Warfare in The Gunpowder Age

An event occurred during the Wars of the Spanish Succession in the very early 18th century that is talked about by some as showing just how silly 18th century warfare was. A French and British battalion stood facing each other at about one hundred yards distance. Both were arrayed four ranks deep and were similarly armed with smooth bore flint lock muskets. The French officer commanding in a grand gesture swept off his hat and graciously invited the English to fire first. The English officer declined and returned the invitation. This went on for several more rounds until the French officer finally ran out of patience and had his battalion discharge a volley of about 800 muskets straight at the waiting British who didn’t move a muscle.

Now this does certainly seem like an odd way to fight an engagement, but what both officers knew was that the first one to fire would probably lose the encounter (the French officer, to his regret. thought he would chance it). Why this was so is based on the type of weapon both sides carried; smooth bore muskets with attachable bayonets.
A smooth bore musket takes on average thirty seconds to load and is only accurate up to about fifty yards. Have you figured it out yet?

As soon as the French had fired, causing of course a number of casualties, the English double timed up to fifty yards well before the thirty seconds required by the French to reload, then discharged a deadly accurate barrage almost point blank into the French infantry, inflicting at least four times the casualties as the French. They then charged home with the bayonet and drove the French from the field. There was nothing silly about this engagement whatsoever.

The limitation and power of the smooth bore musket determined many of the tactics employed during the 18th and first half of the 199h centuries in European and North American armies. Its inherent inaccuracy required that soldiers fired in volleys, delivering something like a huge shotgun blast on its enemies. This required men standing shoulder to shoulder in tight formation and moving together in lock step when  maneuvering so as to fall into formation quickly and orderly. A disorderly rabble was an invitation to a shattering cavalry attack or a measured charge by a stable infantry formation.  This line formation was drilled over and over, both to make each drill maneuver second nature during the noise and confusion of battle, and to steel the men against the shock of brutal cannon fire and musketry.

The Napoleonic wars (1789 – 1815) saw the culmination of the tactics employed in the gunpowder age. It also saw the re-emergence of the ’line versus column’ debate. Ordinarily it was assumed that the line beat the column every time. That is, a column  of say fifty men wide and about one hundred deep would march straight at  a frail looking line two, three, or four men deep hoping through the power of shock, to break through. The reason the line usually won was that it could employ every musket it carried against the column while the column could only deploy those muskets around its edges. As the column moved closer the wings of the line formation would march itself against the column’s sides,

Pausing within the fifty yard accuracy range the two wings and front would deliver a devastating volley, shattering the column and allowing the cavalry to close in on the rabble that the column became. This is exactly what happened during the opening stages of the Battle of Waterloo, June 18th, 1815, with the English line utterly defeating a French column. Even more musket fire was delivered by the English who had drilled their troops into reloading in just 20 seconds.

To reload a musket is an intricate procedure. A soldier first takes a cartridge out of the box he carries at his side, This contains the lead musket ball (roughly one half inch wide), paper for wadding, and the gunpowder needed to fire the weapon. Taking the ball between his teeth he pours the powder down the barrel, holding back a small amount needed to prime the charge. Depositing the remaining powder in the touch hole by the flint he closes the cock. He next spits the ball down the barrel, then tamps the ball down by banging the butt on the ground a couple of times. Next he takes out the ramrod stored under the barrel, puts in the paper wadding and rams it down with the rod, holding the ball firmly in place. Then he replaces the ramrod, raises the musket to his shoulder, pulls back the cock, and fires.

As you might imagine it took an enormous amount of time to drill a man to the point that he could repeat this procedure on the battlefield, where every nerve he had was probably quivering, and repeat it in just twenty seconds. The English accomplished that feat and the French never did. That extra ten seconds gave the English a great advantage.

The musket effected great damage on a person. A musket ball would shatter any bones it encountered  to such an extent that even today amputation would be the only remedy. Belly wounds were dreaded by soldiers because they were a virtual death sentence in these days before anaesthetic surgery. Even today the shock wave effect of a musket ball entering the body would cause massive damage to surrounding organs such that  today many would also die from their wounds.

Why did the French adopt the column formation being fully aware that the line was superior? In the first place the Revolutionary Army was made up largely of half trained citizen soldiers who had great difficulty maintaining a line formation in the attack. The column was much easier to handle and the soldiers on the inside felt a great sense of security whereas In line formation they felt naked and exposed. The other reason was that the French made it work for them through employing massed cannon fire against the enemy line before the column was launched. This caused an enormous number of casualties and threatened to break the nerve of the defending ranks. By the time the column arrived the line was often in disarray and fled at its approach.

Arthur Wellesly, the Duke of Wellington, devised a tactic to counter this French reworking of the columnar attack. He first had his men stand in ranks only two deep greatly limiting casualties from cannon fire. Then he allowed his men to lie down, behind a small rise if possible, only standing them up when the column’s approach caused the cannon fire to cease for fear of hitting its own men. The appearance of alive and healthy Redcoats suddenly popping up in front of them with muskets levelled greatly disturbed the French attacking columns who often thought the English had run away. This is in fact what so startled Napoleon’s famous ‘Old Guard’ at Waterloo, forcing their first and only retreat from a battlefield and signalling Napoleon’s defeat. No French column ever succeeded in breaking an English line during the whole of the war in Portugal, Spain, southern France, and Waterloo.  As Wellington said of Waterloo: “They came on in the same old way and we stopped them in the same old way”  Wellington won every battle he fought.

Waterloo offers no better example of the primary use of the bayonet. Horses hate bayonets and will not advance against them, being the smart creatures that they are. Infantry know this and when threatened by cavalry, form themselves into squares, literally, squares three ranks deep and four sided. With the front rank kneeling with the butt of their muskets firmly fixed against the ground and their bayonets pointing upward at an angle, They and the two ranks behind them with muskets loaded and firing, also with fixed bayonets, present a bristling and dangerous display to any horse attempting to attack the square. Horses will balk and riders are forced around the sides of the square and subject to punishing musket fire as they ride by.

Learning to maneuver into square took hours and hours of relentless training and drill, as might be imagined. The need for discipline and autonomic drill in the face of great and imminent danger could not more plainly be presented than in the case of the square. Infantry hated cavalry, who were looking for any chance to catch them out of formation and unprotected. A formed square was an almost perfect defence against cavalry while infantry in line were easy prey to their swords and sabres. At Waterloo Marshal Ney threw wave after wave of cavalry against Wellington’s chequer boarded squares nearly destroying the French cavalry in the process. 

Also at Waterloo was a new and deadly weapon which augured in major changes in the way battles of the future would be fought  – the Baker rifled musket. What rifling in a barrel did by way of small grooves etched corkscrew fashion along the barrel’s length was to give the musket ball spin making it highly accurate up to about two hundred yards. Only one unit in Wellington’s army possessed these murderous weapons, the famous 95th Rifles.

Loading a rifle was a slow business as a patch had to be wrapped around the ball in order for it to grip the rifling in the barrel. Then a small hammer was used to tamp the ball down. The Rifles primarily acted in pairs as skirmishers out in front of the lines, picking off enemy officers and NCO’s as they attacked. As the attacking formation came closer they moved back into the lines and performed as infantry, loading their rifles without the patches.

Since about 1845 or so the US Army was arming its troops with rifled muskets, but ones with a  major difference from the old Baker rifle. These weapons fired minie balls which had a lead ring around them that expanded when fired, gripping the rifling without the need for the cumbersome patch. Also added were percussion caps that replaced the need for the whole unreliable flint lock system. A soldier simply placed the cap in a touch hole over the loaded gunpowder, cocked back the firing arm and fired. Instead of flint on steel the firing hammer ignited the cap by percussion. which contained fulminate of mercury.  All these new features made the infantryman a lot faster and a lot more accurate as the US Civil War was to so bloodily demonstrate some 17 years later.

The Civil War was notable for the fact that while the weapons had changed the tactics largely had not. Men still stood in serried ranks on both sides taking enormous casualties from the new rifled muskets both sides possessed. Robert E. Lee twigged early to the changes the new musket had brought. Stationing his men behind stone walls, railway cuts, or hilltops time and again he provoked Union troops into launching brave but futile frontal assaults where the new muskets could do their worst damage.

Finally nearer to the end of the war the scene took on an ominous aspect. With both sides savvy to the new realities of warfare, the best protection they both discovered were trenches and barbed wire. This quite effectively brought the gunpowder age to a sudden end. Sadly the British had largely written off the Civil War as a totally amateur affair with nothing to be learned from it. Little did they know.