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Praetorium Honoris

Saturday, October 29, 2022

A Primer - Part One

French Light Infantry in Line
Martin Lancaster Photo
(Source)
Yesterday's post was a taste of what's coming in terms of the Fiction of The Chant. It's not that I don't have anything written just yet, but it struck me (at some time in the wee hours of the morning) that most of you probably know very little about the mechanics of Napoleonic warfare. So I thought that a wee primer might be in order. This is it, well the first part anyway.

(Source)
The Napoleonic Wars took place from 1805 to 1815. The major powers in Europe at the time were France, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Spain (sort of), and Great Britain. The latter nation essentially financed the entire series of wars, all having started from the heinous act of regicide. All of the powers, save France, were governed by monarchs. Those monarchs had taken a dim view of the French having the audacity to send their sovereign, Louis XVI, and his wife, an Austrian princess by birth, to the guillotine.

They also objected to the French wishing to export their ideas of liberté, égalité, et fraternité¹to their own benighted subjects. Understandably.

The armies of the period were all built up of the same basic unit types: infantry, artillery, and cavalry. The infantry being the most numerous as they were the easiest to raise, equip, and train. As has been true throughout most of recorded history, it was also the infantry who did the bulk of the fighting. As well as the dying.

The main tactical unit for the infantry was the battalion, which was formed by a number of companies, the company being the smallest tactical unit on the battlefield. The size of a company varied a great deal across nations, some being as small as fifty men, the largest composed of approximately one hundred and thirty men.

The number of companies within a battalion varied from country to country as well. The French began the period with nine companies to the battalion which they lowered to six eventually. The size of the battalion in French service was consistent but the number of men per company was increased. The British Army had ten companies per battalion, the strengths of those companies varying from fifty to a hundred men depending on many factors.

Infantry battalions had three basic tactical formations: line, column, and square. The line was for firing, the column was for movement, and the square provided an all-around defense against cavalry. It's worth noting that the infantry companies were always (more or less) in line formation, three ranks of men lined up shoulder to shoulder. If the companies were lined up abreast, the battalion was in line, if they were aligned one behind the other, they were in column, in square they were aligned as the name implies, the actual alignment of the companies depended on the nation. Each country had their own method for forming a square, by the book (the French book) it should take a battalion no more that a hundred seconds to form square. Which may give you the idea that forming square was not exactly simple. It was not. (Do it under fire with charging horsemen bearing down upon you, the commander's timing had to be very good indeed.)

Infantry was the main combat arm, maneuvering as necessary to bring fire upon the enemy with the idea of eventually pressing home an attack with the bayonet. (Which was actually a very rare event, one side or the other would usually break and run before they actually came to blows).

Cavalry was very expensive to equip and maintain (as anyone who has ever owned a horse can probably attest to). They were used for two missions, between battles they scouted ahead of the army and prevented any enemy from scouting their own army, on the battlefield they were employed as a shock force.

The basic tactical unit of the cavalry was the squadron, in theory having 150 to 180 men but in practice more like 100 to 120 men. Squadrons were grouped into regiments of four to even eight squadrons depending on the type of cavalry and the country.

Men with swords on horseback are quite formidable to behold. (There is a reason why police forces employ mounted cops for crowd control.) They are best used against shaken infantry, men who have been bombarded, shot at, and harassed for hours will usually break when a body of formed horsemen come at them with speed and determination. Unless those infantry are very well trained and very well led.

Cavalry were also used on the battlefield to drive off the enemy cavalry and, when luck and circumstance allowed, charge into an enemy artillery battery and saber the gunners who've been shooting at you and yours all the damned day long.

French Foot Artillery
(Source)
Napoléon began his military career as an artillery officer. He once said, "It is with artillery that war is made." Artillery has long been the biggest killer in warfare (it still is) and there is nothing like it to reduce an enemy's morale (as well as his numbers).

Though artillery is formidable, it is relatively slow to maneuver, at least the bulk of an army's pieces fall into that category, what they called foot artillery. Though the guns, caissons, and support equipment were pulled by horses, the gunners walked. As those guns (caissons, etc.) were heavy and fairly cumbersome, they tended to move slower than the infantry.

There was a species of artillery where all of the gunners were mounted and rode from place to place, their guns were also smaller than those which accompanied the infantry, so they were much more mobile.

They were also much more expensive as you might surmise. It's all those horses, dontcha know?

Artillery then, as now, was used to "soften up" the opposition. Bombard them, kill them, rattle them, make them want to run away. The main targets of the guns were the infantry and the cavalry, counter-battery fire was discouraged as it took a lot of ammunition to knock out an enemy piece. Generals wanted the enemy infantry driven off in fairly short order so that they could advance. The gunners popping off at each other took longer and used lots and lots of ammunition. (Which was hard to haul around, expensive, etc., etc.)

1805, Les Cuirassiers avant la charge
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier
(Source)
A Napoleonic battle could be viewed in simplistic terms as a giant game of scissors-rock-paper. Though sometimes the scissors can be the rock, the paper becomes the scissors, etc. You aligned your army with the infantry to the front, supported by artillery in the intervals between units, light cavalry on the flanks, with the heavier cavalry held behind the line to exploit opportunities.

Normally one side was on the defensive, protecting some city or terrain feature, while the other was attacking (wanting to take some city or terrain feature). One side would begin the contest by commencing an artillery bombardment, to soften up the opposition. Napoléon was a big proponent of creating a "Grand Battery" composed of multiple batteries advanced slightly forward of his line to concentrate the fire of his guns on a portion of the enemy's line.

Rattle the enemy, punch holes in his lines, then advance the infantry - supported by cavalry, to attack that line and exploit those holes.

It was noisy, smoke from the cannon and the muskets could quickly obscure the field, if there was no wind then visibility would be measured in mere feet. Units would stumble into each other, often friendly units would fire upon each other.

It was chaos. There were no command decisions transmitted to the troops in seconds, messages were scribbled out, sometimes under fire, then an aide would carry that message to its intended recipient. Sometimes the messenger would lose his way, sometimes he would be injured or killed on the way, many times his horse would be injured or killed. Wise commanders would send multiple messengers in the hopes that at least one would get through.

What was a battle like for the individual soldiers? We'll explore that tomorrow.





¹ Liberty, equality, and fraternity.

32 comments:

  1. I shall have to get out the Napoleonic War books I bought on your recommendation!

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    1. What? You didn't devour them immediately? 😁

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    2. I did, but that was several years ago, and a refreshing of the information might be a good thing.

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  2. Hey Old AFSarge;

    I do remember reading that the "Purist" were upset with the Americans during the American Civil War that we used the Artillery like Cavalry and drug the carriages and cassions all over the battlefields for immediate deployment whereas the purist believe that the Artillery should be positioned and left alone during the battle until it was over. It was one of the things that we "amateurs" did that was different than the "professionals" from Europe did. The Basic Napoleonic Tactics hadn't changed since that time but the weapons did.

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    1. Never heard that one, seems apocryphal. The last time the Europeans fixed their guns in place at the beginning of a battle and left them there was the Thirty Years War. Moving cannon isn't easy, which is why Gribeauval in France gained a certain amount of fame by lightening the guns and making them more uniform. While they were still very heavy (the bigger ones weighed in at two tons) moving them was now easier.

      As I recall, most of the artillery in our unpleasantness from 1861 to 1865 had the gunners all mounted, so they were more akin to horse artillery. It should be noted that most of the European observers in this country did view us as amateurs and ignored most of what they saw here. Which cost Europe an entire generation from 1914 to 1918. Who were the amateurs again?

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    2. Another innovation used by a few Union units was mounted infantry equipped with repeating rifles. They rode into battle and then fought as infantry. The concept had been tried before, but the repeater made all the difference.

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    3. Dragoons were intended to be able to fight on horseback or on foot. Our Civil War, and the repeating rifle, turned the horse into simple transport and no longer a combatant. (And yes, the horses fought, each other and the men opposing them. According to legend, a French horse by the name of Lisette (IIRC) bit the face off of a Russian grenadier at Eylau.

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    4. Don's comment- I remember a battlefield at Gettysburg that talked of them, the rifles were privately bought and the unit was raised by the guy in charge.

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    5. Berdan's Sharpshooters perhaps?

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  3. This is good!

    I know very little about all this so a little studying is involved, I started reading "Seven Men Of Gascony" yesterday. (It's my "sitting outside and reading a book" book. I'm retired so I can do that :-)

    I had a couple of questions while I was reading today's lesson so I looked them up. Nothing really deep, just a rough idea of when things happened.

    When did the French Revolution start and end?
    May 5, 1789 – November 9, 1799

    Who invented the bayonet?
    The inventor is unknown, but the first bayonets were made in Bayonne, France, in the early 17th century and became popular among European armies.

    A pike is a very long thrusting spear and were wielded by foot soldiers deployed in pike square formation, until it was largely replaced by bayonet-equipped muskets.

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    1. I had to get another copy of Seven Men of Gascony as my old one was nowhere to be found. Started re-reading it last night. Delderfield's writing is brilliant IMHO.

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  4. Thanks Sarge. I am surprised at how much of this I already knew (other than the size of the units).

    18th and 19th Century warfare seems to be pretty much blunt force trauma. I cannot imagine staring down the line of your opposition as the cannonade started.

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  5. Crusty Old TV Tech here. Donkey Shine for the explanations. In my case, it's been since AJROTC that I've even read about modern Army tactics, much less the earlier stuff. The British loved to drill their Infantry units in "forming the square", that's about all I remembered on that subject, but when you mentioned the other Infantry formations of the day, it makes more sense now. And yep, black powder makes "the fog of war" a very real thing on the battlefield, not just something related to intelligence gathering. Smokeless powder was quite the innovation at the time, I would bet. Keep it coming, please.

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    1. I will, I love this period in history. (Though I admit a certain mount of guilt by applying the word "love" to the brutality of war.)

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    2. ...And there is Kipling's "Fuzzy Wuzzy". "For all the odds against you, you broke the square"...

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    3. Given enough men, determined to win at all costs, squares can and were broken.

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  6. Merci beaucoup. I never really studied that era. I did know a little about our tactics in the Rev. Modern (1917-current) small unit tactics are fascinating. My curiosity was piqued with a book called "The Tiger's Way". it talked about the far east's method of attack and defense. Very interesting book. Interesting to note that the German infantry in the 30's and 40's had similarities to the Chinese in the 1950's. Influence of the Huns?

    Rob mentioned bayonets... The first were plug bayonets. They fit the bore, turning your musket into a pike. It was much later they made wrap arounds that would allow you to still fire the weapon while fitted. The M44 version of the Moison-Nagant was regulated with the bayonet extended. If you shoot while it's folded, the sights are off.

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    1. True, also, for the 91/30 Mosin. The sights are regulated with the bayonet attached. Russian doctrine was that the bayonet was always fixed. (In WW2, the soldiers mostly threw them away.)

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    2. STxAR - The Germans learned many things in WWI which the other nations seemingly ignored. Infiltration tactics, storm/shock groups, they brought those innovations into WWII. Their infantry were very good indeed, smart nations copy good ideas.

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    3. Any Mouse - Alexander Suvorov (Russian general of the early Napoleonic period) loved the bayonet, one of his quotes was:
      The bullet is a fool, the bayonet is a fine chap.
      It's very Russian to love the bayonet.

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  7. Thanks for the primer, Sarge. I knew the basics but some things like Gunners marching ( Quelle Horreur!) were new to me. If course Artillery rules; otherwise the occasion is a " mere brawl"
    Boat Guy

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  8. "Artillery Lends Dignity to What Otherwise Would Be a Common Brawl"

    Good overview of black powder warfare.


    I commanded a gun at the reenactment for the 145th Gettysburg anniversary. Out here in California a big reenactment has maybe a couple of hundred foot on each side and maybe a dozen guns. There we had several thousand foot per side. The Confederate gun line had 70 guns, the Federal maybe 60.

    We've all seen the stylized paintings with a wall of smoke like cotton batting rolling out in front of the infantry. Yep. That's what it looks like when a line of 250 muskets fire a volly. When our Confederate gun line fired by file it blanketed half the field in smoke. Add in the noise, gunners giving commands to his cannoneers being heard by the crew of the next gun in his battery, and his own crew not hearing them. Confusion comes easily.

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    1. It would be worth going to see a big reenactment... Any advice?

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    2. Any Mouse (Izzat you Joe L?, sure sounds like you.) -
      When we went to the re-enactment of Waterloo back in 1995 (on the exact anniversary, the 18th of June, it was also a Sunday and the weather was nearly identical to that in 1815) there were 10,000 participants (according to the media). Not as many guns on the field, but they generated enough smoke that the Allied lines were virtually invisible 30 minutes in. Confusion reigns supreme in those affairs.

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    3. Rob - If you search on line for "Civil War re-enactment schedule 2023" you'll see there are a number of events. Some small, some big. If you go to Europe they re-enact Waterloo in Belgium, Austerlitz in Czechia, and Borodino in Russia (maybe not this year) and these tend to be big affairs with participants from all over.

      You can also find YouTube videos of many of those re-enactments as well.

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    4. I've been to a couple in Illinois when I was stationed there, they were neat, I'll go do the search, thanks!

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    5. I need to get to another one myselg, it's been a long time!

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    6. "Any Mouse (Izzat you Joe L?, sure sounds like you.) -"

      'Twas me, myself. Posted from my phone and didn't think to make sure it showed that I was me. That was a thoroughly miserable event for me. This CA native was in 95+ degree weather with 95%+ humidity with rain on and off, in layers of wool, with gloves, with felt hat. And the idiot who laid it out had the Confederate artillery park on a grassy slope on which the tow vehicles could barely get traction and every wheel on guns and limbers needed to be chocked. You've heard the term "loose cannon?" I got to see 3 of them at that event. People springing out of the way just like in a Charlie Chaplin film. Saw one go down the hill, across the road, down another slope, across a small stream and smash into a van on the road into the reenactors parking.

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