and political situation of the moment. Spain had indeed maintained a relatively high effective in peace, but elsewhere a few personal guards, small garrisons, and sometimes a small regular army to serve as a nucleus, constituted the only permanent forces kept under arms by sovereigns, though, in this era of perpetual wars, armies were almost always on a war footing. The expense of maintenance at that time practically forbade any other system than this, called in German Werbe-system, a term for which in English there is no nearer equivalent than “enlistment” or “levy” system. It is worth noticing that this very system is identical in principle with that of the United States at the present day, viz., a small permanent force, inflated to any required size at the moment of need. The exceptional conditions of the Dutch army, indeed, secured for its regiments a long life; yet when danger was finally over, a large portion of the army was at once reduced. The history of the British army from about 1740 to 1820 is a most striking, if belated, example of the Werbe-system in practice. But the Thirty Years’ War naturally produced an unusual continuity of service in corps raised about 1620-1630, and fifty years later the principle of the standing army was universally accepted. It is thus that the senior regiments of the Prussian and Austrian armies date from about 1630. At this time an event took place which was destined to have a profound influence on the military art. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden landed in Germany with an army better organized, trained and equipped than any which had preceded it. This army, by its great victory of Breitenfeld (1631), inaugurated the era of “modern” warfare, and it is to the system of Gustavus that the student must turn for the initial point of the progressive development which has produced the armies of to-day. Spanish and Dutch methods at once became as obsolete as those of the Landsknechts.
26. The Swedish Army.—The Swedish army was raised by a carefully regulated system of conscription, which was “preached in every pulpit in Sweden.” There were indeed enlisted regiments of the usual type, and it would seem that Gustavus obtained the best even of the soldiers of fortune. But the national regiments were raised on the Indelta system. Each officer and man, under this scheme, received a land grant within the territorial district of his corps, and each of these districts supplied recruits in numbers proportionate to its population. This curious mixture of feudal and modern methods produced the best elements of an army, which, aided by the tactical and technical improvements introduced by Gustavus, proved itself incomparably superior to its rivals. Of course the long and bloody campaigns of 1630-34 led to the admission of great numbers of mercenaries even into the Swedish corps; and German, Scottish and other regiments figured largely, not only in the armies of Duke Bernhard and his successors, but in the army of Gustavus’ own lifetime. As early as 1632 one brigade of the army was distinguished by the title “Swedish,” as alone containing no foreigners. Yet the framework was much the same as it had been in 1630. The battle-organization of two lines and two wings, which was typical of the later “linear” tactics, began to supplant the system of the tercios. How cumbrous the latter had become by 1630 may be judged from any battle-plan of the period, and notably from that of Lützen. Gustavus’ cavalry fought four or three deep only, and depended as little as possible on the pistol. The work of riding down the pikes was indeed rendered easier by the improved tactical handiness of the musketeers, but it was fiery leading which alone compelled victory, for there were relatively few Swedish horse and many squadrons of Germans and others, who in themselves were far less likely to charge boldly than the “Pappenheimers” and other crack corps of the enemy. The infantry was of the highest class, and only on that condition could loose and supple lines be trusted to oppose the solid tercios of Tilly and Wallenstein. Cumbrous indeed these were, but by long practice they had acquired no small manœuvring power, of which Breitenfeld affords a striking example. The Swedes, however, completely surpassed them. The progress thus made may be gauged from the fact that under Gustavus the largest closed body of infantry was less than 300 strong. Briefly, the genius of a great commander, the ardour of a born cavalry leader, better arms and better organization, carried the Swedes to the end of their career of victory, but how personal was the vis viva which inspired the army was quickly noticeable after the death of Gustavus. Even a Bernhard could, in the end, evoke no more heroism from a Swedish army than from any other, and the real Swedish troops fought their last battle at Nördlingen (1634). After this, little distinguished the “Swedish” forces from the general mass of the armies of the time, save their system, to which, and to its influence on the training of such leaders as Banér, Torstensson and Wrangel, all their later victories were due. So much of Gustavus’ work survived even the carnage of Nördlingen, and his system always obtained better results, even with the heterogeneous troops of this later period, than any other of the time.
27. The English Civil War (see [Great Rebellion]).—The armies on either side which, about the same time, were fighting out the constitutional quarrel in England were essentially different from all those of the continent, though their formal organization was similar to that of the Swedes. The military expression of a national conscience had appeared rarely indeed in the Thirty Years’ War, which was a means of livelihood for, rather than an assertion of principle by, those who engaged in it. In England, on the other hand, there were no mercenaries, and the whole character of the operations was settled by the burning desire of a true “nation in arms” to decide at once, by the arbitrament of battle, the vital points at issue. A German critic (Fritz Hoenig) has indicated Worcester as the prototype of Sedan; at any rate, battles of this kind invariably resulted in failure when entrusted to a “standing” army of the 18th century. But the national armies disappeared at the end of the struggle; after the Restoration, English political aims became, so far as military activity was concerned, similar in scope and execution to those of the continent; and the example of Cromwell and the “New Model,” which might have revolutionized military Europe, passed away without having any marked influence on the armies of other nations.
28. Standing Armies.—Nine years after Nördlingen, the old Spanish army fought its last and most honourable battle at Rocroi. Its conquerors were the new French troops, whose victory created as great a sensation as Pavia and Creçy had done. Infusing a new military spirit into the formal organization of Gustavus’ system, the French army was now to “set the fashion” for a century. France had been the first power to revive regular forces, and the famous “Picardie” regiment disputed for precedence even with the old tercios. The country had emerged from the confusion of the past century with the foreign and domestic strength of a practically absolute central power. The Fronde continued the military history of the army from the end of the Thirty Years’ War; and when the period of consolidation was finally closed, all was prepared for the introduction of a “standing army,” practically always at war strength, and entirely at the disposal of the sovereign. The reorganization of the military establishments by Louvois may be taken as the formal date at which standing armies came into prominence (see historical sketch of the French army below). Other powers rapidly followed the lead of France, for the defects of enlisted troops had become very clear, and the possession of an army always ready for war was an obvious advantage in dynastic politics. The French proprietary system of regiments, and the general scheme of army administration which replaced it, may be taken as typical of the armies of other great powers in the time of Louis XIV.
29. Character of the Standing Armies.—A peculiar character was from the first imparted to the new organizations by the results of the Thirty Years’ War. A well-founded horror of military barbarity had the effect of separating the soldier from the civilian by an impassable gulf. The drain of thirty years on the population, resources and finances of almost every country in middle Europe, everywhere limited the size of the new armies; and the decision in 1648 of all questions save those of dynastic interest dictated the nature of their employment. The best soldiers of the time pronounced in favour of small field armies, for in the then state of communications and agriculture large forces proved in practice too cumbrous for good work. In every country, therefore, the army took the form of a professional body, nearly though not quite independent of extra recruits for war, set apart entirely from all contact with civil life, rigidly restricted as to conduct in peace and war, and employed mostly in the “maintenance” of their superiors’ private quarrels. Iron discipline produced splendid tenacity in action, and wholesale desertion at all times. In the Seven Years’ War, for instance, the Austrians stated one-fifth of their total loss as due to desertion, and Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon gives no untrue picture of the life of a soldier under the old regime. Further, since men were costly, rigid economy of their lives in action, and minute care for their feeding and shelter on the march, occupied a disproportionate amount of the attention of their generals. Armies necessarily moved slowly and remained concentrated to facilitate supply and to check desertion, and thus, when a commander had every unit of his troops within a short ride of his headquarters, there was little need for intermediate general officers, and still less for a highly trained staff.
30. Organization in the 18th Century.—All armies were now almost equal in fighting value, and war was consequently reduced to a set of rules (not principles), since superiority was only to be gained by methods, not by men. Soldiers such as Marlborough, who were superior to these jejune prescriptions, met indeed with uniform success. But the methods of the 18th century failed to receive full illustration, save by the accident of a great captain’s direction, even amidst the circumstances for which they were designed. It is hardly to be wondered at, therefore, that they failed, when forced by a new phase of development to cope with events completely beyond their element. The inner organization was not markedly altered. Artillery was still outside the normal organization of the line of battle, though in the period 1660-1740 much was done in all countries to improve the material, and above all to turn the personnel into disciplined soldiers. Cavalry was organized in regiments and squadrons, and armed with sabre and pistol. Infantry had by 1703 begun to assume its three-deep line formation and the typical weapons of the arm, musket and bayonet. Regiments and battalions were the units of combat as well as organization. In the fight the company was entirely merged in the higher unit, but as an administrative body it still remained. As for the higher organization, an army consisted simply of a greater or less number of battalions and squadrons, without, as a rule, intermediate commands and groupings. The army was arrayed as a whole in two lines of battle, with the infantry in the centre and the cavalry on the flanks, and an advanced guard; the so-called reserve consisting merely of troops not assigned to the regular commands. It was divided, for command in action, into right and left wings, both of cavalry and infantry, of each line. This was the famous “linear” organization, which in theory produced the maximum effort in the minimum time, but in practice, handled by officers whose chief care was to avoid the expenditure of effort, achieved only negative results. To see its defects one need only suppose a battalion of the first line hard pressed by the enemy. A battalion of the second line was directly behind it, but there was no authority, less than that of the wing commander, which could order it up to support the first. All the conditions of the time were opposed to tactical subdivision, as the term is now understood. That the 18th century did not revive schiltrons was due to the new fire tactics, to which everything but control was sacrificed. This “control,” as has been said, implied not so much command as police supervision. But far beyond any faults of organization and recruiting, the inherent vice of these armies was, as Machiavelli had pointed out two centuries previously, and as Prussia was to learn to her cost in 1806, that once they were thoroughly defeated, the only thing left to be done was to make peace at once, since there was no other armed force capable of retrieving a failure.
31. Frederick the Great.—The military career of Frederick the Great is very different from those of his predecessors. With an army organized on the customary system, and trained and equipped, better indeed, but still on the same lines as those of his rivals, the king of Prussia achieved results out of all proportion to those imagined by contemporary soldiers. It is to his campaigns, therefore, that the student must refer for the real, if usually latent, possibilities of the army of the 18th century. The prime secret of his success lay in the fact that he was his own master, and responsible to no superior for the uses to which he put his men. This position had never, since the introduction of standing armies, been attained by any one, even Eugene and Leopold of Dessau being subject to the common restriction; and with this extraordinary advantage over his opponents, Frederick had further the firmness and ruthless energy of a great commander. Prussia, moreover, was more strictly organized than other countries, and there was relatively little of that opposition of local authorities to the movement of troops which was conspicuous in Austria. The military successes of Prussia, therefore, up to 1757, were not primarily due to the system and the formal tactics, but were the logical outcome of greater energy in the leading, and less friction in the administration, of her armies. But the conditions were totally different in 1758-1762, when the full force of the alliance against Prussia developed itself in four theatres of war. Frederick was driven back to the old methods of making war, and his men were no longer the soldiers of Leuthen and Hohenfriedberg. If discipline was severe before, it was merciless then; the king obtained men by force and fraud from every part of Germany, and had both to repress and to train them in the face of the enemy. That under such conditions, and with such men, the weaker party finally emerged triumphant, was indeed a startling phenomenon. Yet its result for soldiers was not the production of the national army, though the dynastic forces had once more shown themselves incapable of compassing decisive victories, nor yet the removal of the barrier between army and people, for the operations of Frederick’s recruiting agents made a lasting impression, and, further, large numbers of men who had thought to make a profession of arms were turned adrift at the end of the war. On the contrary, all that the great and prolonged tour de force of these years produced was a tendency, quite in the spirit of the age, to make a formal science out of the art of war. Better working and better methods were less sought after than systematization of the special practices of the most successful commanders. Thus Frederick’s methods, since 1758 essentially the same as those of others, were taken as the basis of the science now for the first time called “strategy,” the fact that his opponents had also practised it without success being strangely ignored. Along with this came a mania for imitation. Prussian drill, uniforms and hair-powder were slavishly copied by every state, and for the next twenty years, and especially when the war-trained officers and men had left active service, the purest pedantry reigned in all the armies of Europe, including that of Prussia. One of the ablest of Frederick’s subordinates wrote a book in which he urged that the cadence of the infantry step should be increased by one pace per minute. The only exceptions to the universal prevalence of this spirit were in the Austrian army, which was saved from atrophy by its Turkish wars, and in a few British and French troops who served in the American War of Independence. The British regiments were sent to die of fever in the West Indies; when the storm of the French Revolution broke over Europe, the Austrian army was the only stable element of resistance.
32. The French Revolution.—Very different were the armies of the Revolution. Europe, after being given over to professional soldiers for five hundred years, at last produced the modern system of the “nation in arms.” The French volunteers of 1792 were a force by which the routine generals of the enemy, working with instruments and by rules designed for other conditions, were completely puzzled, and France gained a short respite. The year 1793 witnessed the most remarkable event that is recorded in the history of armies. Raw enthusiasm was replaced, after the disasters and defections which marked the beginning of the campaign, by a systematic and unsparing conscription, and the masses of men thus enrolled, inspired by ardent patriotism and directed by the ferocious energy of the Committee of Public Safety, met the disciplined formalists with an opposition before which the attack completely collapsed. It was less marvellous in fact than in appearance that this should be so. Not to mention the influence of pedantry and senility on the course of the operations, it may be admitted that Frederick and his army at their best would have been unable to accomplish the downfall of the now thoroughly roused French. Tactically, the fire of the regulars’ line caused the Revolutionary levies to melt away by thousands, but men were ready to fill the gaps. No complicated supply system bound the French to magazines and fortresses, for Europe could once more feed an army without convoys, and roads were now good and numerous. No fear of desertion kept them concentrated under canvas, for each man was personally concerned with the issue. If the allies tried to oppose them on an equal front, they were weak at all points, and the old organization had no provision for the working of a scattered army. While ten victorious campaigns had not carried Marlborough nearer to Paris than some marches beyond the Sambre, two campaigns now carried a French army to within a few miles of Vienna. It was obvious that, before such forces and such mobility, the old system was doomed, and with each successive failure the old armies became more discouraged. Napoleon’s victories finally closed this chapter of military development, and by 1808 the only army left to represent it was the British. Even to this the Peninsular War opened a line of progress, which, if different in many essentials from continental practice, was in any case much more than a copy of an obsolete model.
33. The Conscription.—In 1793, at a moment when the danger to France was so great as to produce the rigorous emergency methods of the Reign of Terror, the combined enemies of the Republic had less than 300,000 men in the field between Basel and Dunkirk. On the other hand, the call of the “country in danger” produced more than four times this number of men for the French armies within a few months. Louis XIV., even when all France had been awakened to warlike enthusiasm by a similar threat (1709), had not been able to put in the field more than one-fifth of this force. The methods of the great war minister Carnot were enforced by the ruthless committee, and when men’s lives were safer before the bayonets of the allies than before the civil tribunals at home, there was no difficulty in enlisting the whole military spirit of France. There is therefore not much to be said as to the earliest application of the conscription, at least as regards its formal working, since any system possessing elasticity would equally have served the purpose. In the meanwhile, the older plans of organization had proved inadequate for dealing with such imposing masses of men. Even with disciplined soldiers they had long been known as applicable only to small armies, and the deficiencies of the French, with their consequences in tactics and strategy, soon produced the first illustrations of modern methods. Unable to meet the allies in the plain, they fought in broken ground and on the widest possible front. This of course produced decentralization and subdivision; and it became absolutely necessary that each detachment on a front of battle 30 m. long (e.g. Stokach) should be properly commanded and self-sufficing. The army was therefore constituted in a number of divisions, each of two or more brigades with cavalry and artillery sufficient for its own needs. It was even more important that each divisional general, with his own staff, should be a real commander, and not merely the supervisor of a section of the line of battle, for he was almost in the position that a commander-in-chief had formerly held. The need of generals was easily supplied when there was so wide a field of selection. For the allies the mere adoption of new forms was without result, since it was contrary both to tradition and to existing organization. The attempts which were made in this direction did not tend to mitigate the evils of inferior numbers and moral. The French soon followed up the divisional system with the further organization of groups of divisions under specially selected general officers; this again quickly developed into the modern army corps.