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Ancestral Voices: The Influence of the Ancients on the Military Thought of the Seventeenth

and Eighteenth CenturiesAuthor(s): Donald A. NeillSource: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Jul., 1998), pp. 487-520Published by: Society for Military HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/120435 .

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Ancestral Voices: The Influence of theAncients on the Military Thought of theSeventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Donald A. Neill

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoilseething,As if this earth in fast thick pantswere breathing,A mightymountainmomentlywas forced;Amidwhose swifthalf-intermittedburstHugefragmentsvaulted like reboundinghail . ..And 'midthis tumult Kublaheardfrom farAncestralvoices prophesyingwar!-Samuel TaylorColeridge,KublaKhan

The Renaissance RevisitedFROM the chasm of the Dark and Middle Ages "with ceaseless turmoilseething," the Renaissance resonated across Europe from the rise ofPetrarch in the mid-fourteenth century, to the Enlightenment of theeighteenth-imposing itself, like Coleridge's metaphorical mountain,upon all aspects of religious, social, scientific, political, and philosophi-cal thought, and scattering fragments of long-forgotten wisdom aboutlike "rebounding hail." In many ways, the period represented a comingof age: a waxing dissatisfaction with the patronizing Christian interpre-tation of man as inherently sinful and the world as a wheel of pain forthe unrighteous; the slow growth of the sense of human "self," of a des-tiny not foreordained; and a new appreciation of the intrinsic worth ofMan. Novelist Jostein Gaarder summarizes the intellectual revolution ofthe era: "Throughout the whole medieval period, the point of departurehad always been God. The humanists of the Renaissance took as theirpoint of departure man himself."'

1. Jostein Gaarder,Sophie's World (Sofies verden), trans. Paulette Moller(NewYork:Berkley PublishingCorp., 1996), 200.The Journal of Military History 62 (July 1998): 487-520 ? Society for Military History * 487


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DONALDA. NEILLBarbara Tuchman further eulogizes the secularism of the era, notingthat:

Under its impulse the individual found in himself, rather than inGod, the designer and captain of his fate. Hiisneeds, his ambitionsand desires, his pleasures and possessions, his mind, his art, hispower, his glory, were the house of life. His earthly passage was nolonger, as in the medieval concept, a weary exile on the way to thespiritualdestiny of his soul1.2

Art and music, philosophy and government, science and warfareunderwent a gradual but profound transformation. Man, grown weary ofthe Tantalan quest for salvation, had decided to supplement it with thepursuit of knowledge, discovery, and wealth-all expressions of a gradui-ally emerging individualism.It is generally accepted that scripts faithfully preserved by the Chris-tian monasteries, supplemented by knowledge retrieved from the exotichinterlands of Palestine, Egypt, and Persia, and in many cases expandedupon by the considerable scientific accomplishments of the MuslimMoors, served to kindle the intellectual conflagrations of the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries, and led eventually to the voyages of discovery,the development of the printing press, the Protestant secession, theexplosion of the humanist arts and, in the Enlightenment, to the "AgeofReason." Revealed knowledge lay therefore at the heart of all contempo-rary scientific, philosophical, and artistic endeavour, the rediscovery ofthe wisdom of Athens and Rome serving as the fundament upon wvhichMachiavelli, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Galileo, and Copernicus stood toachieve the pinnacle of their respective arts and sciences.The explosion of the humanist ideal was effected by myriad devel-opments, discoveries, and re-discoveries during the fifteenth century:

the invention of printingimmensely extended the access to knowl-edge and ideas; advances in science enlarged understanding of theuniverseand in appliedscience suppliednew techniques;newmeth-ods of capitalist financing stimulated production; new techniques ofnavigation and shipbuilding enlarged trade and the geographicalhorizon; newly centralized power absorbed from the decliningmedieval communes was at the disposal of the monarchies and thegrowing nationalism of the past century gave it impetus; discovery ofthe New World and circumnavigation of the globe opened unlimitedvisions.3

Increasing populations added to the tax base, which made more fundingavailable for voyages of discovery, which in turn opened up new vistas2. BarbaraW. Tuchman, The March of Folly from Troy to Vietnam (New York:BallantineBooks, 1984), 52.3. Ibid., 57-58.

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Ancestral Voicesfor trade and exploitation, which in turn poured more capital into thenational economies. This newfound wealth and scientific wherewithalled to the increasing availability of monies disbursable upon militarypursuits, which facilitated the vast increase in the size of armies neces-sitated by the tactical and technological pressures of the era. Henry V ledten thousand men to Agincourt in 1415, a "horde" which Turenne, twocenturies later, would exceed by an order of magnitude, and Napoleon,at his pinnacle, by two orders.

The "rebirth"paradigmAnalyses of the Dark and Middle Ages suffer from a regrettabledearth of reliable historical record, hence the problem with analyses ofthe intellectual impact (or lack thereof) of this period on the Renais-sance. Gutenberg's press multiplied by ten thousand times the numberof books available in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sothat what had previously been unobtainable at any price gradually camewithin the reach of the slowly expanding literate class. A glut of ragpaper4 and the ability to print books much more rapidly than even themost ardent monastic copyist, are alleged to have exhausted quickly the

supply of printable contemporary wisdom, and the scions of Gutenbergturned to the ancient scholars, soldiers, poets, and kings as a means ofgenerating income. The growing availability of ancient wisdom isassumed to have sparked an intellectual revolution, and the soldiers, sci-entists, and kings of Europe, we are led to assume, merely "picked up"where their ancient forebears had left off centuries before.This thesis is central to conventional interpretations of the history ofthe Renaissance. The contemporary Roman Church held as one of itscentral tenets that nothing could be created or destroyed save by thehand of God; and thus knowledge, if it came not from God, must there-fore have come from someone in the past ... to whom God had at thattime vouchsafed it. Citing "the Ancients" as a source of inspirationoffered many an easy escape from accusations of heresy, and thus we canassume that the Church would have been less uncomfortable with emerg-ing wisdom if an "Ancient" origin could be plausibly claimed. Galileo, inpoint of fact, brought condemnation (and house arrest) upon himself byrefuting the accepted, erroneous, Aristotelian model of the universe.The "rebirth paradigm" carries over into the study of military his-tory and conventional explanations for the military reforms of the fif-teenth through seventeenth centuries. George Dyer has argued that

4. Paper produced, science historian James Burke has suggested, from the dis-carded clothing of victims of the Black Death which struck Europe in the mid-fourteenth century.MILITARY HISTORY * 489


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"What the European states were really doing in the fifteenth and six-teenth centuries was reinventing the infantry armies of classical antiq-uity,"5while John Keegan notes thatIt is ... usually claimed that two of the most importantmilitaryreformersof the late sixteenth andearlyseventeenthcenturies,Mau-rice of Nassau and GustavusAdolphus,were consciouslyinfluencedin the makingof their armies by what they had learnt about theRomanLegionfrom Caesar'sGallic War.6Henry Guerlac goes even further in his support of the influence of theAncients; in his view, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Antiquity was still the great teacher in all that concerned thebroaderaspectsof military theory and the secrets of militarygenius.Vegetiusand Frontinus were deemed indispensable;and the mostpopularbook of the century,Henri de Rohan'sLeParfaitcapitaine,was an adaptationof Caesar'sGallic Wars.7

And yet we must question the validity of the "rebirth paradigm." Towhat degree did the resurrected philosophical works of Socrates, Plato,Aristotle, and Seneca; the military treatises of Xenophon, Julius Caesar,and Flavius Vegetius; the scientific efforts of Pythagoras, Archimedes,and Galen; the historical works of Thucydides, Homer, Virgil, and Pliny;or even the "Frogs"of Aristophanes underlie the later accomplishmentsof Giordano Bruno, Gustavus Adolphus, Galileo Galilei, Erasmus, Spin-oza, Martin Luther, Cervantes, Rabelais, and Thomas More? Did the mil-itary adaptations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mimic thescientific and cultural leaps through which Copernicus and Titian addedthe methods of their antecedents to the fruits of their own genius? Orwas the gradual resurgence of large, standing, professional infantryarmies attributable to some other outgrowth of the Renaissance andEnlightenment not directly related to restored historical knowledge?

Some authors disagree with the "rebirth paradigm." MichaelRoberts, in his short treatise on warfare between 1560 and 1660, arguesthat "this period . . . seems to ... have witnessed what may not improp-erly be called a military revolution."8 Keegan expands on this theme inthe opening discussion to his case studies in The Face of Battle:

5. GwynDyer,War London:BodleyHead,1986),55.6. John Keegan,The Face of Battle (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 62.7. HenryGuerlac,"Vauban: heImpactof ScienceonWar,"n PeterParet,ed.,Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J.:PrincetonUniversityPress,1986), 71-72.8. Michael Roberts, TheMilitary Revolution, 1560-1660 (Belfast: Queen's Uni-versity Press, 1956), 4.

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Ancestral VoicesAgreatdeal ofcontroversyhas flowedroundthe issue of exactly howinfluentialclassical writerswereon Renaissancemilitaryaffairs.Veg-etius, a late Romanauthor, s known to have been widely read. ButF. L. Taylor[in TheArtof Warfaren Italy,1494-1529] came to theconclusion,afterreviewingwhat authors the Condottierimight havestudied, that "the influence of classical history and literature wasmainly academic. We view the warfareof the Renaissancethroughthe academicmedium of contemporaryhistorians and teachers andare consequentlyapt to form an exaggeratedopinionof the effect oftheoreticalwritingson militaryoperations."9

A question therefore lies before us: Were the military theorists of theRenaissance and the Enlightenment moved to flights of genius by theirtimes, their tools, and their fellows-or by the example and intellectualbirthright of their ancient forebears?

The problemThe temporal context of the following examination, therefore, is sev-enteenth- and eighteenth-century France; the individuals, Sebastien lePrestre de Vauban (1633-1707) and Hermann Maurice, Comte de Saxe

(1696-1750); the domain, ars bellicus; and the question, whether con-ventional wisdom is correct in asserting that the military thought asexpressed through the works of these gentlemen is attributable primar-ily to their study of the ancients (in particular, Vegetius's De Rei Mili-tarii), or rather to the realities of the temporal context in which theylived, worked, fought, built, and wrote.I shall address the subject in two phases: first, a broad-brush exam-ination of the military mechanism of the Roman Empire through theeyes of the theoretician and historian Vegetius, followed by a brief sur-vey of the evolution of warfare from the MiddleAges through the Renais-sance to the European Enlightenment; second, a more in-depth look atthe principal themes of the military literary works in question, accom-panied by an analysis of the probable nonderivative sources of their con-cepts. I hope that this methodology will demonstrate that the militaryachievements of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France were onlysuperficially attributable to the works of the ancients; and that the con-tributions thereunto of Vauban and Saxe were, as Roberts suggests, "theproduct of military logic"10 rather than the echo of ancestral voicesemphasizing the military wisdom of a bygone age.

9. Keegan,Face of Battle, 61-62. Emphasis added.10. Roberts,Military Revolution, 19.MILITARY HISTORY * 491


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The Mirror of MemoryFabrizio: ... without the principles adopted from the ancients, men of

the greatest experience in military affairs say that the infantryis good for little or nothing ...Cosimo: Which method of arming would you recommend, the Germanor the AncientRomanone?Fabrizio:The Roman,withouta doubt.-Machiavelli, Artedella GuerrallFluellen:Ifyou would take the painsbut to examinethe warsof Pom-pey the Great,you shallfind,I warrantyou, that there is no tid-dle-taddlenorpibble-pabblen Pompey'scamp . . .-Shakespeare, Henry V12

Virgil recounts in vivid prose the founding of Rome by the defeatedexiles of Troy. Through the centuries of Mycenaean, Athenian, and Hel-lenistic Greece, the citizens of the Italian peninsula remained relativelyinward-looking. It was only a century after the death of Alexander thatthe denizens of Rome arose in might and began the struggle to carve outan empire. Between the destruction of Babylon in 689 B.C. and the fallof Rome itself in 476 A.D., the Romans fought more than a hundredmajor wars, campaigns, and battles-in excess of ten for every centuryof her existence. Until the defeat and destruction of Carthage in 146B.C., arguably each of Rome's wars was a war for national survival; fromthat date forward to the early Christian era, each was, with few excep-tions, a war of expansion; and from thence to its fall, each of Rome's warswas a battle against imperial entropy and the encroachment of chaosfrom beyond the frontiers of empire. It has been postulated by authorsas temporally disparate as Edward Gibbon and Paul Kennedy thatempires intrinsically lack stability and are capable only of expansion orcontraction; if this is true, then once having achieved the maximumextent of its empire, Rome may have been ineluctably destined for dis-solution.Two authors of vastly different backgrounds and eras recommendthemselves to this study. The first is Julius Caesar (c. 100-44 B.C.), thegeneral and statesman who, over a nine-year period from 58 to 50 B.C.,conquered the entirety of modern France, Belgium, and Switzerland,seized parts of Germany and Holland, and twice invaded Britain. Hisbest-known work, De Bello Gallico, describes this campaign and offersconsiderable insight into Caesar's military thought, concepts of leader-ship, and-if only peripherally-his considerable political acumen; Kee-

11. Niccol6 Machiavelli, The Art of War, trans. Ellis Farneworth (New York:DaCapoPress, 1965), 47.12. William Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Fifth, in W. J. Craig, ed.,Shakespeare: Complete Works(London: MagpieBooks, 1993), 488; Act IV, Scene I,69-72.THE JOURNALOF92 *


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Ancestral Voicesgan notes the study's wide availability throughout Europe during theRenaissance:

Although Caesar's Commentaries [De Bello Gallico and De BelloCivili] had only recently been rediscovered, they had achieved awide popularity n fifteenth-centuryItalyand were beingtranslatedinto other European languagesby the beginningof the sixteenth(French,1488;German, 1507; English,1530).13The second author, Flavius Vegetius Renatus, wrote De Rei Militariiin the failing years of the empire that Caesar had helped to build. A the-oretician and historian rather than a soldier, his work is of greater sig-nificance to this present study because it spells out his vision of the

Roman army at the height of its power half a millennium before his ownbirth, and is a description of the military machine of the Roman Empirerather than a campaign chronology. For this reason, we will concentrateon Vegetius the theorist rather than on Caesar the general in this presentwork.

Vegetius The Romansowed the conquestof the worldto no other causethan continualmilitary training,exact observanceof disciplinein theircampsand unweariedcultivationof the otherartsofwar.-Flavius VegetiusRenatus14In 212 A.D. Caracalla, with the declaration Civis Romanus sum,conferred Roman citizenship upon every free-born subject within theempire. Eight years later, the Goths invaded Asia Minor and occupied theBalkan peninsula; and in 285, only four decades after its millennialanniversary, the empire was sundered into its Eastern and Westernhalves.15 An empire that had subjugated the Egyptians and the Greeks

and occupied the biblical lands, the Iberian peninsula, and the northernreaches of the Gauls and the Celts, had only two hundred years of exis-tence left to it. Although two centuries is today considered a relativelylong period in the life of a state, the downfall of Rome had already beenforeshadowed in the degeneration of its once near-invincible armies, the

13. Keegan,Face of Battle, 62.14. Thomas R. Phillips, ed., in his preface to Vegetius, TheMilitary Institutionsof the Romans (De ReiMilitarii), trans. John Clark (Harrisburg,Pa.:MilitaryServicePublishingCo., 1944), 13, 112.15. Althoughit would be reunited in the early fourth century by Constantine, itwould fragment again in 340, this time permanently. Arguably,given the subsequentsack and fall of Rome, the rise of Islam, the intellectual heritage of Byzantium, and allof the myriad other results of this event, the division of Empirewas one of the mostsignificant developments in Western history.MILITARY HISTORY * 493


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DONALDA. NEILLslow but implacable advance of the eastern barbarian nations, and thefatal arrogance of imperialism. This was the Rome of Vegetius, who isbelieved to have lived and produced his prescriptive manual during thefinal quarter of the fourth century.Vegetius appears to have been a Roman of relatively significant rank,albeit in the civilian rather than military sphere. Although the details ofhis life are obscure, it is generally accepted that his practical militaryexperience, if indeed he had any at all, was at best limited; his worksconsist largely of the collected arguments of historians and other mili-tary theorists rather than his own observations. Writing apparently forthe eyes of the emperor Valentinian (371-392) in much the same fash-ion that Machiavelli produced The Prince for his prospective Medicipatron, Vegetius's work appears to have been a textbook example ofadvice which came too late to be of any use.The legions that Caesar employed to great effect in the conquest andgarrisoning of Gaul represented the apex of Roman republican militaryevolution: citizen infantry, recruited, trained, and equipped by Romancitizens, and led by long-service veterans. The vast expansion of theempire, however, led inevitably to an increase both in the amount of ter-ritory to be garrisoned and the variety of subject peoples that were avail-able to serve as auxiliaries, each possessing their own peculiar militaryattributes. Conventional wisdom and historical record alike suggest thatthe requirement for additional soldiery coincided both with the growingavailability of "barbarian"troops and the waxing desire of the Roman cit-izenry to enjoy the fruits of their struggles for empire. The end result ofthese trends was a gradual increase in the percentage of foreign troopswithin even the Roman national legions relative to the numbers of citi-zen infantry, a trend that was even more pronounced in the "allied"legions. Of even greater consequence was the increase in relative num-bers of light, unarmoured, stirrupless cavalry and the decline in infantryof all sorts. The stolid line of disciplined, trained infantrymen, whoseflights of javelins and follow-up attacks with the short sword had rarelyfailed to break the lines of less disciplined troops, was no more; andPhillips suggests that by the time Vegetius put pen to parchment, "thedecay of the Roman armies had progressed too far to be arrested by [a]plea for a return to the virtues of discipline and courage of the

ancients."16The absorption of barbarian troops, such as Gauls, Iberians, andCelts, and the supposed unwillingness of the Roman citizenry to defendwhat they had won, however, do not tell the whole story of the evolutionof the legions from infantry to cavalry. By the third and fourth centuries,

16. Phillips in Vegetius, Military Institutions, 2.494 * THE JOURNAL OF


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Ancestral Voiceshorsemen were slashing at the edges of the empire: the Goths along theshores of the Black Sea (257) and throughout Greece (268); the Marco-manni in Bohemia (270); the rise of the individual German kingdoms (c.300); the victory of the Persians in Armenia (350); and the Huns' inva-sion of Europe (360) and Russia (376). The catastrophic defeat of Valensby the Visigoths at Adrianople (378), the worst reverse suffered by aRoman army since Cannae, convinced the emperors that the solidity ofthe line of heavy infantry armed only with the pilum and the gladiuswas no longer sufficient to meet the surging cavalry attacks of the bar-barians.The solution chosen was the incorporation of greater numbers ofcavalry troops and longer-range missile weapons within the legions. Forboth of these, it was necessary to go beyond the Roman citizenry, whohad comparatively little experience with either the horse or the bow.This was accomplished-but only at the cost of the infantry that had beenthe backbone of the legions. Oman notes that by the early fifth century,

The day of infantryhad in fact gone by in southern Europe; theycontinuedto exist, not as the core and strengthof the army,but forvariousminorpurposes-to garrisontowns or operate in mountain-ous countries.Romanand barbarianalikethrew theirvigour nto theorganizationof their cavalry.17In short, Rome adopted the cavalry and missile-launching capabilities ofher enemies, but without the solid skill base thereof, employing merce-naries rather than cultivating the "cavalry nation" that the Huns, theGoths, the Persians, and later the Mongols were to display,18while at thesame time critically weakening the one arm of the legions in which, untilthen, Rome had been unsurpassed. The result was a series of defeats thatgradually ate away the territory and strength of the empire, until in thetime of Vegetius it is arguable whether, as Phillips suggested, the legionscould in fact have been salvaged.Vegetius's chief contentions, arguments, and maxims were, in hind-sight, representative more of common sense and historical argumentthan actual military experience. He had little of the latter, but was wellacquainted with the former two; and to his credit, he was apparently ableto draw on and synthesize the writings of his predecessors in order todistill an appreciable quantity of useful advice.

17. C. W. C. Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages, ed. John H. Beeler(Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1990), 10.18. Victor Davis Hanson describes, in The Western Wayof War:Infantry Battlein Classical Greece (New York:Knopf,1989), the fundamentally dichotomous natureof oriental (slashing) and occidental (shock) warfare during the classical Greekperiod.MILITARY HISTORY * 495


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Vegetius's manual, however, describes a legion that did not exist inhis time and which, perhaps, never existed save as the Platonic ideal ofhis imagination. It is reputed to have been influential in the campaignsof the Count of Anjou (1092-1143), Henry II of England (1133-1189),and Richard Coeur de Lion (1157-1199)-who, it has been suggested,carried the tome with him to the Holy Land. His works have been laudedby Montecuccoli (1609-1680) and the Austrian Field Marshal Prince deLigne (1735-1814). "A manuscript by Vegetius was listed in the will ofCount Everard de Frejus, about 837 A.D.,"19according to Phillips, whodescribes the publishing history of the work. He notes that approxi-mately 150 manuscript editions date from the tenth to the fifteenth cen-turies, and that the first printed edition appeared in Utrecht in 1473, tobe followed rapidly by printings in Cologne, Paris, and Rome. The firstprinted English edition was produced by Caxton in 1489,20 antedating bytwo centuries the accomplishments of Vauban and Saxe. Vegetius'sadvice, theories, and maxims were, therefore, readily available to themilitary thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; and, in themanner translated by the American military during the Second WorldWar, certainly seem applicable to modern warfare. However, it must beborne in mind that the tactical methodology of the legion-armed as itwas with javelin and short sword and offering shock through steadinessrather than firepower-differs vastly from that forced upon Europeanwarfare by the appearance of the firelock. This critical difference will bediscussed at greater length further along in this paper.

The cavalry interregnumThe gradual paring away of the Western Roman Empire by theFranks, Huns, and Visigoths that culminated in the fall of Rome in 476

has been credited largely to the superiority of the light barbarian cavalryover the inept auxiliary cavalry and debased light infantry of the laterRoman Empire. The cavalry lesson was not lost on the European suc-cessors to Rome, and over the next half-century, the development ofscale, chain, and later plate armor; the improved breeding of large, heavyhorses; the invention of the stirrup; and the emergence of the feudal sys-tem of governance (which concentrated limited capital in the hands ofscattered warlords and kings) led to the development of the armoredclass of elite warrior. Warfare devolved even further from the dissolutepractices of the later Romans and the disorganized raiding of the easternEuropean and Asiatic horsemen into a contest involving two distinct

19. Phillips in Vegetius,Military Institutions, 1.20. Ibid., 1.THE JOURNAL OF

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Ancestral Voices(and grossly mismatched) groups: the poorly armed, equipped, andtrained serf-based infantry, and the exquisitely equipped, well-trained,and aloof noble cavalry. As the peasant infantry of the time was, withouta twenty-to-one advantage, generally incapable of harming the heavilyarmored cavalryman; and the cavalryman-for reasons of prestige, hon-our, and perhaps most importantly, prospects of ransom-unwilling toengage the infantry, battles tended to consist of a prolonged fightbetween the ill-equipped serfs, either preceded or followed by a selectivemelee between the mounted heavy cavalrymen.This state of affairs persisted from the time of Charlemagne well intothe terminal decades of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1457), when themounted horseman was gradually unseated by a combination of factors.The first of these was his relative vulnerability while on foot; a man wear-ing some seventy pounds of armor, equipped with heavy muscle-poweredweapons and possessed of extremely restricted vision and breathingarrangements could, if isolated from his fellows, be easily overwhelmedand dispatched by an unencumbered peasant armed with a dagger-thefate of the bulk of the dismounted French knights at Agincourt (1415).Although proof against the lighter missile weapons encountered duringthe various crusades (light javelins and even light composite bows), theknight had become vulnerable to close-range fire from the Welsh long-bow and the crossbow-the latter a weapon which, although expensive,required little training to operate and which could easily transfix anarmored man at a range in excess of one hundred meters. He was furthervulnerable to the emerging power of gunpowder arms which, althoughfinicky and expensive like the crossbow, were also easy (if unsafe) tooperate, and possessed the added quality of a noisy and violent dis-charge.But the most significant threat to the armored knight was the rein-troduction of disciplined, formed infantry armed with a variety of pole-mounted weapons such as the bill, fauchard, guisarme, bec-de-corbin,lochaber axe, and the dreadfully effective Swiss pike and halberd-all ofwhich were designed to keep the knight at a distance and dismount himfrom his horse, the source of his mobility and striking power; and, whileprone and helpless, to penetrate his armor with relative ease. The sameweapons (and to a lesser extent, the two-handed sword and battle-axe)served, through leverage and the reduction in cross-section of the cut-ting or penetrating edge of the weapon, to puncture even the heaviestand most expensive plated armour of the era. Once the vulnerability ofthe armored man to "stand-off" infantry weapons such as the pike andthe halberd had been demonstrated repeatedly in battle, armor begangradually to disappear from the field, although it did retain a hallowedplace in the tilting contests of European monarchs well into the six-

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DONALDA. NEILLearly twentieth century).Deprived of its invulnerability and shock value, cavalry was onceagain relegated to the support role it had played in the Greek and earlyRoman armies: messenger, reconnaissance element, and pursuit force.Through the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries, the hal-berd complemented the pike and, for a brief time, the phalanx re-emerged as a dominant formation for infantry. As Roberts notes, "Thepike was 'queen of the battlefield'; the millennial ascendancy of cavalrywas broken."21 The demise of the mounted, armored horseman-the"flower of chivalry"-was due less to the quirky, expensive, and unreli-able hand-gun than to the offensive value of the "can-opener" halberd,and the defensive value of the pike.22

Infantry renascentInterestingly, Oman in Art of Warin the Middle Ages draws a pointedcomparison between the soldiery of Imperial Rome and RenaissanceSwitzerland. After contending that there are but two means of van-

quishing any particular foe-either through shock corps-a-corps or mis-sile fire-and offering the Swiss pikeman and the English and Welsh longbowman as the respective medieval epitomes of these two methods,23Oman suggests that, in their e'lan, ferocity in the defence of their home-lands, cruelty in the conquest of foreigners, sheer bloodthirstiness, and"moral guilt," the Swiss closely mimicked the action and capabilities ofthe Roman legions. However, Oman's comparison lays little emphasisupon the rigorous training and fierce discipline of the legions, suggestinginstead that the "free herdsman of the Alps" was something of a naturalsoldier who, the pike or halberd once thrust into his willing hands, wascapable of falling on the foe not only with gusto, but with precision andprofessional deliberation. He further credits their tactical mobility andspeed of movement on the march to their rejection of encumberingarmor24-the same decision, Vegetius argues, that ultimately cost thelegions their superiority as heavy infantry. Finally, the pike phalanx, aspreviously noted, itself fell victim to the concentration of manpower thatgave it both its relative invulnerability to cavalry and its massed abilityto inflict "shock."

21. Roberts,Military Revolution, 6.22. RichardA. Preston and Sydney F.Wise,Men in Arms (New York:Holt, Rine-hart and Winston, 1979), 92-95.23. Oman,Art of War,73-74.24. Ibid., 80. It should be noted, however, that the Swiss pikemen did retain thehelmet and cuirass.THE JOURNAL OF98 *


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Ancestral VoicesThe development and employment first of siege and then of field-transportable artillery (the former by Charles VIII, the latter by Gus-

tavus and Maurice) and the widening distribution of the arquebus soonreversed the resurrection of the pike phalanx, there being no moreappropriate target for the wildly inaccurate early field artillery and large-bore hand-guns than an enormous block of tightly-packed soldiery.25Infantry began to adapt to the increasing prevalence of gunpowder onthe field of battle. For the first time, infantry bodies, armed with a com-bination of the arquebus for firepower and the pike for defence, wereable to conduct offensive operations against other, similarly armed bod-ies-an innovation briefly epitomized by the Spanish tercio. What thenbegan to determine the difference between victory and defeat was theskill and speed of the arquebusier in reloading and discharging hisweapon, and the steadiness of the soldiers in the face both of fire and thedisciplined, menacing approach of a forest of eighteen-foot pikes.Roberts's inference that the pike-and-arquebus combination imme-diately obviated cavalry is somewhat exaggerated; in fact, more than twohundred years were required to effectively relegate cavalry to a sec-ondary role on the battlefield. The introduction of first the arquebus andthen the matchlock musket into the pike formations was a slow andgradual one, and did in fact coincide with the slow and gradual disap-pearance of the heavily armored knight; however, like most militaryinstitutions, the knight's actual disappearance only occurred long afterhe had been rendered militarily irrelevant by the polearm. Jones arguesthat the waning need for a stand-off weapon to compete with the knight'slance led to a gradual decrease in the length of the pike, and that thegrowing proportion of musketeers to pikemen led equally to the growingrecognition of the offensive capability of such formations. However, theneed to coordinate the fire of the arquebusiers led to linear rather thanphalanx-like formations, and the linear pike-and-arquebus formationssoon proved to be relatively immobile and difficult to manoeuvre on thebattlefield and tended-unlike the traditional four-sided Swiss pikesquares-to offer vulnerable flanks to slashing attacks by emergingsword-and-pistol cavalry. Unable with a pike-musket phalanx to effec-tively exploit a penetration or pursue a broken enemy,

the Europeanshad at last reached the identical tactical situation asthe Alexandrianand Romanarmiieshad.... The linearsystem andthe battalion's lack of an all-round defence capability made theinfantry particularly vulnerable to cavalry attacks on its flanks. And,

25. Martin van Creveld, Technology and Warfrom 2000 B.C. to the Present(New York:Free Press, 1991), 91. Van Creveld states that "Itwas with artillery thatthe French finally blasted the Swiss phalanx from the battlefield at Marignanoin1515."MILITARY HISTORY * 499


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DONALD. NEILLunlike Roman heavy infantry, the musketeers could not protectthemselves against shock action by sabre-armedcavalry. By com-parisonwith the Romans,they lacked the level of articulationthathad often enabledRomanheavy infantryto manoeuvreso as to pre-sent a frontto heavy cavalry.26

Jones further argues that the conscious and somewhat slavish adoptionof Roman tactical methodology by Gustavus Adolphus and Maurice ofNassau in the early seventeenth century contributed heavily to this lackof adaptability, and attributes the prolonged importance of cavalry to the"intrinsic weapon-system advantage" of pistol and sabre over pike andmusket, a less-than-convincing argument given the difficulty of reloadinga pistol on horseback, and the questionable shock effect of sabre- overlance-armed cavalry. He then argues, more convincingly, that whatturned the tide in favour of the infantry was the invention of the bayo-net, which enabled each musket-armed soldier to, in effect, serve as hisown pikeman, thus simultaneously increasing both the firepower and thedefensive capability of the battalion.Increasing the cumulative firepower of an infantry body of the eracould be accomplished in three ways: by increasing the proportion ofmuskets to pikes; by increasing the rate of fire; and by increasing theshock effect of musketry. The first was accomplished by the eliminationof the pike and its replacement first by the plug, and later by the socket,bayonet, an invention attributed to Vauban; the second, by incessanttraining and harsh discipline; and the third, by the practice of firing incontrolled volleys. Of these innovations, the second-training and disci-pline-rapidly took on paramount importance as it became apparentthat victory in a contest between close-ordered troops exchanging volleyfire would go to the side which maintained its discipline and regularityof fire the longest:

Battle losses werebound to be severe when soldiers advancedshoul-der to shoulder,haltingat the word of command to tradevolleys atdistances suited to duelling pistols. Only an iron discipline couldnerve men to keepon reloadingandfiringwhilethey stoodfirmamidthe heaped-up bodies of writhing or motionless comrades. Onlyyears of drill could school them to close up their tatteredranks andmarch forwardwith the bayonet at that slow and solemn pace ofeightysteps a minute.27Creveld in Technology and War agrees, and suggests that

26. Archer Jones, The Art of Warin the WesternWorld(New York:Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1987), 249.27. LynnMontross,WarThrough the Ages, 3d ed. (New York:Harperand Broth-ers, 1960), 336.500 * THE JOURNAL OF


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Ancestral Voicesconditionspertaining o bothsafetyandeffectivenessdemandedthat[gunpowder]weapons be used in a precisely coordinated fashion.This required great concentration and a wall-like steadfastnessunderfire,qualitiesthat tookyearsof traininganda ferocious disci-pline to inculcate.28

This tactic of massing fires-imposed by the inherent inaccuracies, com-plexities of loading, and slow rate of fire of the musket, to say nothing ofsafety considerations-put a premium on high states of training andruthless discipline. Fortuitously, a model for such training and disciplinewas readily available in the works of Vegetius and other historians ofImperial Rome.The question of the "rebirth" of infantry in the Renaissance there-fore leads us to wonder whether the need for drill, training, and strictdiscipline imposed by the musket would have led to the types of forma-tions and operations that Vegetius recommended even had he not writ-ten his book. Roberts argues that in attempting to find a solution to theproblem and promise of the musket,Maurice[of Nassau]and his cousins, inspiredby a studyof Vegetius,Aelian, and Leo VI ... attemptedto return to Roman models inregardto size of units, orderof battle,discipline,and drill. ... [andnoted that] the sergeant-major f Maurice'sarmy [had to] be capa-ble of executing a great number of intricate parade-ground volu-tions, based on Romanmodels.29

It is readily apparent that Maurice and his contemporaries, as well asthose both antedating (Machiavelli) and following (Saxe) their militaryheyday, drew some degree of inspiration from Roman writings. The nextsection will, in examining the contributions of Saxe and Vauban to themilitary art, attempt to determine whether ancient writings merely com-plemented, or actually furnished, the military thought of the FrenchEnlightenment.

Giving FireThe militaryrevolutionof earlymodernEuropepossessed a numberof separate facets. First, the improvementsin artillery in the fif-teenth century,both qualitativeand quantitative,eventually trans-formedfortressdesign.Second,the increasingreliance on firepowerin battle- whether with archers,fieldartillery,or musketeers-lednot only to the eclipse of cavalryby infantry n most armies,but to

28. Creveld, Technologyand War,94.29. Roberts,Military Revolution, 7, 10.MILITARY HISTORY * 501


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DONALD A. NEILLnew tactical arrangements that maximized the opportunities of giv-ing fire.31

The "devilish cannon" And the nimble gunner with linstock now the devilishcannontouches,And downgoes all beforehim!-Shakespeare, HenryV31The foregoing citation from Parker's Military Revolution demon-strates his agreement with the proposition that tactical innovations flowfrom technological developments rather than the reverse. While the gen-eral thrust of this essay thus far accords with this sentiment, it seemslikely on closer examination that the flux and flow of military thinkingvis-a-vis technical innovation is less a one-way street than a Marxian the-sis-antithesis-synthesis interaction in which competing doctrines andtechnologies, rather than nullifying each other, establish a modusvivendi-for lack of a better term-and result in a wavelike transforma-tion of the battlefield, displaying "troughs" and "crests" as tactics andtechnologies alternately gain and relinquish momentary advantage. Thebest illustration of this principle is the ages-old dialectic between war-head and armor. This competition led through the early and high MiddleAges to a gradual increase in both the thickness of personal armor pro-tection and the amount of body surface protected, and resulted, by thelate fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in genuinely impressivetechnical solutions to the nettlesome problem of armor-plating a flexiblehuman body. Despite the fact that the longbow, the cranequin- or wind-lass-operated crossbow, and eventually the hand-gun were capable ofpenetrating this armor protection, each of these weapon systems pos-sessed inadequacies that ensured that armor would not be instantlyswept from the battlefield, but would in fact endure centuries after theintroduction of weapons capable of defeating it. This would seem to indi-cate that, the continual evolution of military technologies notwithstand-ing, the advantage they confer to the side which possesses them hashistorically been less than the difference between the relative capabili-ties of two armies (including the relative talents of two commanders). AsCreveld suggests, Frederick II (like countless other successful generals)almost certainly owed his successes more to his tactical innovationsthan to any minute differences between the personal firearms borne byhis soldiers and those borne by the enemy.32

30. Geoffrey Parker,TheMilitary Revolution: Military Innovation and the Riseof the West,1500-1800 (New York:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988), 24. Emphasisadded.31. Shakespeare, Henry V,480; Act III, Chorus.32. Creveld, Technologyand War,97.502 * THE JOURNAL OF


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Ancestral VoicesThe introduction of firearms into general use was neither sudden nordid it have an immediately tumultuous effect upon the battlefield.

Although both the French and English possessed cannon at Agincourt,contemporary accounts thereof make no mention of their use in action.Machiavelli even argues against them in his Discourses, stating that theywere inconsequential and ineffective on the battlefield. And yet thatsame year, as Gat notes, and six years prior to the appearance of Artedella Guerra,the guns of FrancisI broke the dreadfulSwissinfantryon the battle-field of Marignano(1515). And only a year after Machiavellidis-missed the significance of the new arquebuses, sarcasticallyremarking hat they were usefulmainlyforterrorizingpeasants,theSpanish arquebusiers nflictedon the Swissinfantry ts secondgreatdefeat at the Battle of Bicocca(1522).33

The gradual rise in proportion of muskets over polearms during thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries that, in combination with light fieldguns, had eliminated the Swiss pike phalanx from the battlefield boresimultaneous witness to the rapid expansion of gunpowder artillery. Thevast expense of the casting and boring processes necessary to the pro-duction of great guns virtually ensured that the creation of an artilleryarm would be a military option open only to the monarch of a large andwealthy state. This fact in turn ensured that the larger monarchies wouldhave at their disposal the means of reducing the fortified places of thesmaller, and led eventually (albeit indirectly) to the consolidation of theEuropean absolute monarchies. It had another, related effect as well; theease with which the high, narrow curtain walls of medieval castles werebattered apart by flat-trajectory cannon prompted, over the periodbeginning with Henry V's 1415 siege of Harfleur and carrying through toVauban's day, the gradual transformation of the fortified place, whetherfield redoubt, military garrison, or walled city.The invulnerable fortress So twice five miles of fertilegroundWithwalls and towersweregirdledround.-Coleridge, KublaKhan

Fortressesare the buttressesof the crown.-MontecuccoliWith the introduction of heavy cannon, a number of requisite archi-

tectural adaptations rapidly became apparent. First, the fortress had tobe capable of mounting heavy guns. This necessitated a broadening of33. Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment toClausewitz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 5.



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DONALDA. NEILLthe tops of walls and towers to hold carriages and permit recoil and theloading of the guns, as well as a thickening of support members to with-stand the weight of cannon and absorb the shock of recoil. This led to abroadening and general flattening of towers, as well as the vast thicken-ing of their walls, pilasters, and other supporting structures. Second, thefortress had to be strengthened against gunfire. During the wars of the fif-teenth and sixteenth centuries, it was observed that, where only a fewdozen or hundred strikes by the immense stone and iron balls of siegeguns were necessary to reduce a stone wall to rubble, thickly banked,wood-faced earthen walls were often capable of withstanding thousandsof impacts while retaining their defensive properties. This suggested theadoption of earthen ramparts rather than stone machilocation, whichhad a tendency to shatter and produce unpleasant shrapnel-like effects.The third element was the relatively flat trajectory of cannon andmusket shot over ranges of less than two to three hundred meters.Where a cannon ball shot from a high tower would have a greater rangethan one shot from ground level, the latter would sweep the earth beforeit and therefore would be more likely to cause casualties among assault-ing infantry, particularly after the adoption of grape and canister shotand the introduction, also by Vauban, of grazing and ricochet fire. Thisalso resulted in a relative lowering of the walls of fortresses, an innova-tion which further reduced the profile of the structure and made it evenless vulnerable to enemy siege guns; and engendered the construction ofa long, gently sloping plain or glacis around the fortress, offering nocover to an advancing force. Finally, in order to take advantage ofenfilade fire, parallel rather than perpendicular to the ranks of anassaulting formation, it was necessary to ensure that the front of eachgun position could be covered by mutually supporting fire from othergun and musket embrasures.The gradual combination of these innovations-broader, flatter,heavier works; the substitution of packed earth and wood for stone; thereduction in height of gun towers; and the redesign of fortresses to allowflank shots and converging fire-over a period spanning two centuriesgradually increased the defensibility of fortresses to the point wheretheir capture either by storm or siege became a particularly thornyproposition. The result, as Guerlac points out, was that by "the late sev-enteenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, warfare oftenappears to us as nothing but an interminable succession of sieges."34These sieges required the employment of thousands of infantrymenfor circumvallation and contravallation of the besieged stronghold, aswell as for the occasional frontal charge to test the mettle of its defend-ers. The new forms of fortress construction often baffled medieval

34. Guerlac in Paret,Makers of Modern Strategy, 73.504 * THE JOURNAL OF


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Ancestral Voicesmining techniques, as the process of tunnelling under walls, shoring withwooden beams, and then firing the supports was less than effectiveagainst thick, broad-based ramparts of packed earth; and the ground-sweeping effect of round-shot, grape, and canister at ranges of up to fivehundred yards rendered the glacis an extremely unhealthy place for anassaulting force. Within one hundred yards of the fortress, the volley fireof musketeers would be added to that of the gunners, and still closer inthe addition of impeding or canalizing obstacles served to break up themomentum of an attack and render the attackers even more vulnerableto the fire of the defenders.The tactical problem for the attacker, then, became one which thetrench fighters of the First World War would later come to ponder andwhich, in fact, would be a major spur to the development of the tank-how to cross the "last three hundred yards" in the face of massed gun-fire. The cost in human life of this type of operation was such that ittended to rapidly deplete both the manpower and the morale of theassaulting army, a solid footnote to Sun Tzu's admonition that "the worstpolicy of all is to besiege walled cities."35The supremacy of the fortified place was symptomatic of the afore-mentioned eternal struggle between warhead and armor, but was not tolast. In the late seventeenth century, a Frenchman of humble origins-peasant, foot-soldier, lieutenant of infantry, and later Marshal ofFrance-would capture the imagination and the heart of Louis XIV,bothby providing a cost-effective solution to the problem of siege warfare,and, paradoxically, by continuing until his dying day to contribute to theintricacies of the problem itself.

Vauban Gower: The Duke of Gloucester, to whom the order of the siegeis given, is altogether directed by an Irishman ...Fluellen: ... he has no more directions in the true disciplinesof the wars, look you, of the Roman disciplines, than is apuppy dog ...Gower: Here 'a comes; and the Scots captain, Captain Jamy,with him.Fluellen: Captain Jamy is a marvellous falorous gentleman, thatis certain; and of great expedition and knowledge inth'aunchient wars ... by Cheshu, he will maintain hisargument as well as any military man in the world, in thedisciplines of the pristine wars of the Romans.-Shakespeare, Henry V36

35. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ed. James Clavell, trans. Lionel Giles (New York:Dell Publishing, 1983), Chapter III.37. Shakespeare, Henry V, 481; Act III, Scene II, 72-91.MILITARY HISTORY * 505


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Unlike either Vegetius or Saxe, both of whom penned explicit vol-umes on the conduct of war as they saw it, Sebastien le Prestre deVauban wrote little in the way of elaborate treatises, instead expressinghis military thought through two media: his extensive correspondencewith a variety of personalities, notably with his patron, Louis XIV, andthrough his impressive array of architectural achievements. His col-lected writings were in fact only published between 1842 and 1845, inthree volumes entitled Oisivetes de M. de Vauban. His technical accom-plishments were, however, most impressive; over the thirty-year periodof his professional activity, he personally designed a great number of newfortresses and oversaw the improvement, in line with his theories of for-tification, of literally thousands of others. In all this time, he producedonly a single treatise on siege craft, another on the defence of fortresses,and a short paper on mining operations. He conducted nearly fifty siegesthroughout this period, all of which were brilliantly successful, and fromwhich evolved his method of operation known as the "scientific siege"and characterized by his system of "triple parallels."Vauban's siege technique was slow, deliberate, utterly certain, andparsimonious of human life-the latter characteristic endearing him tohis strangely humanist patron and his soldiers alike. The method beganwith the circumvallation and contravallation of the fortress in order bothto cut off the defenders from outside aid and to protect his own forcesfrom counterattack.37 He then constructed a long trench, or "parallel"(so known because of its orientation relative to the exterior works of thefortress) just beyond the maximum effective range of its guns. He thensapped forward in a number of "zigzag" approach trenches, so orientedas to prevent the enemy from enfilading them. At a given distance, a sec-ond parallel would be constructed to permit the horizontal movement oftroops, guns, and supplies, while from the approaches, battery positions,complete with ramparts, would be constructed to enable his siege gunsto engage the fortress, sweep its ramparts, and attempt to disable itsguns. From the second parallel, additional approaches would be con-structed to a third parallel, along with additional battery positions tobring the siege artillery even closer to the besieged fortress to pound thedefending batteries further. From the third parallel, generally well withinenemy cannon and musket range, tunnels would be dug and the outerworks and ramparts prepared for demolition with explosive charges. At

37. It should be noted that the apparent similarities between Vauban'stech-niques of circumvallation and contravallation, and those employed by Caesar at, forinstance, Alesia, are only cosmetic. Caesar's egions built the standard rampartedwallwith wooden palisade and circumferential towers;Vauban'sdefensive works consistedof trenches, redoubts, and batteries. The two systems of fortification and siege werepredicated on unique tactical principles derived from entirely different weapon sys-tems.

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Ancestral Voicesthis point, the besieged force was generally offered the opportunity tosurrender; if this was refused, the mines would be detonated and theassaulting parties would charge across the demolished ramparts and intothe fortress, generally at a grave cost in human life despite the weeks ofpounding by the besieger's batteries.38As it was possible to calculate the rate of digging of which the workparties were capable; and from that the length of time it would generallytake to construct the parallels, approaches, batteries, and mines; andsince the maximum range of the enemy cannon could be measured,Vauban boasted that he could calculate to the hour when an enemyfortress would fall. The inexorable nature of his siege methodology led,interestingly, to the evolution of a surrender convention; once the thirdparallel had been constructed and the mines charged, the commander ofthe fortress would generally accept an offer of terms, and was usuallyaccorded the right of departure bearing arms, with drums beating andcolours flying, certain in the guarantee that the population he haddefended would be spared. This spectacle became so commonplace dur-ing the years of Vauban's ascendancy that picnic parties of French noblesoften turned out to witness the departure of the vanquished force. Thisconvention was less the result of nobility and altruism than commonsense; fortress commanders generally surrendered before the finalassault because victorious troops who had been forced to attack a well-defended fortress and suffer hideous losses in so doing were unlikelythereafter to be well disposed towards the defenders and the local popu-lace, and their commanders less likely to prohibit or prevent acts of rap-ine, pillage, murder, and arson. The surrender convention thereforeavoided undue unpleasantness for the attacker, the defender, and thedefended.Vauban is best known, however, for having turned his understandingof geometry, architecture, and gunnery to the science of fortification.Over his career he built small but impregnable redoubts, redesignedfortresses, rebuilt walled cities, fortified large cities, and constructeddefensible harbor sites. His methods of fortification centred upon theballistic characteristics of heavy cannon and the matchlock musket. Hisaim was to encircle the defended locality with an interlocking web of rel-atively flat cannon trajectories out to maximum effective range, andreinforce this at close range with interlocking musket trajectoriesdesigned to inflict further damage on a force that actually managed toapproach the walls. In order to accomplish this, he improved walls andramparts and invented numerous types of outworks (the ravelin, thedemi-lune and the "covered way" among them) designed to enable the

38. It was for this reason-their expected casualty rate-that the assaultingbat-talions generally received the wry nickname of "ForlornHopes."* 507ILITARY HISTORY


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DONALDA. NEILLdefenders of the fortress to achieve interlocking arcs of enfilade firewhile remaining behind the overlapping fire of mutually supporting posi-tions. His achievements in this regard were exceptional and receivedinternational acclaim; "Vaubanian" fortresses began to spring up else-where on the Continent, and even appeared as far away as North Amer-ica and India. His defensive methodology remained unchallenged untilthe development of internal ricochet fire, known otherwise as the "Ger-man method," in the early nineteenth century. Even Governor Fron-tenac of Quebec consulted Vauban on the plans for the fortification ofthat city.39His contributions to the arts of siege and fortification reversed them-selves once again in his later years. By the turn of the eighteenth cen-tury, he had become a strong advocate of the replacement of thematchlock musket by the flintlock (the wheel-lock never having gainedwide distribution due to expense of construction, complexity, and cost ofmaintenance) in order to increase the reliability of the primary infantryweapon system. He resolved the problem of the plug bayonet-whichgave the infantryman the unpalatable choice of being able to either fireor repel a charge, but not both-through the invention of the socket bay-onet, which allowed the soldier to do both simultaneously and, inciden-tally, completely obviated the pike. He attempted to perfect a method forrecruiting troops as a precursor to national conscription, a policy forwhich Saxe would later express considerable support; and he madeinroads towards developing a workable pay system, an important inno-vation in an era when the pay of soldiers was a chancy thing. This latterwas a surprising failing, given the extensive incidences of mutinies byunpaid troops during the Thirty and Eighty Years'Wars, and Augustus'savoidance of similar catastrophes within the legions through the imple-mentation of a reliable pay system.40One equally significant outcome of his siege methodology was the"professionalization" of the military engineers, in much the same fash-ion as Gustavus and Maurice had "professionalized" the artillery, trans-forming their role from an arcane art into a military science. Montrossnotes that Vauban was responsible for the organization of "the first engi-neering corps of uniformed soldiers whose operations were combined

39. In a letter written at Quebec, 20 September 1692, in Louise Dechane, ed.,La correspondance de Vauban relative au Canada (Ottawa:Ministere des affairesculturelles, 1968), 14.40. Michael Grant, The Army of the Caesars (New York:Charles Scribner's,1974), 55-59. Also noted by Grant in his The Twelve Caesars (New York:CharlesScribner's,1975), 60-61. This point was also underscored by John Englishin March-ing Through Chaos: The Descent of Armies (New York:Praeger,1997).508 * THE JOURNAL OF


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Ancestral Voiceswith those of other arms" in the conduct of the scientific siege.41 Hismethodology had an additional and historically significant strategicimpact; by concentrating on the taking of fortresses, most of which forreasons of transportation lay along important river routes, Vauban'smethod enabled the monarchy to avoid exhausting, time-consuming,and costly movement by road of large bodies of troops, by simply takingstrategic choke points with mechanical precision and on a predictabletime-line. This policy must have appealed greatly to Louis XIV, who byall accounts was possessed of a pragmatic as well as frugal turn of mind.Vauban's strategic outlook was similarly portrayed in his treatise onfortress defence, which stated that a defensive network should offer twofundamental characteristics: first, it should close to the enemy all pointsof entry into the kingdom, and second, it should facilitate attack intoenemy territory. Fortresses, he insisted, should never be designed solelyfor defence.

Guerlac, in his review of Vauban's military contributions, has sug-gested that the latter may have drawn certain of his principles fromBlaise de Pagan (1604-1665) and the main ideas from Lesfortificationsdu comte de Pagan (1645), which were grounded in the growing effec-tiveness of cannon in both the offence and the defence; and from Mai-gret, whose Treatise on Preserving the Security of States by Means ofFortresses suggests a number of important characteristics of strategicdefences, all of which can or should control key routes into the kingdom;dominate bridgeheads on great rivers; control important internal com-munications lines; provide a base for offensive action; serve as a refugefor the local populace; offer a fortified seaport for trade or reinforcement;stand as a frontier city; and supply the sovereign with a place to storetreasure.42 Of these, Vauban agreed explicitly with the first and fourthroles, and spent the majority of the latter half of his career seeking toredesign France's strategic defences along the lines of this philosophy.Although it is unlikely that he was familiar with Sun Tzu's aforemen-tioned admonition regarding the folly of attacking fortified places,Vauban's career is a curious admixture of innovations proving theancient Chinese strategist both right and wrong.Near the end of his career, Vauban slowly drew back from his plansto create an enormous and complex network of strategic fortressesacross the French countryside and began instead to advocate the cre-ation of camps retranches to fill the interstices between the existing for-tifications. This may have been the result of a number of influentialfactors. One was likely the enormous cost of building large and compli-cated citadels, which, despite his liking both for Vauban and his strate-

41. Montross, Warthrough the Ages, 339.42. Guerlac in Paret,Makers of Modemrntrategy, 87.MILITARY HISTORY * 509


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gic aspirations, must have begun to concern Louis; and another, the vastincrease in the proportion of infantry in the French army as a result ofVauban's infantry-intensive methodologies. An infantry regiment man-ning an "entrenched camp" could offer as significant a pause to anattacker as a regiment manning a vastly more expensive fortified citadel,and either location would be able to meet the strategic requirements ofdenying entry and supporting offensive action.Ironically, although there is no evidence in Vauban's work to supportsuch an allegation, the camps retranches philosophy came to resembleclosely the ancient Roman practice of the construction, by the legions,of simple fortified camps along their lines of march to serve as way-sta-tions, a defended locality for choke points, and a place of refuge in theevent of a reverse. This may be additional support for the notion that anidea that continues to make military sense will be perpetuated regardlessof who originates it. Finally, the "entrenched camp" idea may also reflectVauban's slow disillusionment with fortification and his growing belief inthe importance of the individual infantryman, to whose effectiveness hehad made so many contributions. Guerlac suggests this evolution mayhave been a sign that the "great engineer, toward the close of his career,was led gradually to lay more emphasis upon armies and less upon forti-fication";43that, having invented the key to unlock fortresses, Vaubangradually turned his attention back to improving the effectiveness of theindividual soldier. His latter-day strategic evolution towards advocacy ofthe entrenched camp over the citadel may have been rooted in his ori-gins as a common musketeer. It is in any case reminiscent of a Japaneseadage dating from the early Tokugawa Shogunate, to the effect that "thesoldier is the castle."

SaxeI am not particularlywise, but the great reputationsofVaubanand Coehorndo not overwhelmme. They havefortified places at enormous expense and have not madethem any stronger. -Maurice De Saxe44

In the late sixteenth century, the ratio of infantry to cavalry in theFrench Army was approximately two to one. A century later, immedi-ately following the heyday of Vauban and just preceding that of Saxe, theinfantry-cavalry ratio had increased to five to one. This evolution was areflection of many variables peculiar to the times, not the least of whichwere the aforementioned decline in the dominance of the battlefield by43. Ibid., 90.44. MarshalHermann Maurice de Saxe, Reveries on the Art of War,trans. anded. Thomas R. Phillips (Harrisburg,Pa.: TelegraphPress, 1944), 89.



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Ancestral Voicesthe horseman; the unsuitability of firearms to the cavalier (it being diffi-cult, if not impossible, to reload a wheel-lock pistol on the back of a trot-ting destrier); and the infantry-intensive nature of the scientific siege,which had for most of Vauban's career been the dominant form of com-bat, as well as the one most certain of outcome and least expensive inpersonnel. Mastery of the infantry, long a subordinate arm, had becomeof paramount importance to the metier of the general-although ranknomenclature had, in England at least, recently been cemented to reflectotherwise.45 At the turn of the seventeenth century, Turenne had beenthe undisputed master of the arms of France. His successor in the titleof Grand Marshal would prove his superior as well.Maurice de Saxe was arguably one of the most successful generals ofthe era of musketry; he was certainly one of the most ambitious andflamboyant. He reached his peak of military glory between 1745 and1748, the latter half of the War of the Austrian Succession, during whichperiod he captured Ghent, Brussels, and Maastricht and won the battlesof Lauffeld, Rocroi, and Fontenoy, the latter reportedly through a feat ofpersonal physical courage that won even the grudging admiration of hisenemies-all of these victories accomplished, as Montross puts it, "withan indolent ease."46Where Vauban concentrated his intellectual effortson rendering cities impregnable and then proving that they were not,Saxe disdained heavy, immobile fortifications, preferring the rapid move-ment of infantry and cavalry in the offence, and depending for thestrengthening of his defences on the rapid construction of mutually sup-porting field fortifications and hasty obstacles to reinforce his infantryformations.An assiduous student of the writings of both the Romans and hismore immediate predecessors (he cites Montecuccoli extensively in hisReveries sur l'Art de la Guerre), Saxe was of the opinion that harshtraining and iron discipline were of greater value than firepower or num-bers and would remain for the foreseeable future the decisive factor inbattle. When he died in 1750 at fifty-four years of age, two equally mem-orable epitaphs were uttered by the nobility of France: Madame de Pom-padour, mistress of King Louis XV, eulogized his lack of character withthe phrase "The only pleasure he takes in the society of women can besummed up in the word 'debauchery.' It is only on the battlefield that heis great." Louis, his patron, was more complimentary; upon learning ofthe loss of Saxe, he is reported to have lamented "I have no generals,now; only captains."47

45. The command structure of the Englishmilitary had since the 1660s includeda Captain-Generalof the Army, a Lieutenant-Generalof the Cavalry,and a Sergeant-MajorGeneral of the Infantry.46. Montross,Warthrough the Ages, 380.47. Saxe, Reveries, 3-4 and 10 respectively.MILITARY HISTORY * 511


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While Saxe relied heavily on the writings of Vegetius, there is animportant difference between the two men; where Vegetius was a theo-retician and historian with little or no military experience, writing aboutevents and soldiers that antedated him by half a millennium, Saxe wasan experienced combat veteran who, by the time he penned his Rever-ies, had been a soldier for all of the twenty-three years since he had firstfought under Prince Eugene at Malplaquet in 1709. His work and Veg-etius's diverge in two significant areas: Saxe's includes gunpowder ratherthan muscle as the primary engine of destruction in war, and Saxe-unlike Vegetius-includes important insights and anecdotes which couldonly have been gained through extensive experience in long militarycampaigns.48A reader familiar with Vegetius who peruses Saxe's Reveries will beimmediately struck by the similarities in structure, phrasing and tacticalmethodology between the two books. This is not surprising, as Saxe con-tinually credits the Romans and their assiduous historians for the sourcematerial underlying his tactical innovations. He even goes so far as tosuggest a redesign of the French Army along the lines of the legion, andemploys such terms as "cohorts" to describe his short battalions. WhereVegetius detailed an inventory of fifty-five ballistae and ten onagri assupport weapons for the legion, Saxe refers to the use of a siege train ofheavy cannon (presumably twenty-four-pounders), drawn by oxenrather than horses (as Vegetius's onagri are drawn by oxen rather thanhorses), and proposes the invention of what he terms an amusette, aheavy breech-loading musket mounted on a swivel and drawn byhorses-"an accompanying gun for the infantry," in effect a gunpowderanalogue for the ballista.49 In the same chapter, he proposes that thetroops should be accompanied by wagons loaded with tools and materi-als for the quick construction of field fortifications, precisely as Vegetiussuggests the legion would have done.Saxe further advocated the reintroduction of the half-pike (thirteenfeet in length, as opposed to the eighteen-foot Swiss pike) to the soldier'sbasic load, which would be advanced by the third and fourth ranks inorder to allow the first and second to load and fire in relative safety. Headvocates the introduction of an effective breech-loading musket (more

48. Of particular note is the paragraphhe devotes to inspecting the baggageofhis troops for accumulated bric-a-brac:"It is necessary from time to time to inspectthe baggageand force them to throw away useless items. I have frequently done it.One can hardly imagine all the trash they carry with them year after year. The poorhorse has to carry everything. It is no exaggeration to say that I have filled twentywagons with rubbish which I have found in the review of a single regiment." (Saxe,Reveries, 62-63). Such an observation could only have been made by an experiencedcampaigner.49. Saxe, Reveries, 11, 38.512 * THE JOURNAL OF


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Ancestralthan a century before one was to become available), and the division ofcavalry between the true light cavalry reconnaissance and pursuittroops, and heavier skirmishing troops, whom he terms "dragoons."As slavishly as he follows the work of Vegetius (and at times itappears he was writing with a quill in one hand and a copy of De Rei Mil-itarii in the other), Saxe departs radically therefrom where his own tac-tical experience so dictates. He admits that the principal differencebetween his theoretical army and that of his Roman antecedents is gun-powder, but hastens to argue that the musket is less significant on thebattlefield than might be expected, asserting that vastly more casualtiesare caused by the firing, bayonetting, and sword-strikes which follow thesundering of the enemy's ranks than by the opening musket volleys.50 Hestates instead that drill and discipline are more fundamental than fire-power: the former to enable the infantry to fire as rapidly and accuratelyas possible (interestingly, he repudiated volley fire, insisting rather thateach marksman should be free to fire at will); and the latter, to enableboth the infantry and the cavalry to carry out a bayonet or sabre chargein good order and without losing cohesion.He even calls the ancients to witness in this argument: "The prodi-gious success which the Romans always gained with small armies againstmultitudes of barbarians can be attributed to nothing but the excellentcomposition of their troops,"51but hastens to add that this was due notto their ethnic homogeneity, of which there was none, but to the excel-lence of their training and the rigidity of their discipline. He furtherinvokes Roman wisdom in dressing and feeding the soldier, recruitingand paying him, providing him with music while marching or at labour,conditioning him through constant physical exercise, organizing himinto small, flexible groups rather than large, unwieldy phalanges, andencouraging him with personal leadership and example. Saxe consideredhimself the intellectual successor to the Roman historians, and, in thechapter entitled "Formation of the Legion," goes to extreme lengths tocarry his theorizing into adapting the cohort, maniple, and legion for-mations to firearms and the half-pike. He even divides his infantry intothe younger, more lightly-armed men, whose role is to act as skirmish-ers (although he does not go so far as to call them velites), and older, vet-eran soldiers, whom he equips with armor, musket, pike, and shield, in

50. "And I have never seen, and neither has anyone else, I believe, a single dis-charge [volley] do enough violence to keep the [charging]troops from continuing for-ward and avengingthemselves with bayonet and shot at close quarters. It is then thatmen are killed, and it is the victorious who do the killing." Saxe, Reveries, 33. Onlya lead-from-the-frontgeneral could make such an assertion. Interestingly, Saxe, withthis statement, proves himself one of the intellectual forebears of the Baron deJomini, ardent proponent of elan.51. Saxe, Reveries, 19-20.MILITARY HISTORY

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DONALDA. NEILLclose resemblance to the veteran triarii of Vegetius. Finally, he suggeststhat each soldier receive a military identification mark on his right hand,inscribed with Indian ink. Vegetius, of course, also prescribed the "mili-tary mark"-although he would have applied it with a branding iron, anddoes not specify which of the recruit's hands was to be marked.52But what is significant in Saxe's blatant imitation of Vegetius's writ-ings is that while Saxe advocated copying the latter's formations andideas in exquisite detail, he pointedly ignored Vegetius's tactics. There isno mention by Saxe of anything even remotely resembling Vegetius's"'seven formations" for attack and defence, for making use of openground or obstacles, and for maximizing the power of cavalry andinfantry. Instead, Saxe offers a number of maxims regarding the use ofterrain, interlocking and overlapping arcs of fire for musketry, hisamusette, and cannon, and the proper design and spacing of redoubts toreinforce infantry positions with fire while leaving open gaps for opera-tions by cavalry. In short, Saxe has adopted from Vegetius only those ele-ments of Roman military theory which either ease the administrativepressure of supporting a large army in the field, or facilitate the handlingof large bodies of men and animals-principles and concepts which ante-date the Romans by millennia, and for which scattered records todayexist, describing (if rather sketchily) the military campaigns of Sargonthe Great, the battles of the Egyptians against the Hyksos, the chariot-fight at Megiddo, and the biblical campaigns recounted by General Yadin.The same principles are in use today, perhaps indicating a timelessnessbased less on the alleged brilliance of the military thinkers of ImperialRome than on physical necessity imposed by the capabilities and limita-tions of the human form, the strengths of materials, the diurnal charac-ter of homo sapiens, patterns of weather, topography, and agriculture,and a host of other variables.This argument, governing the "chicken-and-egg" question ofwhether tactics determine capabilities or vice-versa, is of sufficient ven-erability that it is unlikely to be resolved here. However, given the con-ventional wisdom favoring the former viewpoint, it is appropriate toassemble arguments supporting the latter-to wit, that capabilitiesdetermine operational methodology. Keegan, for example, offers a pow-erful anecdote on the origins and purpose of specialized infantry drill:

ChristopherDuffy,who was lucky enough to spend some weeksteaching Yugoslavmilitia the elements of Napoleonicdrill for a filmenactment of Warand Peace, describedto me the thrill of compre-hension he experiencedin failingto manoeuvre his troopssuccess-fullyacrosscountry"in ine" and of the comparativeease withwhichhe managed t "incolumn,"thus provingto his own satisfactionthat52. Vegetius, Military Institutions, 17-18.



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Ancestral VoicesNapoleonpreferred he latterformation o the formernot because itmore effectively harnessed the revolutionary ervour of his troops(the traditional "glamorous"explanation) but because anythingmorecomplicated was simply impracticable.53

Napoleon's use of the column for movement across broken countryechoes the practice of the Roman legion as described by Vegetius. Themarch formation of the army (one or two legions plus auxiliaries), asdescribed in Book Three of De Rei Militarii, consists of a mixedinfantry/cavalry vanguard led by a reconnaissance element consisting oflight cavalry, skirmishers, and pioneers; followed by the main body ofthe infantry, the baggage train, and a mixed infantry-cavalry rearguard.The whole is surrounded by a cavalry-based flank guard, and Vegetiuseven notes that the most experienced soldiers should be placed in therearguard so as to be able to react promptly to any enemy attack.This is precisely the same combined arms march formation used inmodern mechanized armies. Vegetius antedates us by more than fifteenhundred years, and Saxe by more than two hundred; and yet the com-bined arms operations of infantry and cavalry operate in a similar fash-ion on the march, although Vegetius's men were equipped with javelins,short swords, ballistae, and light cavalry, Saxe's with muskets, sabres,and siege cannon, and our own with main battle tanks, infantry fightingvehicles, and long-range anti-armor missiles. If there is a common threadof ideas linking us to our ancestors, is it absurd to postulate that simi-larities between their operations and our own are due less to slavish pla-giarism of their writings than to the fact that what worked for them,regardless of changes in military technology, by-and-large also works forus, not because we have consciously imitated their methods, butbecause the method itself is founded upon something deeper and moredurable that is relatively resistant to changes in technology?Saxe is an excellent illustration of this notion, simply because hiswritings differ so little from Vegetius's own work; the former divergesfrom the latter only in Saxe's requirement that the elements he adaptsfrom his predecessors be applicable to a battlefield ruled by gunpowder.It is unfortunate that Saxe wrote when he did; had he lived another hun-dred years (or even fifty), he would have seen the power and rate of fireof musketry amplified to the point where his arguments in favour of thepike and the bayonet charge would have been obviated. In proposing areturn to the pike, he was arguing for the reintroduction of a weaponwhich had already been swept from the battlefield, and for the imple-mentation of a system of conscription, training, and discipline thatwould never be possible even in France under an absolute monarchy. Ahalf-century after his death, the greatest of French despot-generals

53. Keegan,Face of Battle, 32-33. Emphasis added.MILITARY HISTORY * 515


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DONALDA. NEILLwould continue to accomplish tactical miracles even after the exquisitelytrained Grande Armee had been decimated and replaced by a vast armyof poorly trained, poorly disciplined, poorly fed, unpaid, and ill-equippedtroops fired by revolutionary fervour and little else. His achievementsare perhaps the most eloquent refutation possible of Saxe's advocacy ofthe theoretical Roman model he attempted to adapt from Vegetius.Napoleon, the epitome of the rational soldier, used column formationsand other concepts theoretically derivable from the ancients becausethey worked, not because of their hoary intellectual credentials.In short, Saxe advocated the resurrection and employment on thebattlefield of only those elements gleaned from the ancients which wereapplicable to the wars of eighteenth-century France, and ignored thosewhich were not-and for this we accuse him of deriving his excellencefrom his antecedents. We attempt the same today, and congratulate our-selves on our originality.

Conclusion: Through a Glass DarklyAs a caveat to this discussion, one must first be prepared to acknowl-edge the weaknesses of the source materials at hand. Caesar, a consum-

mate politician, wrote his works for political purposes to enhance hisown stature at home. Vegetius, a military neophyte, was describing in DeRei Militarii not the military institutions of which he may have had per-sonal knowledge, but those of a half-millennium earlier and of which hisknowledge was apocryphal at best. Vauban left a vast array of corre-spondence but only limited descriptions of his theories and principles;and Saxe, by his own admission, wrote his little book "in a fever" over aperiod of thirteen nights, and even goes so far as to caution the readeragainst taking him too seriously. There is none of the reasoned objectiv-ity displayed by Thucydides; the simple, almost point-form notations ofSun Tzu; or the astute, cynical analysis of Machiavelli in any of theworks in question. While this is not necessarily a crippling factor in thispresent study, it is incumbent upon the reader, as it is upon theresearcher, to carefully consider the source when evaluating its import.This said, the first deduction which may be drawn from the forego-ing discussion is that technological change had a considerable influenceon the battlefield following the Renaissance. While it may be stated withsome certainty that Saxe in his Reveries attempted to follow Vegetius asclosely as possible, it must also be acknowledged that he only did sowhere the adoption of Roman formations and tactics complemented, orat least did not interfere with, the formations and tactics dictated by theweaponry in use in France in the early seventeenth century. This pointis more telling when we consider that Vauban, who had equal access to

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Ancestral Voicesthe works of the ancients, made no reference to them either in his the-oretical developments, his siege techniques, or his architectural accom-plishments, as the siege warfare of the Romans would have been entirelyunsuited to similar activity in the era of gunpowder. Caesar, for example,built his palisades to repel hordes of spear- and axe-wielding Gauls, notto absorb the repeated strikes of hundred-pound stone balls hurled withterrific force on a flat trajectory. The siege techniques of Vauban, both inthe offence and the defence, were dictated entirely by the ballistic char-acteristics of large- and small-bore guns; thus any resemblance theybear to the siege techniques of the Romans is at most coincidental.It may therefore be fair to deduce first, that the influence of theancients held sway only where their principles were complemented bythe new realities of gunpowder combat (e.g., in the areas of training, dis-cipline, drill); but that also, their writings had little or no impact wheretheir principles were no longer relevant (e.g., in the areas of fortification,siege warfare, the employment of cavalry, and the importance of disper-sion on the battlefield).A second point which merits attention is the intellectual frenzy ofthe times. During the Renaissance and for three centuries thereafter,familiarity with the works of the ancients was "chic" in much the samesense that the ability to discuss art and theatre is today consideredessential for the socially aspiring. The passion for all things Romanextended from the arts to political life, science, history, and the militarysphere as well. As Keegan notes, "By the end of the eighteenth century,the Neo-Classical revival had made fashionable an outward assumptionof Roman symbols, to express an attitude which was already internal-ized."54The argument that all things Roman were adopted for reasons offashion rather than because they made any particular military sense is atelling one. Keegan, in a further discourse, goes on to accuse the imita-tors of Rome of slavishly implementing ideas which they little under-stood, because comprehensive explanations thereof were simply notavailable; nobody really knew what a legion was like, because no one atthe time of the Enlightenment had ever seen or fought in one; and no onein ancient Rome had made a credible attempt at describing them in inti-mate detail.

Mauriceof Nassau and GustavusAdolphusmay have believed that,given money, time and effort, they could recreate armies in theimage Caesar had revealed to them. Modern classical scholars,increasingly nclined to fret at the lack of real understandingof theinner life of the Legionswhich the Ancients have left them, suspectthat they were far more complex, fickle and individual in theirbehaviour than Caesar lets on. If this is so, then Mauriceand Gus-54. Ibid., 63.



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DONALDA. NEILLtavus were chasing a chimera. Certainlyno military institution ofwhichwe have detailed,objectiveknowledgehas ever been giventhemonumental,marmoreal,almost monolithicuniformityof characterwhich cla

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