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28 #232 The Armies 18 th century armies had three basic arms: cavalry, infantry and artillery. Cavalry consisted of three general types: heavies, mediums and lights. Heavy cavalry, sometimes called cuirassiers, wore body armor (usually a breast- and back-plate) and were mounted on large horses. They were intended for shock action. An interesting touch was some armies gave their heavies a breast-plate but no back-plate. The idea was that was both a “compliment and a reminder,” that is, recognizing they never turned their back to the enemy, and if they did, they would be more vulnerable. Medium cavalry were usually called dragoons. Originally dragoons had been mounted infantry who could also act as general purpose troops, providing advanced guards, scouts and pickets, but by the mid-18 th century they served largely as combat cavalry. Light cavalry, often termed hussars, performed such functions as scouting and skirmishing but, again, could be involved in shock action. Some armies had auxiliary light cavalry. The Austrians had their pandours, while the Russians had the Cossacks. Often those axillaries were good at independent action but less effective in set-piece battles. Most infantry of this era were armed and equipped in the same way: with a flintlock musket, socket bayonet and short sword. The smoothbore muskets were effective in massed volley fire up to 100 meters. The limited range and rate of fire necessitated rigid “linear” tactics in which troops were placed in geometrically correct lines to maximize the number of muskets pointed at the enemy. Fire was either by ranks or platoons. Under the latter, an infantry line would be divided into sections or platoons, and each platoon would fire as a single unit. The advantage of platoon fire was it allowed for concentrated fire at a single point. The bayonet allowed the pikes, which once formed up to half of each regiment, to be dispensed with. The sword was maintained long after it had any battlefield use largely as a matter of décor. There is some debate about which weapon caused the most casualties. Probably, artillery was the chief killer on the battlefield, bladed weapons probably the least, with muskets somewhere in between. The main effect of swords and bayonets seems to have been psychological: a line of troops advancing with cold steel might break the morale of a defending line and cause it to flee. Most armies had units of grenadiers. Originally, they were soldiers armed with hand grenades, used by storming parties against entrenched enemy troops. By the 18 th century, the hand grenade had fallen out of fashion on the battlefield, but the grenadier units were maintained. They consisted of the tallest and bravest men, who were given the most difficult tasks such as leading assaults, or maintained in reserve for critical actions. They were armed much the same manner as line infantry, though often with more elaborate uniforms. There was some light infantry, though it seems to have fallen out of use with most European armies. That was odd, as up until the mid-17 th century it was standard practice for infantry units to detach parties of musketeers as skirmishers. They would move to the front or flanks to engage in fire fights with the enemy, or to seize objectives into which the more ponderous infantry formations could not easily move. The Austrians did have light troops, but they were auxiliaries. The French did some skirmishing in their North American colonies, while designated light infantry companies did not appear in the British Army until the late 1750s. Enlisted personnel were usually recruited from the lower classes of society; valuable citizens were not to be wasted as cannon fodder. The kings also feared arming the growing middle class, who might then use the military to deprive them of their divinely granted rights. It was not uncommon in the Russian military for lesser nobility to begin a military career as an enlisted ranker, but then move up rapidly. The highest regular echelon of command in that era was the regiment. Depending on the country, a regiment consisted of from one to four battalions. Higher units, such as brigades, “columns” and armies were generally ad hoc affairs; however, there was some experimentation with “legions,” consisting of infantry, cavalry and artillery. Armies also maintained special formations called Guards. Originally, they were the bodyguards of the sovereign, but by the mid-18 th century they were corps of elite troops. In Russia, the Guards were recruited from the nobles. That made them extra insurance for the emperor or empress, since they were presumably more reliable. On the other hand, the Russian Guards were frequently involved in factional infighting and palace coups. The Russians also maintained a special relationship with the Cossacks. The Cossacks were the descendants of peoples who had fled from the surrounding regions and settled along the Black Sea littoral and the Caucuses. The Cossacks maintained a rough democratic egalitarianism, and their leader, or hetman, was elected. They served as Russian auxiliaries in return for certain privileges and generally made fine, if undisciplined, light cavalry. One special Russian unit was the Gatchina Corps. It was set up by Catherine for her son Paul, so he would have an army with which to “play.”
<strong>Tactics</strong> Battlefield tactics used combined arms. Artillery provided the firepower to break an enemy line and run up the casualties. Infantry would advance to finish off a shaken enemy or maintain a defensive wall of fire. Cavalry maneuvered and closed in for shock action. Several of the more effective commanders of the era emphasized infantry attacks with bayonets leveled: these included Charles XII, Frederick the Great and Suvarov. Charles’s use of the bayonet at Poltava in the face of entrenched Russian artillery led to disaster, but it worked on more than one occasion for the Prussians and Russians. When that tactic worked, it was inevitably because it was part of a much larger battle plan in which artillery was used to provide fire support. Frederick employed the attack in echelon to concentrate his sometimes numerically smaller army against larger foes. He concentrated one wing of his army against a vulnerable enemy flank, and that gave him great victories at Rossbach (5 November 1757) and Leuthen (6 December 1757). His use of the echelon tactic also led to stereotypical attacks and, as a result, his enemies were able to counter with such techniques as holding back reserves to deal with the threat. Toward the end of the 18 th century, there was much experimentation with skirmish and column formations. Columns were not a reversion to phalanx-style mass attacks with cold steel; rather, columns were essentially deep infantry formations used to maneuver units about the battlefield. Meanwhile clouds of skirmishers would snipe at the enemy in order to keep him pinned down and disrupt his formations. When the enemy’s line was sufficiently dislocated, or a vulnerability found, the commander would launch his infantry to take advantage of the situation. The artillery, of course, was doing the majority of the killing, and what the column-skirmish tactics were supposed to do was keep the main line of infantry out of contact with the enemy until the decisive movement. Those tactics did not reach full fruition, however, until the Napoleonic era. strategy & tactics 29
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