STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 030
The Shape of the Shooting Line
5. Column and Line in the Peninsula (1)
The Shape of the Shooting Line
Every student who takes a serious interest in military history is aware that, in a general way, the victories of Wellington over his French adversaries were due to a skilful use of the two-deep British line against the massive column, which had become the regular formation for a French army acting on the offensive, during the later years of the great war that raged from 1792 till 1814. But I am not sure that the methods and limitations of Wellington’s system are fully appreciated. For it is not sufficient to lay down the general thesis that he found himself opposed by troops who invariably worked in columns, and that he beat those troops by the simple expedient of meeting them, front to front, with other troops who as invariably fought in the two-deep battle-line. The statement is true in a rough way, but needs explanation and modification.
The use of infantry in line was no invention of Wellington’s, nor is it a universal panacea for all the crises of war. Troops who are armed with missile weapons, and who hope to prevail in combat by the rapidity and accuracy of their shooting, must necessarily array themselves in an order of battle which permits as many men as possible to use their arms freely. This was as clear to Edward III at Crecy, or to Henry V at Agincourt, as to Wellington at Bussaco and Salamanca. A shooting-line must be made as thin as is consistent with solidity, since every soldier who is placed so far to the rear that he cannot see the object at which he is aiming represents a lost weapon, whether he be armed with bow, or with musket, or with rifle. Unaimed fire was even more fruitless in the days of short ranges than it is in the XXth century. And the general principles which guided an English general who wished to win by his archery in the Hundred Years War were much the same as those which prevail today.
There was, it is true, an intermediate period in the XVIIth century when line-fighting for infantry armed with missile weapons seemed to have gone out of fashion. This gap in the continuity of British tactics was due to the introduction of fire-arms, which during the first two centuries of their existence were both slow to load and very short in their range. The earliest musket had an effective range decidedly less than that of the old English bow, and took five times as long between shot and shot. Indeed, it is not easy to make out the reasons why it superseded the bow in the end of the reign of Elizabeth, till one has gone through the series of controversial pamphlets which were written by the advocates of the rival weapons between 1590 and 1600.
But after the disappearance of the archer from the British line of battle, there was a century during which generals trusted to the pike and the dense column as the main striking force in infantry fighting, while the musket became for a time the subsidiary arm. This came to an end with the invention of the bayonet in the later XVIIth century, which enabled every musketeer to become his own pikeman, and abolished the necessity for the further continuance of the thick clump of pikes as a shelter and support for the slowly-loading bearers of the firearm. The Boyne and Killiecrankie were the last British battles in which the pike appeared, and Marlborough’s victories were won by regiments armed with musket and bayonet in the style which was to endure without change for the next hundred and fifty years. For no essential difference was introduced with the weapon of the infantry soldier till the middle of the XIXth century, when the rifle, which had been employed hitherto only by small and chosen bodies of light infantry, was put into the hands of whole armies. We had possessed riflemen in the British Army as early as the War of American Independence, and specialized rifle battalions since 1800, yet so late as the Crimean War certain divisions sailed to the East armed with nothing better than the old “Brown Bess”.
During the wars of the XVIIIth century, from Marlborough to Frederick the Great, all European infantry was fighting normally in line, three or four deep, and looking for success in battle to the rapidity and accuracy of its fire, not to the impetus of advances in column, such as had been practised by the pikemen of the XVIIth century, and were to be introduced again by the French generals of the Revolutionary Period. Armies had a stereotyped array, with infantry battalions deployed in long lines in the centre, and heavy masses of cavalry covering the wings. A glance at the battle-plans of the War of the Austrian Succession or the Seven Years War shows a marvellous similarity between them all in the general arrangements, and the front-to-front collision of long parallel lines was normal, though commanders of genius had their own way of varying the tactics of the day. Frederick the Great’s famous oblique order, or advance in echelon, with the strong striking wing brought forward, and the weaker containing wing held back and refused, is sufficiently well known. Occasionally he was able to vary it, as at Rossbach and Leuthen, and to throw a great part of his troops across the enemy’s flank at right-angles, so as to roll him up in detail.
But these were “uncovenanted mercies” obtained owing to the abnormal sloth or unskilfulness of the opposing general. They partook in no degree of the nature of an attack in column for the purpose of drilling a hole in the front of the enemy’s line of battle. There are, of course, instances in the old XVIIIth-century wars of engagements won by the piercing of a hostile centre, such as Marshal Saxe’s victory of Roucoux (1746). But in such cases the advantage was won by pushing forward successive lines of infantry one after another, each carrying the last forward, against some section of the hostile front where the opposing force was much less in number. The attacking force was deployed in brigade lines. one behind the other, and the units were not in column.
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