[1] At Bouvines, it is recorded with special emphasis that Guillaume des Barres, when in the act of felling the emperor, heard the call to rescue King Philip Augustus and, forfeiting his rich prize, made his way back to help his own sovereign.
[2] Crossbows indeed were powerful, and also handled by professional soldiers (e.g. the Genoese at Crécy), but they were slow in action, six times as slow as the long bow, and the impatient gendarmerie generally became tired of the delay and crowded out or rode over the crossbowmen.
[3] As for instance when thirty men-at-arms “cut out” the Captal de Buch from the midst of his army at Cocherel.
[4] This tendency of the French military temperament reappears at almost every stage in the history of armies.
[5] The term landsknecht, it appears, was not confined to the right bank of the Rhine. The French “lansquenets” came largely from Alsace, according to General Hardy de Périni. In the Italian wars Francis I. had in his service a famous corps called the “black bands” which was recruited, in the lower Rhine countries.
[6] This practice of “maintenance” on a large scale continued to exist in France long afterwards. As late as the battle of Lens (1648) we find figuring in the king of France’s army three “regiments of the House of Condé.”
[7] Even as late as 1645 a battalion of infantry in England was called a “tercio” or “tertia” (see [Army]; Spanish army).
[8] In France it is recorded that the Gardes françaises, when warned for duty at the Louvre, used to stroll thither in twos and threes.
[9] About this time there was introduced, for resisting cavalry, the well-known hollow battalion square, which, replacing the former masses of pikes, represented up to the most modern times the defensive, as the line or column represented the offensive formation of infantry.
[10] The Prussian Grenadier battalions in the Silesian and Seven Years’ Wars were more and more confined strictly to line-of-battle duties as the irregular light infantry developed in numbers.