5. Column and Line in the Peninsula (2)
The New Tactics of the Revolutionary Army
At Fontenoy it is often said that the Duke of Cumberland assaulted the French left-centre in column, but this is quite inaccurate as regards his original array. His English and Hanoverian infantry went forward in three successive lines, and his formation only assumed something like a columnar shape when he had broken through the French first line for a certain space, and had then been forced to throw back both his wings in order to avoid being taken in flank by fresh troops from the intact parts of Saxe’s front and from his general reserve. To speak of the “invincible column of Fontenoy” is to use a most misleading term.
Normally the tactics of the XVIIIth century were directed to the smashing up of one of the enemy’s wings, either by outflanking it, or by assailing it with very superior forces, while the rest of the hostile army was “contained” by equal or inferior numbers, according as the assailant had more or less troops than his enemy. The smashing blow was more often than not delivered by a superior mass of cavalry concentrated on the striking wing, which commenced the action by turning or beating down the inferior hostile cavalry, after which the infantry of the turned wing would be helpless against attacks on its flank or rear by the victorious horse of the assailant. Such a type of battle may sometimes be found much later, even in Napoleonic times: Ocafía is a perfect example of it. There the reinforced cavalry wing of the French army tumbled the Spanish right-flank cavalry into ruin, and then fell on the exposed rear of the long line of infantry, which the beaten cavalry ought to have protected.
Speaking roughly, however, the period of set battles in line terminated with the outbreak of the French Revolutionary war. The generals who conducted the first campaigns of that struggle on the side of the allies had been trained in the school of Frederick the Great, or of his rivals, Daun and Laudohn, and conscientiously attempted to reproduce the old style of engagements. And at first the elder generals in command of the French armies obliged them with the sort of opposition that they wanted. But the troops of the Jacobin republic had been demoralized by the removal or desertion of the greater proportion of their commissioned officers, and their cadres had been hastily filled with half-trained recruits, while hundreds of new units formed on no old cadre at all, in which men and officers alike were little better than untrained civilians, took the field along with the reorganized remains of the old royal army.
I need hardly remind you of the series of disgraceful defeats which these raw and improvised hosts suffered, at the hands of much inferior numbers of Austrian and other allied troops in 1792–3. They were completely beaten, both in tactics, in manoeuvring, and in fire-discipline, by the well trained old battalions to whom they were opposed. Demoralized by many disasters, they were continually raising the cry of treason against their generals, and their complaints were taken most seriously by the Paris government, which arrested and guillotined one after another a large proportion of the unfortunate commanders-in-chief to whom the first armies of the republic had been entrusted.
The principle at the back of the mind of the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety seems to have been that generals fighting with the axe above their heads would at least be resolute and enterprising. If defeat meant impeachment and death they would be stimulated to desperate efforts to avoid it, and the famous “representatives en mission” were sent to the headquarters of every army to apply their personal stimulus to the unfortunate officers. As these detestable emissaries were, almost without exception, as ignorant of military affairs as they were self-important and autocratic, the results of their first efforts were simply to confuse and to drive to the verge of insanity the generals on whom they were inflicted.
One thing, however, the Jacobin government did accomplish. They pushed into the field reinforcements in such myriads that the armies of the allies were hopelessly outnumbered on every frontier. The first successes of the French armies in the north were won by brute force, by heaping double and triple numbers on to the enemy. And the new tactics of the Revolutionary army were evolved from a consciousness of superiority in this respect, a determination to swamp troops that manoeuvred better than themselves by hurling preponderant masses upon them, regardless of the loss that must necessarily be suffered. For they had inexhaustible reserves from the levy en masse behind them, while the bases of the allies were far off, and their trained men, when destroyed, could only be replaced slowly and with difficulty.
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