1Roberts

saurian, to linear formations. 2 In place of

the Spanish tercio, or the stilJ larger but
umn, they relied upon a multiplicity of
, and so disposed and armed as to permit
?On. Maurice used these new formations
lt achievement of Gustav Adolf to apply
lctions too. Moreover, he restored to cavhe caracole; he made it charge home with
Ir its effeet upon the impact of the weight
It of his experiments in gunfounding, he
md transportable field-piece designed to
ry and cavalry alike.
d they were essentially tactical in nature.
implication. They entailed, for instance, a
ne of the ordinary soldier. The soldier of
an individualist; and he (and his horse)
ed periodo The coming, first of firearms,
this state ofaffairs. The mercenary in the
ining and less skill: ifhe indined his pike
on the man in front ofhim, he had done
n. 3 So too with the musketeer: a certain
myas ninety-eight words of command to
le ranks, sufficed to execute the counterdemand of a musket that it should be
XlWman, schooled to be a dead shot at a
feet an instrument as an arquebus or a
le lance, was not an individual weapon at
the bow and the lance was precisely this,
deep formations, whether of horse
ge trained corps of officers, and required
run away with fifteen ranks behind you.
a real, and a lasting, revolution in these
be highly trained in manoeuvre they
olead them. The tactics of Gustav Adolf
ne, and long practice in the combination
had been well content if he mastered the
: sergeant-major ofMaurice's army must
, of intricate parade-ground evolutions,
ber ofbattle movements of more strictly
xercises had been designed primarily to
r were a method of inculcating Stoic vir:e the fundamental postulates of tactics.
lole vocabulary of military command,

The Military Revolution, Is6o-1660

15

transmitting it almost unaltered to our own day.7 Contemporaries found in the

new drill which he introduced a strange and powerful fascination: it was an 'invention', a 'science',8 indeed, a revelation; and a large literature appeared, designed
to explain to the aspiring soldier, in two pages of close print, the precise significance of the order 'right turn'-a service the more necessary, since it sometimes
meant, in fact, turn left. 9 And so officers became not merely leaders, but trainers,
of men; diligent practice in peacetime, and in winter, became essential; and drill,
for the first time in modern history, beeame the precondition ofmilitary success.
The decline in the size of the basic infantry unit from about three thousand to
about thirty meant that individual initiative was nowexpected at a far lower leve!
of command than before. The slowly-increasing technical complexity of firearms
was already beginning the process of forcing the soldier to be a primitive technician. If the revolution in drill implied a more absolute subordination of the soldier's will to the command of a superior, it implied also an intelligent subordination. Henceforth it might not be the soldier's business to think, but he would at
least be expected to possess a certain minimal capacity for thinking. The army
was no longer to be a brute mass, in the Swiss style, nor a collection of beUicose
individuals, in the feudal style; it was to be an articulated organism of which each
part responded to impulses from aboye. The demand for unanimity and precision of movement led naturalIy to the innovation of marching in step, which appears at some date impossible to establish about the middle of the seventeenth
century.IO And the principIe of mass-subordination, of the solution of the individual will in the will of the commander, received a last reinforcement with the
said Frederick the Great, 'there
slow adoption of uniforms: 'without
can be no discipline.' The pro<::ess was already observable in the 1620S; but it was
scarcely complete by the end of the century. The long delay is easily explained. As
long as body-armour remained general, uniforms were scarcely practical: and
even when armour was abandoned, the common use of the sword-resisting buffcoat prevented for a time a general change. 11 Moreover, the habit of using mercenaryarmies, and the notorious readiness of mercenaries to change sides, induced
men to prefer the 'token'--a kerchief round the arm, a green branch in the hatwhich could be discarded easily as the occasion for it passed. Nevertheless, by the
time Louvois \.vas wel! in the saddle it was sufficiently plain that the general adoption of uniforms would not long be de!ayed. 12 Their mass-psychological effect
will be readily appreciated by anyone who has ever worn one. The way was clear
fqr the armies of the nineteenth century: it remained only for the twentieth to
complete the process by repladng dolmans, busbies, eagle's wings, and all the
flaunting panache of Cossack and Hussar, by the fIat uniformity of fie!d-grey and
khaki.
The new emphasis on training and drill seemed to contemporaries to reinforce
their aIready established convictions about the best way to recruit an army. The
armies which carried through the military revolution-or upon which that revolution impinged-were nearly al! mercenary armies. It has indeed been argued,