J. Fortescue - The History of the British Army

Authorities.—Monstrelet as before is the most important authority for the wars in France. The Wars of the English in France (Rolls Series) are valuable in elucidation. For the rise of the Scots in France M. Francisque Michel's Les Ecossais en France, and Forbes Leith's Scots Men-at-Arms in France. For the Wars of the Roses the sources of information are proverbially meagre, but the material has been worked up with admirable skill by Mr. Oman in his Warwick, to which I am greatly indebted. For the reorganisation of the French Army Daniel's Ancien milice Française may be consulted.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1420.

Five years after the battle of Agincourt the religious wars in Bohemia had given birth to one of the great soldiers of the world's history, John Zizka, the blind general of the Hussites. His military genius, quickened by fanaticism and spurred by the stern necessity of encountering an enemy always superior in numbers and equipment, had led him to ideas which were far in advance of his age. A master in organisation and discipline, he had evolved literally out of nothing the most famous army of its day in Europe, and by inexhaustible activity and resource had rendered it invincible. Beginning with such rude material of war as waggons and flails, and with no more skilful men than poor Bohemian peasants, he matured a system of tactics which defeated not only the chivalry of Europe but even the light irregular cavalry, soon to become famous as hussars, of Hungary. As victory supplied him with the means of procuring better arms, he rose rapidly to the occasion. Throwing all military pedantry to the winds he fought as his own genius dictated, and in the rapidity of his movements and unrelenting swiftness with which he followed up a victory he bears comparison with Napoleon. He was the first man to make artillery a manœuvrable arm, the first to execute complicated evolutions in the face of an enemy, and the first to handle cavalry, infantry, and artillery in efficient tactical combination. The employment of waggons for defence we have already seen copied by the English at the battle of the Herrings, but Zizka's influence[42] spread far wider than this by breaking down the strength of European chivalry, and showing that drill, discipline, and mobility could make the poorest peasant more than a match for the armoured knight.

1382.

Zizka, however, had not been the first to deal a blow at the supremacy of feudal cavalry. The English archers and dismounted men-at-arms had been before him, and another power, which was destined to abolish that supremacy for ever, had been in some respects the predecessor even of the English. Allusion has already been made to the victory of the Swiss over the Austrian chivalry at Sempach; from that day it may be said that they began their advance to the highest military reputation of Europe. Appointed from the ruggedness of their country as well as by their own poverty to fight rather on their own feet than on horseback, cut off in great measure by the same causes from the feudalism that had overrun the rest of Europe, they were by nature destined to be infantry, and as infantry they developed their fighting system. Beginning like all primitive foot-men in all countries with the simple weapons of shield, spear, and axe, they improved upon them to meet their own peculiar wants. The problem before them was, how to defeat mounted men mailed from head to foot in the open field, how to keep the horses at a distance and cut through the iron shells that protected the men. The instinct of a Teutonic nation led them to give first attention to the cutting weapon. The English had turned their axes into broad-bladed bills; the Flemings had gone further and produced the godendag , a weapon good alike for cut and thrust; the Swiss, improving upon the godendag , invented the halberd, which combined a hook for pulling men out of the saddle, a point to thrust between the joints of their armour, and a broad heavy blade, the whole being set on the head of an eight-foot shaft. The weight of the halberd made it, as an old chronicler[43] says, a terrific weapon, "cleaving men asunder like a wedge and cutting them into small pieces." Altogether it was calculated to surprise galloping gentlemen who thought themselves invulnerable in their armour.

1422.

1444.

1476.

1477.

1515.

1522, 1525.

But the halberd did not solve the problem of keeping horses at a distance. For this purpose the primitive spear was lengthened more and more till it finally issued in the long pike, the pike of the eighteen-foot shaft, which for nearly two centuries ruled the battlefields of Europe. The birthplace of the long pike is obscure,[44] but it was undoubtedly first brought into prominence by the Swiss, and that by a series of brilliant actions. Arbedo attested the firmness of the new infantry in the field; St. Jacob-en-Birs, where the Swiss detached sixteen hundred men to fight against fifty thousand, its boundless confidence; and finally the three crushing defeats of Charles the Bold at Granson, Morat, and Nancy, established its reputation as invincible. For action the Swiss were generally formed in three bodies, van, battle, and rear—the van and rear being each of half the strength of the battle or main body. These bodies were always of a very deep formation, and if not actually square were very solidly oblong. Occasionally the whole were massed into one gigantic battalion in order that the proportion of pikes to halberds, which was about one to three, might go further in securing immunity from the attack of cavalry. The van, from the desperate nature of its work, was called the Verlorener Hauf , from which is derived our own term, not yet wholly extinct, forlorn hope.[45] As regards discipline the Swiss appear to have been orderly and sober men until spoiled by the multitude of their successes, but at the last they became intolerably insubordinate. The cantons indeed were so deeply bitten with the military mania, that all great occasions, feasts, fairs, and even weddings, were made the occasion of some form of military display, while the very children turned out with drums, flags, and pikes, and marched with all the order and regularity of full-grown soldiers. In fact fighting became the regular trade of Switzerland, and as her people enjoyed for a time a practical monopoly of that trade they soon became grasping and avaricious, and would dictate to generals under threat of mutiny when and where they should fight, select their own position in the order of battle, and open the action at such time as they thought proper. Their officers lost control of them, and would plaintively say that if they could but enforce obedience in their men they would march through France from end to end. This insubordination was their ruin. The French, who were their chief employers, at last lost all patience with them, and gave them at Marignano a lesson which they did not speedily forget. The suppression of this mutiny, which was in fact a two days' battle of the most desperate description, cost the Swiss twelve thousand men; and it speaks volumes for the fine qualities that were in them that the defeat attached them more closely than ever to the cause of France. But the spell of their invincibility was broken, and two more severe defeats at the hands of a rival infantry at Bicocca and Pavia destroyed their prestige for ever. Nevertheless they were superb soldiers, and as their good fortune delivered them from a meeting with the English archers, who would certainly have riddled their huge bristling battalion through and through, they became as they deserved the fathers of modern infantry. Let it be noted that they marched in step to the music of fife and drum, that they carried a colour in each company, and that several of the cantons carried a huge horn, whose sound was the signal for all to rally around it.