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ESSAYS IN SWEDISH HISTORY

With those of Moltke and Schlieffen. By 1660 the modern art of war had come to birth. Mass armies, strict discipline, the control of the State, the submergence of the individual, had already arrived; the conjoint ascendancy of financial power and applied science was already established in all its malignity; the use of propaganda, psychological warfare, and terrorism as military weapons was already familiar to theorists, as well as to commanders in the field. The last remaining ąualms as to the religious and ethical legitimacy of war seemed to have been stilled. The road lay open, broad and straight, to the abyss of the twentieth century.

NOTES

¹ This paper is a revision of an inaugural lecture delivered before The Queen’s University of Belfast on 21 January 1955.

⁸ For a generał treatment of the period Hans Delbriick, Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der politischen Geschichte, Berlin, 1920. iv, is the best authority, though this volume is on a slighter scalę than its predecessors. Paul Schmitthenner, Krieg und Kriegjiihrung im Wandel der Weltgeschichte, Potsdam, 1930, is a stimulating and suggestive survey. Sir Charles Oman’s A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (1937) necessarily ends with Maurice of Orange. The best discussions in English are the chapter in Sir George Clark, The Setenteenth Century, Oxford, 1929, and the same author’s War and Society in the Setenteenth Century, Cambridge, 1958.

³    For a fuller consideration of the changes in the art of war in Europę, and the reforms of Maurice and Gustav Adolf, see chapter 3, supra.

⁴    ‘Non bisogna credere che 1’addestramento dei combattanti richieda tempo e spese: non ci sono esercizi d’armi nel senso moderno. Una sia pur rudimentale istruzione permette agli Svizzeri di formare dei corpi tattici .. .*: Piero Pieri, U Rinascimento e la Crisi militare italiano, Turiń, 1952, p. 236.

⁶    There were many reasons for the decline of the lance, but this was certainly one of them: see Raimondo Montecuccoli, Memoires, Strasbourg, 1735, p. 16; and cf J. J. Wallhausen, Art militaire d cheual, Frankfurt, 1616, pp. 3-22.

⁶1.e., the art of drawing up a given number of men into a perfect sąuare. There is a description in Sir James Turner, Pallas Armata (1683), pp. 266-8.

⁷    E.g. ‘The Quadrate or Sąuare, the Wedg, the Tenaille or Tongs, the Saw, and the Globe’: Turner, op. cit., pp. 112-14.

⁸    Werner Hahlweg, Die Heeresreform der Oranier und die Antike, Berlin, 1941, pp. 25-93, 110-16; J. W. Wijn, Het Krijgswezen in den Tijd tan Prins Maurits, Utrecht, 1934, pp. 74, 138-40, 430; H. Wertheim, Der toller Halberstddter. Herzog Christian ton Braunschweig im pfalzischen Kriege, Berlin,

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1939, i, 116. Jahns suggested that Maurice’s reforms may havc been forced on him by the great wastage of trained soldiers during protracted hostilities in a smali area, and the conseąuent need to use untrained men. But the old style would have suited untrained men much better. Max Jahns, Handbuch einer Geschichte des Kriegswesens von der Urzeit bis zur Renaissance, Leipzig, 1880, p. 1207.

⁰ J. J. Wallhausen, U Art militaire pour VInfanterie, Oppenheim, 1615, p. 65.

¹⁰    Jahns, op. cit., p. 1208.

¹¹    The matter of marching in step needs investigation. The only discussion appears to be E. Sander, ‘Zur Geschichte des Gleichschrittes’, Zjńtschrift fur Heeres- und Uniformkunde (1935), who as a result of a misreading of Francis Grose, The Military Antiquities of Great Britain (1812), i, 345, attri-butes the credit for the idea to the Earl of Essex, on the strength of a sentence which he believes to be contained in A Worthy Speech spoken by his Excellence the Earl of Essex (1642). But the quotation is in fact (as Grose plainly States) from the Regulations of 1686 ; and confidence in Sander’s views is not much restored by his suggestion that marching in step was the ‘gegebene Form’ for armies of the Nordic Race. It has been said that it was Leopold of Dessau who madę it the rule in the Prussian army (W. Sombart, Der modemer Kapitalismus, i, 345); but it seems probable that it was used much earlier. The Swiss columns and the tercios, though they marched to tap of drum, do not seem to have kept step; and such reproductions of GalIot’s etchings as I have seen suggest that the armies of the Thirty Years’ War did not keep step either. Wallhausen says nothing of it in his chapter on marching (Wallhausen, U Art militaire pour ITnfanteńe, pp. 121-4); nor does Monro {Monro his Expedition [London, 1637], ii, 190). But whatever may have been the case on the march, it seems quite certain that the infantry of the early seventeenth century kept step for drill. Thus Wallhausen writes (op. cit., p. 73)'-: ‘Tenez le pied gauche coy, conversez vous en reculant le pied droict’; and E. D. Davies, in The Art of War and Englands Traynings (1619), is even morę explicit: ‘The Captaine commands, Files to the ńght hand Counter march, and then the Leaders of the Files advancing with their right legge, tum to the right hand, and march downe towards the Reare. ..’ (p. 194). Indeed, it might be possible to argue from Davies that English soldiers already kept step on the march: ‘Let him march then with a good grace, holding vp his head gallantly, his pace fuli of grauities and State .. . and that which most imports, is that they haue alwaies their eies vpon their companions which are in rankę with them, and before them going iust one with the other, and keeping perfit distance without com-mitting error in the least pace or step [my italics]’ (p. 76). This may be to attach too much importance to a mere flower of Davies* exuberant style; but it seems very likely that pikemen, at least, could not afford to be out of step when marching in close order, for the position of the pikę when held at the trail, and its extreme length, would otherwise have been liable to im-peril the haunches of the man in front: see Davies’ description, loc. cit.

¹² ‘II n’y a pas un Cavalier dans les trouppes de France, qui n’ait un habillement de Bufie, depuis que Fon s’est deffait de ceux de fer*: Gaya, Traiti des Armes, Paris, 1678, p. 56.

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