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Title: The Battles that Changed History
Date of first publication: 1956
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook: Garden City,
NY: Dolphin, 1956 (paperback)
Author: Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956)
Date first posted: 4 January 2008
Date last updated: 4 January 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #56

This ebook was produced by: Andy Blumson and Gareth Jones





  THE BATTLES THAT CHANGED HISTORY


      By


    Fletcher Pratt

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    CONTENTS

    * *A Few Words In Introduction*

   1. *Arbela And The Man Who Would Be God*
   2. *The Red King At Beneventum*
   3. *Fighting In The Streets And The Future Of Order*
   4. *Kadisiyah And The Cost Of Conquest*
   5. *Las Navas De Tolosa And Why The Americas Were Conquered*
   6. *Jeanne D'Arc And The Non-Conquest Of England*
   7. *Vienna And The Failure To Complete The Crescent*
   8. *Leyden And The Foundation Of Sea Power*
   9. *Gustavus Adolphus And The End Of The Middle Ages*
  10. *Interlude; The Day Of Inadequate Decisions*
  11. *Frederick The Great And The Unacceptable Decision*
  12. *Quebec, Quiberon, America*
  13. *Why The American Revolution Succeeded*
  14. *Trafalgar, Austerlitz, And The Fall And Rise Of Empire*
  15. *The Things Decided At Vicksburg*
  16. *More Than Midway*

    * *Bibliography for Further Reading*



  THE BATTLES THAT CHANGED HISTORY

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    A Few Words In Introduction



Viewing a wide and accidented landscape, it is sometimes necessary to
half close the eyes to determine what are the most important features
involved. If one is to make any sense of history as a whole, the process
is somewhat similar. Putting in all details and qualifications adds up
to accuracy and is indispensable for analysis, but often leads to
analysis of minor features only and prevents the perception of the
really outstanding features, around whose sides cluster so liberal an
accumulation of minutiae.

The present volume is a half-closed-eye view of one aspect of Western
history. From such a viewpoint one of the most striking features of
Western European culture has been its ability to achieve decisive
results by military means. It may even be the critical factor, the
reason why that culture has encircled the world. Not that the Far East
and Africa have been lacking in great battles or great victories, but
their results have had less permanent effect on the stream of world
history. The conquests of China are a classic case; they resulted in
nothing but the absorption of the victors, and the resultant cultural
pattern was transmitted only to the narrowest range of peripheral areas.
The seepage through the Afghan passes into India would have taken place
without any accompaniment of military events, and more importantly, did
little either to change the basic patterns of Indian life or to extend
them to other areas. The genuinely decisive wars began when the peoples
of Western European culture (and those who acquired it by osmosis, like
the Arabs) discovered that it was possible to change the course of
history on the battlefield.

There will be ample room for disagreement as to the choice of the
battles named here as decisive, and it is therefore worth while
explaining the basis on which the choices were made. The first criterion
was that the war in which the battle took place must itself have decided
something, must really mark one of those turning points after which
things would been a good deal different if the decision had gone in the
other direction. It would be possible, for instance, to introduce a
battle or two from World War I, and on the technical side to discuss the
vast changes that conflict made in the ideology and technique of combat;
but the war itself decided nothing, and it had to be fought all over
again in twenty years. Moreover, certain decisions taken in battle have
turned out to be reversible. Tsushima is an instance; anyone writing
this book in 1930 might well have set it down as decisive, and someone
did; but the subsequent course of history has not allowed this to be the
case.

The second requirement in compilation was that the battle in question
represent a positive decision. History is full of negatives, of things
prevented from happening. Creasy's _Fifteen Decisive Battles_, the first
book in the series of which this is a member, includes Chalons and
Tours, fought only a small distance apart, both of which were preventive
decisions. But the special genius of Western European culture when it
takes up arms is that for really changing the course of history in
battle, not merely arresting a movement, but completely altering its
direction. The battles described all did this, regardless of whatever
subjective regrets one may have in the individual case.

It was also necessary to impose a limitation to keep this from being a
general military history of the Western world, approximately as long as
the Encyclopedia Britannica. This limitation was achieved by omitting
all those cases where the battle or campaign, although decisive, could
hardly have had any other result, given the forces engaged. There will
doubtless be some disagreement as to the choices on this ground also,
but the point may be illustrated by the case of the Battle of
Tenochtitlan, in which Cortes overthrew and the empire of the Aztecs. In
view of the small number of Spaniards engaged, there was certainly an
element of doubt about the outcome of the immediate operation, and
Tenochtitlan was preceded by a battle which was definitely a Spanish
defeat. But the European technical and logistic background was so
superior, with the seagoing ship, the horse, the sword, the musket,
armor, and knowledge of how to use all five, that even if Cortes' force
had been destroyed it would have been no more than an accident in the
tide of conquest.

The sweep of the Vikings over England had a similar inevitability, not
through superior technological equipment, but more efficient social
organization. Hastings decided nothing but the names of the Norman
families that were to rule England, and the change in basic system was
really very slight. In the reverse case the decaying Byzantine Empire
could have been preserved against the Turks only by a decisive victory
which never took place, and the Battle of Manzikert, generally taken as
the deathblow of that empire, merely confirmed an existing trend.

The battles listed here may thus be described as decisive in a
counterdeterminist sense. Not all of them reversed existing tendencies,
although this is a very common case among the battles chosen. It is
quite clear that the absorptive power of the ancient Persian Empire on
Greek civilization could have been neutralized only in battle; as it
was, after Alexander's victory at Arbela the absorption was turned in
the other direction.

The question then became one of the extent of the absorptive power of
the Greek system. It is often held that the severest test of the Roman
system came in the great struggle with Carthage, but I think that close
examination will not allow this to be the case. Carthage was a
tremendous opponent and she was served by one of the greatest geniuses
of military history, but the fundamental structure beneath the
Carthaginian effort was flawed. Defeats for Carthage were always
disasters; defeats for Rome only called forth more effort from the
incomparably strong and resilient polity that supported the effort. That
polity was menaced only once, at Beneventum, when it came in contact
with the Greek system that was the heritage of Alexander, and which
itself contained elements of permanence that the Carthaginian system
never had.

After this the development of the Roman Empire was inevitable; all the
battles, however otherwise decisive, were made up of predetermined
elements. There is no real point at which one can say that the basic
structure of Western civilization was altered by a single event, off the
battlefield or on it, for many generations. Even the failure of the
Roman effort to conquer Germany was in the cards; the Romans never
developed a real technique of forest warfare, and it would have taken a
decisive battle, which did not occur, to change matters. The Nike
sedition, the first true crisis, the point at which there might have
been a fundamental change, occurred late in the game (532 A.D.), and in
Constantinople, which had already become the seat of whatever Rome there
was left.

After this more than one deluge came down and beneath them the long
ground swell of the barbarian invasions or, more properly,
infiltrations. It was an age rich in changes and personalities, but not
one in which there were basic changes in the cultural pattern. One can
point to developments, but to no such abrupt shift of direction and
emphasis as that following Arbela. When the Battle of Kadisiyah did
effect a change, it was at a tangent to the flow and not a reversal; and
it is necessary to understand Kadisiyah to comprehend why the newly
risen power of Islam became a threat to the developing European system.
That threat was brought to a halt in Western Europe through Spain for
reasons explained in the text; it was the reversal of the
 threat in this
area and the manner of the reversal that counted.

Far more serious for the West was the Islamic drive up the Danube
valley, where the Turks had developed not only a better military system
than any Islamic predecessors, but a military-political system capable
of indefinite expansion. Vienna was a reversal of tendency; when the
tide rolled back down the Danube, there passed with it the last chance
that an exterior system would be imposed on the European, and the
decisions henceforth were within variations of that Western European
culture.

The farther we are from the peaks, the higher they must be to become
visible. After Vienna the line is easier to follow, the parts become
more integrated. It is possible that the story of the relief of Orleans
should have been placed in that later complex instead of where it is set
down for chronological reasons. But this would have involved pulling out
of position one of the key facts in connection with Vienna, that the
Turk was a greater danger to Charles V than the Protestant Reformation.

No apology is offered for construing the term "battle" in a rather loose
sense. Not all military decisions have hinged on the result of a single
clash of arms. The Vicksburg campaign is the best illustration; it was
thoroughly decisive, but none of the five battles can be said to have
done more than emphasize the character of the campaign itself. The
abiding interest is in the command decisions and the rush of Grant's
hurrying columns, so disposed that at every contact Union forces were in
the field in numbers that made victory a foregone conclusion.

If it seems that a considerable proportion of the battles cited deal
with the American scene, it can be replied that the emergence of the
United States as a world power is one of the great facts of history as
it stands today. The emergence of the Soviet Union is another; but the
decisions in favor of that entity were seldom made on the battlefield
(which, after all, does not determine everything), and the record in
many cases has been so deliberately befouled for propaganda purposes
that no honest account can be given.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    1. ARBELA AND THE MAN WHO WOULD BE GOD




      I

The Greeks had to go imperial to make it stand up.

This was something that Demosthenes, like many liberals insulated within
the circle of his own rightness, failed to understand. He was a genius
and he spoke in the name of an admirable ideal: the ideal of democracy,
that the state is the collective will of all its individual components,
achieving the united decision through free discussion. What he failed to
see was that even in Athens this remained an unattained ideal, a
precarious balance subject to destructive forces both from above and
below, from within and without.

The achievement of Athens in the arts, philosophy, every intellectual
pursuit, was magnificent and the democratic ideal was always present,
but she was no more of a real democracy than Renaissance Florence, where
there was also intellectual achievement. Democracy was in the hands of a
small body of citizen voters, an island in the vast sea of slaves,
metics, and unnaturalizable residents of exterior origin. There was a
fatal inconsistency in Demosthenes' doctrine; his banner might more
accurately have read, "Democracy--for Athenians only". Athens differed
from Sparta, frankly an oligarchy, only in cultivating things of the
spirit and in placing the fewer restrictions on the personal habits of
the individual. To be sure, this subtended enormous cultural
differences, but they were not political differences, and the important
decisions were made in the political field.

By its self-imposed limitations the Athenian democracy was incapable of
real cooperation with any other state. It could form alliances, but only
on a strictly temporary basis and in the face of imminent danger. It
could take a place in no organization larger than itself, for this would
involve the recognition of exteriors as equals, and the whole theory of
Athenian democracy was that no one else had reached or could reach its
own level. When Athens formed a league, it was the League of Delos, and
its members were subjects. They were admitted to the sacred company of
Greeks, the only civilized people in the world, but as second-class
Greeks, like the lumpish Boeotians or the soft Corinthians.

This was not merely provincialism; there was in it a certain pride of
attainment, and the general view, both at the time and since, has been
that the attainment was very real. The narrowed view of democracy,
however, did deprive Athens of one of the specific advantages of
democracy--its defense mechanism. A monarchy or dictatorship is in a
very happy position at the beginning of a war; it has unified command,
the coordination of all efforts to a single purpose, and unlimited
control of resources. But the experience of the ages has been that in
the long run these do not overmaster the resilience of democracy, its
ability to adopt on a temporary basis whatever variations from the norm
of practice may be needed for military efficiency, and the ease with
which ability makes its way to the top through the looser structure of a
democratic organization. In the closed circuit of Athenian democracy
ability did not find it easy to reach the top or to stay there, and
nobody thought of looking for it in a slave or a metic. Resilience was
wanting; Sparta, organized for total war, had more of it.

The defense mechanism is always necessary. That of the Greek city states
as a group grew out of the very thing that made their democracy
imperfect--the common recognition of all as Greeks, possessing the
_homonoia_, and having a common duty to help each other against the
great, menacing world of the barbarians. The mechanism worked reasonably
well for a time, thanks to several factors. One of these was
psychological: the devotion of every Greek to his own city, his own
group; his relation of mutual reliance within that circle to the
_homonoia_, and its relation to him. Two factors were technical: the
development of good iron armor, good iron spears and swords; and the
fact that these were made to a common pattern, permitting the employment
of groups of identically armed men as units. One was tactical: the fact
that out of the mutual reliance the Greeks had learned to march in step.

The last came to the fore at Marathon in 490BCE, and at Plataea in 479
it was decisive. In both battles the Asiatics, strong and courageous
men, made their fight in the manner tribesmen usually do, in little
knots of ten or a dozen, rushing one part of the line or another. At the
point of contact they were always outnumbered by the Greek infantry, all
in line, they were outreached by the long pikes, they could not get
through Greek armor when they did close and, with light targets that
would keep out an arrow but not much more and no body armor, had little
defense of their own. At Marathon the Persians were driven in rout; at
Plataea they were crushed, and even that cavalry which was the pride of
Persia could make nothing of the hedge of spears.

Yet Thermopylae, Salamis, Marathon, Plataea were not decisive battles.
In each case they decided nothing but that Greek civilization would not
be submerged this time, and they determined nothing but the fact that
the Greeks had developed a highly superior tactical technique. The Greek
victories were backed by nothing so permanent as the fact that the
conquest of Indians by whites in America was supported by a technology
which could produce muskets and swords. Persians as well as Greeks could
manufacture iron armor and eight-foot pikes and train men to use them;
the Persians were quite as capable as Greeks of learning how to march in
step, and some of them did when they found out what a good trick it was.

Even devotion was no monopoly; and in the century that followed Plataea
the Greek kind began sensibly to decline through the long series of
conflicts that collectively bear the name of Peloponnesian and
Corinthian wars. The citizen-solider turned out to save his home, but as
it began to require almost daily salvation over a period of years, he
became more of a solider and less of a citizen, and in the intervals of
peace that spaced with those of combat, he tended to find he had no home
and become a mercenary.

It is unnecessary to go into the complicated history of that century.
But the main line is clear: Greece was gradually succumbing to Persia,
not by force of arms--which had been defeated--but from the political
impact of a system which could digest small units into larger ones.
Under Xenophon, 10,000 Greeks marched through Asia Minor without
anyone's being able to stop them, but they were mercenaries in Persian
pay. When Sparta established her hegemony in the Greek world, it was
overthrown among the islands at the Battle of Cnidus in 394 by a Greek
fleet; but the fleet was paid from Persia and at least technically under
the command of a Persian satrap. In the "King's Peace" of 386 the Greek
cities of continental Asia Minor were turned over unconditionally to
Persia, and perpetual Persian interference in Greek affairs was
recognized as a right. Sparta, Thebes, and even Athens successively took
Persian money for the furtherance of projects which in the long run
could benefit only Persia.

That is, for all the formidable character of their armies and the skill
with which they were used, the Greeks had found no answer to the Persian
system of government, its way of life on high levels. They were becoming
adsorbed to it, and the process would become absorption as soon as Greek
internal conflicts had produced sufficient weakness. The collective
defense mechanism of the Greek culture was failing and had, indeed,
already failed.


      II

In 367 a younger son of
 the King of Macedon, named Philip, was sent to
Thebes as a hostage to guarantee the good behavior of his father's
turbulent little kingdom toward the Greek cities along the coast. Thebes
spoke for them because she was enjoying a brief period of leadership.
Four years before at Leuctra the Thebans had inflicted an utterly
astonishing defeat on one of those hitherto invincible Spartan armies,
killing the king who led it and ending Sparta's lordship in continental
Greece, as it had earlier been lost among the islands.

The whole air of Thebes at this date was electric, and there must have
been a good deal of discussion of how the Theban farmers had pulled off
their incredible feat. It was due to their general (and leading
statesman) Epaminondas, people said. Confronted by that Spartan army,
the very announcement of whose approach produced utter despondency in
his home city, he did not draw out the hoplite infantry in parallel
order, as the custom was. Instead he deployed the best of his men into a
massive column, fifty men deep, on the left wing, and flung it well
forward before the rest of the armies could close. This huge
battering-ram of men sheared through the crushed the Spartan right, and
all the Spartans not left on the ground were soon going somewhere else.

It was as simple as that to most of them. Probably the fifteen-year-old
boy from Macedon was one of the few who saw that it was not quite as
simple as that, that before the huge block of Thebans made contact there
had been some sharp cavalry fighting in the wings and the Theban horse,
which was always very good, had driven off the Spartan cavalry, which
was always very weak, then turned in on the flank of the enemy line just
as the Theban battering-ram struck it. It was the sort of observation
the fifteen-year-old boy would make; he belonged to a race whose princes
made war their only profession, partly through force of circumstances
and partly because they liked it.

The Greeks generally regarded Macedonians and not quite in the
_homonoia_; barbarians who had acquired a veneer of Greek culture and
spoke a Greek dialect. In fact, they were mainly Dorian Greeks who had
stopped off in the plains of the Haliacmon during the great southern
movement of the tribes and intermarried a little with the original
inhabitants. The intermarriage was nowhere near as extensive as that of
the southern-going Dorians with the Achaeans who preceded them, and the
Macedonians never did participate in the movement from the eighth
century to the fifth, in which the city states developed various forms
of aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy. Politically Macedon was
intensely conservative; it kept the old king-and-council system and the
people thought of themselves as Macedonians, not citizens of the towns
of Pella or Larissa. This was one of the things that made them un-Greek.

Philip's Theban visit lasted three years. He returned to Macedon, was
given a small and remote province to govern, and proceeded to grow up a
vivid, rip-roaring blade, with strong taste for women (he rather rapidly
accumulated six wives) and a still stronger one for wine. There is
something very like the Vikings about all the Macedonians, and most
especially about Philip; the hoopla attracted attention, and nobody
noticed that underneath it he was making some rather remarkable
alterations in the army of his province, or that no matter how much of a
hangover he had in the morning he was out drilling with the troops.

In 359, when Philip was twenty-three, his elder brother, King Perdiccas,
was killed in a fight with some Lyncestian highlanders, leaving an
infant son and a formidable harridan of a queen mother, who had been
regent before and wanted to be again. This sort of thing was not new in
Macedonian history, and all the surrounding hill tribes--Illyrians from
the west, Lyncestians and Paeonians from the north, Thracians from the
east--moved in to collect the usual plunder from the cities of the plain
while the royal family was weak. A Macedonian king--again like a
Viking--was supposed to be a military leader; the council of higher
nobles asked Philip to take the crown, a step doubtless encouraged by
his own previous arrangements.

He bought off the Paeonians and Thracians by money payments, drove out
the Lyncestians with the normal local levies, and secured the support of
Athens (temporarily dominant in Greece) by ceding any right he had to
their revolted colony of Amphipolis; the rest would have to wait. That
winter Philip opened up a gold mine at Mount Pangaeus to fill up his
treasury, a key event, then sent to south Greece and Greek Italy for
technical experts, and began organizing and drilling his army.

The completion of that last process took years, and owed something to
what he had learned from the Thebans and a good deal to what he heard
from people who were not Thebans; but the essential elements in it were
Philip's own, and the most essential of these were that it was the first
standing army in the world, based on universal service, and that it was
the first army in the world that did not take local levies just as they
came, but deliberately trained for and combined all arms.

The core of this new model was the phalanx of heavy infantry: they were
armed with a longsword and a spear, the sarissa, considerably longer
than the usual Greek model, between twelve and twenty feet, according to
which source you choose. They were trained to stand at three-foot
intervals, but could close up to receive cavalry. For mobility the Greek
hoplite's breastplate was discarded in favor of a leather jerkin, but he
kept the shield and helmet. They were divided into regiments of 1,536
men, and Philip gave this phalanx weight by arranging them sixteen men
deep instead of the eight or twelve of the normal hoplite formation.

One of the weaknesses of the pre-Philip block of infantry was its
flanks; to cover those of his phalanx Philip attached a corps of his own
invention, the hypaspists, later very famous as the "Silver Shields."
They were spear-and-sword men, but the spears were shorter and the
shields lighter than in the phalanx; a corps of maneuver, which could
extend or mass. For skirmishing and light work there were archers and
javelin men, still more mobile; the latter chiefly Agrianian tribesmen
from the hills, the former mostly hired out of Crete, which had a great
reputation as a nursery of bowmen.

But the heart of the army and its striking force was the heavy cavalry,
the _hetiaroi_, or "King's Companions." They had helmet, shield,
breastplate, and spear, but as stirrups were not yet invented the spear
was used for thrusting and not as a lance. Service in the Companions was
honorific, and most honorific of all was to be a member of the squadron
of 250, which always rode on the extreme right, the post of greatest
danger, and was known as the Agema, or "King's Own." Finally Philip had
heard that among the Greek cities of Italy they had machines that would
batter down the brick and timber walls that surrounded most cities; he
imported engineers from that area and had them set up a mobile siege
train, the first in history.

All these formations were kept with the colors until they had very
thoroughly learned their dill, making route marches of thirty-five miles
a day with full kit. By the spring of 358 the king had 10,000 trained
infantry and 600 of the Companion cavalry and turned on the hill tribes
which had been such a nuisance. The Paeonians collapsed after one not
very hard fight; the Illyrians were strong enough to stand a battle in
the formal Greek style, and Philip showed them something new in military
tactics. He held his left refused while the hypaspists and phalanx
closed on center and right, and when a satisfactory stage of front line
confusion had been produced, charged on his left with the Companion
cavalry and nearly wiped out the enemy.

After this the hill peoples were quiet and furnished a good many of the
recruits which made up the growing body of the national army, a process
which simultaneously assisted the unification of Macedon, since the men
were not brigaded in the usual way according to districts and races, but
formed a unified force. There were some incidents with various city
states (Philip took Amphipolis by storm, for instance, to the
indignation of Athens), but nothing really important for another six
years, during which the king matured his army and his project, which was
nothing less than an attack on the huge empire of Persia. This attack he
did not intend to make merely as King of Macedon, but as commanding
general for a league of all the Greek states. In fine, he had discerned
what Demosthenes missed, that the Greek cultural system must ultimately
be rooted out by the Persian if the former remained so divided and the
latter so extensive and wealthy. It is somewhat more than probable that
Philip intended no more than setting up a solid state in the area
populated by Greeks; that he was not looking for conquest, but coexistence.

What Demosthenes did not miss was the implications of the early steps in
this process, the drive toward the unification of Greece. To his mind
this involved the suppression of democracy (including the privilege of
each democratic city to go to war with any other). When, by a carefully
arranged request, Philip intervened in one of these local wars and came
out of it as official head of the confederation of Thessaly, the orator
delivered his First Phillipic. He kept on delivering them as long as he
lasted.

At this point it is necessary to note that although Philip was a
diplomatic liar on a large scale, a lecher, and a drunken viking, his
civil administration was quite as sharp as his military. He gave good
government. The gold mines he had opened allowed him to pay for
everything on the nail; there was justice in his courts and people were
prosperous
 under his administration. What the hell was the use of
democracy when you lived better under Philip? There was thus a strong
pro-Philip party in most cities and Demosthenes had an uphill job. It is
unnecessary to trace all the steps in the complicated double dance that
followed, but in 338 the allied armies of Athens, Thebes, and some of
the lesser cities met that of Macedon at Chaeronea. Thebes was wiped out
and Athens terribly crippled.

To the surprise of the defeated, the conqueror, instead of going on for
the expected exations and proscriptions, called a conference of the
powers of Greece at Corinth, even including Athens and Thebes. He
presided at that conference and, recognizing that Greeks thought with
their tongues, let them talk as long as they pleased. The issue was a
general agreement prohibiting wars within Greece and naming Philip as
the Captain-General of a League of Corinth to enforce. Since such a
league must have a purpose beyond the mere police function, there was
implied in its statute the idea that the fundamental reason for the
League was a war of revenge on Persia for the aggressions begun by
military means 150 years before and continued by other devices since.
This idea was of no small help to pro-Macedonian parties; no concept
could have been more popular than a union of the _homonoia_ against the
great power which did not recognize it.


      III

In 357 Philip married, as his seventh wife, an Epirote princess named
Olympias, whom he had met at Samothrace during the celebration of the
mysteries there. She was an Orphic priestess and a bacchanal, who
claimed descent from Achilles, indulged in strange rites and a
friendship for snakes. In a sense she became his only wife, a woman who
could keep step with him. The night the marriage was consummated she
dreamed that thunderbolts fell on her womb, and in due time was
delivered of a son named Alexander.

Alexander's earliest tutor was a man of extraordinary strictness, who
made him march half the night to gain an appetite for breakfast and eat
a light breakfast to have an appetite for dinner. When passed beyond the
grammar school age, Alexander was turned over to Aristotle. The training
was both philosophical and military; he early developed such strength,
such address, such extraordinary good looks, such quickness of
intelligence that in view of his mother's close connection with
mysterious deities tales began to circulate that he might be of no human
origin. As he grew up at the court he drank to keep the others company,
but not very much. He exhibited an extraordinary continence and walked
out of the room with a sneer when his father caused a courtesan to be
placed in his bed; he did not care for games. At the age of eighteen he
commanded the Companion cavalry when it delivered the decisive charge at
Chaeronea. When he was twenty, and an advanced corps under the old
marshal, Parmenio, had already secured a beachhead at the Dardanelles
for the attack on Persia, Philip was assassinated and Alexander became
King of Macedon.

The leading Greek cities of the opposition, Athens and Thebes, expressed
a delight over the death of the monster which quickly cooled when
Alexander came through the passes at the head of his army. He was
elected Captain-General of the League in his father's room, and turned
back to northern Macedon, where, to secure his base before attempting
the great adventure against Persia, he conducted two whirlwind campaigns
to the Danube and in Illyria. These campaigns are ill-documented, but
they were key events. It was not only that Alexander broke the tribes so
thoroughly that they gave no more trouble for a generation, but the
manner in which he did it. He marched the men harder than Philip ever
had; he was in the middle of every battle, and always with the arm with
which he intended to strike the decisive blow--once with the phalanx,
once with the Companions, once with the hypaspists, and once even with
the light-armed javelin men. That is, he had a new concept of tactics.
His maneuvers were astonishing and somewhat outrageous to the old
officers who had served with Philip for twenty years; but they had to
admit that everything came off as planned, and there developed a bond of
confidence between the youthful commander and his army.

While Alexander was on this expedition, Darius III Codomannus, who had
become King of Persia and was by no means ignorant of what the
Macedonians intended, tried the old infallible trick of subsidizing the
Greeks to fight each other. Sparta, not a member of the Corinthian
League, took his money; so did Demosthenes for Athens, though the city
officially refused; probably Thebes collected also. A story was spread
that Alexander had been killed in the north and witnesses were produced
to prove it. Thebes rose and attacked the Macedonian garrison in its
citadel; Athens was discussing doing something when Alexander and his
army dropped out of the clouds, stormed Thebes, killed 6,000 of its
people in street fighting, and ordered the place leveled to the ground.
Athens he treated with the greatest consideration, not only from the
emotional reason that he regarded her as the center of Greek culture,
but also for the practical one that she had a powerful fleet. He usually
had two reasons for doing things.

The Greek base was now secured. In the winter of 335, Alexander went to
the Straits, recalled Parmenio from the beachhead, and began his own
preparations for the invasion. It is quite certain that from the
beginning he had discarded his father's concept of a war of limited
objectives for the preservation of Greece and was aiming at nothing less
than the conquest of the Persian Empire and the whole system supporting
it. He expected to be away from Greece for a long time; in charge of
Macedonian-Greek affairs he left the other marshal, Antipater, with
military authority and 9,000 Macedonian troops. Olympias, the queen
mother, theoretically had charge of civil affairs, although the
authority of the two somewhat overlapped. They hated each other, and
could be counted on to achieve some sort of dynamic balance.

The invading force consisted of 30,000 infantry and 5,000 horse. In
addition to the Macedonian regular army it included a strong contingent
of League troops, normal Greek hoplites, and a body of cavalry from
Thessaly, second in value only to the Companions. In all previous wars
the central idea had been to find the enemy field army, beat it, and
then take his cities; Alexander brought to his task something quite as
novel as Philip's combination of arms--a master strategic plan. For a
twenty-one-year-old who conducted his movements with a celerity
indicating impatience it was a distinctly surprising plan: to clear out
the whole west coast of Asia and, by depriving the fleets serving Persia
of their bases, to prevent any counteroffensive against his lines of
communication or home areas. Alexander was perfectly aware of the
looseness of the bonds produced by the Persian principle of local
autonomy, the fact that the provinces would change allegiance easily in
the presence of force, and the fact that it would take time for Darius
to assemble an army to deal with him.

He set out, then, down the coast of Asia Minor; and at the river
Granicus, a stream with steep banks, met the first opposition in the
form of 20,000 Asiatic horse and 20,000 Greek mercenary infantry
commanded by Memnon of Rhodes, general for Persia in those parts. Memnon
made the mistake of trying to hold the bank with his cavalry while the
Greek spearmen were in the rear. Alexander broke the horse by a charge
of the Companions, the phalanx gained the crossing and cut the
mercenaries to pieces. Not enough of the Persians were left to keep most
of Phrygia from falling under the king's control. Now he moved south
through Asia Minor, taking cities, with a turn back to Gordium and
Angora in the central plateau, then moved south through the mountains to
the coast of Lycia.

Darius had meanwhile gathered an army of several times the Macedonian
numbers and, well advised at least in strategy, suddenly brought it
through the passes onto Alexander's rear in the plain of Issue, the date
being October 333. The Persians were so cramped between hill and sea
that their numbers did them no good; Darius' army was reduced to
fragments in a battle of hard Macedonian charges, and what was left of
it dissolved, while Alexander moved on down the coast. Of the cities
only Tyre held out; it took an eight-month siege to reduce the place,
but when he had it Alexander also had command of all the Phoenician
fleets and the waters of the eastern Mediterranean.

Gaza also stood a siege, but Egypt made hardly any resistance, and
Alexander rolled through it to visit the famous oracle of Zeus-Ammon at
the oasis of Siwa. This was a key event; the priest on duty greeted him
as the son of Zeus without previous recognition and they went in
together to visit the altar of the god, where Alexander received
revelations he never afterward discussed. But from this time onward the
story of his quasi-divine origin became more and more firmly
established. There was nothing unreasonable about this to the age;
everyone, including probably Alexander himself, believed in his descent
from Achilles on his mother's side and from Heracles on his father's.
Also he was coming into frequent contact with Orientals, among whom
divine kingship was a rooted and normal institution; a king was not a
king at all unless he had some special connection with the gods, even in
Israel. And in Greece royal divinity had very special uses; the
antimonarchial tradition among the city states was very strong and had
been one of the main reasons why it was possible to arouse opposition to
Philip. But it became quite a different matter if, instead of dealing
with a king, you were being ordered about by a demigod.

At
 Memphis, Alexander made a governmental reorganization that was to
become a pattern with him, placing the civil administration in the hands
of local talent, to rule according to traditional usages, and the
military administration and garrison commands in the hands of Macedonian
officers. It was now the spring of 331; reinforcements from Greece,
mainly mercenaries, met the army at Memphis and Alexander turned back
northward, meeting his fleet at Tyre and sending a strong squadron back
to Greece to keep an eye on the Spartans. He struck inland through
Damascus, crossed the Euphrates at Thapsacus, and made for the upper
waters of the Tigris, which was spanned north of the ruins of Nineveh,
whereupon the Macedonians moved down the left bank of the river.
Alexander's intelligence organization, like all his subsidiary services,
was good; he had learned that Darius was approaching with all the men he
could gather, intending to fight in the open plain east of the Tigris;
and the invader meant to oblige.


      IV

Darius Codomannus does not seem to have been much of a man of war
himself, but he had a certain talent as an employer of experts, and
under their advice he had made the best possible use of the vast
potential of the empire. The whole two years of Alexander's campaign
along the eastern Mediterranean had been spent in assembling a vast
host--Bedouins from the Red Sea, Armenians, Parthians, Hyrcanians, even
Pathans from distant India, in addition to the home forces. The size of
that army is given by several ancient authors as a million men, which is
certainly an overestimate meaning a "very large number," but it cannot
have been smaller than the least figure given, which is 45,000 cavalry
and 200,000 infantry, against the 40,000 infantry and 7,000 horse
Alexander now had.

The Persian advanced base was established at Arbela, from which Darius
moved thirty-five miles west to where an already extensive plain was
rendered still more suitably for his operations by the leveling of
hummocks and the removal of all obstacles. He had two hundred
scythe-chariots, weapons with which the Macedonians were totally
unfamiliar and which could be very formidable. These he placed in his
first line, with the idea of disorganizing the phalanx. Midway along
that line and directly in front of Darius' own post were stationed
fifteen war elephants from the Indus. It was as certain as anything
could be that Alexander would strike for the Persian king, as he had at
Issus, and that he would be leading the Companion cavalry; the elephants
were supposed to break up this formation.

An accurate picture of the rest of Darius' formation has come down from
the fact that his order of battle was later captured. On the left, under
the eastern satrap Bessus, one of the employed experts, there were
thrown well forward the Bactrian and Scythian armored horse archers;
next to them a big block of the Persian royal horse guard. Out on the
extreme right, under another expert, named Mazaeus, were the Armenian
and Cappadocian heavy cavalry. In the center of the second line was a
solid formation of Persian foot spearmen, the "Kinsmen," trained like
Greeks and with golden apples on the hilts of their spears; on either
flank they were supported by formations of Greek mercenaries, the only
troops who could be expected to meet the phalanx on foot, but who would
(it was hoped) encounter it after it had been shaken by the
scythe-chariots in front and charges of the cavalry into its wings. Left
of this solid infantry center were more cavalry formations, Bactrians
and Persians; right of it, still more cavalry, Persians, Indians,
Hyrcanians, Parthians, mostly of the steppe variety. Behind, marshaled
according to their tribes, whose names do not matter, were the various
infantry levies, mostly ill-armed, mostly ill-led, not even speaking
each other's languages, present rather to emphasize the power and glory
of the Great King than for any serious service expected of them.

This was the array, expecting immediate attack, that Alexander saw when
he rode forward on the afternoon of September 30 with a picked body of
cavalry. Instead of attacking he went into camp to rest his men after a
day's march, to think and to conduct certain incantations after the
manner he had been taught by the priests of Egypt. When this private
mumbling was over, Parmenio, the old marshal, entered the royal tent to
suggest that a night attack would throw so huge a host as the Persian
into disorder. Alexander refused, with the recorded reason, "I will not
steal a victory." But as with many of his high-flown phrases this
indubitably concealed his perfectly rational appreciation that whatever
advantages Macedon had lay in discipline and timing, and these would be
lost in a night attack. A little more puzzling is that neither high
commander thought about operating against his opponent's communications;
the logistics of Darius' big army must have been very difficult, and
those of Alexander, so far from his base, precarious. Probably the
explanation is that both had a supply problem that could be solved only
by victorious battle.

In the morning Alexander drew out his army in an order based on what he
had seen the afternoon before, quite confident that the Persian force
was too cumbersome for any real alteration. The whole of his right wing
consisted of the Companion cavalry, with half the Agrianians, archers,
and javelin men across the front as a protection against the elephants
and scythe-chariots. Left of the Companions were posted the hypaspists;
then the phalanx in its solid formation, finally the cavalry of Greece,
Thessaly, and Pharsalia. Old Parmenion was in charge of this wing.

The whole line was so short that although Alexander, with the extreme
right wing of the Companions, was nearly opposite Darius, the Macedonian
left did not even reach out as far as the Persian right. There was thus
a huge overlap on both wings, greatest on the Macedonian right, and
Alexander could confidently expect to be flanked on both. Against this
he provided by setting up two flying wings, for the moment stations
behind the central line of battle. On the right, under an officer named
Philotas, were the remainder of the light troops, with a body of light
cavalry under Aretes, some Greek mercenary cavalry, and a regiment of
veteran mercenary infantry for stiffening. On the left, under Craterus,
were formations of Odryssian and Greek allied cavalry, with another
regiment of mercenaries and some Thracian infantry. Both these flying
wings were very flexible and were instructed to face as occasion
dictated, take in the flank any forces attempting the flank of the main
battle line, or wheel right around against anything coming from the
rear. In charge of the entrenched camp were left some Thracian infantry,
hillmen who often swung two swords, not well drilled in precision
movements. Alexander's order of battle is very important; it explains
everything that happened.

Instead of moving straight forward Alexander obliqued to his right, the
Persian left, the heavy cavalry under his own hand moving fastest.
Darius, perceiving that they were reaching the limits of the cleared
ground where the scythe-chariots would be effective, ordered the cavalry
of his left to halt this movement. Alexander replied by putting in the
Greek mercenary cavalry of Philotas' command; they were driven back, but
as the light cavalry of Aretes followed them, Bessus turned loose the
Bactrian and Scythian horse. There was a violent cavalry fight,
involving some of the Companions, in dust that rose so thick it was hard
to see anything. The Bactrians had better armor, and for a time the
Macedonian losses were heavy; but Alexander's men were trained to give
hard, repeated shocks in tight squadrons while the Asiatics fought in a
confused mass. They could make nothing whatever of the infantry support
on this wind and gradually were driven back.

While this was going on, Darius launched his scythe-chariots against the
phalanx, which had been gradually carried out in front of the Companion
cavalry by its own continued rightward slant and Alexander's
semi-retreat. The light-armed in front shot down the charioteers, flung
javelins into horses, and raced along cutting traces and seizing
bridles; the few chariots that got away from this swarm of wasps could
do nothing but run down the lanes between the taxes of the phalanx to
the rear, where they were captured by grooms.

Now the Persian cavalry on the left of Darius' infantry center left its
place, with or without orders, to follow Bessus' Bactrians and Scythians
around the Macedonian right wing. Alexander ordered Aretes with the
light cavalry, recovered from its original shock, to attack them in
flank as they did so; he himself formed the Companions into a huge wedge
and, swinging out around the right wing of the phalanx, drove them in
through the huge gap left by the Persian cavalry, straight toward the
Persian infantry center, where Darius stood conspicuous in his high
chariot. Both the Companions and the solid ranks of the phalanx took the
Greek mercenaries and the apple-bearers at the oblique, and the Persian
forces crumpled. Darius' charioteer was killed by his side; he leaped
onto a fast horse and fled from the field.

Alexander was just driving the hypaspists into the confused mass of
tribal infantry in the rear of Darius' center and making preparations
for a pursuit when word reached him that Parmenio and Craterus of the
left were in trouble. It was due to the Persian, Indian, and steppe
cavalry of the enemy right wing, which launched itself at, and all
around, the flying left wing of Craterus, well behind the advancing
phalanx. Parmenio had too few mounted men to do more than barely hold
head to them on his front; they lapped around his left and through the
gap that had unavoidably opened between him
 and the phalanx. Many of
them made for the baggage camp; Parmenio was surrounded by the rest.

However, one taxis of the phalanx, not yet engaged in the center, faced
around, formed line with Parmenio's infantry, and fell on the Persians
and Indians at the baggage camp from the rear. They could not stand that
and all began to drift back just as Alexander fell on their rear with
the Companions. Now came the most desperate fighting of the day and
Alexander lost sixty of his top 200 Companions before the last fighting
formations of the enemy were cut to pieces and utterly routed. Before he
camped that night, the army had made a forced march of thirty-five miles
in pursuit of the man who was now ex-King of Persia.


      V

The decisiveness of Arbela lay not in the fact that it was achieved, but
in what Alexander did with it. It was merely on the lowest plane of
history that he demolished the menace to Greek culture in the battle and
in the campaigns that followed, carrying him beyond the Oxus and to the
Indus. It was merely a military event that he had demonstrated that an
an army disciplined and armed as his could go anywhere and do anything,
that the specific defense mechanism of civilization is the cooperative
and intelligent use of means open for anyone to use.

He did much more, and it was by virtue of his background and
constitution that he did that much more. Even from Aristotle he had
learned the Greeks were very superior creatures and barbarians hardly
human. He went beyond that "and preferred to divide men into good and
bad without regard to race" <endnote 1> . His crowning act was that
marriage of 7,000 of his Macedonians to as many Persian women according
to Persian rites, at Babylon, following his immense journeys and
campaignings. The concept was that the _homonoia_, "the unity in
concord," should not apply to the relations between Greek and Greek
alone, but those between man and man of any race. His own career hardly
allowed him any other process of thinking; the Greeks often denied him
the name of Greek and he was always conscious of some Illyrian blood;
yet in the interest of Greek culture he had overthrown the enemies of
Greece and won the empire of all the world that mattered. Zeus-Ammon was
the sun god; all were entitled to his radiance, and Alexander conceived
it his duty to bring it to all.

This concept leads straight to the Pauline "neither Greek nor Jew,
circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." He
spread that concept, with highly practical means of enforcing it and
bringing to its support the intelligence of Greece and the arms of
Macedon. If his own country ceased to be a great power in the subsequent
age, it was chiefly because the best brains in it--and many of those in
Greece, for that matter--were siphoned off into the business of
Hellenizing the world. Says Ulrich Wilcken, the biographer, "The whole
subsequent course of history, the political, economic and cultural life
of after times, cannot be understood apart from the career of Alexander."

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    2. THE RED KING AT BENEVENTUM




      I

The ambassador from the northern tribes was a man of the most absurd
dignity, with a hook nose and a robe cut too long for him. His Greek was
so bad as to be comic, and the people in the agora laughed as he
demanded reparations for the four ships their mob had destroyed. They
all knew--their orators had told them--that those four ships had no
right in their harbor and the mob had merely executed an unofficial act
of justice according to law. They laughed, then, and pelted the
ambassador with clods. After a while he ceased trying to reason with
them, held up the dirtied toga, made some remark in his incorrect Greek
to the effect that it would take a good deal to wash it clean, and
stalked out.

After he had left, it occured to the city fathers that those tribesmen
were very numerous and could make a good deal of trouble for farmers in
the back country. They decided to send an embassy across the Adriatic to
ask King Pyrrhus of Epirus to help them in the name of _homonoia_, the
union of all Greeks against all barbarians, promising him that he could
keep anything he could take from the tribesmen. This was precisely the
opportunity for which King Pyrrhus had been waiting. He was now nearly
forty and all his life had been something of an adventurer, beginning
with the time when, as an infant, he had been carried by night and cloud
to take refuge with the Illyrians from those who had usurped his
father's throne. Grown to young manhood, he took part as a free-lance in
that great battle of Ipsus, where it was decided that the heritage of
Alexander should not remain one, but be split into separate kingdoms. He
chose the wrong side, and was carried away a hostage to Egypt.

There he set his cap at Berenice, one of the king's wives, and made such
an impression on that forceful woman that she gave him her daughter in
marriage and later saw to it that Pyrrhus was furnished with money
enough to raise an army and was sent back to his own land. This was also
good politics, since King Ptolemy of Egypt was engaged in a struggle
with the dynasty that had inherited Macedon, and anything that would
weaken the old kingdom was pleasant to him.

Pyrrhus was a collateral relative of the great Alexander, and himself a
descendant of Achilles, as proved by the red hair he shared with the son
of that Homeric hero. In Epirus he quickly proved himself every bit the
man Ptolemy had hoped. Very quickly he raised an army on the Macedonian
border and took half of Macedon, which recognized his people as at least
as much Greek as themselves. His military skill was prodigious; like
Alexander, he was a man who enchanted all hearts, and like Philip, he
gave sound administration and honest justice. It was said of his race,
the Aecides, that they were more war-strong than wisdom-strong, but in
every respect he belied the judgment.

Not that he lacked being war-strong. In his army he had forged an
instrument at least equal to that of Philip of Macedon, and over Philip
he had the advantage of being in friendly relations with Seleucus
Nicator, to whom had fallen the Great East on the breakup of the
Alexandrian Empire, and that monarch had furnished him with a supply of
elephants, one of the most formidable weapons yet discovered. In India
they had demonstrated that they could put any cavalry to flight, even
Alexander's.

The only trouble was that Pyrrhus, with an ambition as boundless as that
of Alexander and a perfectly attuned military instrument, had nowhere to
go. The only prospect of war was against another Hellenistic kingdom
nearly as well equipped as his own. Experience showed that conquest in
this direction would provoke a general alliance against him; it was the
custom of these states to pull down the strongest. This was the reason
why the appeal from Tarentum, saying she was menaced by barbarian
tribes, was so very pleasant. In the barbarian West there ought to be
opportunities as wide as Alexander had found in the barbarian East; and
the Red King of Epirus responded at once.

In the spring of 280 BCE he arrived at Tarentum through a storm so
violent that it blew some of his ships all the way to Libya. The oracle
of Apollo at Delphi had promised him a victory. Cineas, his orator,
philosopher, and man of business, had gone on ahead with 3,000 men, and
was ready with a report. As to the people of Tarentum, it was not too
favorable. They might as well have been Corinthians; luxurious,
indolent, and unstable, inclined toward democratic government. In their
favor it could be said that they had brought the city of Thurii into
alliance; as this place lay on the opposite shore of the Tarentine Gulf,
it afforded an excellent base for menacing the rear of the barbarian
bands, who were working eastward along the shore.

As to the tribesmen, Cineas said they were reported quite skilled
fighters. They had formed one of those confederations which so readily
assemble and so readily dissolve among barbarians, and had lately been
engaged in war with the Samnites, a strong hill people of the central
peninsula, who would probably furnish some auxiliaries. Pyrrhus approved
the sending of ambassadors to these Samnites and sat down to wait for
the rest of the troops, only 2,000 with two elephants having come with him.

When all were arrived he had 20,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry, 2,000
archers, 500 slingers, and 20 elephants. The king immediately closed the
walks and places of public exercise and prohibited all festivities and
drinking parties as unseasonable during a war. This did not endear him
to the Tarentines, but they turned out to drill under the eyes of his
officers and furnished a contingent of hoplites to the army, probably
few more than enough to balance the garrison he left in the citadel.

These arrangements may be conceived as taking a couple of months. When
they were complete, Pyrrhus marched out from the town along the
Tarentine Gulf with an army that, except for the elephants, was almost a
carbon copy of the one Alexander had taken to Asia. Like the Macedonian
army, that of Pyrrhus had a solid core of phalangites, thoroughly
trained, with hypaspists to link with the cavalry in the wings. His
personal bodyguard was less numerous than the Companions, the Epirotes
not being so much a horse-riding people, but he had adopted Alexander's
practice of brevetting to this corps d'elite the best men he could find
anywhere, regardless of origin, and it would grow. Meanwhile the bulk of
his horse were Thessalians, very good men. Cineas had arranged with some
of the other cities of Italian Greece to send allied contingents of
hoplites, but these hardly seemed necessary in dealing with a barbarian
force that was reported no greater than his own.

The
 Red King moved forward at once, then, and, as common courtesy
demanded, sent on ahead a herald to offer to arbitrate between Tarentum
and the tribesmen. This man presently returned with the proud reply that
they neither accepted him as an arbitrator nor feared him as an enemy.
Pyrrhus pushed on, and near Heraclea at the river Liris camped at the
top of a hill and rode forward to examine the camp of the tribesmen on
the opposite slope.

He was looking at a Roman consular army.


      II

From where he stood, the king could see the neatly palisaded wall of the
Roman camp, the guards posted all in order, the muscular small men
filing down to the river for water, with good helmets and mail of iron
bands. He turned to one of his generals and friends. "This order of the
barbarians is not at all barbarian in character."

He did not have a chance to say much more. No sooner had the Romans
sighted his approach than they poured out of their camp and down to the
fords, covered with a foam of light-armed. This was an impudence not to
be borne, and moreover, for reasons customary and honorific rather than
tactical, it was considered at the time desirable to fight on the far
slope of a stream after having crossed, as Alexander had done at the
Granicus. Pyrrhus dispatched Megacles to draw up and bring on the
phalanx, while he himself led the cavalry in a charge to halt this
audacious advance.

Instantly he found himself in the fight of his life. The Roman cavalry
were not as numerous as he expected, but they were much better fighters
than they had any right to be, and behind them he came up against the
legionary soldiers, something utterly new in Greek experience. They had
big cylinder shields, which they locked together from man to man against
attack, short spears, and heavy shortswords. They were formed in little
blocks, the maniples, which lined up checkerboardwise instead of in the
solid Greek formations, and these maniples displayed an amazing
mobility. Attack one of them in the flank and you were promptly flanked
by another. Pyrrhus' horse was killed under him, his Companions were
rudely thrown back, and he barely reached the shelter of the phalanx
before the two main lines came in contact.

The shock was terrific, and as the cavalry filed into the wings, there
followed one of the hardest fights of history. The phalanx found it had
to tighten up in close order; the gaps in the Roman checkerboard
formation tended to split it apart as it advanced into the open spaces,
while the Roman soliders seeped into every interstice, stabbing with
their shortswords and using the upper edges of their big shields under
the chins of their adversaries. The Romans could not gain against the
solid ranks of the phalanx, but neither could it do more than defend
itself. Seven times the lines separated and clashed together again. The
casualties were terrific; the Roman line, though thinner, was longer
than that of Pyrrhus, the hypaspists on the flanks were definitely
outmarched, Megacles was killed, and the phalanx itself began to shake
when Pyrrhus at last succeeded in bringing the slow-moving elephants
around from the rear against the cavalry of the Roman right wing.

No Roman had seen or heard of these huge beasts before, and the horses,
as horses always, could not bear them. The Roman cavalry fled and in its
flight broke up the legionary formations, Pyrrhus put in the Thessalian
horse against the broken line and the battle was won.

It was not an Alexandrian victory. The Romans had lost 7,000 killed and
2,000 prisoners, but Pyrrhus had lost 4,000 men in killed alone, 16
percent of his total force--a whole forest had to be cut down to burn
the dead--and there could be no pursuit. The Romans held their fords and
their camp until they were ready to go. On a precedent established by
Alexander it had become the custom among the Hellenistic monarchies to
offer prisoners service with their captor, and Pyrrhus made the usual
offer. To his surprise, it was unanimously refused; he did not get a man.

On top of the battle itself this should have given him a sense that he
was dealing with some very peculiar phenomena indeed, and there is
evidence that to a certain extent it did, but he continued to apply the
accepted formulae. In view of the fact that all the Greek cities of
south Italy now enthusiastically joined him, he had every reason for
doing so. The way to break up a confederation of barbarians is to strike
at its nexus, as Alexander had in Bactria and again in India; the Red
King marched straight on Rome.

He received another surprise; the confederation showed no signs of
dissolution. Neapolis and Capua refused him admittance, the local people
sniped his campfires with arrows from the woods at night, and as he
neared the city he found it garrisoned by another consular army, larger
than the one he had beaten. The Romans even found resources to reinforce
their retreating field force by two additional legions.

Barbarians with such a military organization could clearly be quite as
useful allies as the Thessalians. Moreover, Pyrrhus already had offers
that would take him into fabulously rich Sicily, where he could make
gains far beyond what he might get out of these tough hillmen. He sent
Cineas to Rome with presents for the leading ladies and political
personages and an offer of peace and friendship. He would release his
prisoners; the Romans were to pledge autonomy and liberty to the Greek
cities, let the Samnites alone in the future and, at least by
implication, withdraw the colonies they had placed at Luceria and
Venusia in south Italy. That is, there was to be an alliance and a
delimitation of boundaries, with the south and west of the Mediterranean
open for the empire of Pyrrhus.

The experience of Cineas in Rome, the first nonhostile impact of two
utterly different civilizations, has been justly celebrated. The
orator's presents were declined with dignity, but he was heard with
respect, and voices were raised in the Senate for the acceptance of his
offer. At this moment there was led into the hall the aged Appius
Claudius, blind and very patrician, who made a fighting speech, the
first one we have of Roman record. It was his misfortune, he said, that
he was not deaf as well as blind before he heard Romans propose such
things; did they not realize that peace with Pyrrhus after a defeat
would be an invitation to other invaders from the dynasts, world without
end? Rome should make no peace with anyone on her soil.

He convinced them; Cineas was sent back to report that the Romans had
already enlisted more new troops than they had lost in the battle. They
were not Roman citizens alone, but men from the allies all over central
Italy; this business was going to be like fighting the Lernaean hydra,
and the Romans had two new generals, P. Sulpicius and Decius Mus, who
might be good.

Pyrrhus seems not to have been too deeply impressed. After all, Heracles
had found a means of dealing with the hydra, and he himself was
conscious of something close to military genius; he had proved it. His
direct march on Rome would have been perfectly correct if the
assumptions underlying it were true. Now he adopted a more careful
strategic approach, retiring to his widespread base in southern Italy,
where he picked up important allied contingents, then moved north along
the Adriatic coast, with the anti-Roman southern Samnites protecting his
communications. Well north of Rome, where he expected to pull in more
anti-Roman groups and establish a forward base for direct operations
against the city, he turned inland to pass the spine of the Apennines . . .

And encountered a double consular army, about 40,000 men, equal to his
own strength, even including the allies he had gathered. There were as
many pro-Romans as anti-Romans in those hills, and the consuls had
excellent intelligence. The place they chose to stop Pyrrhus was at
Asculum, on the Aufidus River, an area rough and wooded, with marshes
along the banks of the stream to hinder the operations of Pyrrhus'
cavalry and elephants. The Romans got across the stream to set up a
parallel order battle with their flanks on marshes, and in April 278 the
contest was engaged.

Pyrrhus placed his phalanx in the center and, to avoid the outflanking
that had almost ruined him at Heraclea, prolonged its line in both
directions with hoplites from the Greek cities and Samnites in
semi-manipular formation. The two armies fought a set piece of a battle,
with neither side able to make much impression on the other, the usual
thing in ancient battles unless one side began to break. At night they
drew off by a kind of mutual agreement. At this point it occurred to the
Red King that one of the things which made these barbarians so dangerous
was the fact that they applied what were essentially cavalry tactics to
infantry--charging in intervaled tight shock groups, which withdrew to
allow the second line of maniples to charge, then the third. He needed
to cramp them, hinder their free movement. He sent forward the
light-armed to seize and fortify the flanking marshes for this purpose,
at the same time gaining more elbowroom for his own movements. He wanted
to use the elephants, but had been unable to find a place to put them in
on the first day without opening a fatal gap in his line.

In the morning the Romans attacked him again, and he sent forward the
elephants through the low ground, mixed with light-armed. They had
provided chariots bearing long sharp spears as a defense against the big
beasts, but the ground was too rough for their operation; the elephants
broke through. They succeeded in driving off the Roman horse and
reaching the legions, but even so, it was a very near thing; the allies
on the wings of the phalanx were just giving way, and Pyrrhus himself
was badly wounded. The Romans lost 6,000 men, but they held their fords
and
 their camps.

Asculum was the Pyrrhic triumph of the famous quotation, when the king
remarked in answer to congratulations, "One more such victory and I am
undone." The 3,500 killed on his side included most of his generals and
his best friends, the flower of the army; the Companions were
practically wiped out, and he was visibly no nearer the end of the war
than before Heraclea. The Romans began raising more legions.


      III

At this point the Red King began to be conscious of a lack of strategic
support. The reinforcements that reached him from across the Adriatic
were insufficient to make good his losses, especially in officers, and
the troops he could get from the Italian cities were showing an
increasing disinclination to fight legionaries. It was therefore with
fairly sound strategic logic that he decided to let the Roman war hang
while he broadened his base by accepting the offers from Sicily.

These offers were to place him in control of Syracuse, Agrigentum, and
Leontini if he would only drive off the Carthaginians, who were
threatening to conquer the whole island and already had most of it. For
the Carthaginians, Pyrrhus could only have felt the contempt he began by
feeling for the Romans. They were un-Hellenized Orientals, not steady in
the field. Possession of the the main Greek cities of Sicily--and
Syracuse was one of the largest in the Hellenistic world--would give him
a huge reservoir of manpower, which needed only leadership, drill,
discipline, things the Red King could most specifically supply.
Moreover, he was sure that the Romans had been hard hit in the two
battles. It would take the time to recover, and in that time he would
gain faster than they, until he returned with all the resources of
Sicily behind him.

He went to Sicily, therefore, and justified his calculation by driving
the Carthaginians out of the island, except for the single city of
Lilybaeum, in a campaign that lasted a trifle over two years, and whose
details need form no part of this narrative. That Sicily did not fully
develop into the broad base he expected was due mainly to his lack of
the one thing Alexander so abundantly possessed--statesmanship. Or
perhaps it was the loss in the Roman battles of his lieutenants and
trained administrators--Megacles, Leonnatus, and the rest. There was a
gap in the command structure near the top. Sicily remained in his
possession, but it was nearing the edge of mutiny when he returned to
Italy in the fall of 276. However, he had filled up his ranks, victory
in Italy would bring Sicily into line again, and by the spring of 275 he
was ready to end the Roman matter.

In the interim Rome had been systematically beating down such tribes as
the southern Samnites and Lucanians and conducting a drive against the
minor Greek cities. Pyrrhus would not have as many barbarian allies as
before, and of the towns only Tarentum and Rhegium were strongly against
Rome.

The Red King's opponents were Manius Curius Dentatus and Cornelius
Lentulus, consuls for the year. The latter has left no particular mark
on history, but Manius Curius was something else. To begin with, he was
one of the ugliest men Rome ever saw, his special adornment being a set
of buck teeth. He had commanded armies before and had twice been awarded
official triumphs, which were considerably more difficult to attain in
those days than they became later. When Manius Curius heard that Pyrrhus
was again in Italy, he decided that this war was no ordinary contest
with Gauls or Samnites, but the real big show. He conducted the yearly
enrollment with unexampled strictness, selling at public auction the
property of those who failed to report for duty, which shocked
contemporaries.

Each consul had an army. That under Lentulus pushed into Lucania to hold
the road up central Italy between Tarentum and Rome. Manius Curius, who
began by operating against some of the southern Samnite tribes, crossed
to the more westerly route at the news of Pyrrhus' approach and went
into camp at Beneventum. This was the chief town and market place of the
Samnites, and only while Pyrrhus was in Sicily had it fallen into Roman
hands. It gave the consul the strategic advantage of holding a nexus,
from which he could prevent the Red King from stirring things up in
Samnium while the Road to Rome was still held. The lessons of Heraclea
and Asculum were not lost on Manius Curius; he chose an area of rough,
wooded country, where it would be difficult for cavalry and elephants to
operate, with a small stream at the rear of his camp, and out in front a
comparatively open, rolling plain, bordered on the right by forest and
on the left by timbered ravines.

Pyrrhus' plan seems to have been to crush Manius Curius, then swing
around and take Lentulus from along his line of communications. He
detached a corps to amuse and contain the latter, something in which it
abundantly succeeded, then made a fast march toward Beneventum with
20,000 infantry, 3,000 horse, and always the elephants. The Roman
scouting and outpost services were excellent; Manius Curius was fully
informed of the king's approach, but the sacrifices (doubtless not
without some suggestion from the commander) proved unfavorable, so
instead of drawing out for battle as a Roman leader normally would, he
stayed in camp, shooting out messengers to summon Lentulus.

Pyrrhus was nearly as well informed about Manius' position as the Roman
was about him, and took the Alexandrian view that the boldest course is
usually the safest. An attack on one of those square Roman camps,
heavily stockaded and ditched, was not normally an operation that would
commend itself to a general, but the matter would be considerably
handier if he could do it by night and surprise. He set off by a circuit
through the woods in the dark, intending to catch the Romans just before
dawn.

At this point Pyrrhus' inspiration probably let him down. It is
difficult to imagine anything unhandier for progress through a forest in
the dark than a twenty-foot sarissa; the men must have split up into
files and groups, and the movement was unexpectedly slow. The
consequence was that the torches went out, the guides lost their way,
and it was already breaking daylight when Pyrrhus' head of column issued
into a small open space at the flank of the camp.

Within, the sacrifices instantly became favorable. The Romans poured out
like a swarm of hornets and attacked the Epirote vanguard at the edge of
the trees. This was close-in sword work against opponents who had
sacrificed the weight and cohesion that were the specific advantages of
Greek armament, and the leading Epirote formations (it is not clear
whether they were hypaspists or phalangites) were badly broken, losing a
number of prisoners and a couple of the elephants. Pyrrhus was now too
deeply involved to disengage and he had no back road; by compulsion
rather than choice he had to draw his army through the forest on his
right and accept battle in the plain. He performed this difficult
maneuver with considerable skill, placing his elephants on the right,
with most of the cavalry echeloned behind, and hardly got his formation
ready before the lines locked.

At Heraclea, the Romans were dealing with a formation of a type they had
never met before; on the second day at Asculum they were cramped into an
area which forced them into a more or less solid-block style of
fighting, in which the phalanx was at its best. But here they had plenty
of elbowroom and the plain was not very plane; that is, it tended to
break up the Epirote close order and offered every advantage to the
attack-and-withdraw tactics of the maniples. On the Roman right and in
the center they carried everything right away before them; Pyrrhus'
formations suffered heavily and began to go to pieces.

But on the Roman left, Pyrrhus' right, the elephants produced their
usual effect; neither Roman horse nor Roman foot could stand against
them. Manius Curius' men were driven right to walls of their camp. At
this point there was revealed something that would have been as much of
a surprise to any commander of the age as it was to Pyrrhus. Manius
Curius had held out a large reserve of legionaries within the camp; as
the battle moved down on the stockade, this reserve issued from the side
gate and, all in beautiful order, counterattacked the flank of the
Epirote movement. The cavalry were cut to pieces by the swarm of Roman
javelin spears and driven off; the infantry supports collapsed; the
elephants, attacked from flank and rear, were driven into a wooded
ravine, where two of them were killed and the remaining eight captured.
Rome was victorious all along the line.

Pyrrhus managed to hold some of his taxes together, but after he reached
Tarentum and left a small garrison under his general, Milon, there were
only 8,000 infantry and 500 cavalry left to take back to Greece. When
the Red King was killed three years later by a pisspot thrown by an old
woman from a rooftop in Argos, the Tarentum garrison surrendered and
Rome owned Italy.


      IV

Beneventum decided that the future of the Mediterranean world belonged
to Rome and that the transmission medium for whatever of Greek culture
was to survive would be the Roman political system. Or rather Heraclea,
Asculum, and Beneventum together achieved this decision. It was gained
by the qualities of the Roman soldier and the political organization
that produced him. But it could have gone the other way if Rome had not
happened to find the buck-toothed Manius Curius at just the right moment.

It would be many years before the decision was written into the records
and the long, desperate struggle with Carthage, which was to produce a
military genius of its own, lay ahead. But by the time Hannibal arrived,
Rome knew all about dealing with geniuses; Pyrrhus had taught them. You
tightened your belt, raised another army,
 and ultimately found a
commander who, if not a genius himself, could hold genius in check until
the supports were cut from under it by the ceaseless pressure of the
Roman system. The essential elements of the future were present at
Beneventum and the decision was taken there.

That decision was that the Hellenistic states, even when managed by the
ablest officers, could not produce a military establishment to overmatch
the Roman, even when the latter was headed by quite ordinary men; and
when the Romans got generals who were anywhere near as good as the
troops they commanded, their superiority was crushing. It was necessary
to find that good general--there could have been against Pyrrhus an
exhausting series of Asculums if Manius Curius had not appeared--but the
point was that the Romans always found their man.

It has been the custom to call Pyrrhus a mere adventurer and to
disparage his generalship, but on careful examination it stands up very
well indeed. At Heralcea he was certainly surprised by the formidable
character of the opposition; but all his information about Romans came
from other Greeks, and no one had ever heard of barbarians who could
face a civilized army in a pitched battle. At least Pyrrhus realized at
once what he was up against and took the right measures. The Asculum
campaign was planned to give him the maximum security of communications
and the maximum fruits of victory. He very nearly cleared the
Carthaginians out of Sicily; and if he had won at Beneventum, he could
have had Rome in trouble.

The only thing lacking in the first two battles was pursuit; it was by
pursuit that Alexander always turned a victory into a decision. The only
thing lacking the aftermath of Pyrrhus' Roman victories was the
surrender of the defeated side and its acceptance into subject alliance;
this was the process by which Alexander achieved his empire. But the
Romans fought so well that though Pyrrhus could beat them he could never
break them; pursuit was impossible against an enemy still having some
thousands of men in a heavily fortified camp. And Appius Claudius
supplied the answer to the diplomatic question.

That is, the Romans had achieved a military-political system that was
incomparably stronger and more resilient than anything Greece or the
East could produce. This was obvious at the base, in the method of
recruitment, which so surprised Cineas. Philip of Macedon's universal
training principle worked very well until it became necessary to keep
armies afoot for several years; then it became a question of whom the
recruiting agents could persuade or catch. The Roman process of drafts
by lot for a campaign kept the ranks full as needed and left a continual
reserve of trained manpower. Whether the total system was "better" in a
cultural sense or a moral is beside the point. The question of survival,
of which system is the more valid, is not decided on moral or cultural
grounds; the place of decision is the battlefield and the decision is
taken by violence.

It is also worth noting that one of the major factors in the Beneventum
decision was political. Nothing so much surprised Cineas, Pyrrhus, and
all the Greeks as the fact that after a Roman army had been beaten in
battle and the King had marched to the heart of the Roman territory, not
a one of Rome's subject allies stirred to join the victor; not even the
northern Samnites, who had been subjugated so recently that Pyrrhus was
still on the scene when they gave in. In Greek experience there was
nothing like this willingness of a conquered people to stay conquered,
and through the long range of later Greek literature there has rung down
to our own day the idea that somehow Rome enslaved the intellect as well
as the body, deprived the nations of their mental as well as their
physical freedom.

This is to confound the later Rome with the Rome of Pyrrhus' day and of
the Punic Wars. The fact is that in that earlier period the nations were
not enslaved, they were not conquered, they were not subjugated; they
were taken into the firm. Alexander the Great showed a generosity almost
incredible to ancient times in leaving the civil administration of
conquered territories in the hands of natives, but there was a
Macedonian garrison in every citadel. Ardea, Neapolis, Fregellae, after
Rome took them, were not garrisoned by Romans; they were garrisoned by
Ardeans, Neapolitans, Fregelmans, who had a share, even if a limited
one, in directing the affairs of the Roman state of which they became a
part, and who believed they could get a better deal within it than under
the banner of any foreigner.

That this system was altered and perverted during the process of world
expansion should not be allowed to conceal the fact that it was the
system which enabled the Apostle Paul to say, "_Civis Romanus sum_," and
thereby force the local magistrate to pronounce that he had no jurisdiction.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    3. FIGHTING IN THE STREETS AND THE FUTURE OF ORDER




      I

The emperor and one of his subjects slanged each other like fishwives,
and everyone in Constantinople heard it, because the debate was chanted
by professional _mandators_ across the vast space of the Hippodrome.
When it was over, the Greens left the place in a body and the trouble
had begun.

To understand what kind of trouble and what it mean, a good deal of
background in necessary. The Greens were one of the four sectional
associations (the others being Blues, Whites, and Reds) which at base
were a kind of civic national guard. In case of attack they would have
helped to man the walls. To keep them together and active they were
organized as sports associations; the chariots in the Hippodrome races
bore the colors of Greens, Blues, Reds, or Whites, and rivalry was so
intense that it ran over from the field of sports into every other. All
the colors maintained groups of "partisans" who enjoyed dressing like
Huns, with shaved foreheads, topknots in back, and baggy sleeves in
which they carried daggers, which they had no compunction whatever about
using. At this date, which was 532 CE, the Greens and Blues had become
so important that hardly anybody spoke about the Reds or Whites.

In addition to the partisans of the Greens and Blues there was usually
around Constantinople another source of turbulence in the form of
certain members of the private bodyguards of the great magnates, called
"Bucellarians." They were not legal, but licensed, and they became more
important as the estates grew larger near the frontiers, where there
might be trouble at any time from wild tribesmen and bodyguards were
necessary for an establishment. It was perfectly natural that when a
magnate went up to the capital for business or fun he would take along
some of his bully boys, and it was also natural that sometimes they got
into semi-organized rows.

The forces of law and order which had to contend with these unruly
elements were represented by two classes of guards--Domestici and
Excubitors. The former were the type to be found around any royal or
imperial court in a period of general world turmoil--soldiers of fortune
of various races who had discovered it was easier to stand to attention
behind a well-polished shield than to wander around and fight battles.
The Excubitors were something special. They owed their origin to events
of nearly a generation before the slanging match, when the Goths were on
the verge of taking over the Eastern Empire as they took over that of
the West, from the inside. There were so many of these Goths and they
were such formidable fighters that no emperor could do without a corps
of them or a Gothic commander in chief, or _magister militum_, for his
army. One of these officers, named Aspar, fell into the habit of naming
emperors, and he set on the throne his steward, a Dacian named Leo. The
principal reason Aspar did not take the dignity for himself was that all
Goths were Arians, and in spite of martial prowess an Arian heretic
could not have maintained himself for a moment against a united empire
which regarded his beliefs as no better than pagan.

Besides, the arrangement of having all the real power and practically no
responsibility was thoroughly satisfactory to Aspar. However, Leo had
not been in office very long before Aspar discovered that the
arrangement was not quite as satisfactory as he had imagined. The new
emperor proceeded to raise a personal bodyguard of extremely taught
hillmen from Isauria in southern Asia Minor--the Excubitors--and began
to exhibit signs of independent thought. The Goths knew everything about
how to handle a campaign in open country but very little about how to
handle matters in the capital; when things came to a head, it was
Aspar's head that rolled. Ever since that date the Isaurians had been
around the palace, a sort of special Goth-prevention guardian.

This was the physical background of the trouble. In addition there was a
background of religious deviation. The Byzantines of the fifth and sixth
centuries loved to split doctrinal hairs, and every political or
personal fission produced a new heresy or something that was called one
by somebody. The most significant of these at the moment was that of the
Monophysites. Its religious tenets are unimportant and later became so
modified by further splinterings that some of them were absolutely
indistinguishable from orthodoxy. But the central fact is that
Monophysitism was fundamentally a political movement which had taken
religious form because most intellectual differences of the age
expressed themselves in that way. Although considered a heresy, it was
not so dangerous that its adherents could not live with their Catholic
cocitizens and take the sacraments from the same priest. It was a
Syro-Egyptian nationalism, basically opposed to the growing spiritual
power of
 the Bishop of Rome and even to the temporal power of the
Emperor of Constantinople, unless he happened to be a Monophysite.

Anastasius, the last emperor but one before the trouble, had so been. So
were the Greens; this also was part of the background. But Anastasius
died without leaving any direct issue, and on his death the Byzantine
Empire embarked upon its peculiar process of election. The candidates
were Anastasius' three nephews, Probus, Pompeius, and Hypatius, with an
individual named Theocritus, who was backed by the Grand Chamberlain.
Behind the Ivory Gate, which led from the palace to the Hippodrome, the
Senate and the leading officials of the Church conferred. In the
Hippodrome itself were gathered four groups--the Domestici, the
Excubitors, and the armed bands of the Blue and Green gangs. Candidates
were being proposed on both sides of the gate; and when a choice was
named in the Hippodrome, someone was sent to the Ivory Gate to claim the
imperial insignia for him. But no choice could attain a majority on the
Hippodrome side; Excubitors, Blues, and Domestici successively put up
men who were howled down so loudly, and to an accompaniments of broken
heads, that the gate remained closed.

Finally it was opened, and a man already dressed in the insignia came
out into the imperial box. It was Justin, commander of the Excubitors
and at least nominally one of the heads of the Blue party. He was
greeted with cheers by all but the Greens and it was an election. That
fact that he had been given money by the Grand Chamberlain to promote
Theocritus, money which had apparently fallen into the right hands with
the wrong instructions, did not invalidate the choice.

Justin was an old solider, a Macedonian peasant of Latin ancestry, who
could not read and needed help in signing his own name, but this does
not tell the whole story. When he came to Constantinople to make his
fortune a good many years earlier, being childless himself, he brought
with him a young nephew named Justinian, and saw to it that the boy
received the education he himself had missed. The process was not
wasted; as Justinian grew up he displayed an enormous grasp both of
minute detail and the large picture of which detail makes the parts;
also remarkable gifts of friendliness and self-control, and most
especially an incredible capacity for work. No one ever knew when he
slept; at any hour he might be writing or conferring. As some of the
work inevitably took the form of intrigue in that milieu, it is
permissible to hypothesize that he had more than a finger in the
election of the Emperor Justin.

This was in 518, and Justinian was about thirty-six years old; he became
emperor in fact while old Justin signed the official documents with the
aid of a stencil, and made the necessary public appearances. Nine years
later, when the old man was failing fast, he associated Justinian with
him in his dignities and after four months quietly died. There was no
difficulty about the succession.

Justinian's policy was anti-Monophysite. There was no accompaniment of
violence, as there had been so often in these religious contests, but
Monophysite monasteries were gradually closed out and Monophysite
bishops replaced. Also Justinian effected a complete reconciliation with
the Church of Rome on terms that left no doubt of his personal
orthodoxy, while the name of Anastasius was erased from the list of
emperors as that of a heretic. But the measures were subtle and gradual;
the sect was too well rooted throughout Syria, Palestine, and Egypt for
Justinian to do anything that might provoke a civil war. Besides, his
wife was a Monophysite.


      II

In 526, the year before Justinian took formal charge, the Persians
decided to go to war with the empire. Their forces were considerably in
excess of what the new Rome could bring to bear on the eastern frontier
and its line was so long and open that some nasty raiding could be
anticipated. To command in Persarmenia, Justinian sent out two young
men; one was a connection named Sittas, the other an absolutely unknown
member of his military household, Belisarius.

This turned out to be a spectacular demonstration of perhaps the most
extraordinary of the new emperor's qualities--his judgment of people.
Belisarius was a Thracian peasant, without a speck of influence, little
military experience, and no money to speak of; the only thing he had was
genius. It took him two campaigns to get his feet under him; then he
beat Persian forces of double his own strength in a great battle at
Daras, a battle which he won not only by leadership, but also by
inspired tactics. He then proceeded to reorganize the army.

By this date it bore practically no resemblance to the Roman army that
fought at Beneventum. The last of the legions had been destroyed at
Adrianople 150 years before, and even if Belisarius had wished to revive
and legionary infantry, he must have realized that there was
insufficient time for training. The war was in progress; he needed
soldiers who could fight tomorrow morning and it would take years to
rear up sound infantry. Moreover, the infantry tradition had been lost
since Adrianople; the foot soldiers of the Byzantine army were little
better than camp followers. They could be made into fairly good
defensive men in a fixed position and had capable archery, but they did
not stand up well under persistent cavalry attack and their flanks
wanted watching. The striking force of the Roman army, as of all others
in the period, lay in the cavalry, and this was of various kinds.

First, there were the Foederati, recruited partly from barbarian
tribesmen as individuals, partly from Roman citizens. They were as near
a regular force as the empire possessed (unless one counts the
Excubitors of the city guard), and while they usually gave an excellent
account of themselves in the field, there were never enough of them and
recruitment was usually done on a campaign basis, so that the membership
was constantly shifting and there was no chance to search out and
promote officer material.

Second, there were the Bucellarians, the private posses of the great
magnates and the army divisional commanders; there were not many of
them, either, and they exhibited a wide variety of equipment and
training, both of which were in the hands of the officers who led them.
Finally there were the "allies," recruited in tribal groups from the
barbarians, and under their tribal chiefs. The best and most numerous of
these at the time of Belisarius were the Huns, very good heavy cavalry
indeed, and men whose reputation has been traduced. There was usually
also a contingent of Heruls, who had a terrific reputation as fighters,
and some Saracens for light cavalry.

There tribal contingents were nearly as numerous as the Roman soldiers
in any given army, and the leading trouble with them was that they were
temperamental. The Huns all regarded themselves as heroes, and could
never be persuaded to retreat, even to draw the enemy into a trap. The
Heruls insisted on choosing for themselves what spot they would occupy
in a battle line, and the Saracens often decided that the amount of
plunder was inadequate and went home in the middle of a campaign.

Thus the army Belisarius inherited had no such solidly dependable body
as the phalanx, and its command structure was such that the general in
chief often had to accept the strategy and tactics imposed by the
prejudices of the "allies" instead of doing his own thinking.
Nevertheless, it was with this formless mass that Belisarius met the
homogeneous Persians at Daras and brought off a victory in which 8,000
enemy dead were left on the field. It was the only battle in a couple of
hundred years in which there were any tactics to speak of; and the idea
that men in battle could be maneuvered to make one do the work of two
struck contemporaries as so utterly novel that Belisarius' reputation
was made at once. After that people listened to him.

He based his reorganization of the Roman army on the concept of the
Bucellarians, the private retainers of the great lords. Since he was
commanding general, he was entitled to more Bucellarians than anyone
else, and he proceeded to raise them into a corps of considerable size.
A little after Daras there were 1,500 of them, a large number for the
date. They were recruited from all sources--Huns, Goths, Romans,
Heruls--and they differed from the Foederati in this: that they were
given a standard equipment of full body armor, spear, sword, a stronger
bow than any other then in use; and standard training in using the
weapons. They were long-term professional soldiers in the fullest sense
of the term and they no oath of allegiance to anyone but Belisarius. He
called them his _comitatus_. But it was not the _comitatus_ alone that
made Belisarius' army so good; it was the fact that possessing it as a
core, he could achieve the combination of all arms that had been
characteristic of Philip of Macedon, even the degenerate infantry
playing a part. The "allies" obeyed orders when they were given by a man
who had 1,500 highly skilled fighters at his disposal.

Of course, the matter of the personal oath was a dangerous feature and
it was undoubtedly the basis of the series of strains that later arose
between the general and his imperial master, strains which appeared only
somewhat later. For the present what the emperor wanted was victories
and he got them. When the cross-grained old King of Persia died in the
fall of 531, Justinian sent his best diplomats to Ctesiphon, recalled
Belisarius and his _comitatus_ to Constantinople, and saw the general
married off to a lady named Antonina.

In this marriage it is possible to see Justinian's first effort to
relieve the strain of dealing with a subject who had a more powerful
army that he did. Antonina was a close personal friend of the empress,
and could
 be counted on to keep Belisarius in line if he developed
uncomfortable ambitions. She was a lady of somewhat easy virtue (which
was not remarkable in the Constantinople of that period) but she got
along well with her husband and had the qualities Justinian wanted in her.


      III

But Belisarius had not been ordered to Constantinople merely to get
married and neither had an officer named Mundus, who commanded the
contingent of Heruls. Everyone knew the real reason. The two officers
were preparing for one of the most ambitious projects of an emperor
whose undertakings were all of enormous dimensions. Justinian intended
nothing else than the reconquest of the Western Empire, beginning with
the kingdom of the Vandals in North Africa.

The plan has been described as equivalent to sending an army from Europe
around Cape Horn to conquer China and, with relation to the available
techniques and means of communication, this is perfectly true. Moreover,
it had been tried in recent years by that same Leo who founded the
Excubitors and he had been well beaten by the Vandals, though he put an
army of 100,000 and a large fleet into the enterprise. Justinian had a
poorer empire and a smaller army. He also lacked anything like united
support, especially in Constantinople.

The opposition to the emperor's adventure centered in the Monophysites,
and it was basically political, nationalism against imperialism,
Syria-Egypt against Constantinople, which as the center of a wider
empire would be less responsive to Alexandria. It was also fed by a
powerful opposition of self-interest to the procedures of John the
Cappadocian, Justinian's prime minister and financial officer, who was
coming down on rich tax delinquents with a weight not seen in a
generation. For reasons that will presently appear, it is impossible to
assign any specific names of participants in this movement, or to
describe the steps by which the dissident forces were brought into
alignment. But there can be no doubt that there was a concerted
underground movement whose objective was the overthrow of Justinian by a
mass uprising, or that the thing centered in the senators and great
magnates. The method had been tried before in Byzantine history and it
had usually succeeded.

This was the background of the slanging match in the Hippodrome and the
walkout of the Greens. This took place on Sunday, January 11, 532. That
night seven of the Green-Blue partisan gangsters who had been condemned
to death for rioting were hanged. Through some blunder two of them
escaped alive, one a Green and one a Blue, and took sanctuary in the
Church of St. Lawrence. The city prefect, who was the chief of police,
threw a cordon around the church, and Monday was a quiet day, while the
men in the background made preparations.

Tuesday the thirteenth was gala, with the finals of the races whose
opening heats had been run on Sunday, and the Hippodrome was crowded.
The temper of the gathering was evident from the beginning; they began
appealing to the imperial box for clemency for the two men in St.
Lawrence, and as Justinian refused to make any reply, the shouting
became more and more vehement. At the twenty-second race someone started
to chant, "Long live the humane Blue-Greens!" The whole assembly reacted
with such enthusiasm that by the time the last race was run the humane
Blue-Greens poured out of the Hippodrome as a mob.

Whoever was stage-managing the affair showed excellent tactical sense.
Instead of marching to the Church of St. Lawrence, as might have been
expected, the mob made for the central police station, the Praetorium.
There they broke in the doors, released all the prisoners, killed the
officials or beat them up and drove them into hiding, including the
Prefect Eudaimon, then set fire to the place. With the police force
scattered and deprived of its command, the mob poured down the main
street, the Mese, growing in numbers and fury. At the terminus they
began smashing and burning in the great colonnaded forum known as the
Augusteum; the big main entrance to the imperial palace was soon in
flames, and so were the Senate House behind the Augusteum and
Constantine's Church of St. Sophia.

The fires burned most of the night. In the morning the mob began again,
at the Baths of Zeuxippus, in the angle between the Hippodrome and the
Augusteum. This structure was nicely alight when word ran through the
mob that three of the high officers of state were in the imperial box at
the Hippodrome. The crowd poured in; there was a good deal of shouting
back and forth between officers and mobsters, in the course of which the
latter presented their demands. They were for the dismissal of John of
Cappadocia, of the Prefect Eudaimon, and Tribonian, the chief law officer.

Justinian was reported willing to comply; it made not the slightest
difference to the mob, which left the Hippodrome only to do some more
burning and to hunt out those nephews of Anastasius who had missed the
imperial election when Justin was chosen. The crowd was disappointed to
find that two of them, Hypatius and Pompeius, were in the imperial
palace with Justinian, so they went to the home of the third brother,
Probus, to tell him that he was the new emperor. Probus had had the
sense to see this would probably happen and had left for parts unknown,
so the mob burned his house as a means of persuasion.

This was Wednesday night, and matters had now so clearly gotten out of
hand that no ordinary process would serve to dampen the revolt.
Moreover, ordinary process would have included the use of the Domestici
and the Excubitors to clear the streets, and they had so many friends
and relatives in the city that they were more likely to join the rising
than to suppress it. But Justinian did have Mundus with his Heruls and
Belisarius with his _comitatus_. On the morning of Thursday, January 15,
they sallied from the burned gate into the ruins of the Augusteum, and
there they encountered something that revealed the origin and animus of
the trouble.

They found themselves fighting not a mob with its Blue-Green foam, but
thoroughly armed men, Bucellarians, retainers of the great lords. It was
merely an incident that in the course of the fighting the clergy tried
to stop it by marching between the two parties, and were driven away,
passions having now gone beyond that kind of persuasion. There ensued a
day of street fighting of the hardest character, work for which
Belisarius' men were not particularly well equipped, but with the help
of the Heruls, he cleared most of the burned area. He undoubtedly placed
strong guard posts around this conquered area and on Friday morning he
began again, north of the St. Sophia area. The revolutionists countered
by setting fire to the city well to the north, the wind carried the
flames through buildings into the faces of Belisarius' men and they
destroyed a considerable area, including the Hospital of St. Samson with
all its patients.

The base of the revolters appeared to be in the north part of the city,
around the Brassmarket. On Saturday the seventeenth Belisarius tried to
get at it up a group of streets to the east of his previous line of
advance. The insurgents barricaded themselves in a big building called
the Octagon and could not be ejected until the soldiers set it ablaze, a
fire which spread along most of the main street and cleaned out a good
many important buildings.

That night two things happened. Belisarius reported that he was making
little progress at anything but burning down Constantinople, and in view
of the growing shortage of food and water in the palace area, Justinian
sent away everyone who did not have active business there, including a
number of senators and the Anastasian nephews, Hypatius and Pompeius.
They protested their loyalty and it is just barely possible that the
protests were sincere, though Hypatius had been pretty deeply involved
in an earlier conspiracy.

But they were packed off, and when the mob found were available on
Sunday morning the eighteenth, it knew what it wanted. Hypatius was
carried in triumph through the smoking streets to the Forum of
Constantine and crowned with a gold chain, the only object at hand. This
proceeding completely ruined Justinian's final effort to quell the
revolt with words where more violent methods had failed. He entered the
imperial box at the Hippodrome, carrying a copy of the Gospels, and
swore to make a faithful peace, with a complete amnesty. He was greeted
with shouts of "Perjurer!" and after he had returned to the palace,
Hypatius was brought into the box and cheered by the exultant throng.
There presently arrived before him a man from the palace named Ephraim,
who reported that Justinian and his whole court had fled to Asia and the
revolution was a success. A good many of the senators rallied around the
box after a private meeting, at which they decided to attack the palace
as soon as the celebration for Hypatius was over.


      IV

Ephraim was a trifle premature. His informant had left an imperial
council just after John the Cappadocian urged flight by sea to Heraclea,
and Belisarius agreed with him, in view of the hopelessness of the
military situation. The informant had failed to hear the next speaker,
who was the Empress Theodora.

About this woman the contemporary historians are very positive. They say
she was a prostitute, and she certainly was; she was brought up in that
profession. They also agree that she was a comedienne of quite
extraordinary gifts, that she was pretty, petite, and vivacious. It
takes a little closer reading of the scandalmongers to discover why she
was perhaps the most extraordinary example of Justinian's special talent
for selecting the right person.

When he first formed an attachment with her, she had given up both the
stage and whoring and was a business woman in a small way, with a loom
of
 her own. Doubtless her unquestionable physical charms had something
to do with the connection, but they were not the operative factor;
Justinian was surrounded by beautiful women, only too willing to be
charming to an emperor. It was a union of intelligence, character, and
spirit, and it became something more than a marriage.

Justinian gave her one of the largest personal settlements ever received
by a woman in an age and place where women commonly turned everything
they owned over to their husbands. She managed the property with a skill
that excited the admiration of even John of Cappadocia. She could argue
theology with a bishop and foreign affairs with a diplomat, and she did
both. She took part in every important measure of the government. It was
usually in ways not directly traceable because the team of Justinian and
Theodora functioned so completely as a unit, with separate but
overlapping spheres of authority; but she certainly had a finger in her
husband's delicate handling of the Monophysite question.

This was the woman who addressed the palace conference after Ephraim's
informant had left. She said, "In a crisis like the present we have not
time to argue whether to woman's place is the home, and whether she
ought to be meek and modest in the presence of the lords of creation. We
have got to get a move on quick. My opinion is that this is not the time
for flight--not even if it is the easiest course. Everyone who has been
born has to die; but it does not follow that everyone who has been made
an emperor has to get off his throne. May the day never come when I do!
If you want to make yourself safe, Emperor, nothing stops you. There is
the sea over there, and boats on it and money to pay your way. But if
you go, you may presently very much wish that you had not. As for me, I
stand by the old saying, that the best winding sheet is a purple one."
<endnote 2>

The speech was decisive, and under the influence of his wife's courage
Justinian's courage reblossomed. He sent the eunuch Narses (who was
later to be another of his impossible and monstrously successful choices
for military command) with plenty of money to dig out the leaders of the
Blues and appeal to them to call off this nonsense on grounds of party
loyalty. They now had an emperor of their own faction; were they going
to exert themselves further to put a Green in his place? Narses' money
was pretty convincing and his words probably quite as much. The rioting
had gone on long enough to take most of the fun out of it, and it is
probable that the Blue leaders succeeded in getting a good many of their
people out of the Hippodrome before the next act.

This was a sufficiently appalling one. At the same time Narses started,
Justinian send Belisarius at the head of the _comitatus_ to the imperial
box to arrest the new emperor. He could not get in through the passages,
and the prospect of fighting a way through heavy doors and guard rooms
against Domestici and Excubitors who now considered Hypatius the legal
emperor had little appeal. Belisarius therefore went around through the
ruined area of the Augusteum and the Baths of Zeuxippus, picking up his
guard details as he went, to the colonnaded arcade known as the Portico
of the Blues, the main entrance to the Hippodrome. Mundus and his Heruls
attacked and broke open a secondary gate, usually barred.

Before them the two groups of steel-clad fighting men had not only the
authors of the revolt, but the revolters themselves, caught en masse in
a position where they could no longer escape under the cover of burning
hospitals. They proceeded methodically to slaughter every one of them.
At the very least estimate 30,000 were killed, not all in the massacre,
since the street fighting of the previous days had been pretty serious.
Hypatius, a rather poor stick of a man, was pulled from his box, and had
to be executed with his brother Pompeius to remove any focus for future
uprisings, but that was the end of Justinian's vengeance. He banished
eighteen men who had escaped the scene in the Hippodrome, but a few
months later quietly canceled even these sentences. He could afford to
be generous, for his victory was so complete that no other was necessary.


      V

It was called the "Nike sedition," but in reality it was a military
operation, with a staff, a plan of campaign, and an organized body of
troops, the humane Blue-Greens being irregular auxiliaries and the fires
a surprise weapon. If Theodora had not talked the council out of their
discouragements, if the Justinian-Theodora-Belisarius team had not acted
with lightning efficiency after she did, there would have been a siege
as well as a campaign. We do not know who planned the operation, because
whoever it was died in the Hippodrome, but it is clear that the planning
was good and the campaign came perilously near to success.

Perilously: for the issues involved were far beyond the question of
whether the empire should be Monophysite or Catholic, nationalist or
imperialist. This issue had its importance, to be sure, and though
nothing could have solidified the churches of Rome and Constantinople,
they were brought far closer together than if the East had gone fully
Monophysite. But it was peculiarly important that the emperor should
remain Justinian, the man of wide vision and immense projects. The Nike
sedition was directed against only one of these projects, the African
invasion, but in a sense it included them all; it was a revolt in favor
of provincialism, the narrow view, and fragmentation.

Justinian's conquests in Africa and Italy did not succeed in reuniting
the empire, and his military adventures in the West have usually been
treated as unproductive acts of aggression. But it is worth looking at
what they did accomplish. They destroyed the Vandal kingdom in Africa
and fatally crippled the Gothic kingdom in Italy. Sentimental regrets
over the downfall of these noble barbarians cannot alter the fact that
they were Arians, peculiarly determined to see the triumph of their own
sect. Whether they used persecution, like Huneric in Africa, or, like
Theodoric in Italy, toleration combined with a firm determination to
make all major decisions for a church of which he was not a member, the
result was the same. The Arian Church was gaining, it was the official
church of the court and upper classes; and it was not a universal
church, it had no focus. In a religious sense it was what the
Monophysites were in a political: the thing whose greatest effort was
turned back by the Justinian-Belisarius-Theodora team in the Nike sedition.

This is not all. It was perhaps not of vital importance that one of
Justinian's large projects was the construction of that new Church of
St. Sophia, which even yet remains one of the wonders of the world. But
it was of the utmost importance that one of the officers whose dismissal
was demanded by the mob was Tribonian, and that a dismissal would have
been a warrant of execution. For Tribonian was in charge of the most
monumental of all Justinian's projects and the most permanent--the
codification of Roman civil law.

The first section, the "Codes," or index of what was to come, had just
been published at the date of the Nike sedition and work was just
beginning on the more complete classification. It was beginning
primarily because Justinian had examined the Codes, decided they were
nowhere near good enough or complete enough, and sent Tribonian and his
law committee back to start all over. (Nothing was ever good enough or
complete enough for Justinian; his projects were always beyond the
human, and partly because they were, what was left of them lasted
perdurably.) Some idea of the size of the work done by Tribonian's
committee can be gained from the fact that the law had to be extracted
from more than 2,000 treatises, comprising 3 million sentences;
reconciled, arranged, fused. That law had fallen into inextricable
confusion, and it was challenged in various ways by barbarian custom.
But after Justinian had sent Tribonian through it, it stood; and the
whole of Western civilization was different and better and more just.
This was the world that hung in the balance during the Nike sedition.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    4. KADISIYAH AND THE COST OF CONQUEST




      I

The trouble with the second Persian Empire was that it was not an
empire. Its rulers bore the Achaemenid title of "king of kings," but the
kings to whom the titular ruler acted as chairman of committee were so
numerous and had so much individual authority that the head of state
hardly dared to promote for ability unless it appeared in one of the
lordly houses. There were not only the great feudatories known as "lords
of the marches," but also the lesser "lords of the villages" and
"knights," who had authority over part of a city or the whole of a
smaller town. And in addition there were the Magi, or Mazdean priests,
who could always bring a man up for heresy, and any kind of incorrect
conduct might turn out to be heretical.

The system was completely interlocked, ironbound; there was no
possibility that a change would be made in it at any point. And while
the tradition that stood for a constitution required that the king of
kings should be a member of the royal house, it was not specific about
which member, so that there was usually a war of succession at the end
of each reign, and sometimes one in between. On the whole, it is rather
surprising that the general political talent which seems endemic in the
Indo-European race should have been able to overcome such handicaps and
produce an administration that was reasonably orderly and a system of
taxation that was reasonably fair.

It also produced a military organization that was one of the most
effective of the early Middle Ages. The nobility down to and including
the knights
 was a nobility of service, specifically military service.
The Achaemenid tradition that a noble need only know how to ride, shoot,
and speak the truth had been thoroughly revived, like so many traditions
of the pre-Alexander empire, and even improved upon. The nobles knew
nothing but war, though not in a way to be confounded with the feudalism
that sprang up later in the West. The military caste of the Sassanid
empire were not domiciled in isolated castles, and their allegiance was
not transmitted by stages through a series of terraced lordships, but
went directly to the king of kings.

Professionally also they differed from the Western knights and from any
predecessors. They were all cavalry, of course; the decline of the
infantry already pronounced at the time of Justinian and Belisarius had
reached its nadir, and the only footmen who accompanied a Sassanid army
were troops of the baggage train, armed with a small spear and a wicker
shield covered with hide. The horsemen were a development of the
_comitatus_ of Justinian's time. They had scale armor, steel caps, and
light shields, and carried almost every conceivable kind of weapon--a
six-foot spear, a bow, a short straight sword, a mace, a hand ax, and
two ropes, which together made a kind of lasso and was used for pulling
an opponent off his horse. In view of the amount of training necessary
to obtain dexterity with all these weapons, it is not surprising that
they had to make a profession of war. At moving in close-knit formations
for heavy shock to the sound of the trumpet they were good; they
employed many barbarian auxiliaries of the usual desert light cavalry
type and had picked up a considerable amount of siegecraft from the
Byzantines. Their armies usually employed armored elephants, but only as
a reserve. The Westerners had worked out a battlefield technique for
dealing with these animals, and refused to be borne down or panicked.

Two institutions of the Persian army were unique and of some importance
in the psychological warfare department. It always carried a huge
throne, which was set up in the center of the battle line and occupied
during action by the shah or the general acting for him. It was
surrounded by the picked bodyguard, called "the Immortals," as they had
been in the days of the old empire, nearly a thousand years before, with
an outer circle of foot archers. Before it there was always borne the
other institution, the _Diraish-i-kaviyani_, theoretically the leather
apron of the heroic smith who had founded the empire back in legendary
times by leading a revolt against the ruling Semites. It had become a
banner of fifteen feet by twenty-two, and was all one crust of precious
stones, since it was regarded as holy and each successive king added new
decorations to it with the help and approval of the Mazdean priests.
When a Persian army was defeated, the first care was always the
preservation of the sacred standard; men gave their lives for.

The greatest weakness of this army was the lack of control by the high
command during the frequent struggles for succession. But as no one
could remain king of kings very long without making himself thoroughly
feared, this was not usually a difficulty. About the turn of the sixth
into the seventh century, Chosroes, second of the name, got his war of
succession under control and began to think about other things. In a
state organized like Sassanid Persia there was only one line
intellection could follow; the strong, rigid system permitted no major
activity but war. An able grandfather had pushed Chosroes' eastern
frontier up to the Oxus and the Himalayas, and there was not much point
in proceeding farther in that direction. The only thing the new king of
kings could do was take up the war against the Byzantine Empire that had
been running off and on for nearly a hundred years, or ever since his
great-grandfather attacked Justinian.

The usual thematic material of this war was a series of battles and
sieges in Mesopotamia and Armenia, with Persian raids into Syria and
Byzantine counterraids into Persian Iraq. Just at this juncture the
Byzantine Empire was experiencing some dynastic troubles of its own, the
Balkan provinces were pulverized by a huge incursion of Slavic Avars,
and the Persians were lucky enough to turn up a couple of highly
competent generals besides Chosroes himself. He introduced a variation
into the pattern, so effective that it gained him the name of Chosroes
Parvez, "Chosroes the Conqueror," and he deserved it. Armenia was so
thoroughly subdued that its church split from that of Constantinople;
Cilicia and Cappadocia were subdued. Jerusalem was taken in 614, with
57,000 killed and 35,000 more carried away as prisoners. Damascus,
Tarsus, Antioch were occupied. Alexandria was captured and all northern
Egypt passed into Persian hands. Persian armies cruised at will through
Asia Minor and an attempt was made on Constantinople itself.

All this was the work of some years, but by 619 it would have struck a
contemporary new chronicler that the Byzantine Empire was done for. The
loss of Egypt had cut off the usual grain supply and there were famine
and pestilence in the capital. There was no money and no taxes were
coming in. Even outside the cities, where the Persians were only too
glad to see the Greeks quarreling among themselves, administration had
collapsed to the edge of anarchy. The armies had been beaten and broken
up in the field. And with Illyria in the hands of the Avars, Armenia,
Anatolia, and the mountain districts of southern Asia Minor in those of
the Persians, the recruiting grounds where new forces could be raised
were no longer available.

However, there remained intact the African province Belisarius had
conquered for Justinian after the suppression of the Nike sedition, the
conquest which the sedition was started to prevent. The Emperor
Heraclius himself was from that province, and to it he turned for men.
Its very existence had made it necessary for the empire to keep up a
navy; what was left of Byzantium held the sea and the communications it
offered. For money Heraclius appealed to the Church, and in view of the
fact that the Magians had conducted some fairly intolerant persecutions
and encouraged the Jews to join them in massacring the Christians at
Jerusalem, the cash was willingly given. The various generals had all
proved failures or tried to seize the decaying empire for themselves. In
spite of the fact that it was warned that only ruin could come of it,
Heraclius held a solemn communion, then called a great meeting of
Senate, officials, and people in the Hippodrome, placed the empire in
the charge of the Patriarch Sergius, and took the field in person.

The date was April 5, 622; five months later an Arab who had been making
a nuisance of himself by preaching that he was a prophet in the
important desert commercial center of Mecca was forced to leave town.


      II

The surviving records about Heraclius and his campaigns are not very
satisfactory, nor are the details important, but it is clear that in the
tactical field he recovered part of the lost art of infantry, and in
strategy he was something like a master. He maneuvered the Persians out
of Asia Minor, beat them in a battle in which the enemy army was almost
destroyed and, instead of trying to recover the lost places in the
south, drove northeast into the country at the foot of the Caucasus.
During the next six years the destruction in the West was repaid with
doubly compound interest. Every time the Persians sent army against
Heraclius he broke it, usually with heavy loss, and every time he came
to a city he sacked it. He reached the Caspian and swung southward; he
inflicted a deadly blow to Persian morale by taking and destroying the
greatest fire temple in the country; and his ambassadors succeeded in
calling in the Khazar tribes of the steppes to do some more damage. In
628 it became evident to the Persians that Chosroes the Conquerer was
losing his grip. One of his sons had him thrown into the "Well of
Darkness" and then murdered.

The son got a peace out of Heraclius but he did not get much else; that
year the Tigris and Euphrates produced a flood of Noahan proportions and
the new king of kings died in the ensuing pestilence. His only son was
an infant, and as might be expected, there was a chain reaction of wars
of succession, in which the various candidates were backed by groups of
magnates. It is probable that losses in defeats by Heraclius had
weakened the lords, both intellectually and physically. During four
years no less than twelve persons, two of them women, wore the
mountainous royal tiara, and none of them kept it more than a year, or
could get recognition from enough of the country to bring the rest into
line. At last the supply of eligible princes began to run low, even for
a royal house so prolific as the Persian; in 632 it was generally agreed
that a child named Yezdigerd II was the real article. A general named
Rustam became what we would call regent.

During the next year there was a raid of Arabs against Hira on the
border of Iraq; the town was ransomed for the absurdly small sum of
60,000 dirhams, and Rustam followed by a raid into Arab territory to
remind the tribes that they must not do this sort of thing.


      III

Historians of an exclamatory temperament often voice surprise over "the
explosion of the Saracens." This is because they have been taken in by
Muslim chroniclers, who refer to the period before Muhammad as "the time
of ignorance," with the implication that the Prophet was a civilizer as
well as a religious leader. It also completely overlooks the nature of
the material that exploded. Actually, there was throughout the Arabian
peninsula at the time something which, if not meeting all the demands of
a civilization, was considerably above barbarism. There were tribes
grouped
 in clans, yes, and feuds among them; a good part of the
population were nomads. But the arts flourished, especially poetry
(which may be considered a barbaric art), commerce was reasonably secure
(Mecca owed its importance to the fact that it was a trading town which
had become sacred to business, so no violence was allowed in the area),
and the position of women was higher than in most of contemporary
Western Europe, a very good index. There was no little agriculture,
partly based on peaches and pomegranates, which did not ship well, but
partly also on dates and aromatics, which did ship and were in wide demand.

At the time of Muhammad this nascent civilization was suffering from a
malaise. There were two basic causes. One was a persistent
overproduction of children in spite of the common practice of female
infanticide. The consequence was emigration by seepage; Arab stocks had
heavily infiltrated the whole of Syria, Palestine, and even Egypt, where
they readily mingled with kindred stems that had no basic differences
even in language. By the sixth century these emigrant Arabs even had two
kingdoms of their own, Ghassan at the northwestern edge of the desert
and Hira on the northeast. Ghassan was subdued and broken up into
districts by the Byzantines while Hira became a Persian dukedom. But the
key fact was that throughout most of Syria, Iraq, and Mesopotamia the
bulk of the population was strongly Arabic, with blood and clan
connections back in the homeland.

The second difficulty was economic: both on the Red Sea and the Persian
Gulf shipping had become efficient as a common carrier. As water
transport is always easier and cheaper than that by land, the old
caravan routes that had provided a way of life for so many Arabs fell
into decline. That is, there was unemployment in the overpopulated
peninsula, and almost anything would have touched off some kind of
explosion.

That the energies of the explosion were directed outward and not inward
was due to several causes. One was the nature of the Prophet's teaching,
which contained several features unique to an area where prophets were
not uncommon. It made positive virtues out of several things that were
necessities of life in the desert--abstemiousness, the avoidance of
luxury, the laws of hospitality. This made it very easy to be a Muslim.
It forbade the infanticide which is contrary to every human instinct and
offered a viable substitute in polygamy. It turned fighting and plunder
into profoundly religious acts, provided they were directed against
unbelievers; and it provided a common ground on which every Arab could
meet every other Arab, without distinction of tribe or clan. The appeal
of Islam on a purely spiritual basis is not to be neglected; but it is
worth noting that if the faith had been put forward in the most
cold-blooded rationalism as a solution to the problems of place and
date, it could hardly have been better conceived.

In the second place, Muhammad had the good fortune to number among his
earliest converts an extremely able administrator, Omar, and a general
far beyond the ordinary, Khalid ibn al-Walid. The Prophet himself was
certainly an administrator of the highest skill, but as a military
commander he was energetic rather than able. The special merit of Khalid
as an officer was that he managed to convert a tactical doctrine into a
strategic system. The Saracens were naturally light cavalry, bow- and
spearmen, and in view of the shortage of natural materials their bows
cannot have been much better than those of the Persians, which were not
as good as the Byzantine bow. The tactics of this kind of light horse
are dictated by their equipment: they are skirmishers. What Khalid did
was skirmish the enemy to death. In the period following the death of
the Prophet, when many of the desert converts seceded and half a dozen
new prophets claiming divine inspiration appeared, Khalid did fight some
semi-formal battles which were decided by his own furious energy; but
later, when he came up against the Byzantines, a typical "battle" lasted
for days, and in one case weeks.

The problem faced by all commanders down to the equalization imposed by
firearms was that of using a military tool developed in and intended for
one kind of country in a region of quite different physiographical
characteristics. The irresistible horsemen of the Tartars were quite
helpless when they tried to attack the Japanese by sea, and they had to
turn back from an utterly inferior military establishment in the jungles
of Burma. The armored knights who ruled Western Europe had terrible
trouble when they met pikemen in the Swiss valleys. Khalid turned the
skirmishing tactic into something that could be used anywhere. He
brought his army into the presence of the enemy and waited. Not
passively, for he attacked everything and anything that moved outside a
tight array. But all the same he waited until the battle became one made
up exclusively of small skirmishes, his kind of battle. Superior
mobility and superior logistics helped him greatly; his men could
maneuver around any formation, they needed nothing but a bag of dates
and access to water, while his opponents had to have provision convoys.

With this technique he conquered the whole of Syria and Palestine within
four years after the death of the Prophet. He was considerably aided by
racial and religious forces. The Arabs of Ghassan and, above all, those
of southern Palestine, who might have formed a buffer state, had become
Christians. But just at the juncture of Khalid's appearance the Emperor
Heraclius had been forced to discontinue the customary subsidies to the
Palestinian Arabs because, the Persian danger being exorcised, the
Church wanted its money back from him in a hurry. Moreover, throughout
Syria and Egypt, Christianity retained a strong Monophysite strain.
Heraclius and his patriarch sought a compromise formula, the
Monothelite, but the men they placed in charge of propagating it turned
out to be persecutors instead of persuaders, and the whole area was
unhappy over something that meant a great deal to it.

When Khalid and his Arabs appeared, they were welcomed as deliverers by
people of their own race, many of whom wished and were allowed to accept
the new faith. Christians of non-Semitic stock and Jews found they were
allowed to practice their religion in any form they chose, provided they
paid a head tax far less than what Constantinople demanded in other
forms of contribution. The Bishop of Damascus helped arrange his city's
surrender and only the thoroughly Greek cities of Jerusalem and Caesarea
held out for any time in hope of relief.

The relief never came. Heraclius was now too old to take the field
himself, and after two of the armies he had entrusted to generals who
could make nothing of Khalid's tactic were wiped out, he was unable to
raise a third. Everything from Antioch and Edessa southward became
permanently Muslim. The Prophet's old friend Omar, now caliph, or
"successor," Commander of the Faithful, began preparations for the
invasion of Egypt. Conditions there were much the same as in Syria.


      IV

Hira, like Ghassan, was a state of Arab blood, ruled by non-Arabs. The
marshes of the lower Euphrates separated it from an area occupied by a
nomadic clan called the Bakr. The head of this clan, one Muthanna,
waited on Khalid during his march to Syria, and although the Bakr had
not accepted Islam and had no current intention of doing so, suggested a
joint raid on Hira as a highly profitable enterprise. Khalid agreed;
this was the 60,000 dirham raid of 633, which provoked Rustam to
countermeasures. The preparations for these measures were no secret, and
as Muthanna did not like the prospect of dealing with a major Persian
army unaided, he appealed to Omar at Medina for help. He may also have
thrown out some hint about joining the new religion.

It is necessary to note that at this stage Islam, in spite of the
Prophet's statements of universality, was a racial movement. The policy
of Medina was to take in only pagan, Christian, and Jewish Arabs (of the
last there were a great many), leaving non-Arabs as payers of the head
tax. In Syria no effort was made to push beyond the ethnic limit.
Muthanna was within that limit and thus entitled to help, regardless of
his religion. But at the date of his appeal the Syrian campaign was at
its height, Khalid was facing the first of the major Byzantine armies
with the issue undecided, and Omar was mobilizing every possible
resource in support. The caliph was not interested in fighting Persia.
Unlike the sprawling empire, it was a well-knit unit of non-Arabic
people, which already claimed some vague suzerainty over the peninsula,
and there was not much sense in stirring up such a sleeping lion. The
help sent to Muthanna was therefore a small, purely defensive force.

It was not well led, and in the Battle of the Bridge, November 26, 634,
it was crushingly defeated, mainly as a result of a charge of elephants
which the Arab horses refused to face. Muthanna had difficulty in
pulling a third of his force out of the wreck, and Abu Obayd, the
captain from Medina, was taken and trampled to death by a huge white
elephant.

At this date Rustam was only about as much interested in Arabia as Omar
was in him; he still had some internal difficulties to settle and
undertook nothing beyond a minor raid for the next year and a half. But
by the fall of 636 the whole strategic situation had changed: the last
of the great Byzantine armies had been wiped out in Syria; Damascus and
Antioch were in the hands of the Saracens, Jerusalem and Caesarea were
under siege. Rustam assembled an army to put an end to this menace.

As usual, the news crossed the frontier before the troops did, and Omar
set about gathering a force to defend not merely fellow Arabs this time,
but also the line of communications
 to the new possessions in Syria.
Command was given to an old companion of the Prophet, Sa'ad ibn Abu
Wakkas, a man afflicted with boils. Shortly after his arrival in the
area Muthanna died and, in accordance with Arab custom, Sa'ad secured
the allegiance of the Bakr by marrying his widow. Making up the army was
not so easy; word had run through the peninsula that the fertile fields
of Syria were something like paradise, and the first great wave of
immigration was washing into the corridors. It was doubtless a high
religious duty to smite the infidel in the name of the Prophet, but a
man had to look out for his family; that also was in the Qu'ran. Sa'ad
probably had not collected above 6,000 men (in spite of enormous figures
given in the chronicles) when Rustam crossed the Euphrates and encamped
just north of the marshes on the border of the cultivated zone, at
Kadisiyah. It was May or June 637.

The Arab tale is that the Muslims sent fourteen ambassadors who reached
King Yezdigerd himself with a demand that the Persians either adopt
their religion or pay a head tax. The people of Ctesiphon jeered at the
tattered homely garments of the emissaries. Yezdigerd told them that if
they were not ambassadors he would have had them beheaded, and spoke
feelingly about Arab customs.

The head of the embassy said, "The prince speaks truly. Whatever you
have said regarding the former condition of the Arabs is true. Their
food was green lizards; they buried their infant daughters alive. But
God in His Mercy has sent us a holy Prophet, a holy volume which teaches
us the true faith. Now the Arabs have sent us to ask you either to adopt
our religion or fight with us."

The Persians gave them one sack of dirt per man to carry away; they laid
the burdens before Sa'ad as an omen: "for earth is the key to empire."

Rustam had considerably more men than the Arabs, and Sa'ad appears to
have been unwilling to fight until the arrival of some reinforcements
promised from Syria. But the Saracens began to run short of provisions,
and when they sent out a foraging corps to collect some fish from the
river, the Persians attacked and Sa'ad felt compelled to draw up in
battle formation. The ball was opened by a number of Persian knights
riding out of the ranks, shouting "Man to man!" as their custom was,
challenging the Muslims to single combat. As it suited the Khalid
tactical system to fight this way, they got plenty of customers, but the
result of these personal encounters was usually in favor of the
better-armed Persians. But as skirmishing went on all along the line
Rustam perceived he was not going to get the close general action he
wanted and, with the memory of the Battle of the Bridge in mind, ordered
up the elephants. Once again the Arab horses would not stand; in
fighting that lasted till evening Sa'ad's forces were driven back, much
scattered, and saved from destruction only by some foot archers who
slowed down the elephants.

An army not inspired by Muslim fanaticism might have broken up then and
there, but Sa'ad managed to pull his men together during the night,
doubtless not without assuring them that help was on the way from Syria.
It began to come toward morning; the Arabs again took the field in their
loose formations, and all day long there was one of the typical
skirmishing battles of the Khalid system. Light cavalry had rather the
better of it that day over heavy; the Persian losses are stated at five
to one of the Muslims, but neither army showed any real sign of breaking
when night shut down on the second day.

There was anxiety in both camps that night. Sa'ad was so troubled by his
boils that he had barely been able to stay on his horse during the day,
and in an Arab army, where personal leadership means everything, was
unable to provide that indispensable quality. The main body of the
Syrians had not arrived and until they did the enemy would be in
superior force. There was a grave conference; Sa'ad turned over his
field command for the following day to Kakaa ibn Amru, the captain of
the Syrians--and one must picture messengers going from campsite to
campsite through the dark informing everybody of the change.

In the Persian camp Rustam was still hopeful of victory, but
considerably disturbed by his inability to fix on any solid tactical
plan in this formless desert fighting. The enemy had no real camp to
attack or communications to cut. He received some reinforcements during
the night, and doubtless as a result of his report on the first day's
fighting, it included additional elephants. In the morning they were to
be the main reliance in dealing with the sinuous Saracen formations;
they were placed in front and center when the Persians drew out toward
where the Muslims were advancing in clouds of dust.

But the Persians were not now dealing exclusively with desert Arabs who
had never seen an elephant; they now had on their hands the Syrian
troops, many of who had previously served the Byzantine Empire and knew
all about elephant fighting. They galled the big animals frightfully
with bowshot and javelin and even had the nerve to attack them on foot
with spear and sword, jabbing at eyes and cutting off trunks. The
elephant was always a two-edged weapon; now these stampeded through the
Persian ranks, doing frightful damage, and into the gaps they made,
Kakaa poured in his formations.

The Persians did not give up easily. Rustam left his official throne to
mount a horse and personally rally his lines. They were driven back to a
wide canal, where the battle hung for a time, but it did not end even
with darkness, since the Arabs, now confident of victory, kept pressing
on in small groups, at one point or another. It was called the "Night of
Clangor" or "Night of Delirium," "because each one caught the other's
beard," and it must have been a wild scene in almost complete darkness,
but in this confused close combat most of the Persian advantages were
canceled and the gains were all on the side of the Saracens.

With daybreak came a sandstorm, and it blew in the faces of the
Persians. Rustam took refuge from it among the baggage camels; a sack of
money fell from one of them, injuring his back, and he plunged into the
canal to swim to safety. At that moment there appeared an Arab named
Hillal ibn Alkama. He hauled the Persian generalissimo from the canal by
one foot and cut off his head, then ran to the official throne, by this
time in Muslim hands, and mounted it, shouting, "By the Lord, I have
slain Rustam!"

It was the final blow; what was left of the Persian army panicked. But
there was no place left for them to go; hundreds in their heavy armor
were drowned in the canal and thousands were cut down along its banks in
utterly open country by Arabs who had no reason for giving quarter and
no intention of giving it.


      V

The booty was immense, since a Persian knight carried most of his
portable wealth on his back, and Rustam's army chest was considerable.
When accounts of what had been gained, and still more when some of the
tangible booty began to reach Medina, Omar and his advisers decided
there was something in this Persian business. Sa'ad, who was resting his
army after its victory, was directed to form a military colony at Kufa,
near the scene of the battle, and push on later.

Hira town surrendered readily enough, and when the Muslims got into the
blackened country between the Tigris and the Euphrates they found
conditions basically similar to those in Syria--a population composed of
Aramaic peasants, who had been under both economic and religious
pressure from Aryan overlords, and who were glad to see invaders of
their own race. All Iraq fell into the hands of the conquerors without
further contest; they pushed on to the Tigris, and when Yezdigerd
offered to accept the line of this river as a boundary and was refused,
he evacuated his capital at Ctesiphon and fell back into the mountains.

For the second Persian empire was done. The lost commander's throne
could be replaced, but the sacred _Diraish-i-kaviyani_, which had been
sent to Medina to be cut up in pieces, could not. With its loss the
national morale sustained a blow hardly less paralyzing than the one
that resulted from Heraclius' destruction of the great fire temple, the
more so because one topped the other. Nor could the fighting men lost at
Kadisiyah be replaced in any important quantity, and their loss, like
that of the symbolic banner, had to be added to those sustained in the
war with the empire and the civil troubles that followed it. The Persian
upper class was even more seriously crippled than the English was to be
in the War of the Roses, and the organization of the state was such that
there was no yeomanry underneath, out of which a new upper class could grow.

Yezdigerd, who was now old enough to be considered not to need a regent,
managed to assemble a force which met the Muslims again at Jalula, the
entrance to the mountains, but not long after Sa'ad took Ctesiphon it
was heavily beaten. Four years later the last army of the Persian Empire
was destroyed at Nihawand and Persia became a Saracen province.

It took the full four years to reach this point, because the advance
into Persia proper represented something completely new, strange, and
changed in Saracen policy. Soon after Jalula, Mesopotamia fell into
their hands, but like the rest of the early conquests, it was largely
Semitic with tribal connections southward and its subjection involved no
more than the capture of a few garrison towns. But Persia proper was
different; it was inhabited by an alien race, one that already had a
strong religion of its own. They heavily outnumbered any Saracen
governing class that could be placed in possession.

This was at least dimly visible at the time and was one of the reasons
for the delay in completing the work of Kadisiyah. But the results of
the
 battle, including the capture of Ctesiphon, made the prospect
irresistible. For if the booty of Rustam's camp was immense, that of the
Persian capital was beyond all counting in terms of purchasing power. It
was one of the richest cities in the world and it was taken under
conditions that made plunder rather than occupation practically
obligatory. Arabs who had been living on dates and camel's milk suddenly
found themselves with jewels that represented the income of several
lifetimes.

Persia thus became a promised land, where wealth could be had for the
taking, and a wave of Arabian emigration followed the armies thither.
But quite aside from the effects of sudden wealth, which are pretty much
the same everywhere, the capture of Persia introduced new factors into
the Muslim polity--factors not covered by any revelation to the Prophet.

It has already been noted that the policy of the early caliphs was to
let non-Arab Christians and Jews keep their religion and make them a
source of revenue by means of the capitation tax. They were so small a
minority as hardly to be an irritant; the oyster of the Arab state could
readily convert them to pearl. But the classic method clearly would not
do in dealing with the Magian fire-worshippers. There was no element in
their religion on which a Muslim could find agreement with his own as a
basis for toleration; they had no Solomon or Moses or Jesus, who have
honored places in the Muslim pantheon. But more importantly, as soon as
the Arab state had engulfed Persia, it found itself in possession of a
huge racially and religiously alien bloc, violently different in customs
and culture.

The Western peoples later developed systems of colonial administration
for dealing with this type of situation. But the seventh-century
Saracens had no long tradition of politics and administration behind
them, and no experience with any kind of administration except the
patriarchal, with an overlay of the political-religious control from
Medina. In their view the only means of assuring political control over
the new conquest was through religious control; the Persians had to be
converted under the sword and the Magian religion wiped out, or Islam
could never control Iran.

The effectiveness of religious persecutions is often underestimated.
Mazdaism was wiped out in a practical sense; but it took a good deal of
doing, and the detestation with which fire-worshippers are mentioned in
the _Arabian Nights_ shows that the issue was not wholly dead a couple
of hundred years later. In the meanwhile the forced conversion of Persia
completely changed Islam itself. It ceased to be a racial movement; it
necessarily became more militant, more willing to expand the frontiers
in every direction. If so large a mass as Persia could be digested and
become a source of new sinews, there was no reason why other and even
larger entities could not be absorbed, and the command of the Prophet to
convert or slay was not a figure of speech, but something deserving of
literal obedience.

The attempt at complete absorption, of course, was only a partial
success. There were too many Persians and they had too much political
experience. In the end, under the Abassid caliphs, the Muslim Persians
came into command of the whole movement. They swept away the patriarchal
system Muhammad had known and designed for his polity in favor of a new,
monarchial, conquering system, which completely forgot the democracy
that was one of the Prophet's most basic doctrines.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    5. LAS NAVAS DE TOLOSA AND WHY THE AMERICAS WERE CONQUERED




      I

At the beginning of the eleventh century the Christians of Spain began
to come up for air. There had never been much danger that the Muslims
would get the whole peninsula under their formal jurisdiction. Despite
an endless series of forays and several invasions intended to be
permanent, the Muslims never succeeded in establishing a stable state
much north of the line below which the olive grows--a matter which
should engage the attention of some economic historian, though there is
no visible correlation. The major northward drive, of course, was the
one turned back by Charles the Hammer at Tours in 732, and it is just
barely possible that a Moorish victory in that struggle would have
resulted in the establishment of a Muslim France. But it is no more than
barely possible; the absorptive power of the Arabs and their religion
found an easier field in the East, which is to say that there were
insufficient reserves behind the 732 invasion wave, while the Franks
were tough-minded as well as tough fighters, not good subjects for
conversion.

Neither were the Visigoths of Spain, for that matter, and there was no
compelling reason why they had to be, as in the case of Persia. The
Muslim occupation forces were more adequate, and the religion readily
found converts among the old Romanized population of the peninsula, who
under the Visigoths had become serfs. They formed a reserve which gave
the Muslims the necessary numerical superiority over the old Visigothic
aristocracy, who adapted to Saracen rule by becoming Mozarabs, Saracen
in dress and social customs, but by religion still Christian, having
their own courts and magistrates.

The Muslim Spain that stabilized south of the line of the olive after
the failure in Gaul had certain internal pressures. These rooted in the
unwillingness of genuine Arabs to recognize Persians and Berbers as
belonging to the same level of humanity, Muslim though they were; the
quarrels of the various tribes; and the personal ambition of the emirs
who were their heads. As long as the dynasty of the Omayyad (strictly
Spanish) caliphs lasted, these stresses were easily held in check. The
caliphs always had available the powerful corps of the Slaves (with a
capital), serf soldiers, a typical Muslim institution, which was to
reappear in the Janisseries of Turkey and the Mamelukes of Egypt. The
Slaves were strong enough to overawe or overcome any loose alliance of
divisive forces. Also the caliphs enjoyed an unusual range of authority.
They were not only civil and military leaders, but also the heads of
religion, the only true interpreters of the word of God. It was as
though the Pope were also absolute monarch of France and field commander
of its armies. Finally, the Omayyads were greatly beloved by their
subjects; even the Mozarabs found no objection to living under their rule.

The result was that Spain under the Omayyad caliphs was immune to
whatever exterior pressure could be applied by the tiny Christian states
of the north. It developed the most solid and brilliant civilization in
the Europe of the period, with achievements in science, the arts, and
literature far beyond anything the nascent northern or Italian states
could offer, or even the decadent Byzantines. It was no earthly
paradise, but it was a system that worked. The rulers of Galicia, Leon,
Castile, Navarre, Aragon, the county of Barcelona, could make no headway
against the unified strength of the caliphate or the willingness of its
subjects to remain subjects. While the Christian kingdoms squabbled
among themselves, they were forced to pay tribute to Cordova, where the
caliph had his capital.

This state of affairs began to come to an end with the death of 'Adb-ar
Rahman III, the great caliph. He was succeeded by Hakam II, who was too
much interested in literature to fulfill his combined duties as Pope,
chief justice, and general. Most of the work was turned over to a vizier
named Abd-'amir, known historically as Almanzor, from a title he
assumed, meaning "Victorious with the help of God." Almanzor reorganized
the army by importing Berbers from Africa and bringing in paid soldiers
from the Christian states, and he conducted the endemic war with the
Christians so vigorously that he was able to storm Barcelona and destroy
the city of Leon, all but one tower, which he left as a monument.

Not even the death of Hakam mattered. Almanzor consigned the successor,
Hisham II, to an even more cloistered existence than his predecessor,
gained favor with the religious leaders by burning Hakam's secular
library, and was in a fair way to breaking the boundary of the olive
line when he died in 1002. What followed was as typical of a Muslim
state as anything in the _Thousand and One Nights_. Almanzor had been
arbitrary; the son who succeeded him as vizier was not only cruel in
addition, but far from orthodox and utterly incapable of controlling the
tribal leaders, who had no taste for Almanzor's army reorganization
program. There was a confused series of sectarian and personal
revolutions, in the course of which Hisham II disappeared, and after
several nominal caliphs of various provenances had failed to consolidate
the government, a council of state declared the caliphate abolished in 1031.

At once everything fell into inextricable confusion and the solid,
civilized state that had seemed certain to gobble up the peninsula and
even to extend beyond dissolved into a fair imitation of England under
the Saxons. In every city, in every district, there arose petty kings,
the kings of the _taifas_ (from the Arabic "tribe"), each of whom was
chiefly ambitious to restore the fallen caliphate under his own
authority. The institution of slave soldiers, which had been so valuable
a cement in a united caliphate, disappeared after a brief period in
which they played kingmakers; there was insufficient continuity at the
head of state to keep them going. Muslim Spain was ready to be taken
over by the Christians.

But the Christians were not ready to take it over. In the tiny northwest
corner never conquered, in the pockets along the Pyrenees out of which
the new kingdoms grew, the tradition was invincibly Visigothic, that is,
Gothic, and the Gothic tradition was one of an
 equal division of
inheritance. Time and again the kings of Leon, Castile, Aragon, and
Navarre succeeded by force or marriage in pulling together dominions of
respectable size, only to dissipate them by dividing the heritage among
sons and daughters. Helped by the Spanish geography of relatively small
and fertile valleys surrounded by mountains through which the
communications were poor, and still further encouraged by very real
differences in custom, method of life, and even language induced by that
geography, the process of fraction continued wearisomely and
interminably. Galicia and Leon looked out on Biscay and their contacts
were across it; Castile had little commerce except with the Moorish
states; Navarre straddled the Pyrenees and faced obstinately north;
Aragon and Catalonia were Mediterranean powers. The whole of the central
plateau, where these forces might have achieved union, was still in
Moorish hands at the fall of the caliphate.

The result was that the irregularly periodic divisions of the Spanish
kingdoms following a new succession were invariably succeeded by wars
among the successors, each anxious to obtain the entire patrimony.
Inevitably one of the successors would call in the help of the single
great power to the south; and as soon as that broke up, the _taifa_
kings as persistently sought help from the north in their efforts to
reunite the caliphate.

Thus the eleventh century in Spain was occupied by an endless chain of
small wars and civil wars, Christian against Christian, Muslim against
Muslim, with contingents from both parties fighting indifferently on
either side. Ruy Diaz de Vivar, the Cid Campeador, was held the perfect
knight and champion of his nation and religion; but he spent more of his
active career fighting for Muslim princes than he did for Christian,
which, if it made excellent literature, did not make much sense.


      II

In this period of pointless minor wars the character of military
operations in the peninsula became fixed along lines that diverged
considerably from those operative elsewhere in medieval Europe or Asia,
and which in turn deeply affected the life of the communities, as
military operations do in a land where the main business is war. As
elsewhere, the cross-raiding system developed as soon as the militant
units became so small that major operations for the capture of cities
were difficult; as elsewhere, the defense against cross-raiding became
the castle.

The difference lay in the intensity with which both were applied. The
raids in Spain were more frequent and became more of an object in
themselves; it was always both legal and moral to increase resources by
taking them away from the party of the other religion, and if the
Christian King of Aragon had some Muslims in his pay, the Christian King
of Castile could always attack them as Muslims rather than Aragonese.
Peasant serfs were a major item in the booty of these raids; they could
be settled on one's own soil and become a source of honor and profit. To
protect them the castles were much more numerous than in the rest of
Europe, and even the villages were in some sense fortresses, closely
packed small stone buildings from which the tillers of the soil went
forth in the morning and to which they returned at twilight.

Tendencies present elsewhere were also intensified among the military
forces which took part in these constant raids. Infantry moved too
slowly, and in a country where the only middle classes were in the
industrial and mercantile groups of the cities, there was little
material for recruiting this arm. The normal and decisive weapon was
cavalry, in a proportion of about four to one. A technical
non-development also helped keep infantry in its place: the crossbow was
only being reinvented in Italy and Denmark, still was excessively rare
and not well made in Spain. The country provides few woods from which
decent longbows can be made. The usual type was the Turkish horn bow, a
short wooden weapon backed with leather, a horseman's arm for use at
close range. That is, the infantry had no missile weapon that could make
cavalry keep its distance, and they were neither trained well enough not
equipped to stand on the defensive with pikes. The usual battle
formation, when things came to a battle, was for the spear-armed
infantry to form a front line, kneeling on the left knee, with archers
just behind to conduct the preliminaries. When the arrows were exhausted
or the moment became propitious, these footmen got out of the way and
the cavalry began the real business of fighting.

Since Spain is a rough country, a large proportion of this cavalry was
mounted on mules, especially among the Muslims. Mostly spear- and
swordmen, the tactics of the cavaliers were considerably influenced by
the skirmishing methods descended from Khalid. Since the deficiencies of
the available bows were widely felt, there developed a peculiarly
Spanish form of light horse called _genetes_. They wore a heavily
quilted form of gambeson in lieu of armor and carried javelins, about
three feet long, with a seven-inch metal head, whose accurate balance
has been much admired by military archaeologists. They were very
accurate and deadly.

Through the complex of raidings and battles of the minor dynasts there
appeared a tendency in favor of the Christian powers. It was observable
in small details: with their firmer industrial base extending back into
France, the Christians were the better armored; their opponents held
fast to traditional ways and ideas, such as that a shield covered with
the hide of the Atlas antelope could not be penetrated by anything.
Christian siege engines were better, and better used. The tribal
organization of the Muslim armies was less efficient than the
knight-and-retainer system of the Christians, who could take in anyone
on the basis of efficiency instead of being forced to accept armies
recruited by the lottery of birth. And in spite of usurpations and
family quarrels there was more permanence of tenure, more orderly
succession, and more established administration among the Christian
nations than the Muslim, where every officer of state could aspire to
become the state itself.

By the end of the century Castile had crossed the olive line and taken
Toledo. Saracen Seville and most of the southeast were paying tribute,
while Raymond-Berenger, Count of Barcelona, had practically reached the
Ebro. The situation had become so serious from the Muslim point of view
that the petty kings of the the _taifas_ took a strictly exceptional
step: they banded together, and an embassy from the federated rulers of
Badajoz, Seville, Granada, and Cordova went to ask the help of their
coreligionists in Africa.


      III

It was admittedly a dangerous thing to do. While the Spanish Muslims
were splitting into fractions of fractions, the Murabitin Berbers, or
Almoravides, had built a powerful united empire with overtones of
religious revival in western Africa. It extended from Senegal to
Algeria, and as usual in Muslim countries, religious revival was
accompanied by an outburst or both military ambition and military
strength. For the moment the empire of the Almoravides was the most
powerful Muslim state in the world, and the invitation from Spain was a
heaven-sent opportunity for the use of its energies.

The Berbers came, then, under their Emperor Yusuf ibn Tashfin and, with
the help of the kings of the _taifas_, defeated Alfonso of Castile in a
great battle near Badajoz, with such loss that the Christian advance was
stopped and some parts of the line turned back. Then the petty Saracen
kings discovered that they had imported more than military assistance.
In the train of Ibn Tashfin came a considerable group of _faqihs_, who
may be homologated to religious revivalists or Puritan preachers, and
who were by no means pleased with the liberty of religion accorded to
Christians and Jews by the Spanish Muslims. At the same time Ibn
Tashfin's Berber hillmen were very much pleased indeed with the wealth
and luxury they found in Spain, and proceeded to help themselves. By
1111, under Ibn Tashfin's successor, 'Ali, the _taifa_ kingdoms had been
wiped out except in the northeast and Muslim Spain was a part of the
Almoravide state, with Cordova as its capital.

The wars went on, but as border wars of the usual cross-raiding type;
the Aragonese succeeded in reducing Saragossa, and the Castilians were
not ejected from Toledo. But there things hung; through all the middle
years of the twelfth century the Christian kingdoms were racked by a
distressing series of dynastic troubles that reduced them to black
anarchy, while on the Moorish side of the line the Almoravides were
exchanging military habits for the pleasures of civilization. They won
most of the battles along the frontiers, but gained little territory,
and at home the new luxury lost them the support of the orthodox. The
Almoravide empire became subject to a group of independence movements
that tore it to pieces. The _taifas_ were back, and north and south the
pattern was repeating.

It was repeating in another sense also. While the later Almoravides were
wrangling among themselves in Spain, there appeared in the Atlas a young
man named Abu Muhammad ibn Tumari, son of a lamplighter, who began
preaching against luxury and the relaxation of the laws of the holy
Qu'ran. He claimed prophetic revelations, led mob attacks on wineshops,
and started riots in which overdressed individuals got themselves hurt.
Ascetic fanaticism is easily aroused in people of his race and
background, and like Muhammad the original, he was lucky enough to find
early a convert who had considerable qualities as an administrator and a
solider, Abd-el-Mumin. When Muhammad ibn Tumari retired to a monastery
to pray, Abd-el-Mumin took over. For two years after the prophet's
actual death revelations continued
 to come from his retreat, all
favorable to Abd-el-Mumin, and the movement spread like a current in an
ocean through the whole of North African life. By 1149, Abd-el-Mumin was
Emir of Morocco, and when he died in 1163 his territories were already
coterminous with those that had belonged to the Almoravides and were
reaching beyond.

The imperializing sectarians were the Almohades or "Unitarians." Son and
grandson of Abd-el-Mumin were both able and fanatical. Their outriders
reached Spain in 1146, at the instance of one of the reformist,
independence-movement chiefs, and by 1172 they had swallowed the whole
of the Muslim territory.

There were these differences between them and the Almoravides they
replaced: they kept the capital in the Atlas mountains of their origin
and thus did not so readily succumb to pleasures forbidden by the
Qu'ran, and they came down hard on Jews and Mozarabs, who emigrated to
the Christian kingdoms by the thousands.

In all this there was little to promise any real change in the repeating
pattern of periods of anarchy and recovery on both sides of the
border--or if change was indicated, it was in favor of the Muslims. By
1195 they had succeeded in maintaining a stable union of Spain and
Africa through three generations and developing to the full the inherent
military qualities of religious fanaticism. In that year Ya'cub, the
Almohade emperor, for the first time threw the full strength of the
combined African-Spanish military establishment against the northern border.


      IV

His objective was the Castile of King Alfonso VIII, remarkable man,
about whom perhaps the most remarkable thing was his good fortune. He
was lucky to be a king at all. His grandfather had united the crowns of
Castile and Leon, but when he died it was found that his will made the
usual split. Alfonso's father died within a year, leaving that young man
an infant king, whether of one and a half or three years is still a
matter of dispute. The accession of a baby in that age was an
invitation; Leon and Navarre promptly began taking Castilian castles and
cities, while the members of the great families challenged each other in
private wars whose objective was obtaining the regency.

The normal thing is such cases is for the baby to get lost in the
shuffle; Alfonso not only escaped, but even achieved an unusually good
education. The latter was probably due to the Lara, one of the
imperially-minded families, who for a long time had the lead in the
struggle for custody of the crown over the rival family of Castro. The
king was still in his early teens when he got away from the Lara, but at
once there coalesced around him one of those outbursts of unselfish
patriotic loyalty which only Spain can produce. It seemed that
practically every grandee in the country had only been waiting for
Alfonso's appearance to get rid of the Castros and Lara. Surrounded by a
cavalcade which grew in numbers and importance at every moment, he made
a tour of the communes to accept their allegiance personally (something
very important in that part of the Middle Ages) and got the capital of
Toledo back from the Lara by surprise.

It took a matter of years for the young king to get things firmly into
his own hands, and Alfonso's luck arranged that these should be the
years when the Almohades were extremely busy in the south with the kings
of the _taifas_. He was also lucky in having a daughter very early in
the game and marrying her to another Alfonso, second of the name to rule
in Aragon. Aragon was the one Spanish kingdom that had no particular
ambitions in the peninsula at the moment; to it had fallen the heritage
of the counts of Barcelona, whose interests lay mainly beyond the
Pyrenees. The marriage alliance with Castile thus worked out a good deal
better than most such alliances; the lucky Alfonso of Castile got
abundant help in recovering what had been lost to Leon and Navarre. By
1175 he was strong enough so that the Christian kingdoms were agreed
that more could be gained by fighting the Moors than by fighting each
other and the advance toward the south was resumed.

By this date a new element had entered the military situation in the
formation of the great military monastic orders of Calatrava, Santiago,
and Alcantara. For some reason which should interest a social historian
as much as the line of the olive should an economist, celibate military
communities have been a success from the time of the Mamertines down
through the Jomsvikings to the Janissaries, and conditions in Spain were
exceptionally favorable for their development. The orders provided the
Spanish kings with something they had never had before--a body of
disciplined professional soldiers and, moreover, a body whose religious
fervor equaled that of Almohades and who were not interested in quarrels
between one Christian kingdom and another, but only in breaking the
heads of the infidels.

The result was a canalization of energies toward the Moorish frontier,
and between 1175 and 1195, nearly twenty years, the advance from both
Castile and Leon was steady. There were no spectacular gains unless
Alfonso's capture of Cuenca by siege could be called one, but the chain
of posts moved forward. It took time for the movement to become apparent
in an age of leisurely communications, but the pressure was there and it
brought Ya'cub and the African army into action.

The armies of Ya'cub and Alfonso clashed at Alarcos on July 18, 1196,
and the result was a crushing defeat for the Castilian king, who tried
to die among the spears and had to be forcibly led away from the field.
The chronicles speak of 25,000 Spanish casualties, which seems very high
indeed, but medieval chroniclers seldom exaggerated the losses on their
own side. Toledo, Alcala de Hermanes, and Cuenca were besieged, Muslim
columns snaked through Castile, and the kings of Leon and Navarre seized
the occasion to snatch a few castles in the north. Alfonso was forced to
make a humiliating truce with the Moors.

At this point he was saved by two pieces of his usual luck. Ya'cub was a
dying man and had to go back to Africa to set his affairs in order,
while Alfonso II of Aragon became a dead man and the succession fell to
Alfonso the Lucky's grandson, Pedro II. This young man, twenty-two at
the date of his succession, has been described as "a marked and curious
character." He was all of that: a genuine knight-errant, right out of
some lay of chivalry, and placed in many of them by the troubadours,
with whom he was a great favorite. He also had notable accomplishments
as a lecher; it is related of him that he once spent the night before a
battle in such a manner that he could not stand at Mass and had to be
hoisted onto his horse by a squire. His romantic instincts flared up at
the tale of his grandfather's misfortunes; he put all the weight Aragon
could swing into the scale, and it was his intervention at least as much
as Ya'cub's approaching demise that made the truce possible.

On both sides it was rather definitely recognized as a truce instead of
a peace and on both it was followed by a slow-paced gathering of forces
to carry on the struggle to a definitive result. It was 1200 before
Alfonso of Castile found himself strong enough to denounce the truce.
Ya'cub had been succeeded the year before by his son, Muhammad al Nazir,
who had a holy war preached. It was a period more or less of stasis in
the Muslim Near East; the Seljuq Turks had fragmented, the Byzantine
Empire and the crusader kingdom in Palestine had developed enough
stability to make Muslim invasion there temporarily unprofitable, and
there was unemployment among fighting men. Muhammad was able to recruit
an army stated (probably inaccurately) at 600,000 men, all the way from
Persia and Nubia.

In the meanwhile the Christians decided that they too could play the
holy war game. Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo, one of the most militant
prelates of the Middle Ages, went to Rome, secured the proclamation of a
crusade with generous indulgences from Pope Innocent III, and made a
tour of the courts of Western Europe, preaching the good cause. The
response was excellent; in the spring of 1212 there assembled at Toledo
a number of knights set at 60,000, which is as much of an underestimate
as the figures for the Muslims are an overestimate, since each knight
included in his retinue enough supporters to double or treble the number
of fighting men in line.

They did not all stay. A host of this size must have placed a severe
burden on the logistic equipment available in a city of no great size,
and French knights speedily became disgusted with the proud ways of the
Castilians and the lack of opportunity for profitable forays. When King
Alfonso moved south for the test he had with him only the contingents
from his own realm, those of the knightly orders, a rather small group
led by King Sancho the Strong of Navarre and a rather large one led by
the romantic Pedro of Aragon. It was, nevertheless, the largest army
ever assembled in Christian Spain, and it was facing the largest Moorish
one. There would be a decision.


      V

Muhammad al Nazir had a strategy, and his intelligence organization
seems to have been better than anyone would have a right to expect. His
army was spread out for the siege of various castles. When his forward
elements reported contacts with Alfonso's forces at Malagon, Calatrava,
Alarcos (the Christians were apparently marching straight down the
valley of the Bullaque), the Muslim leader pulled back behind the Sierra
Morena chain and placed strong contingents in all the passes. He was
perfectly aware that the specific weaknesses of a medieval knightly
force were in its lack of cohesion and inability to solve the supply
problem during a long campaign. He intended to make his opponents fight
for the passes at considerable disadvantage or (what was infinitely
 more
probable) break up and go home. He was near his own base, had provided
magazines of good in the cities, and even remount depots on islands in
the Guadalquivir. In the reflex movement he could win back all he left
behind in the valley of the Guadiana and carry on deep into Castile.

Alfonso's army tested the mountain barrier at various points and found
the passes too strongly held for penetration. There was a council of
war, at which both Sancho of Navarre and Pedro of Aragon advised retreat
and a campaign against the bypassed castles still held by the Muslims,
while the Archbishop of Toledo was the only one who supported the king
in his desire to press on. At this moment there appeared a shepherd,
miraculously according to Spanish legend, who offered to show the arm a
defile by which the passes could be turned. The offer was accepted; the
army filed southward through an area where the difficulties were
considerable, but purely of a geographic order, and on the heights
exhibited themselves to the Muslims.

At this point there is a rather curious gap in the story. Why did not
Alfonso attack at once? Muhammad certainly could not have had his full
strength at hand and the absent elements would be among the mounted men
who were his best armed. There was no question of fighting anywhere but
in that place. The Muslims were across the only good road to the valley
of the Guadalquivir; to the Christian left were ragged and wooded
mountains; any attempt to slide rightward would have brought the Muslims
down on flank and rear. The fact remains that, for reasons we do not
know, the Spaniards spent two whole days in prayers and conferences
before deciding to attack.

During those two days and Moors set up their position on the south bank
of a small stream called the Campana Ronegadero, which runs from west to
east across the valley just north of the modern town of La Carolina. The
area is known as Las Navas de Tolosa, and a _nava_ is a small plain
among hills; there were several of these along the valley and one can
picture the Moors formed across them, with heavily wooded rocky slopes
at their backs. They are reported as having 100,000 mounted men in line,
which may not be far from correct, with a considerable number of
infantry. In the center of the line Muhammad placed himself, behind a
palisade bound with heavy iron chains, a Qu'ran in one hand, a sword in
the other, surrounded by warriors on foot, while an attendant held over
his head the official parasol which was the banner of the army.

His forces formed a single solid mass; the Christians were in the
customary three "battles" of a medieval army, King Alfonso in the center
with the Archbishop Rodrigo and the knights of Santiago and Calatrava,
Pedro of Aragon on the left, Sancho the Strong on the right. Before the
archbishop there was borne an enormous red cross with a shield at its
base, the emblem of the day. It was July 16, 1212.

The Christians attacked. There were probably the usual preliminary
skirmishings and challenges to single combat before the fronts actually
locked. This phase was followed by violent fighting all along the line,
not so much of the character of knightly charges as of single combats
interlocking, one man falling back as another came forward. The chess
game feature of war was utterly absent and it is impossible to speak of
tactics. On the wings the Christians gradually forced the Moors back,
and the farther they pushed them the worse it became for the Muslims,
for they were being driven into trees and rocks, where their individual
mobility was lost and the heavier armor and swords of the knights had
every advantage. It must, nevertheless, have entailed some fairly
obstinate fighting, for this went on most of the day. In the center,
where an inevitable concentration of Muslim power had taken place,
things were different. The knights of Calatrava were nearly wiped out
and the Christians driven back.

Alfonso cried, "Archbishop, it is here we ought to die!" Rodrigo
replied, "No, sire, it is here we should live and conquer!" He had a
better eye than the king, for he had observed that the Muslim
counterstroke in the center had come up against Christian spearmen on
foot, stiffened by the knights of Santiago; for once medieval infantry
did not give way. The banner of the cross was borne forward; there was a
furious new attack against the spur where Muhammad held his ground and
at the same time Sancho the Strong personally cut his way through the
chained stockade from the right. The emperor's bodyguard began to go; he
had the official parasol lowered and the loss of that symbol of
leadership produced the usual effect on an Oriental army. The rest
became a massacre. The chronicles speak of 185,000 Muslims slain; it is
too many, but not by a great deal.


      VI

There was no immediacy to the results. After the battle the Christian
army took a couple of towns and then broke up, as Muhammad al Nazir had
foreseen that it would. Two years later Alfonso VIII died and his issue
became involved in a series of obscure rows that seemed to repeat the
ancient pattern. The year after the battle Pedro of Aragon was killed in
the fight where he had to be hoisted onto his horse, and his successors
looked eastward, to the Balaerics and Sicily. In the south the empire of
the Almohades collapsed into another group of anarchic petty states.

That is, Las Navas de Tolosa appeared to decide nothing. In reality it
decided practically everything. It is unnecessary to believe the figures
of the chroniclers to realize that the flower of the Moorish army had
been wiped out, the point blunted, the edge dulled. Within fifty years
the Almohade dynasty became extinct, and there was no replacement. There
were no more Moorish raids into Christian territory, only the gradual
erosion of Muslim provinces and cities, a process which reached its end
with the conquest of the final corner of Granada, which had long been
tributary to the Christian kings. As a matter of speculation, one may
assume that the Almohades would ultimately have succumbed to the same
forces that brought down the Almoravides, but as a matter of historical
fact, they did not. Their fighting aristocracy was destroyed on the
battlefield. The reserves behind Muslim conquests were always very thin;
the Muslims depended upon continual success, on the acquisition of
recruits to make war feed war, and when the leadership was thus
decisively wiped out, the whole structure that it held together went to
pieces.

This was the more important because of two factors, one spiritual and
the other tactical and technical. The overthrow at Las Navas was not the
destruction of an Eastern monarchy already weakened by dry rot; what
went down there was a revivalist movement which, if not absolutely at
its peak, had been strong enough to attract recruits from across 50
degrees of longitude and 15 of latitude. It was not merely the
Almohades, but the Muslim world and Muslim system that were defeated;
and the manner of the defeat was quite as important as the fact. A good
part of Spain consists of territory so much resembling North Africa that
the hit-and-run horse-archer tactics of the Near East were perfectly
valid, and the assumption had been that the whole peninsula was subject
to such an approach. Las Navas de Tolosa demonstrated on a large scale
that this was not a general geographical truth, that a Moorish army was
formidable only when fighting under its own conditions, and that it
could be forced to fight under conditions which it did not find comfortable.

The lesson, never precisely set forth at the time, was by no means lost
on the later Christian kings. It helps explain why the erosionary
process on the Moorish states went on uninterrupted until they were
demolished. The battle, in fact, decided that no part of Europe could
remain a part of Africa, that the Western gate was closed to the heirs
of the Saracens; that European military organization possessed a
flexibility that Africans and Arabs could not rival. The Spaniards could
at least hold even with the Moors on the latter's own kind of ground;
but when the Europeans could force the choice of the battle area, the
Moors were finished.

Much more than this was decided. With the battle of Las Navas, the
central plateau of Spain fell into the hands of the Kingdom of Castile
and the unification of the peninsula became possible. Before it Spain
was a geographical expression, no more a unit than Germany or Italy at
the same period, and much less of an entity than England, Denmark,
Poland, or even France. The battle placed in the hands of the Castilian
kings the headwaters of all the great rivers and the control of the
roads that paralleled them. The union of Spain did not become a physical
fact for another 250 years, but it had been rendered inevitable by
control of communications. When the knot was tied, the expansion of
Aragon in the Mediterranean had made her the equal if not dominant
partner, but it was a union and not a conquest for which the foundations
were laid at Las Navas de Tolosa. It had been demonstrated that control
of the central watershed was vital to the possession of Spain--and also
that the Spanish kingdoms could work together for a common purpose when
that purpose was a crusade.

Centrifugal forces remained and it would be hard to exaggerate their
importance, but the remark of one of the Castilian kings when asked to
help in the defense of Jerusalem is worth repeating: "We are always on
crusade here, and so we do our share." It was in that spirit, with that
background, with the desire to smite the infidel everywhere, with the
secure knowledge that great things could be achieved if the kingdoms
worked together as they had at Las Navas, that the conquest of the
Americas was undertaken as soon as the Moors were expelled.

------------------------------------------------------------------------



    6. JEANNE D'ARC AND THE NON-CONQUEST OF ENGLAND




      I

They met at the bridge of Montereau, where the Aube breaks through the
Burgundian highlands to join the Seine. The great duke advanced with a
handful of his retainers behind him and knelt at the feet of Charles the
Dauphin to show that their resistances were over and there would
henceforth be cooperation between them against the English. As Duke Jean
lowered his head, a man stepped forward. It was Tanneguy Duchatel, the
dauphin's friend; and before anyone could prevent him or even speak, he
hewed at the duke with a battle-ax, striking him just where neck joined
shoulder. There was a gush of blood and a shout; someone thrust one of
the other Burgundians through the belly with a sword, and the rest of
the suite were taken to be thrown in chains.

The date was 19 September, 1419, and the deed inaugurated a series of
troubles that tore France to pieces for the next thirty years. Not that
the kingdom had lacked evils before the Montereau murder. The weight of
the armies of Henry of England, fifth of the name, bore heavily on the
land, and he had taken nearly all of Normandy after breaking the French
knights at Agincourt. King Charles VI of France was in the habit of
going mad every summer; Queen Isabeau had the morals of a slut and took
pleasure in informing the dauphin, her son, that he was a bastard. Under
Jean the Fearless, Burgundy had been welded into a powerful state,
reaching from the Alps to the North Sea, a fit rival for the whole of
France, and the Burgundians were currently in the possession of king,
queen, and Paris.

Dauphin Charles, to be sure, was at liberty and claiming the regency as
head of the national cause. But he was weak, slobbering, sensual, sly,
and surrounded by the faction of the Armagnacs, who had no qualities but
those of capable bandits. They stole the dauphin's money, left his
soldiers unpaid, and used their authority so ill that it was the people
of Paris themselves who had driven them out and brought the Burgundians
in. It was the same elsewhere. When Henry of England besieged Rouen, the
people defended themselves bravely, but after the place was forced to
surrender, the lords and knights were so disgusted with the dauphin's
party that hardly any of them refused to take the oath of allegiance to
the conquerer--arrogant and a foreigner, but at least able to keep some
order and to administer things with reasonable honesty.

The arrogance might have offered France an avenue of escape. Henry, who
had begun the war by asserting the old Plantagenet claim to the whole
realm of France, secretly advised Duke Jean of Burgundy that he was
willing to settle for the hand of Princess Katherine, with Normandy as
her dower. But after Agincourt he raised his sights and said he must
have Anjou and the suzerainty of Brittany as well. At this point
Tanneguy Duchatel first came into the picture. It was impossible to keep
a secret in any medieval court, and that of Charles the Dauphin was
fully advised of Henry's demand. Duchatel went to Duke Jean with an
offer to let him control the royal council if he would take up the good
cause against the English.

It was a trap and it was the prelude to the deed on the bridge at
Montereau. Charles the Dauphin and his Armagnac friends had no real
intention of striking hands with the Burgundians and had now
demonstrated it in the most unmistakable manner. It is reasonable to ask
whether they were quite aware of what they were doing, for Jean the
Fearless had a son named Philip, twenty-three years old (which was ripe
maturity for 1419), of approved skill both in council and in war. The
answer is probably that Charles never had any mind of his own and the
Armagnacs around him had no other idea than revenge for the revolt of
Paris against their party. They simply did not care what happened after
that.

What did happen was that Philip called a congress of Burgundians and
pro-Burgundians at Arras. Subject: how to take counterrevenge on the
dauphin for his murderous treachery. The decision of this congress was
that peace should be made with Henry of England on any terms acceptable
to him in order to make united war on the scoundrel, Charles. Henry's
terms now moved higher yet; they now included the hand of the Princess
Katherine, recognition of himself as regent for the half-mad king, and
succession to the throne of France, to the exclusion of the dauphin, who
was described by his own mother as a bastard. The terms were agreed, the
alliance was doubled by the marriage of Henry's brother, John, Duke of
Bedford, to Burgundy's sister, Anne. The treaty provided that when the
crowns of France and England fell into the same hands, it should be a
personal union only; the two nations were to preserve their own laws and
customs, be ruled by their own nationals, and the Parlement of Paris was
to be the supreme authority in France under the king's majesty.

Under this agreement English and Burgundians entered upon the conquest
of France. They made progress, since they had a perfectly legitimate
King of France on their side and Paris in their possession. The
remaining opposition was dumb rather than vocal, passive rather than
active, and consisted mainly in a series of holdouts in towns, which
turned the war into a procession of sieges. But in the summer of 1422
Henry, called "Henry the Conqueror" in France, fell ill of the
conqueror's disease of exhaustion and died within a few weeks. In
October mad Charles VI followed him, and an infant less than a year old
was proclaimed Henry VI of England and Henri II of France.


      II

This hardly seemed to matter. The regent and protector of both realms
was John Plantagenet, Duke of Bedford, and even in that able and violent
family he had few superiors. He spent most of his time administering the
French conquest, leaving England in the hands of his brother Humphrey of
Gloucester, who mismanaged things sadly, got into trouble with the
bishops and nobles, and had to be bailed out periodically by brother John.

But the main line of the story lies in France. There Bedford was not the
equal of Henry the Conqueror, since very few men could have been, but
his relations with Burgundy remained excellent and he behaved as though
he really were steward of France for the interests of France. He
reformed the procedure of the courts of justice and founded a university
at Caen. The governors of the great provinces "in the obedience of King
Henri" were Frenchmen, and the council of regency was overwhelmingly
French. The estates were called regularly, and contemporary chronicles
speak of Bedford with genuine enthusiasm. In short, he was succeeding in
subduing those parts of France that Henry V had only conquered. Guy de
Boutillier, who commanded the defense of Rouen against Henry V, became
the loyal provost of Paris for Henri II.

Yet the acceptance of the English was an acceptance at the upper levels
of society and beneath it the dumb opposition remained. Bedford's was an
enlightened and conciliatory policy, but the men down below who
administered it were neither. They were invaders, aliens, "Goddams," and
they behaved like it. When they came to a town they took the eggs and
the hen, the milk and the cow, and usually raped any available women.
The Burgundians, who at least spoke a kind of French, were not much
better; and on those lower levels there was a pronounced tendency toward
brawls.

This was not true of the great towns, of course, where the higher
officers could maintain order, but the Anglo-Burgundian occupation came
down hard on the countryside. Its weight was accentuated by the
conditions of the war. The English occupation of Normandy was fairly
solid, and no particular police operation was needed, while in Picardy
and northern Champagne, Burgundy was the lawful duke, and the invaders
need not put in an appearance as such. But in Maine, Anjou, the Ile de
France, southern Champagne, there were everywhere little islands of
resistance, everywhere towns flaring up, possessors of single chateaux
who held for the dauphin. Through this amorphous polity trailed bands of
English and Burgundians, looking for enemy holdings with intent to put
them down to the accompaniment of plunder, and claiming they had found
opposition whether it was there or not.

The Anglo-Burgundians simply did not have men enough to wipe out these
islands of resistance systematically. The population of England was just
recovering from two bouts with the Black Death and stood at something
like 2 million; that of the territory compromised in modern France was
about 20 million. Some of these latter were Burgundians, pro-English, or
still belonged to the empire, but the proportionate French numerical
superiority was still prodigious, and during Bedford's regency the
French still had the services of a considerable number of Scots.

In themselves numbers were no bar to an ultimate English conquest.
England itself had passed under the rule of Normans quite as small
proportionately, and Alexander the Great conquered the whole East with
not much more than double the number of men Bedford could deploy in
France. But weight must be given to local conditions. South of the Loire
and all along its length there were bridgeheads in the conquered north,
held by a French government which, however despicable, however
incompetent, could claim to be the legitimate government of France.
While it remained in possession of a considerable stretch of territory,
while it was still able to raise armies and levy taxes, while it had an
administrative center, the conquest was incomplete. It had been the lack
of any administrative focus for resistance that led to the acceptance of
conquerors in Persia and later in England; it was the destruction of
such a focus that made Las Navas de Tolosa decisive.

The state of the art of war also had a good deal to
 do with conditions.
Nearly a hundred years before, the Edwards of England had replaced
feudal levies by a system of long-term paid professional soldiers and
worked out a tactical doctrine that made the most of this material.
Basically this consisted of drawing up a solid block of men at arms on
foot, using spear, sword, and battle-ax; on the flanks of this formation
were thrown forward strong triangles of archers, covered by the sharp
stakes they carried. The English then awaited attack. Knightly cavalry
piled up under archer fire; men at arms on foot could not get through it
without paralyzing losses. The theme was played in all variations at
Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt, Aljubarita, and in a dozen minor contests.
If the enemy refused to attack, the English waited for the operation of
the disruptive forces Muhammad al Nazir counted on, then went somewhere
else, wherever they pleased. As paid professionals they could afford to
make a long campaign. But they usually drew their attack because, aside
from other considerations, chivalry forbade their opponents not to attack.

There existed at the time no real method of dealing with this English
hedgehog of armed men. No armor would keep out a shaft from an English
longbow; it fired so rapidly and had such range that other hand-borne
missile weapons could not be brought against it and the archers were so
mobile that heavier weapons were useless. To be sure, the longbow
required a period of training from childhood up, but this did not matter
in a country still largely forested, where the normal method of
supplying the cooking pot was by hunting, and in a service of
professionals, where archers had nothing to do but be archers. The total
result was that an English army in the terrain where it operated was
incomparably the best in Europe, and fully aware of the fact.

There were never as many of these English archers as the commanders
wanted, and they had no siegecraft to speak of. Cannon were not yet of a
force to deal with strong stone walls nor of a mobility to be taken into
the field. The normal method of taking a fortress was by starving it
out, since escalade was expensive in manpower when it failed, and
manpower was the specific shortage.

Thus the war in France under Bedford's regency was a repetition of Henry
V's: a long series of sieges, spotted with occasional battles. The most
important of the latter was at Verneuil in 1424, where the French
managed to gather a considerable force under the young Duke Jean II
d'Alencon, with a large Scottish contingent. The only difference from
the classic Anglo-French battle pattern was that Alencon detached a
flying wing to attack the English baggage train as a preliminary to
falling on the rear of the line of archers and men at arms. Bedford had
foreseen this and left a strong archer contingent in charge of the
train; they cut the flying wig to pieces and counterattacked so heavily
that the French front collapsed. Alencon was taken; Bedford reported
over 7,000 French dead or prisoners, which, if true, made Verneuil as
great an overthrow as Agincourt.

The old magic thus still held and the war of sieges went on, with the
line of the English obedience gradually but inexorably advancing. It
advanced only gradually because Bedford had to keep going back to
England to unravel the tangles set up by his brother. But by 1427
affairs there were in so much order that Bedford came back to take the
general direction of France. The field army, about 5,000 strong,
including some Burgundian auxiliaries, was placed under Thomas, Earl of
Salisbury, and ordered forward to the siege of Orleans.

This was a sound strategic decision in a war of sieges. Orleans covers
the chief passage of the Loire and the one nearest to Paris; it was the
largest city remaining in the hands of the dauphin (Bordeaux was
English) and the symbol of his dominion. Moreover, there is something
almost mystical about the Loire line in French military history. The
light of later events says that no less than three times--in 1815, 1871,
and 1940--France has given up after that line was passed; the light of
earlier times shows that when the Goths failed to break that line at
Chalons from the north and the Moors failed from the south at Tours,
France stood.

At this date the city part of Orleans lay north of the river, surrounded
by a castellated wall. There is an island in the stream; it held two
strong towers, the "Tourelles," connected with the city by a masonry
bridge, and with an outwork on the south bank by a drawbridge.
Salisbury, who was a reasonably good captain, judged that the key to the
place was this southern entrance and threw his weight on it. After
several failures he succeeded in storming the outwork and the Tourelles
on October 23. From this position his cannon could play on several of
the principle streets of the city; and it is worth setting down that in
this, the first important siege where guns played a part, they were used
exclusively as anti-personnel weapons.

Around the outside of the walls on the north bank a series of six
stockaded works were set up, served from the English camps in the rear.
Salisbury had not men enough to make a complete line of circumvallation
or to guard it. The spaces between his forts were covered by cavalry
patrols, which naturally did not stop the passage of messengers and of
some small convoys. The river was not fully blocked. Salisbury had every
intention of drawing the lines tighter and had begun work on it when he
was killed by a cannon ball on 3 November and was succeeded by his
lieutenant, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk.

Suffolk would qualify as a first-rate corps commander, but was without
the capacity to lead an army. He had served at Agincourt and Verneuil
and proved that he could command men in battle; he was also a creditable
diplomat, which seems to prove that there was nothing basically wrong
with his brain. But somewhere in his faculties there was a gap, a
circuit breaker between the fighting man as such and the man who uses
his brain for all purposes. It was not in the usual medieval scheme of
things for siege to be pressed around the clock, as Alexander the Great
had driven his siege at Tyre, but Suffolk pushed far less than usual.
The year turned without any important additions to the siege lines, and
as February of 1429 came, with provision beginning to grow short in the
town, there was scarcity also in the camps around it.

At this point Bedford dispatched a provision convoy from Paris,
consisting largely of barreled herring for Lent, under escort of 1,000
archers and 1,200 Parisian militia. The commander was Sir John Fastolf,
who has passed into Shakespeare and legend as Falstaff, the figure of
fun, but who was really a very able officer indeed. Someone in the
dauphin's circle heard of the expedition, and the Comte de Clermont was
sent with a hastily raised body of 4,000 men to intercept. They caught
up with Fastolf at Rouvray on February 12, and it was not the
conventional French-English battle. Fastolf formed his carts in a
circular wagonburg (it is probable that he had heard of the Hussites'
doing this sort of thing in Bohemia), with the archers stop the herring
barrels and the spearmen operating between the carts and through the
wheels. Clermont's men could make nothing of this novel defense; he was
beaten, his army broke up, and with it disappeared the last visible
French field force.


      III

In the early part of the fifteenth century people took their religion
personally. Good angels and bad angels, who took the most intimate
interest in their charges, were of common acceptance, and the great
Henry the Conqueror quite seriously accused his stepmother of practicing
sorcery to the detriment of her husband with the aid of an evil spirit.
It is therefore not surprising that when Jeanne d'Arc, the daughter of a
well-to-do peasant of Domremy on the border of Lorraine, began to hear
voices and see visions she should attribute them to angelic sources, or
that when she confided in others they should believe her.

The voices were those of St. Michael, St. Margaret, and St. Catherine,
and they came to her oftenest when she heard the churchbells sounding
for prayer, a ceremony which she performed assiduously and with genuine
devotion. Her family were dauphinists, who at least once had been forced
to take refuge in a castle to escape marauding Anglo-Burgundian bands.
When the news of the siege of Orleans arrived, the voices became
specific and insistent. They told her that she must leave her home, for
she was the instrument divinely chosen to drive the English from the
sieged city and to see that the dauphin was anointed at Rheims as
legitimate King of France. At this date Jeanne was eighteen, a tall,
strong girl with black hair, not particularly good-looking.

When she informed her parents of her mission they were first angry, then
sad; they would rather see her drowned than in the life of a camp, being
perfectly acquainted with what that life meant for an eighteen-year-old
girl. Anger and pleas alike were fruitless; finally an uncle took her to
the Sieur de Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs, the dauphinist leader in that
area. It is possible to imagine a certain amount of skepticism at
Vaucouleurs when Jeanne informed them that she had a divine mission to
assume the arms of a knight and save France, but this eroded away
rapidly under the influence of her peculiarly earnest and vehement
method of expression, the fact that she performed all the duties of the
Church with unquestionable piety and sincerity, and the other background
fact that friars had been traveling all through the country preaching
that deliverance from the Anglo-Burgundian oppressors must be sought
from heaven. There was nothing at all incredible about the idea that
this maid might be heaven's instrument; all of Vaucouleurs contributed
to
 buy her a horse and armor, and De Baudricourt supplied an escort to
take her to Chinon, where the dauphin was in residence.

There she encountered higher levels of skepticism. The first incident
that shook it was that of the identification. She was led into a hall
where three-hundred-odd people were gathered, among them Charles,
dressed rather simply, while many of the courtiers were elaborately
turned out. She walked straight up to the dauphin and said, "God give
you life, noble King."

"I am not the king," said Charles.

Jeanne said, "In God's name, sire, you are the king and no other. Give
me troops wherewith to succor Orleans and guard you to Rheims to be
crowned. It is the will of God."

Charles was impressed enough to take her aside privately and ask her for
a sign. He got it. She told him about his doubts as to his own
legitimacy, fostered by his harridan of a mother, and about his prayers
for reassurance; and she added that his fears were groundless.

This was enough for the dauphin; he assigned to her a chaplain and an
old knight, Jean d'Aulnon, under whom she studied the management of
horse and sword. The sign was not enough, however, for many of the other
courtiers and particularly Archbishop Renault de Chartres, primate of
France. The churchman was perfectly willing to admit that Jeanne was
supernaturally inspired; his doubt was whether the inspiration was
divine or demoniac, and he had her taken to Poitiers for examination by
the doctors of the university there. The combination of unmistakable
sincerity and piety with correctness on doctrinal points added them to
her list of converts.

Six weeks had gone by since Jeanne had arrived at Chinon and she was in
a fever of impatience to complete her mission, saying that her voices
told her she had "only a year and a little more." Charles sent her to
Blois, where a small army had been collected to cover a large convoy of
provisions for Orleans, with the best captains available--the young Duke
d'Alencon, ransomed from his Verneuil captivity, La Hire, Xaintrailles.

She made a striking figure in the camp, always clad in white armor and
riding a big black horse, which she managed with a dexterity that
excited admiration, carrying a white banner embroidered with the lilies
of France and a representation of Christ in his glory. In an age when
all news passed by word of mouth and lost nothing in the passing, it was
natural that tales should gather around the figure of the Maid (as
everyone was now calling her), but at least some of them must have had
foundation. The matter of the sword, for instance. When they offered her
one she said no, the sword destined for her would be found at the shrine
of St. Catherine of Fierbois, in a coffer long unopened, and it would be
engraved with three crosses. The sword was unearthed at the named spot;
it was the one she ever afterward carried. There was also the tale of
the soldier at the gate of Chinon, who swore when crowded as she entered
the castle with her escort.

"In the name of God, do you swear," said Jeanne, "and you so near
death?" He fell into the moat an hour later and was drowned.

That is, the men of the little army at Blois were convinced that they
were led by a miraculously inspired virgin, and the tale of her spread.
The impression was deepened by the Maid's behavior in her capacity as
commander of the army. She left matters of maneuver to the captains
without much interference, but she allowed no oaths, she drove whores
from the camp with the flat of her sword, she compelled regular
attendance at Mass and confessionals; and she was vigorous on points of
strategy. Under her guidance it was unquestionably the most moral army
of the Middle Ages, and it was glad to be so, for she had given it the
thrilling assurance of victory.

On April 25 she marched from Blois. She wished to move by the north bank
of the Loire, declaring that the English would neither sally from their
"bastilles," the forts around the city, nor from the towns of Beaugency
and Meung, which lay along the road. The captains insisted on the south
bank as more secure. They were probably wrong: the medieval news service
of gossip had functioned very thoroughly during Jeanne's delay at
Chinon; the English knew all about her and were worried. Not that there
was any admission that she was inspired by God or angels. The official
English view was that she was a witch, a sorceress; but this made her
more dangerous rather than less. Not many men of that period cared to
tamper with black magic.

She came up the south bank, then, and outside the town met Jean, Comte
Dunois, commandant of Orleans, an illegitimate son of Charles VI's
brother. This man, already one of the most distinguished soldiers of
France, was impressed at once. Then came the incident of the barges,
hardest of all to explain, however one many designate the stories of the
sword and the swearing solider as magnified tales. The provision convoy
was following by boat and Dunois pointed out that with the prevailing
east winds it would be impossible for the barges to get past the English
forts at the river's banks.

Jeanne said, "You are deceived. Better succor do I bring you than ever
yet came to town or men at arms, for it is the aid of the king of heaven."

Half an hour later the east wind dropped; an unseasonable, improper,
utterly impossible west wind blew up with the fall of night, bearing a
storm of thunder and rain, so strong that the sailing barges could tow
those without masts, and Orleans had its provision. For the rest of his
life Dunois never forgot it.

The news of this success of the sorceress did not do much for English
morale and the subsequent proceedings did still less. Jeanne rode into
the town during the storm that night, made a solemn procession through
the crowded streets the next morning, went to the principal church,
where a _Te Deum_ was chanted, and returned to the quarters provided for
her, refusing to attend a banquet. The next day she went to the walls
and by trumpet and word of mouth repeated a summons she had sent by
heralds, bidding the English to go home lest they suffer sorrow and
shame. Sir William Gladsdale, who commanded the Tourelles and the south
bank outpost, called her "the Armagnac whore"; she wept and made ready
for battle.

It is of some importance that although this girl of a little over
eighteen had now established her moral ascendancy among the troops she
had never been in a fight. That afternoon, while she was lying asleep,
Dunois believed he saw a weakness in the easternmost, upriver English
post, called St. Loup, and made a sally. It failed; the troops were
flowing back when Jeanne, roused by a sound which she afterward
identified as one of her voices, came riding into the reflux, carrying
her banner and shouting, "Hari! Go boldly in among the English!"

Wild with recovered enthusiasm, they followed her; St. Loup was taken
and all its garrison put to the sword, except some few spared at the
insistence of the Maid. It was now the judgment of Dunois, d'Alencon and
company, that they had moral and material forces sufficient to attempt
something more serious than a single fort and, moreover, that they had
better do so because it was altogether likely that the regent, Bedford,
would be down on them with reinforcements. Jeanne told them calmly that
the siege would be raised in five days. Whether it was she or another
who suggested the idea that the new enterprise would be an attack on the
southern bridgehead and the Tourelles, it was accepted at once. As much
of the garrison as could be spared were taken in boats to the southern
bank to join the men the Maid had brought with her and the command was
forward.

The date was May 7, and it was a desperate business, being
scaling-ladder work against strong walls. As Jeanne mounted one of the
ladders, an arrow went right through her armor between neck and
shoulder; she was carried to the rear, weeping with pain and shock. The
wound was dressed and she had begun to pray with her confessor when word
arrived that it was a repulse and Dunois had given orders for a retreat
to be sounded.

Jeanne sent for the commandant. "By my God," she said, "you shall soon
enter in there. Do not doubt it. When you see my banner wave against the
wall, to your arms again. The fort is yours. For the present rest a
little, and take some food and drink."

She was now recovered from the shock of the wound, but could not carry
her banner, which was borne by a soldier. As it went forward and touched
the wall, all the French made a concerted rush up the ladders, while in
the rear the Orleannais laid planks across the broken bridge and
sallied. The French went up, over, into the outpost, and swept right
into the Tourelles when Gladsdale was killed by a cannon ball that took
out the drawbridge under his feet. Of the garrison 300 were killed and
200 taken.

The next day was Sunday; the Orleannais woke to see the English forts
north of the river in flames, but their troops drawn up for battle
before the city. Dunois was eager to go out and give them a fight, but
Jeanne said no. "In the name of God, let them depart, and let us return
thanks to God." Her view (which was the soundest tactical sense, since
one did not attack an English army in the field with good chances)
prevailed; instead of a battle, it was a solemn procession around the
walls, with services of thanksgiving. Orleans was relieved.


      IV

The event was not in itself decisive; there had been sieges and reliefs
all through the war, and although English morale had been badly shaken
by "that disciple and limb of the fiend called Pucelle, that uses false
enchantments and sorcery," they still had strong forces in the field.
There was Suffolk's former besieging army and a new one concentrated
from various points by Bedford, under Fastolf and John, Lord Talbot,
already on the march
 into the Loire country. Jeanne was in favor of
neglecting both for a progress to Rheims and the immediate coronation of
Charles in fulfillment of her mission, but the captains persuaded her
that the English field forces must first be dealt with.

At this point the gap between Suffolk the fighting man and Suffolk the
strategist becomes apparent. Instead of falling back to rally on the
Fastolf-Talbot force, he parceled his small army out among the Loire
towns--Jargeau, Meung, Beaugency. Jeanne moved on Jargeau first and on
June 12 took the place by assault when the defenders flinched from the
wall in the face of her black magic. Suffolk the fighting man bravely
tried to make a stand in the streets and was taken with whatever men he
had left. On the fifteenth Jeanne and her people forced the bridge at
Meung and took that place too; next day they were around Beaugency. It
was a town of considerable strength and held the largest of Suffolk's
detachments, but whether from utterly depleted morale or because there
had been no tie to assemble provision, it surrendered on terms after
only three days of siege.

Talbot learned of this on the day following and began to fall back
toward Paris. The region through which he moved was much cut up by
hedgerows and small clumps of forest, and it was not the custom of the
age to put out flank guards, but near Patay the English commander
learned that the French were close, without being able to see too much
of them. Instead of accepting advice to continue the retreat, Talbot
cried, "By God and St. George, I will attack!" and ordered out the
archers to form wings along the hedgerows, while the remainder of his
forces filed into position behind them.

He did not realize how close the French were, or that they would be
driven by the urgency of the Maid, La Hire, and Alencon. The two armies
seem to have been moving along courses roughly parallel, with the French
even less aware than their opponents of the enemy's presence, when a
stag was started and the English archers, just beginning to fix their
stakes along the hedge, raised a view halloo. Jeanne instantly wheeled
everything round with all the vehemence she could impart to such a
movement, crying that the men at arms should not wait to form line but
go straight in.

The archers were scattered before they could shoot, and Talbot's
Burgundian and Picard auxiliaries, caught in column, were borne down and
away under weight of numbers and momentum in a dusty, clanging,
whirlwind melee. Baggage train and artillery, which had been the head of
the column, made a brief stand under their archer guard; then they also
went. Fastolf with the English knights came up just in time to face the
whole French force and then got out as best he could, his men panicking.
He was afterward accused of cowardice, and though the charge was justly
dismissed, enough of the tar stuck to make the Shakespearean character.
Talbot was captured; more than a third of his army was destroyed and the
rest pretty well dispersed.

This now was decisive. Charles marched on Rheims and was duly anointed
on July 17, while Jeanne threw herself weeping at his feet, her mission
accomplished. In a strategic sense it did not matter that she was
persuaded by the courtiers to remain in the field, that she failed in an
attack on Paris in September, or that in the following spring she was
taken by the Burgundians and sold to the English to be cruelly burned at
the stake in Rouen.

Patay was locally decisive because it completed the wiping out of two
English armies. It is evident that Bedford must have stripped his
garrisons down thin to make up the Talbot force; when Jeanne and Charles
appeared after the battle, town after town went over to the royal
arms--Troyes, Chalons, Rheims, Soissons, Laon. The Regent of England did
manage to get together a field force with which he operated all the
following summer, but it kept costing him more towns and the English
domination of France slid downhill to complete ruin.

It slid because, beyond the local decisions at Orleans and Patay, an
answer had at last been found to that English system of war which
enabled the smaller nation to bring France to the edge of national
collapse. Most obviously the solution lay in the release of moral
forces. _In hoc signo vinces_ can be quite as useful a military weapon
as a sword or a cannon, as Sa'ad's Saracens had earlier demonstrated.
Moral forces also ended the effects of the good government with which
Bedford was gradually securing northern France. It was not that Charles
could offer any better government; practically everything was in the
hands of his wretched court favorites, justice was at a minimum, taxes
at their peak. It was not even that one government was English and the
other French, for Bedford's administration was nearly all French. But
Charles had been given the direct support of the king of heaven through
the Maid, and he was God's anointed; duty to him had become religious as
well as political.

This invalidated the Anglo-Burgundian method of conquering the country
by holding the towns, a method which rested on small garrisons and
acquiescence. It also had its effect on the morale of the always
outnumbered English professional soldiers, whether in towns or in the
field. The fall of Jargeau, the surrender of Beaugency are evidential.
But the fact that Jeanne released and channeled moral forces in an
atmosphere of mysticism and religious fervor has been allowed to conceal
something quite as important--namely, that she and not the captains had
found a method of dealing with the strategy and tactics of the English
hedgehog.

This method was so simple that no one had been able to think of it
before: Jeanne simply refrained from attacking the hedgehog. It has been
suggested that her furious out-of-hand assault at Patay was due to no
more than a desire to come to handgrips with the enemy as soon as
possible. But she had an excellent opportunity to close with the English
on the morning after they burned their forts at Orleans, with the moral
factors heavily on her side, and she did nothing of the kind; they were
in formation. During the campaign that followed the coronation, she had
other opportunities to attack English formations, and she made no such
attacks. The weight of the evidence says that at Patay the charge was
made in a hurry precisely to keep the English from setting up their
invincible defense.

Moral authority here reached over into the tactical field. D'Alencon and
Verneuil, like other French captains before him, was involved in the
concept of chivalry; if he failed to attack, he would have been guilty
of unknightly conduct and part of the base on which his ability to
command rested would have been taken from under him. The fact that in
all the battles of the Hundred Years' War the French had a numerical
superiority was plainly visible; the facts that they were opposing one
arm to the combined arms, that they were amateurs fighting
professionals, made no difference to chivalry. But Jeanne had a moral
authority that could override chivalry and let her do what the tactics
and strategy of the situation plainly demanded.

Dunois, La Hire, the other leaders caught up the lesson, and that they
learned it was one of the main reasons why the English were driven from
France. They did not attack hedgehogs, they waited to be attacked, and
the defect of the English formation stood revealed. It could not move.

It is probably fortunate that they lost in the long run. The conquest of
France on the lines begun by Bedford could hardly have resulted in
anything but a kind of French conquest of England. Henry VI was half
French by blood; he must inevitably have placed the center of gravity of
the dual crown in the larger kingdom and set its interests first. This,
of course, leaves out of account the character of that unimpressive
monarch, or the lack of it. He would very likely have made out as badly
in France as he ended by doing in England. But the advisers, the great
feudatories, the men reaching for power would have been French and not
English, they would have set up a sort of second Norman conquest. The
total possible results defy speculation, but there were no such results.
Jeanne d'Arc took care of that.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    7. VIENNA AND THE FAILURE TO COMPLETE THE CRESCENT




      I

In the early part of the sixteenth century there developed a nexus of
decision in Western Europe. It centered around five men--two of them
kings, one an emperor, one a religious leader, and one a politician
wearing the clothes of a religious leader. Though all of them took
advice and occasionally changed the details of their policy, they were
so consistent that it is possible to deal with them in general terms.

One of the kings was Henry VIII of England; his policy looked inward to
England and outward across the Atlantic, and although his support was
eagerly sought by other members of the power group and that seeking
influenced many of their actions, he was always so unwilling to do
anything practical about affairs on the Continent that he may be
dismissed with the remark that he raised tides like the moon and
remained about the same distance.

The second king was Francis I of France, who thought of himself as a
knight-errant like Pedro of Aragon, and behaved like a bandit. He
inherited a realm which had become the first modern unified state of
Europe under Louis XI, Charles VII's son, with the great feudatories
broken down, and a military system based on a combination of artillery
with heavy cavalry, especially designed to deal with English armies of
static archers and men at arms. In Francis' very first year of 1515
ambition took him to Italy, where he encountered the Swiss pikemen and
halberdiers, the terror of Central Europe, at Marignano. It was one of
the
 most gigantic battles of the age. Two days of desperate fighting
proved that the new French system was quite as useful against pikemen as
against archers. "The drunken Swiss" were driven from the field; France
won the duchy of Milan and made with Switzerland a "perpetual peace"
that really turned out to be perpetual.

The war in which this took place was really part of the long duel
between the royal house of France and the ducal house of Burgundy, which
in Jeanne d'Arc's time so nearly missed ending in the completion of
Henry V's conquest. But the ducal house of Burgundy had ceased being
merely the greatest of the French feudatories. By one of those marriages
which caused a rival king to ejaculate, "_Tu, felix Austria, nube_," its
possessions had fallen in with those of the Hapsburg Empire. By another,
with Joanna, the heiress of Spain (who, like all queens named Joanna,
ultimately went mad), that peninsula and its immense overseas empire
were added to the Hapsburg heritage. In 1519 the third protagonist of
this story, Charles V, attained the united throne.

He inherited more than dominions that encircled France on every side and
a tradition of implacable hostility toward her. Charles also acquired
the Spanish military establishment, based on solid blocks of heavily
armored, thoroughly disciplined pikemen, with little knots of
arquebusiers at the corners: the _tercias_. At Pavia in 1525 this
establishment clashed with Francis and the combination of fire power and
push proved so far superior to what France could put in the field, even
with Swiss help, that the French army was destroyed and Francis himself
taken prisoner.

The event decided the fate of Italy, which in a practical sense became a
Spanish possession for two generations, but it did not make things much
easier for Charles, because of the politician in the power complex. This
was Pope Clement VII, who could never forget that before his election he
had been Giulio de' Medici, a member of the former ruling house of
Florence. Neither in this capacity nor as an Italian temporal potentate
was he anxious to be helpful to Charles, and in fact was so unhelpful
that strains built up to that sack of Rome, which is usually taken as
the most convenient date point for the end of the Italian Renaissance.

Quite as importantly the Holy Father procrastinated about calling a
general council of the Church, which Charles deeply desired as a means
of dealing with one of his leading problems, the fifth member of the
combination, Martin Luther. It is by no means certain that a council
would have extricated Charles from his difficulties with the Reformers,
for when the matter came to a head, Luther had already pronounced his
conviction of the fallibility of councils to Charles' face at Worms. By
this date the movement had taken on a certain nationalistic aspect in
addition to the religious. But the refusal of Clement to call a council
made it very certain that Charles would not easily get out of this
particular trouble.

There were the forces. They produced a long series of French-Imperial
wars that left everybody poor, without any significant territorial
changes after Pavia. These wars had the technical characteristic of
being largely conducted through siege operations. After Pavia nobody
quite dared to meet the Spanish infantry in the field, and in any case,
the plunder of a town at reasonable intervals was one of the best
methods of keeping mercenary _Landsknechts_ and terciaries to the line
of discipline.

By 1528 the situation of Western Europe had become not too dissimilar
from that in the Middle East at the date when the Persian and Byzantine
empires had exhausted each other just in time to clear the track for the
coming of the Saracens. Here also there was a sprawling empire, short of
financial resources, with part of its population in a state of religious
disaffection, engaged in a great struggle with another entity.

The Muslims were at hand to take advantage of the situation here also.


      II

They were no longer the penniless Saracens of the desert, with the drive
supplied by a religion which had united a race, but a closely organized
and modern, if non-Western, state--the Ottoman Turks. They were a clan
which appeared in Asia Minor in 1227, nomads from the steppes and
relatives of the Seljuq Turks. The Seljuqs assigned them some territory
around Ankara as a reward for military services. The Seljuqs themselves
had reached Asia Minor earlier, as servants and fighting men for the
later and more luxurious caliphs, and soon owned everything; but they
had no gift of political organization, and as the clan system tended to
fragment where they were in permanent residence, they became a group of
quarreling independent principalities about the time the Ottomans
arrived on the scene.

These Ottomans had two stupendous pieces of luck. One was in their royal
family; in the course of nearly 300 years, down to the point at which
this narrative begins, that family produced an unbroken succession of no
less than nine extremely able rulers--energetic, adventurous, cruel,
just, and intelligent. Conquest was their peculiar pleasure. No other
family strain in all history can show such a record.

The second piece of luck was Ala ed-Din, one of the members of this
family and elder son of Othman, the first sultan. He was a philosopher
and a theoretician, who willingly left the throne to his younger brother
Orkhan, and devoted himself to working out a military and administrative
system that would make the most of what the Ottoman Turks had.

There were never very many of them, but they were all soldiers, and
being of nomad origin, soldiers who fought on horseback. When a district
was overrun, it was cut up into fiefs, each of which was to supply a
horseman. These fiefs were combined into districts and the districts
into larger counties under the authority of a _beylerbey_. Thus far the
system was feudal. There was a provision that a fief did not necessarily
fall from father to son, each must must prove his own right by valor and
service, but there were similar statutes in early European feudalisms
also, and the Turkish setup might have taken similar lines of
development but for the unique additive supplied by Ala ed-Din.

This was the institution of the _yeni cheri_, Europeanized as
Janissaries. Their background was that the later caliphs of Egypt had
set up a body of slave soldiers called the Mamelukes; at the same time
in all Muslim countries the religious duty of exacting tribute from all
non-Muslims endured. Ala ed-Din combined the two institutions by taking
his tribute in the form of male children. They were brought up in Islam,
forbidden to marry or to engage in trade, held under the strictest
discipline and, except for those who showed administrative talent, they
were confined to the camp from the age of twenty-five. They were infantry.

The Ottoman sultans thus had a celibate military community within the
body of their state, one whose only devotion was to them and to Islam,
and one whose every member was trained from childhood in the sole
business of war. With such an instrument in the hands of the heads of
state, and with such heads of state as the Ottoman line provided, the
feudal lords never had a chance to develop into great feudatories, as in
the West. They remained a body of first-class cavalry and a rather loose
aristocratic class, since only the son of a feudal tenant could hold a fief.

The military organization thus combined a standing army of elite
infantry, whose cavalry wings could be increased in an emergency. It was
infinitely superior to anything in the West, and the Ottomans proceeded
to prove it, beginning with what was left of the dying Greek Empire,
since they were not too interested in subduing other Turks. By 1355 what
was left of the Byzantines in Asia Minor had been wiped out; in 1361
Murad I crossed the straits, took Adrianople, made it his capital, and
began working on the Balkans. Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania, Montenegro,
Wallachia celebrate national heroes for their resistance to the flood
from the East, but it always ended the same way, in another nation or
district being added to the Ottoman Empire. With each addition the
number of available fiefs and of children to be made into robot
Janisseries grew, a snowballing process without visible limit.

It was not even interrupted by an incursion of Mongols who captured
Sultan Bayezid I and kept him in an iron cage till he died; nor by the
fact that each succeeding sultan usually found it necessary to have his
brothers and cousins poisoned or strangled. The supply of good blood in
the Othmanli line seemed inexhaustible. By the middle of the fifteenth
century the whole of the Balkans and Greece were Turkish and their
fleets began to dominate the eastern Mediterranean.

One of the specific excellences of that Ottoman line was its ability to
learn. It is not certain when and where they first encountered
cannon--probably in the hands of Venetian sailors--but it did not take
them long to discover that this invention covered the one technical
weakness of an army essentially nomadic by habit and thought, its
inability to handle siege operations. The new device was adopted with
enthusiasm, and under the influence of the Turkish penchant for
magnificence the Ottoman heavy artillery speedily became the best in the
world. When Muhammad II reached the throne in 1451 he at once began
casting enormous guns that could throw stone balls up to twenty-five
inches in diameter; two years later he turned them on the greatest city
in the world and Constantinople became Istanbul.

It was a shock to Christianity, but all efforts to raise a crusade
encountered the fact that Christianity was thinking about other things.
Moreover, Muhammad failed to take Rhodes from the Knights of St. John;
his successor, Bayezid II, kept peace
 in Europe except with the
Hungarians, whom everyone regarded as little better than the Turks; and
_his_ successor, Selim the Grim, became involved in a series of wars in
the East, in support of Muslim orthodoxy against the Shi'ite heretics of
Persia. It is worth noting that his artillery won the wars for him and
also enabled him to take over Syria and Egypt.

In 1520 he died, and his son Suleiman, known to Turks as Suleiman the
Lawgiver and to Europe as Suleiman the Magnificent, became the tenth sultan.


      III

To contemporaries this seemed good news rather than bad. The
communications of the West with the Turkish court through Venice were
excellent, and people knew all about the new ruler--about twenty-five
years old, tall for a Turk, somewhat of sallow countenance, with Tartar
blood from his mother; very quick, both of mind and body, delighting in
romantic tales and the Muslim type of chivalry, a linguist who could
converse with his officers in most of the Balkan dialects, knew Italian,
was a master of Persian and Arabic, and wrote poetry in his own language
so well that even if he had not bee a ruler he would have ranked as one
of his country's leading poets. His interests were thoroughly Western;
he had been governor of European Turkey while his father was campaigning
in the south and east, and he cared nothing for Selim's crusade against
the Shi'ite heretics. A despot, but an enlightened despot, on the
familiar model of Francis I and Charles V; Europe considered it entirely
possible to do business with a man like that. Finally, his grand vizier
and alter ego was a Greek turned Muslim, a man named Ibrahim, of
infinite charm and accommodation.

Europe overlooked two factors, not very surprisingly, since they were
buried in Muslim law and tradition. One was the fact that just before
his death, the late Grim Selim had become Caliph of all Islam, Commander
of the Faithful. In the theory of Muslim law this office should be in
the hands of a member of the Prophet's clan, the Koreish. The last
caliph of the blood was a shadowy creature, who held a phantom court at
Cairo; when Selim acquired Egypt, the office was resigned to the sultan
without much urging. Suleiman thus inherited the position of the early
caliphs as combined emperor, Pope, and commander in chief of the armies
of a Muslim world that had abruptly become very nearly united, thanks to
his father's overthrow of the heretical units and the expulsion from
Spain of the last remnants of the Almohades.

The second factor overlooked in the West was the compilation of a code
of Muslim law, which took in not only the Qu'ran, but also the sayings
of the Prophet recorded from oral tradition and the decisions of the
early caliphs. The code was not complete when Suleiman reached the
throne, but there was enough of it, added to previous codes, to
establish the main line, and one point in it was absolutely clear: it
was the plain religious duty of Muslims to conquer the unbeliever,
convert him to Islam, or impose tribute upon him. It is not recorded
that Suleiman was particularly devout, but many of his officers were,
and the Janissaries, who were beginning to realize themselves as an
influential guild, were not at all happy unless there was a war on.

The sum of these forces was that Suleiman's interest in the West became
an interest in conquering the West, and he began with a demand on young
King Lajos (or Louis) of Hungary for tribute. Young King Lajos had the
ambassadors killed, which would have been a fairly good cause of war
even if nobody were trying to provoke one. Suleiman set the troops in
motion, and without difficulty captured the two great border fortresses
of Szabacs and Belgrade. They were, in fact, taken almost too easily;
not only did Suleiman wish to shine, but also the vizier, Ibrahim,
pointed out to him that the realm had expanded so rapidly to east and
south that some labor of consolidation in those directions would be
necessary. The shining part of the program was temporarily accomplished
by an attack on the Knights of St. John of Rhodes, who were forced to
surrender after a tremendous defense. Suleiman was still engaged in
distributing fiefs, putting down local troubles, and organizing
administration in Egypt and Kurdistan when he received a letter from the
King of France.

It was written from Madrid, whither Francis had been taken as a prisoner
after Pavia, and it urged the sultan to press on against Hungary and the
empire for glory and booty; France would do her part by keeping Charles
V occupied in a two-front war. The embassy acted as a detonating charge;
Suleiman dropped his administrative details into the hands of
subordinates and turned in the direction to which ambition, religion,
and the demands of the Janissaries all urged him--Hungary.

That state was particularly ill-prepared to meet attack. Throughout the
turn-of-the-century period Hungary had presented the curious spectacle
of social evolution backward. The great nobles cased themselves in
semi-barbaric luxury and jewels, even wearing their coronets to bed; the
burden of taxation fell ever more heavily on the peasantry until they
staged a fierce revolt, fiercely repressed in 1514. It was followed by
the "Savage Diet," which enacted laws that placed the entire laboring
population in actual, not virtual, slavery to "their natural lords,"
annulled any charters the towns had, permitted nobles to engage in trade
tax-free, and came down so hard on the minor gentry that thousands of
them preferred to cross the Turkish border, live under Muhammad, and pay
tribute rather than be part of such a regime. King Lajos himself was
often short of clothes and food.

When Suleiman came through Belgrade with 100,000 men, Lajos could
assemble less than 30,000, feudal cavalry, with a group of
forced-to-fight peasant infantry. Lajos had hoped and asked for help
from Charles V, doubly his brother-in-law, but Francis of France,
faithful to his engagement with the Turks, pushed an army into Italy,
and the emperor could spare nothing. Young King Lajos led against the
Turks at Mohacs; on August 28, 1526, he was killed with both archbishops
of the realm, five bishops, and 24,000 men, and Hungary ceased to exist
as a nation. The plunder of Buda furnished the bazaars of the Near East
with wares for years afterward, and Suleiman had John Zapolya, the
voivode of Transylvania, elected to the vacant throne as a tributary king.

He was not the only claimant. The emperor's brother Ferdinand called
himself King of Hungary in the right of his wife, sister of the late
King Lajos, and assembled enough of the magnates to make up something
called a Diet, which went through a form of election. "Tell him I will
see him at Mohacs," said Suleiman when he heard of it, "and if he is not
there I will come to Vienna for him."

For the moment the sultan was too busy with affairs in Persia to do
anything about Vienna, and with the withdrawal of Turkish troops,
Hungary collapsed into an anarchy of roving bands who theoretically held
for King Ferdinand or King John, but actually served only themselves.
But by the end of 1528, Suleiman had solved out his Persian
preoccupations and determined that the next step should be the thorough
digestion of Hungary through the fief system, as the Balkans had been
digested earlier. A necessary step in this direction was the capture of
Vienna and the elimination of any German danger to the new frontier, as
the Hungarian danger to the Balkans had been eliminated by Mohacs and
the capture of Buda.

The strategic plan was to take Vienna in the late summer of 1529, winter
there and, drawing in reinforcements, proceed to a spring campaign for
the preliminary conquest of Germany. Francis of France could be counted
on to keep the empire busy on the opposite flank, the one Charles
regarded as vital; Ferdinand, like young King Lajos, would have to
depend pretty much on his own resources. Suleiman had observed that
these Christian kingdoms lacked such unity of action as was conferred by
the combined sultanate-caliphate.

On April 10, 1529, the sultan left Istanbul with more than 200,000 men.
The Janissaries were sent up the Danube in boats; King John Zapolya
would join with a contingent in Hungary.


      IV

Ferdinand, in addition to his title of King of Hungary, was also
Archduke of Austria and King of Bohemia. As soon as he heard that
Suleiman was on the march, with his ultimate destination the Rhine,
meetings of the estates were called in all the dominions where Ferdinand
had any authority. The leading limitation on all Central European
monarchies of the date was that of weak police power. Austria voted to
sent every tenth man for the defense of Vienna, but could by no means
enforce it, and Bohemia, where the estates valiantly declared in favor
of mobilizing every man capable of bearing arms, actually sent only
2,000, and these not till late August. The Diet of the empire, which was
assembled at Speyer, voted an assistance of 12,000 foot and 2,000 horse,
but tacked on a provision that no troops at all were to move until a
deputation had visited Hungary to find out whether this nonsense about a
Turkish drive was really true; then went into a series of almost
interminable debates as to who should command the imperial forces if it
turned out that they were really needed. Charles V was in Italy, very
much concerned about what the French were doing there, and Pope Clement
VII was intensely occupied in reestablishing the Medici dukedom of
Florence in place of the republic.

That is, nobody wished to believe there was any real danger except the
men on the spot. Fortunately for Germany and Europe there was a couple
of very good men on the spot. The better was a certain Graf Nicolas zu
Salm-Reifferscheidt, all his life a solider of the empire, who had
fought at Pavia and personally wounded and been wounded by
 King Francis.
Salm was already sixty-six at the time, and in the year of Suleiman's
invasion seventy; a man who had defended the Croat and Slovene lands
against the puppet King Zapolya and who knew the country. He was too
minor a noble to be named formally as commander; after its endless
debate the Diet of Speyer gave this office to Duke Friedrich of the
Palatinate.

Graf Nicolas reached Vienna in the early days of September; not long
after his arrival word came through that Suleiman had taken Pesth, where
the empire had a small garrison, and the Janissaries had slaughtered
every man in the place. If any news were needed to stir the Viennese to
work on their defenses this was probably it; but down to the coming of
Graf Nicolas there had been nobody to take the lead, to tell people what
to do. And there was everything to do: the city wall dated from
approximately the time when Rudolph of Hapsburg made the place his
capital in 1276, was only six feet thick and ruinous, enclosing the
strictly limited area now known as "the Ring." The outer palisade beyond
the dry ditch was so weak that it bore and deserved the name of "city
hedge"--_Stadtzaun_; the citadel was an old building of brick and
timber; the houses roofed with highly inflammable shingles. There were
no magazines.

Graf Nicolas sent details out to scout the countryside for every kind of
food, while in and around the city he built and destroyed. All the
houses of the suburbs outside the ancient wall were pulled down or
burned to deprive the attackers of cover, including the great city
hospital, two churches, and three convents. There was no time to build
new masonry walls or to extend the old ones; where they were weak,
earthwork bastions were thrown up and stoutly palisaded. The bank of the
Danube arm that swings past the city was also trenched and fitted with
palisades. To avoid the ricochet of shot all the paving stones were
taken up and most of them used for a new loose wall inside the old from
the Stuben to the Karnthner Gate--on the east side, along the creek that
is called Wiener Bach, where the old defenses were weakest.

Graf Nicolas conducted a conscientious census, assembling as many of the
useless mouths as he could, women, children, old men and ecclesiastics,
for dispatch outside the city. On 21 September word came that the Turks
were across the river Raab and had taken the outpost of Altenburg; two
days later there arrived in the city 700 first-class Spaniards and about
1,000 German troops of the empire under the Pfalzgraf Philip, the second
of the two good leaders in the defense. He said that the deputation from
the Diet of Speyer had reported that the Turkish danger was indeed
serious, and Duke Friedrich had come as far forward as Linz with the
imperial contingent but, hearing that Suleiman was in great force,
declined to risk ruin by advancing any further.

That same day there was a skirmish outside the walls between a body of
Turks and 500 cuirassiers under Graf Hardegg; the cuirassiers were
driven in with the loss of seven prisoners, four of whom were presently
sent to Vienna by the sultan, richly dressed, to bear his terms. He
expected to breakfast in the city on the twenty-ninth; if it would
surrender at discretion, none of his people but functionaries should
enter and all would be secure; if it held out the place would be so
utterly destroyed that no one would know where it had stood, and every
living thing in it would be put to the sword. In view of the general
proceedings of the Turks one could believe that; the word was that the
light troops of their vanguard had come up with a convoy of 5,000 of the
useless mouths at Traismauer and massacred every one of them.

Graf Nicolas had four Turkish prisoners dressed as richly as the
cuirassier messengers and sent them to Suleiman. They bore no word in
return. The garrison numbered 22,000 foot, 2,000 horse, and seventy-two
guns of nearly as many calibers and makes. The cavalry were stationed in
the four main squares to rush wherever they were needed; a master gunner
was assigned to each of the pieces. Pfalzgraf Philip outranked Salm, but
cheerfully waived the fact and only countersigned his orders. There were
nearly 350,000 of the attackers.


      V

That summer it had rained. It rained with an intensity such as few
people in that part of Europe had seen, day after day, one of the most
remarkable meteorological events of the century. Suleiman would have
thought it beneath him to be impeded by the weather, and in fact he did
not allow himself to be. The horsemen who formed the largest numerical
proportion of his army were not, and ahead of the main body there moved
a corps of 20,000 of them, called by the Turks _akinji_, or "sackmen,"
whose specific task was to devastate the country and destroy the
inhabitants in preparation for Turkish occupation. They were the people
who cut off the 5,000 noncombatants at Traismauer, and it is estimated
that they got rid of two thirds of the population of the districts
through which they moved, which cannot be much of an exaggeration.

The horsemen could thus move, no matter how wet it was. The camp
followers, baggage, and women could move after a fashion in wagons, and
it did not matter if they fell behind, because everything they supplied
could be had by ravaging the countryside. The Janissary infantry and the
light guns moved up the Danube in boats. But there was one force that
could not move at all through those perpetual rains in a country largely
wooded and with no metalled roads. That was the heavy artillery, the
siege guns, which weighed all the way up to twelve tons apiece. Even the
Danube flotilla could not carry such monsters, and they were left
behind, to the number of 200.

In view of the number of his troops, the fact that he was joined at
Mohacs by Zapolya, who commanded certain Hungarian loyalties, and the
skill of his engineers, this did not seem particularly important to
Suleiman. He planned on mining operations if Vienna did not surrender
easily, and some thousands of his host were experienced miners from
Wallachia and Moldavia. When he arrived opposite the city on September
26 and set up seven great camps around it--tents visible as far as the
eye could reach from the tower of St. Stephen, where Salm established
his observation post--the first thing he did was to command regular
parallels at the southwest side of the city and mining operations
against the Karnthner Gate area on the south side, accompanied by
artillery bombardment and a ceaseless storm of arrows.

It was characteristic of Suleiman the Magnificent that while these
arrows were so numerous that they made the streets near the walls
unsafe, many of them were finished with costly fabrics and even inlaid
with pearls. The Janissaries fired most of them from the ruins of the
suburban houses. The results from the guns available were notably poor
against Salm's emergency earthworks; after the first day target was
shifted to the taller buildings, notably St. Stephen's tower, and it
says something about the quality of Turkish gunnery practice that they
could not even drive Graf Nicolas from his post. The artillery of the
defense does not seem to have been much better in the beginning. Many of
the embrasures in the old walls were so narrow that the guns would not
traverse properly and there was no fund of experience in mounting pieces
behind earthwork bastions. But Salm, or someone under him, had a highly
judgmatical eye; some of the guns were removed to the tops of buildings,
and for others platforms were built, after which they really began to
hurt, especially in the areas along the river.

This was to have a highly important result, but in the meanwhile the
main event was a cavalry sally from the Karnthner Gate, led by the
Austrian Eck von Reischach on the twenty-ninth, the day Suleiman
proposed to breakfast in Vienna. Von Reischach had spotted numbers of
the Turks spread out among the vineyards on that side, and killed a lot
of them before they could assemble. Through the next day it was all
shooting, and at noon on October 1 the result of the good artillery
practice along the river appeared in the form of a Turk who came out of
the no man's land created by the guns and said he was of Christian
parents, bearing information.

He was turned over to a cavalry commander, Wilhelm von Roggendorf, who
had him tortured a little to make sure he was telling the truth, and
thus learned that the Turks were driving mines in an utterly unexpected
spot--not where their parallels were, opposite the Berg, but right under
the Wiener Bach, on both sides of the Karnthner Gate. Countermining was
ordered at once; next morning a big mine under the gate tower was broken
into and destroyed in a strange underground battle by torchlight.
General Roggendorf gave the deserter substance for life; guards were
placed in all the cellars, with drums scattered over with dried peas,
where activity was suspected.

Suleiman's technique of mining had failed to work by surprise; but there
was no other means of getting into the city, so he turned to making it
work by main force and superior numbers. More mines were dug in the
Karnthner Gate area and all along under the Wiener Bach. Twice
countermines reached the Turkish powder chambers and as much as eight
tons of explosive was carried off from one of them; three times in the
stormy week between October 4 and October 12 mines did go off and made
breaches in the walls, one of them wide enough for twenty-four men
abreast. The always victorious Janissaries assaulted these breaches; but
behind them were palisades, and behind the palisades Spanish
arquebusiers and German _Landsknechts_ with their long swords and huge
halberds, quite as rough citizens as the Janissaries, and better armed
for the conditions. There were 1,200 bodies in the breach on the
afternoon of the twelfth.

Late
 that night there was a council of war in the Turkish camp. It was
still raining, the food situation in the huge army had become distinctly
serious, since provision convoys could not move. The losses had not been
intolerable in numerical terms--the figures ran between 14,000 and
20,000--but their incidence was alarming, most of them falling on the
aristocratic horsemen and the Janissaries. The latter proud troops were
depressed and doing something they had never done before, complaining
that their lives were being sacrificed needlessly. The vizier, Ibrahim,
remarked that the law of the Qu'ran had been satisfied by three main
assaults, each three times renewed. But Suleiman the Magnificent was not
satisfied. Three more great mines, one on each side of the Karnthner
Gate, one directly under the Beg, were just ready, and he wanted a
really grand attack, the whole force of the army, supported by all its
guns. He promised the Janissaries a donative of 1,000 aspers per man for
this attack, with 30,000 aspers and promotion to the highest military
rank for the first man inside the city.

On the morning of the fourteenth everything was ready. At nine the order
to explode the mines was given and the sacred horsetails borne forward.
The thing miscarried from the start. The mine at the Berg never went off
at all (the Austrians had countermined it and robbed it of its powder)
and though the Kanthner Gate mines made a breach 130 feet across, the
rubble fell outward, and the defense had a trench inside with new
palisades, behind which waited the same nasty Spaniards and Germans with
their long spits. From the walls the Turkish officers, including the
vizier himself, could be seen trying to drive the men forward with whips
and sabers. It was no use; for the first time in Turkish history an army
refused to advance any farther, almost en masse.

Graf Salm was hit in the hip by the splinters of a stone ball during the
attack, a wound from which he never recovered, but that night Vienna was
kept awake by the light of fires, as the Janissaries burned everything
not portable, and the screams as they threw their prisoners into the
fire. Next morning they were gone. It snowed.

In the deserted camps the Austrians found some curious-looking brown
beans. They boiled them; the beans themselves were not very good, but
the soup that came from them proved quite potable. It was the first
coffee in Europe.


      VI

Various causes add up to the Turkish defeat at Vienna, one of the main
ones undoubtedly Suleiman's lack of those heavy guns that had battered
holes in besieged places from Constantinople to Rhodes to Belgrade. The
rains deprived him of the guns and also of the time to take the city
without them, and the miners were not a particularly efficient
substitute. They produced gaps in the walls, but their very operation
allowed new defenses to be set up behind the gaps, and mass attacks were
powerless against these defenses. Yet the breaking of the siege had a
positive technical side as well as a negative; those resolute Spanish
arquebusiers and German _Landsknechts_ were something the Janissaries
had not encountered before; and the West had at last developed a
tactical force that could meet the standing army of the Turkish Empire
on equal terms.

Yet it was the effects rather than the causes that made Vienna decisive.
The unbeatable Janissaries had been beaten, and not only beaten, but
broken in morale. They were only human after all, and now they knew it.
Not only that; a main line of the story lies in that donative of 1,000
aspers per man to make them undertake an attack they would normally have
urged upon their sultan. Vienna, in fact, marked the end of the
Janissaries as the tribute-children fanatics founded by Ala ed-Din. They
began by taking in their own children and making it a privilege to be a
Janissary with the disabilities that accompany any hereditary caste, and
there was eventually nothing left of them but the savagery that made
them throw prisoners into the fire.

This development did not reach its peak at once, to be sure. The
Janissaries were to turn into unruly Praetorian guards, who made and
unmade sultans, and this was perhaps inevitable. But even determinism
must admit that Vienna started them down the long slide. After they had
been defeated there and were paid extra for being defeated, their basic
moral broke and they were never the same. The marvelous Turkish military
instrument had a crack in it.

So did the marvelous Turkish family of the Othmanli sultans. Suleiman
had a son, Mustapha, universally and probably correctly reported as not
inferior in ability to any in the line. He was reasonably friendly with
the vizier, Ibrahim, but after his birth there was brought to Suleiman
the Russian girl known historically as Roxelana. After the defeat at
Vienna she became for Suleiman something rare in Oriental history, a
devouring passion which nothing could slake. She bore him two sons and a
daughter, and it was elementary that she should want one of her sons to
be the heir of empire. There were two barriers; and in spite of the fact
that Turkish sultans usually kept their private and public lives
separate, the defeat at Vienna made it quite easy for Roxelana to
destroy the major hindrance, Suleiman's friend, the almost genius,
Ibrahim. He was executed for inefficiency, Roxelana married her daughter
to a man whom she had no difficulty in getting promoted to the
viziership, and started a deliberate campaign against Mustapha. One
afternoon when he called on his father he was met by the seven mutes
with their bowstrings, whom Suleiman watched at their work, urging them
to hurry.

That was the end of the great line. Roxelana's son Selim became sultan,
but he was correctly known as Selim the Sot, and down to the time Kemal
Ataturk overthrew the remains of the dynasty, the Othmanli line never
produced another able man. For some years the Turks made faces and
horrible noises in Eastern Europe, but always on a declining scale,
always steps going down. They even worked up to another siege of Vienna
in 1683, but it was a matter of local politics and brought on them the
combined forces of Venice, Poland, Austria, and Russia, and the end of
it was that they lost most of Hungary and all of the Crimea. The real
Turkish danger to Europe was ended for good on the morning of October
14, 1529.

And this was not all that ended. When Martin Luther heard of the advance
of Suleiman against the Hungarians, he declared it was a visitation fro
God in punishment for the sins of the Pope and his bishops; but after
Suleiman started for the Rhine by way of Vienna, he rapidly changed
stance and declared it the duty of every Christian to oppose the Turk.
This had a double effect; for Charles the Emperor, already involved in a
two-front war against France in Italy and the Netherlands, could not
neglect the help of the north German Protestants. He therefore tolerated
internal religious disorder for the sake of keeping out the external,
and not a few of the stern halberdiers of Vienna were Lutherans. By the
time Charles was ready to turn against the Protestants, they were too
solidly established for even an emperor to cut them down.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    8. LEYDEN AND THE FOUNDATION OF SEA POWER




      I

"We may regard the Prince as a dead man; he has neither influence nor
credit." Thus wrote Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, to his
master, King Philip II of Spain and the Netherlands, Emperor of America
and the Indies. The date was 1568 and the prince referred to was William
of Orange, called "the Silent" because, although he talked a great deal,
he so seldom said the wrong thing.

There was some justification for Alva's statement; he had been
captain-general in the Netherlands for barely a year, but already those
turbulent estates were well in hand, their revolt was over. Of the great
Catholic nobles who led it, Hoogstraeten had died of a wound, Egmont and
Hoorn had lost their heads on the scaffold. Only Orange was left, and he
was wandering from place to place, pursued by creditors, while his lived
lived as she pleased in Cologne and pleased to live in a fashion
referred to as "irregular." "We may regard the Prince as a dead man";
the army he had gathered by selling everything he owned had dissolved at
a touch from Alva and in a manner that brought an imputation of personal
cowardice on Orange himself.

Nor was it likely that any other army Orange could raise would have
better luck. The best he could get were mercenaries, Walloon and German
_Landsknechts_, fairly good man, but lacking in cohesion, while Alva led
the "invincible terciaries" of Spain, infantry such as the world had
hardly seen since Roman days. They had training and morale, a
consciousness that nothing could break or shake them; they had proved it
a hundred times under every conceivable battle condition. Alva gave them
iron discipline; saving always the right of sack when a town was taken,
they behaved. When his army marched from Italy to the uneasy
Netherlands, even the 2,000 prostitutes who came with it were organized
in battalions and companies and under military command.

There was something of the iron, of the perpetual struggle against
adversaries who could only be overcome by crusade, in everything Alva
said or did. "I have tamed men of iron in my day," he remarked on taking
up the mission to Brussels. "I shall know how to deal with these men of
butter." He began that dealing by placing a garrison of the metallic
terciaries in every town that had any importance; he prosecuted it by
setting up a trial court, or "Council of Troubles," which soon and more
accurately became known as the "Council of Blood," for its verdict was
always guilty and the sentence always death. Nobody knows how many
thousands besides Egmont
 and Hoorn passed through its hands to stake,
sword, or gibbet during the year before Alva decided to regard the
prince as a dead man. On Ash Wednesday morning alone, when people would
be found in their beds after the carnival, 1,500 were taken. "I have
ordered them all to be executed," wrote Alva.

Basically he was acting as agent of the perpetual crusade, as the right
arm of Philip of Spain, who had publicly prayed never to be allowed to
be called king over those who rejected God (as recognized by the
Catholic confession) as their Lord, and who had said he would sacrifice
100,00 lives rather. But there was also a constitutional question
involved, and Alva was acute enough to perceive that he could never
extirpate the Protestant heresy without first getting rid of those
councils which, all through the Netherlands, had cognizance of juridical
and financial matters under a complex system of charters, grants, and
privileges, one for each town or province. In the eyes of the perpetual
crusaders these councils had failed to do their plain duty. They had not
put down heresy; they had winked at Calvinist conventicles openly held;
they visited no punishment on the vandals who sacked and plundered
churches during the great wave of iconoclasm in 1566.

It was therefore upon the great Catholic nobles who maintained the
integrity of the charters that Alva first bore down, then on the minor
clergy, who resented their revenues being taken away for new bishops
from Spain, and finally upon the magistrates of the big cities, Catholic
every man. Of course, Protestants stood automatically condemned; but the
main first movement, the necessary step, was to get rid of local
authority, or rather to place above it an authority that would enforce
obedience to orders from Spain.

This Alva had achieved. Egmont, Hoorn, Hoogstraeten were dead and their
estates forfeit; Orange could be regarded as dead and his estates were
also forfeit so far as they lay within Philip's dominion. To a
disposition to resistance there had succeeded such utter apathy that
hardly a man joined Prince William when he brought his mercenaries over
the French border. The Inquisition was proceeding famously with its job
of eliminating heretics when there occurred a key event. The pay chest
for Alva's terciaries, 450,000 ducats, was aboard five ships forced by a
gale to put into Plymouth, and Elizabeth of England, that untrustworthy
woman who so seldom neglected any opportunity to lay her hands on money,
seized both vessels and cash.

Trying to get the money back was a matter for diplomacy, but even if
diplomacy succeeded far better than it usually did in extracting ducats
from Elizabeth, the process would take time and the emergency was
immediate. The invincible terciaries were deeply in arrears for their
pay, they were grumbling about it, and they possessed a monopoly of
military force within the Netherlands. If they chose to take what they
wanted, there was no power that could stop them, and it would not be the
first time that unpaid Spanish soldiers had done their own collecting.
In thoroughly well-founded apprehension, Alva summoned the
States-General of the realm to Brussels in March 1569 and told them they
would have to pay taxes to support the soldiers who were protecting
them. He proposed a special 1 percent tax on all real property, once
only; a 5 percent tax on real estate transfers; and a 10 percent sales
tax. He explained to the estates that this was the system of the
_alcabala_, which worked very well in Spain.

Perhaps, but the Netherlands was a closely populated commercial area,
and the real estate and sales taxes simply meant ruin. The
States-General refused them; Alva got part of his 1 percent tax and that
was all. Utrecht refused to pay even this; Alva quartered a regiment
there, then declared the city and province guilty of high treason, its
charters, privileges, and property confiscated to the crown. Even the
Catholic bishops and two members of Alva's Council of Blood joined the
protest, and a seep of discontent went through the country like
underground water, only waiting for a puncture to bring it to the surface.


      II

At this point Alva discovered that William of Orange was not quite as
dead as he thought. Back in '66, before the outbreak of the iconoclasts,
a not inconsiderable number of the lesser nobility held a meeting in
Brussels to protest against the vigor with which the Inquisition was
putting down heresy, and submitted a "Request" to the then regent for
mitigation. They heard themselves described as "beggars," and adjourned
to a hotel, where, with the accompaniment of a good deal of drinking,
they enthusiastically accepted the name, adopted the beggar's staff,
wallet, and bowl as their emblem, and formed an association in support
of the privileges of the Netherlands. One of the charges that sent
Egmont and Hoorn to the block was that they had looked in while this
festive scene was taking place, though they had retired with cluckings
of disapproval.

Alva's repressive measures made it dangerous to wear that beggar badge,
and the movement seemed reasonably well beaten down when the tax dispute
arose. William the Silent was perfectly well aware of the state of
feeling engendered by that row. One of the things that helped him stay
alive was that he ran an extremely good intelligence service, with spies
even in the cabinet of Madrid, who tipped him off every time a new
assassin was dispatched. Now, in his capacity as a sovereign prince, he
issued letters of marque to eighteen ships. His brother, Louis of
Nassau, saw to it that the ships were actually equipped at the Huguenot
port of La Rochelle in France, and that they put to sea. They became the
"Sea Beggars," and their business was plundering and killing Catholics.

By the end of 1569 eighty-four ships were in commission, and they had
taken 300; no church or convent along the shore was safe from them.
William of Orange tried to keep them in bounds by drawing regulations
and appointing an admiral, but he might as well have tried to restrain a
rhinoceros. The main leaders of the Sea Beggars were William of Blois,
Lord of Treslong, and William de la Marck, a descendant of the famous
"Wild Boar of the Ardennes," who was very like his ancestor. Nothing
that happened on the Spanish Main went beyond the doings of the Sea
Beggars. They were under no civil control and animated by fierce
hatreds. Many of them had lost ears or a nose to the executioners of the
Inquisition or had been otherwise mutilated, and now was the chance to
pay it all out. Priests, nuns, and Catholic magistrates they usually
tortured to death, letting everyone know that it stood to the account of
Alva.

What the Duke of Alva thought of this is not a matter of record. He had
no experience or knowledge of sea power--nobody did at that date--and no
naval service. He probably regarded the Sea Beggars as banditti, who
could in time be exorcised by the method normal for dealing with such
gentry on land: that is, cutting their bases of operation from under
them. In this case it took diplomatic action. Queen Elizabeth of
England, as might be expected, was allowing the Beggars to use her
harbors for victualing and the disposal of plunder, but she was
unwilling to push Philip of Spain too far at this particular time, and
when protests from Madrid became really stiff, she stopped
procrastinating and issued a proclamation closing her harbors to the sea
robbers.

This was early in 1572. The German ports were at some distance and not
very good markets, and it is likely that discussions in the Beggar fleet
about what to do were still going on when an unseasonable westerly gale
blew up on April 1 and drove twenty-eight Beggar ships under Treslong
into the estuary of the Scheldt. They anchored off Brill on the island
of Walcheren, and the word from the town was that its Spanish garrison
had gone to Utrecht to help enforce the edict of high treason.

Treslong instantly conceived the idea of taking the town; the Beggars
set fire to the north gate and beat it in with the stump of a mast. They
treated the Catholic churches and religious houses as usual, but the
people well, and were about to leave when it occurred to Treslong that
here was the answer to the base problem. Instead of pulling out he
landed some guns and raised the flag of the Prince of Orange.

The news of this mad exploit produced a chain reaction. Jean de
Henin-Lietard, Comte Bossu, the governor of Holland province, came down
with a strong force to repossess the place. There were not over 300 of
the Beggars in Brill, but the townspeople helped in the defense, someone
cut a sluice gate and flooded the Spaniards onto a dike, where the ships
cannonaded them. Most of the boats in which they came were taken. Bossu
just barely got away; his force was practically wiped out.

When Orange heard of it, he was inclined to treat the whole episode as
just one more caprice of the ungovernable Sea Beggars. But the water
table had been breached; it stood demonstrated that there was one thing
against which the terciaries were not invincible--water. Flushing rose
against its garrison, the Sea Beggars sent help, and Alva's chief
engineer, hastily rushed in to strengthen the citadel, was hanged from
its gate. All Walcheren island except Middelburg fell into the hands of
the revolters, and from Walcheren the movement spread to the mainland.
Everywhere in Zeeland, Holland, Gelderland, Overyssel, Utrecht, and
Friesland the Orange flag was hoisted; in these provinces only Amsterdam
and a few minor places failed to kill their garrisons and were held for
the king. At this precise moment Louis of Nassau succeeded in raising an
army in France, which pushed in to take Mons, and the revolters received
the spiritual lift of one of the great war songs of history, "Wilhelmus
van Nassouwen," still the Dutch
 national anthem. On the wave of
excitement money contributions flowed in that enabled Prince William to
raise an army of mercenaries and march over the German border.

Any popular revolt carries things with a dash in the beginning, but
unless the upper authority is quite swept away, as in the French
Revolution, this period is succeeded by one in which the contending
parties shake down to the forces that will actually be employed during
the struggle. In the Netherlands revolt Alva lost only a comparatively
small number of men from his garrisons, and was by no means swept away.
After the first rush the counterrevolutionary elements in the situation
began to become manifest. One of them remained in the background, but
helped to determine the character of the struggle from that point; the
rising was economic as well as religious, and what the burghers wanted
was to be let alone in the conduct of their commercial affairs. They did
not rush to join the standard and were not very anxious to contribute
money; they simply wanted to get rid of the Spanish system of taxation.

Another of the pro-Spanish factors was fortuitous; the Massacre of St.
Bartholemew in France took place soon after Louis of Nassau threw
himself into Mons, and it cut from under him the support of the French
Huguenots, who had planned to join him with 12,000 men. Alva instantly
saw and seized the strategic occasion by drawing troops from everywhere
to besiege the place.

A third influence was supplied by William of Orange's men. He began a
war of sieges and actually took several towns--Roermond, Tirlemont,
Malines, Oudenarde--but in every one his German Protestant mercenaries
sacked churches and maltreated churchmen, in spite of the prince's
efforts to enforce religious toleration. The southern Netherlands, where
he was operating, had grave economic and political complaints against
Spanish rule, but they remained predominantly Catholic, and forced
conversion was no more acceptable to one side than to the other. William
found himself treated as an enemy; Louvain closed its gates, and he
could make no impression on Brussels, where the citizens joined the
small garrison in defense against him. That is, the Low Countries were
beginning their ultimate fission along the line of language and religion.

Nevertheless, William pressed on toward the relief of Mons. Alva, with
an army that could have destroyed him in battle, made no attempt to
fight. He had a lively appreciation of the structural weakness of a
mercenary force, which lay in the financial department, and no intention
of wasting his manpower resources to achieve a breakup that should come
about through natural causes. However, he did help the natural causes
along. On the night of September 11, 1572, Orange encamped at the
village of Harmignies, a league from Mons. During the dark hours 600
Spanish soldiers under Julian Romero slipped into his camp with white
shirts over their armor for identification, and just barely missed
taking the prince himself while killing 800 of his men.

The natural causes took effect at once. The army went to pieces, Orange
was tagged as a timid and incompetent general, who had not even set
guards to provide for his own safety. Louis in Mons surrendered six days
later and the war entered a new phase.

III

Instead of sieges by the Orange party it became an affair of Spanish
sieges of towns held for Orange. Alva organized two columns, one under
his natural son, Don Frederic of Toledo, for the province of Holland,
the other under General Mondragon for Zeeland. The Mondragon command
performed some extraordinary feats, such as assaulting the island of
South Beveland by crossing a channel at ebb tide, with water up to the
soldiers'' breasts, but its operations were off the main line. The
decisive command was that of Frederic of Toledo. He took Malines first
and, as it was the most important town that had surrendered to Orange,
made an example by giving it up to his soldiers for a three-day sack, in
which no distinction was made between Catholic and Protestant; all
equally raped, robbed, or slaughtered. Zutphen came next; as it was
largely Protestant, there was more killing than at Malines. At Naarden
the destruction was systematic; the women were publicly raped, then
every living thing was put to the sword, just as Suleiman had promised
at Vienna.

Don Frederic now pushed through to Amsterdam and, basing there, advanced
against Haarlem at the beginning of December 1572. The place was of both
symbolic and intrinsic importance, a hotbed of Calvinism and one of the
largest cities in the Netherlands. It was also one of the weakest; the
garrison of 4,000 was nowhere near enough for the wide circuit of its
half-ruinous walls, and Toledo had 30,000 men, Spaniards, Walloons, and
Germans. He expected to take the place by assault, and after a
bombardment tried it; but Haarlem had heard of Zutphen and Naarden, the
burghers joined in the defense, and in fierce fighting the assault was
beaten off with heavy loss.

This caused Don Frederic to take stock. On the east the town was
protected by a sheet of shallow water, and not approachable; on the
north by the estuary of the Y, an arm of the Zuyder Zee, with outlying
forts on the estuary; only on the west and south was solid ground.
Across this ground Don Frederic began a formal siege approach, and all
winter long there were mining and countermining, cannon battering the
walls and citizens repairing them by night. The burghers made frequent
and violent sallies, cut off the heads of the men they captured and
rolled them into the Spanish lines in barrels; the Spaniards hanged
their prisoners on gibbets; and the townspeople parodied Catholic
religious services in indecent processions along the walls. Toledo tried
another assault on January 31; this also was beaten, and he wanted to
give up, but Alva threatened to disown him if he did. The siege ran down
to a blockade.

The Spanish difficulty was that the blockade could not be made complete.
All winter long skaters carried provisions across the frozen lake, and
with the coming of spring their place was taken by shallow-draft boats.
Don Frederic solved this by setting up a fleet of curiously made ships
on the Y under Count Bossu, and on May 28, Bossu engaged and utterly
defeated the Dutch inland ships. After this it became merely a question
of time. When shoe leather, rats, and weeds had been eaten, Haarlem
surrendered on July 11. Don Frederic executed every man of the garrison
and the 400 most prominent citizens, but was gracious enough to spare
the rest of the town in return for all the money in it.

The cause of the revolt was now in reasonably bad shape. During the
siege William of Orange made frantic efforts to get together and three
times managed to send forces of three or four thousand men under various
commanders for a relief. They were always cut to pieces; the terciaries
were still invincible in the field, and free to go on besieging until
the Netherlanders ran out of towns. William's efforts to persuade
Elizabeth of England to assume a protectorate over the provinces came to
nothing, and he was always faced by a grinding shortage of money.

As in any contest, the difficulties were not all on one side. Alva had
spent 25 million florins sent from Spain, besides the 5 million he got
out of the 1 percent tax, and his treasury was empty. Don Frederic had
lost 12,000 men at Haarlem, whom it would be onerous and expensive to
replace. The duke wrote to the king that the only way to suppress this
heresy was to burn every Protestant town to the ground and kill everyone
in it, and in August he sent Don Frederic to Alkmaar with 16,000 men to
make a beginning on this new policy.

Toledo failed. Alkmaar had only 2,000 burghers, but they beat off an
assault and, after a seven-week siege, opened the dikes, with a slogan
from Prince William: "Better to ruin the land than to lose the land."
The water rose around the Spanish camp, an event not necessarily fatal
in itself, but which turned into defeat when Count Bossu attempted to
bring the Spanish inland fleet up from the Y. It was met in the Zuyder
Zee by the Beggars under Admiral Dirkzoon and utterly destroyed, Bossu
himself being taken prisoner, and the investment could not be maintained
through the waters.

That finished Alva. He asked to be relieved, and at the end of 1573
there arrived to replace him the Grand Commander, Don Luis Requesens. He
brought a less savage policy, with some effort at conciliation, but the
utmost Philip of Spain would concede was that heretics should have time
to sell their property before leaving the country, and the least William
of Orange would accept was full freedom of worship; the war went on.
Strategically there was no change. Requesens continued Alva's policy of
working south through the Holland towns to crack the coastal provinces
against the anvil of Flanders. He built a fleet at Antwerp and Bergen op
Zoom to clear the Sea Beggars from the Scheldt, and sent an army of
8,000 under General Valdez to besiege Leyden. The Hague was already
Spanish, and the coast down to the mouth of the New Meuse; possession of
Leyden would cut the whole of Holland province from the sea.

The Spanish fleet, commanded by the same Julian Romero who almost caught
William at Harmignies, found the Beggars off Walcheren, now led by Louis
de Boisot, Sieur de Ruart. (William de la Marck had been dismissed for
torturing a seventy-two-year-old priest who was a friend of Orange, and
a couple of years later met a singularly appropriate death as the result
of being bitten by a mad dog.) The battle ended as Spanish attempts to
deal with the Sea Beggars usually did, in total defeat. Romero got out
of a porthole of his burning flagship and, swimming to the bank where
Requesens was watching, climbed out of the water and said, "I told Your
Excellency that
 I was a land fighter, not a sailor." In exchange the
Spaniards fell on Louis of Nassau, who had crossed the Rhine with one of
the usual ragtag armies of mercenaries and volunteers, and wiped it out
with hardly any loss to themselves, Louis being killed in the process.

The minor pieces had now been swept from the board. William was between
Delft and Rotterdam with some 6,000 men, certainly not enough to meet
the Spaniards in the field or to raise a siege of Leyden, and if the
Spaniards took Leyden, they could take anything.


      IV

Valdez originally approached the place in October 1573, but after some
rather desultory operations, in which he does seem even to have
established a complete blockade, he had to be recalled because of a
mutiny in Antwerp. His second approach was on May 26, 1574, and this
time he was thoroughly clear on plan and technique. Leyden lay at the
heart of a concentric ring of dikes, with occasional villages along
them. These villages Valdez fortified, and where there was no town at
the right strategic point, a redoubt was built, making a total of
sixty-two strong points in all, mutually supporting. The Spaniard
intended to avoid the expensive assaults, battering and mining
operations Don Frederic had used at Haarlem and Alkmaar, and let hunger
work for him through a pure but very tight blockade. He seems to have
been aware that the lazy Netherlanders, deep in their own affairs, had
failed to reprovision the place after his first approach, or to
strengthen its garrison.

Just before the ring closed, Orange got through a letter telling the
townspeople that if they could hold out for three months it would be
enough, they would be relieved. But the days passed and the weeks
passed; Orange fell ill of a tertian fever, he had no money, and there
was no hope of raising an army to break the Valdez ring. The estates of
the realm were summoned, and authorized the prince to take the desperate
measure of cutting the great dikes along the Meuse and Yssel at
Rotterdam, Schiedam, Delfshaven, submerging half of Holland. On August
21 the townspeople got out a message saying they had made good the three
months asked; bread was now all gone and malt cake would last only four
days more.

Be of good cheer, said the reply from Orange, flown in by carrier
pigeon, the water is coming. Burgomaster Van der Werff read the missive
from the steps of the town hall and sent musicians through the streets
playing "Wilhelmus van Nassouwen." In the Spanish camp there was
anxiety, but the "Glippers," as the Medizing Netherlanders were called,
told Valdez not to worry, this was not Alkmaar, protected by a single
dike system; here the tiers of dikes were so extensive, one behind
another, that there was no chance the besiegers would be drowned out. So
it proved; the waters spread inland, but the ruined land was a useless
sacrifice, there were only ten inches of sea, the redoubts and fortified
villages were still dry. On August 27, Leyden got through another
desperate appeal to the estates; the town was eating horses and dogs,
all cereal had vanished.

Orange's body was so ill that his life was despaired of, but the
affliction had not attacked his brain, and as soon as he got the
authorization to cut the dikes, he had determined to make use of the one
force in which the Netherlanders had a clear superiority--the sea arm.
On September 1, Admiral Boisot and the Sea Beggars arrived at Rotterdam
with 200 shallow-draft ships, most of them specially-built, carrying
about ten light guns apiece and ten to eighteen oars. They included
experimental craft like the huge _Ark of Delft_, with shotproof bulwarks
and paddle wheels on hand-operated cranks.

With this fleet the Beggars floated through to a huge dike called the
_Land Schieding_, Shield of the Land, five miles from Leyden. On
Orange's orders Boisot waited till it fell dark on the night of
September 10, then warped in and seized a section of the dike. The
Spaniards attempted a counterattack from the villages flanked the seized
section, but the guns of the ships were too much for them; the dike was
cut and Boisot's squadron floated through.

Three quarters of a mile father was another dike, the Greenway, still a
foot above water. Once more Boisot worked the game of a night surprise;
once more the dike was cut and the ships passed. But now came a check;
beyond the Greenway lay an extensive march, the Freshwater Lake, into
which the tide spread without rising high enough to float the fleet. A
canal led through this marsh, but the Spaniards had fortified both ends;
the ships could approach the barrier only one at a time, end on, and so
could make no use of their superior artillery. For nearly a week the
fleet milled about confusedly, doubtless with tempers growing short;
then on September 18 a northwest gale blew up to increase the depth of
the water, and simultaneously there appeared some refugees who said
there was a low dike between the villages of Zoetermeer and Benthuysen
by cutting which the lake could be avoided. Boisot made for it; both
villages had been fortified, but the ships carried too many guns, the
Spaniards were driven out after a sharp little fight, and the fleet
pushed on. Boisot had the houses fired as a signal to Leyden that help
was coming.

But was it? Beyond the burning villages stood the strong point of
Zoeterwoude, a mile and a quarter from Leyden, heavily fortified, well
above the floods, and the wind held steadily and seasonably to light
airs from the east, keeping the waterlevel in the operating area at no
more than nine inches, while Boisot's ships needed twenty. Even the
presence of William of Orange, who had himself brought to the spearhead
of the advance on a litter, could not help. Within the town nearly the
last edible morsel was gone; people were dying of starvation, and a
crowd swarmed around Burgomaster Van der Werff, begging him to surrender
and take a chance on what the Spaniards would do to them. "Here is my
sword," he cried. "If you will, plunge it into my heart and divide my
flesh among you to appease your hunger; but expect no surrender as long
as I am alive."

Orange went back to Rotterdam, and the sun rose and set; but on the
morning of October 1 a gale rose from the northwest, as unreasonable as
Jeanne d'Arc's wind. It switched to southwest, the whole North Sea came
piling through the broken dikes, and in a matter of hours Boisot had
more than two feet of water. The ships moved to the storm of
Zoeterwoude, there was a singular amphibious battle against Spanish
picket boats afloat in the dark among treetops and houses and Spanish
terciaries on the causeways and patches of emergent ground. The Beggars
were the better men at this kind of game; the Spanish ships were all
sunk, their men were driven down the causeways by Zeeland fishermen,
using gun, harpoon, and pike, and Boisot was through.

But not yet in Leyden. Only 300 yards from the walls were the two
strongest fortifications yet, Lammen and Leyderdorp, heavily armed, one
of them holding Valdez himself. Boisot moved up toward Lammen, just out
of gun range, and spent a day looking it over. The appearance was very
formidable indeed; he held off till dark and called a council of his
captains.

It was a night full of apocalyptic events, and it is unlikely that
anyone slept much. There was some firing through it, where ships
approached the Leyderdorp on the Dutch right. Toward midnight a terrible
crash of unexplained origin came from the direction of the town; then a
long series of lights visible from Lammen, the Spaniards engaged in some
mysterious activity. But at daybreak a figure was seen wildly
gesticulating from the top of Lammen fort; when a ship pulled in, it was
a Netherlander, and the fort had been abandoned during the night. The
crash had been a section of wall falling, undermined by the waters, and
Valdez had left, fearing a sally combined with an attack from the
outside, which he lacked the strength to sustain in this curious wet war.

Leyden was relieved. Boisot's ships pulled in and began tossing out
bread on all sides to the famished inhabitants. William of Orange
offered them a remission of taxes for their heroic endurance, but they
said they would rather have a university, and one of the greatest
institutions of learning in Europe came into being.


      V

The relief was doubly, trebly, quadruply decisive. It was decisive
because the jealous States-General said it was: they held a meeting and
conferred on William of Orange "absolute power, authority and sovereign
command in all concerns of the common land without exception."
Henceforth he was no longer a free-lance, helping out as best he could,
but stadtholder of the realm. It is true that he and his successors were
often hampered by those same States-General; but the new nation had been
given a central executive, which could coordinate its activities as
never before. A united effort became possible, and united effort was made.

Secondly, while Haarlem had cost the Spaniards 12,000 nearly
irreplaceable men, Leyden was nearly as expensive, and they had failed
to take the town. As a result, no more great sieges were attempted; the
war slid down to minor enterprises and battlings. Neither Requesens nor
his successors could get enough money to pay their troops, there were
mutinies and a series of confused events lasting for years, but the
independence of Holland was substantially achieved when Boisot sailed
past Fort Lammen.

It was also decisive for its effect on the Spanish command; for there
had been brought into combination something new in the world's history,
something realized at the time rather than comprehended, but acted upon
in realization--the influence of sea power. There was nothing in the
Spanish system fitted to deal with the Sea Beggars. "I am a land
fighter, not a sailor"; the Spaniards never did succeed in
 finding the
latter, and it was to be the ruin of that vast empire whose roots went
down to Las Navas de Tolosa. The invocation of sea power at Leyden was
more or less accidental on the part of William of Orange: it was the
only weapon he had left on the wall. But it was effective and it
demonstrated that a city on the water could always be supported from the
water. This was one of the reasons why there were no more great sieges.

And much more. The relief of Leyden made it certain that the Catholic
reaction would not submerge northwest Europe as it had Bohemia and
Poland; that the liberty of conscience, for which William of Orange so
earnestly strove, would not be wiped out, at least from this one little
corner. That certitude is usually referred to the English defeat of the
Spanish Armada, and the English-speaking peoples have taken a
justifiable pride in the events of the summer of 1588. But the fighting
against the Armada was not only the crowning event in a series; it also
contained an element too easily and too often overlooked. When the Duke
of Medina Sidonia sailed for the English Channel, his mission was not
direct attack on England; it was to clear the way for that most astute
of the governors of the Spanish Netherlands, Alexander Farnese, Prince
of Parma, who was to cross the Channel at the head of 25,000 men. They
were Spanish veterans, and it is not likely that the English levies
could have made out any better against them in the field than the
successive mercenary armies of Orange and his brothers did.

But Parma never made it, and his failure was not entirely due to the
defeat of the Armada. Even in defeat, even before he was defeated,
Medina Sidonia had done his part in the combined operation. Every
English ship that would bear guns was concentrated in the western mouth
of the Channel when the Armada put into Calais, and the duke wrote from
there to Parma, urging him to hurry, to cross while there was nothing to
oppose his crossing. Parma had his transports ready and his troops; he
even had an elaborate equipment of flat-bottomed landing craft.

But he did not move; and the reason he did not move was that there lay
in the mouth of the Scheldt the Dutch squadron of Justinian of Nassau,
William's natural son. He sat there; and the Spanish reflected that they
were land fighters, not sailors. "The shippes of Holland and Zeeland
stood continually in their sight, threatening shot and powder and many
inconveniences; for fear of which shippes the Mariners and sea-men
secretly withdrew themselves both day and night, lest the Duke of Parma
his soldiers should compell them by maine force to goe on board."

So in the chain of causation Queen Elizabeth builded better than she
knew when she seized Alva's pay chest and forced him to lay the taxes
that provoked the rise of the Dutch republic. For it was those
high-pooped, ungainly little ships, rocking gently on the sluggish waves
of the Scheldt, the ships that had become a national navy when Leyden
was relieved, that kept Parma where he was and rendered the operation
against England futile. It was a singularly rich reward for stealing
someone's money.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    9. GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS AND THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES




      I

Ten years after the siege of Vienna, in 1539, one Ignatius Loyola
founded the Society of Jesus, or Jesuit Order. From the beginning it was
conceived of as an army; its head was a general, its training course
long, rigorous, and carried out with military precision. Discipline was
strict and absolute obedience was demanded. "Let us all think alike and
talk in the same manner if possible," the founder once said. The order
was as much of a celibate military community within the body politic as
the Janissaries, and like them, its purpose was militant, for Loyola
conceived that the Church was at war--against those enemies of true
religion, the Protestants of the North. The Jesuits produced no great
men to speak of, but they did produce the devoted formations which
conducted the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Unity of doctrine, action, and purpose made them a most conspicuous
success, especially in view of the fact that the Protestants were
splintering into all sorts of sects--Lutherans, Calvinists, Bohemian
Brothers, Church of England, Anabaptists--some of which went off into
pedantry and some into witch burning. Sometime early in the 1580s, while
William the Silent was being assassinated and Philip II was building up
to that quarrel with Elizabeth of England that issued in the Armada
fighting, a group of these Jesuits got hold of a young son of a cadet
branch of the house of Hapsburg, a boy named Ferdinand. They brought him
up in the right way. There is no sign that they tried to make a Jesuit
of him--after all, his destiny was royal and not ecclesiastical--but
they trained him so thoroughly that all the rest of his life he behaved
as though he were in fact a Jesuit, as though his first and almost his
only duty was the service of the Church. In 1590, when he was twelve,
his father died, and he became Duke of Styria, which is the southern
part of Austria. Six years later he finished his education, made a trip
to Rome, and on his return assumed personal control of the province.

The Steiermark was a border country, subject to incursions of Turks;
Duke Ferdinand considered keeping them out nowhere near as important as
getting rid of the Protestants, who had made considerable headway in the
area. One decree prohibited any form of Protestant worship, another
offered everyone in Styria a reasonable choice--recant and conform or
leave the country. There had been similar instruments of government in
various jurisdictions before; the difference this time was that it was
enforced with the utmost Jesuit rigor. Nearly one third of the
population was driven over the frontiers, and by the twentieth century
Styria was still over 98 percent Catholic. Ferdinand's local
Counter-Reformation was a success.

At this point something unusual occurred in the dynastic history of the
Hapsburgs. None of the sons of the Emperor Maximilian II had any
children, and Ferdinand of Styria, the pet of the Jesuits, emerged as
the heir apparent of the whole Hapsburg heritage, except for Spain and
the Netherlands. This was not particularly pleasant for the Protestants,
and the friction point appeared in Bohemia. Like most of the East
European states, it was at least theoretically an elective monarchy; and
in 1617, when Emperor Matthias, the last of Maximilian's childless sons,
was obviously not going to live much longer, the Bohemian estates were
persuaded to name Ferdinand of Styria as king-designate.

The Emperor Matthias was principally interested in establishing his
personal power and concerned himself very little with religious matters.
His predecessor, Rudolph II, had been a gloomy man, chiefly interested
in art, who had issued a "Letter of Majesty," giving the Protestants
full religious toleration. It stood up; in 1617, at the time of
Ferdinand's election, there were more Protestants than Catholics in
Bohemia. But now things changed at once; the Jesuits were in control.
Peasants who refused to profess Catholicism were driven into exile; the
town councils were packed with Catholics, and in at least two places
Protestant churches were physically pulled down.

The opposition was at least partly political and dynastic. The whole
history of the German lands from the time of Charles the Great is one of
efforts on the part of various houses--Wittelsbach, Wettin, Zahringen,
Hohenzollern, or toll off any number you please--to establish themselves
independently, which subtended resistance to the supremacy of the house
of Austria. At this date Hohenzollern was still insignificant, Wettin
was in the hands of one of its weakest members and Wittelsbach in those
of Maximilian II of Bavaria (not to be confounded with Maximilian II,
the emperor), who, like Ferdinand, was a child of the Jesuits, and
heartily willing to second his religious projects. In accordance with
the thought of the period, the Bohemian Protestants needed a titular
head, a royal personage, and they chose Friedrich of the Simmern line,
Elector Palatine and husband of Princess Elizabeth of England, which
should assure some financial help from that quarter. (It is interesting
to note how deeply and over how many years Continental politics have
been influenced by the hope or actuality of financial help from England.)

On May 23, 1618, the Protestant estates of Bohemia met in the Hradcany
Palace at Prague, denounced the Catholic board of regents that had been
running the country in Matthias' name, threw two of them out the window,
and set up a provisional government under thirty "directors." This was
the "Defenestration of Prague," and it was the real beginning of the
Thirty Years' War. Count Matthias Thurn, the Protestant leader,
recognized that he had committed an act of rebellion and at once began
to raise troops but, having few financial resources of his own and none
being forthcoming from England, got very few men. Ferdinand's forces
crossed the Bohemian border that fall and began burning villages, but
there was no serious fighting until March 1619, when, the Emperor
Matthias having decided to die in a fit, the full Estates of Bohemia
met, declared Ferdinand deposed, and elected Friedrich as their king.


      II

The news of this proceeding reached Frankfurt am Main just as the
election was being held to determine a new emperor in succession to
Matthias. In the Holy Roman Empire there were seven voters for the
crown. Three of them were the bishops of Mainz, Koln, and Treves, and
these were safely Catholic; three were Protestant, the electors of
Brandenburg and Saxony and the Elector Palatine, while the seventh was
the Bohemian vote. Thus if Ferdinand were
 not King of Bohemia, he could
not be emperor. It was absolutely necessary for him to conquer Bohemia,
and he had little money and hardly any troops. His fellow Jesuit,
Maximilian of Bavaria, offered to help him out with both for a price,
the same being the transfer of the lucrative Palatinate electorate to
Bavaria. The ministers of Philip III of Spain, who had no brains to act
for himself, sent money and a Spanish army from the Netherlands, in view
of the fact that this was a matter of the faith and they had joined
Ferdinand in a Catholic League.

It took time to get these forces moving and they did not cross the
Bohemian border until July 1620. This march was important; it brought to
the center of the stage Johann Tzerclaes Tilly, then sixty-one, a
professional soldier from Brabant, who had begun as a simple pikeman and
fought his way up to command against the Turks, the French, and anyone
else who wanted fighting. He was a past master of the Spanish system of
war; of handling those steady blocks of pikemen with musketeers in their
corners, guns planted carefully across the front, and cavalry in the
wings--the armies that had marched from one end of Europe to the other.
In 1610 he entered the service of Maximilian of Bavaria; Maximilian made
him general of the Catholic League for the invasion of Bohemia, and on
November 8, 1620, he and his troops came up with the Protestants at the
White Hill, near Prague.

No details need be supplied. The Protestant army, composed of
post-feudal levies, could not stand for a moment against the iron
_tercias_ of Spain, and was utterly destroyed. At the same time Ambrose
Spinola, with the troops from the Spanish Netherlands, overran most of
the Palatinate, and Friedrich gained the title of "the Winter King," for
the one season he had been allowed in Prague.

This double disaster broke up the Evangelical Union of Protestant
Princes, which had been formed to face the Catholic League. Ferdinand
proceeded to settle matters in accordance with his state principle of:
"Better to rule over a desert than a country full of heretics." The
Palatine electorate was transferred to Bavaria, in accordance with the
deal, and in Bohemia the punishments began. Only twenty-seven people
were executed, but more than 700 nobles and landowners were declared
deprived of their estates and sentenced to exile unless they conformed
to the Catholic confession. Protestant churches were closed or
destroyed; Protestant teachers and professors were given three days to
leave the country; the revenues of the University of Prague were turned
over to the Jesuits, the rites of any but the Catholic Church were
forbidden, and even those who wished to leave the country had to abandon
everything they owned. Within less than two years nearly half the landed
property in Bohemia belonged to Ferdinand, and he announced his
intention of selling the whole business for cash, of which, like all
dukes of Austria and Holy Roman emperors, he was forever short.

Substantially this was the economic error of Alva made when trying to
enforce a similar Catholicization in the Netherlands. Among the
escheated noblemen the majority were certainly Protestants, but there
were also a certain number of perfectly good Catholics, who regarded the
transfer of the imperial electoral dignity and the proceedings of a king
whom they did not even recognize as a violation of charters and rights.
So did many people inside the empire but outside Bohemia; for instance,
Johann Georg, Elector of Saxony, a Lutheran who detested the Calvinists
of Brandenburg and the Palatinate, and who had been mildly pro-Hapsburg
up to this point. Ferdinand may have acted from the purest religious
motives, but when religious motives pay off so handsomely, there is at
least a suspicion that they are tainted by something else. Moreover,
even if the motive remained purely religious, the procedure was such as
to arouse apprehension. Ferdinand practically wiped out the Bohemian
nobility and replaced it with Germans, Spaniards, and Italians. If he
could do this in Bohemia, he could do it elsewhere and no one was safe.

Ferdinand proceeded to prove that this was precisely the case. Various
Protestant lords and various mercenary soldiers appeared in the
Palatinate; Tilly beat them all in a series of battles, and Ferdinand
entered upon the same thoroughgoing re-Catholicization as in Bohemia.
There and in Austria, where he had promised the nobles freedom of
worship, Protestant ministers were expelled, the churches were turned
over to the Jesuits and so were the universities, including that of
Heidelberg, long the intellectual center of Calvinism. Its famous
library, one of the finest in Europe, was carried off to Rome, and
little of it was ever seen again.

The result was a reconstitution of the Protestant union on a diplomatic
rather than a religious basis. Only Johann Georg of Saxony clung to an
impossible neutrality. James I of England promised money which he never
delivered; the Estates of Holland promised troops which were actually
forthcoming, and which formed the nucleus of an army, placed under the
command of an able mercenary, Graf Ernst von Mansfeld. In spite of a
couple of defeats by Tilly he still ranked high as a solider; and most
important of all, King Christian IV of Denmark entered the combination.

This King of Denmark was not to be taken lightly. He had a considerable
reputation as a military leader, which he deserved. He had built up the
Danish navy to be the first in Europe and set up a strong Danish army.
He was head of the largest, most prosperous, and most powerful state in
the North. Handling him at the same time as the resuscitated Protestant
forces under Mansfeld was a far different proposition for Ferdinand than
merely dealing with the disorderly Bohemian levies and the mercenaries
who had followed the Elector Palatine. Moreover, Tilly, though
technically in the service of the Catholic League, was actually
Maximilian of Bavaria's general. Since Elector Max was already claiming
pieces of the Palatinate, the price for Tilly's services was apt to be high.

Ferdinand II was thus in something of a dilemma when Mephistopheles
stepped from the wings in the person of a Czech named Albrecht Wenzel
Eusebius von Waldstein, better known to history as Wallenstein. In 1617
he was already rich (by marriage) and growing richer by raising troops
for the Bohemian war. He had made connections with the banking house of
De Vito, which had a patent to buy up and remint all the silver in
Bohemia; lent the emperor up to a million florins, and was one of the
chief beneficiaries of the Protestant confiscations. From these he had
assembled a whole principality and received the title of Duke of
Friedland. He was tall, dark, implacable, and never laughed; and ruled
his subordinates by naked fear. There is no indication that he had a
conscience. At one time he was a member of the Protestant sect of
Bohemian Brothers but, being possessed of an absolutely infallible gift
of foresight, converted in time to ride the rising wave. His actual
faith remained astrology, but in military as well as civil matters he
attained greatness by a process of the purest intellection without any
necessity for training. This was the character who came forward with an
offer that Ferdinand could not possibly refuse--to raise an army of
50,000 men in the imperial interest and operate it absolutely without
charge if he were allowed to command it.

It was a mercenary army, but not at Wallenstein's expense. He was
engaged in a war of conquest and he made it pay for itself; his troops
were well fed and well paid, and the districts through which they moved
footed the bill. The men were a completely motley crowd in the
beginning, welded into a unit by their commander's discipline of fear
and system of reward. In 1626 he had this army in marching condition and
moved north to cooperate with Tilly against Mansfeld and King Christian.

Tilly advanced against Christian along the line of the Elbe and beat him
badly in battle, while Wallenstein in the Saxon country beat Mansfeld
and threw him off in the direction of Silesia. Wallenstein followed
hard, broke up Mansfeld's army in December 1626, and forced its leader
from the stage. Tilly was meanwhile pursuing Christian into Holstein.
Wallenstein turned back to join him, assumed command of both forces as
superior officer, beat Christian again, and flooded the whole of Jutland
with imperial troops. The Danes took to their ships and Wallenstein to
the Baltic provinces. Mecklenburg and Pomerania were overrun, and in
March 1628, Ferdinand made his general Duke of Mecklenburg, declaring
the Protestant duke deposed. King Christian signed a peace which took
him out of the war entirely, and in March 1629, Ferdinand crowned his
work by pronouncing the Edict of Restitution.

At this date there remained of the major Protestant states in north
Germany only Saxony and Brandenburg, whose electors were a pair of
soft-shelled creatures, only desirous of being let alone. There were
numerous minor states and free cities belonging to the old Hanseatic
League, neither united nor individually capable of resisting the
imperial power, as wielded by Wallenstein. The Edict of Restitution
required that in all these states and cities anything secularized since
1552 was to be given back to the Church; all archbishops, bishops, and
abbots were to receive the return of their sees and full possession of
lands lost under the Reformation; all churches that held gone Protestant
were to be reopened for Catholic worship. Ferdinand was going to
re-Catholicize north Germany as he had Styria and Bohemia; and in the
face of Wallenstein's 80,000 men there could be no resistance. "There is
too much of this local privilege!" cried the new Duke of Mecklenburg.
"We want one land, one faith, one monarch, as in other countries!"

But
 the final steps were to be carried out without Wallenstein's
personal supervision. In 1630 the Imperial Diet was held at Regensburg,
and even the representatives of the Catholic states became so exercised
over the manner in which the Duke of Friedland and Mecklenburg had paid
and provisioned his army (which had marched through their lands as well
as the Protestant), and over his growing pretensions (which did not seem
to fall short of the empire itself), that Ferdinand was forced to
dismiss him. Wallenstein retired to a castle in Bohemia; Tilly was
appointed to complete the work of re-Catholicization, as general of both
empire and Catholic League.


      III

This was a process that appeared within the competence of Tilly and the
army he headed, since there was no opposition above the local level. But
it was a process which attracted the attention of a man with a wide
forehead, speculative eyes, sharp moustaches, a pointed beard, and an
almost incredible talent for intrigue--Armand Jean du Plessis de
Richelieu, first minister of France. He had no objection to
re-Catholicization, for he was himself a cardinal; but he had every
objection to seeing the princes of Germany placed in the position of
state officers who held their positions only at the emperor's pleasure.
An emperor having so vast a territory at his absolute disposal, able to
summon an army like Wallenstein's out of the ground, and allied with the
Spanish Hapsburgs would not be very long in deciding that France was
next on the list. Richelieu had helped Christian of Denmark with money;
now he turned to the one remaining power that might accomplish something
against this overwhelming empire and agreed to terms the King of Sweden
had previously proposed--a lump sum down and 400,000 rix-dollars a year,
with a truce arranged by France between Sweden and Poland, where there
was a quarrel on.

The French diplomatic reports were excellent, but it is unlikely that
even Richelieu realized quite what he was buying. Sweden, with her
possessions east of the Baltic, had a population of less than a million
and a half, one third that of England, less than a tenth that of the
Hapsburg crown lands. In that system of predatory states she had been
engaged for years in a struggle with immensely stronger Poland, whose
Catholic king claimed her throne, as well as having to hold off Muscovy
and Denmark. What Richelieu did know about the little nation was that it
had furnished reinforcements and naval help to Stralsund, when
Wallenstein besieged it in 1628, as part of his policy of reducing the
Hanseatic towns, and the help had been effective. Richelieu also know
that the Poles were persuaded to their truce by a stunning defeat at
Stuhm. Since the Swedish king had reported it to his own estates in a
one-paragraph latter, the cardinal could not have known much more.

He certainly was not aware that he had drawn into the conflict one of
the greatest statesmen of the age, Axel Oxenstjerna, and one of the
greatest generals of any age, Gustavu II Adolphus, for whom Napoleon
could find a comparison only in Alexander the Great. Somewhere between
knowledge and ignorance there would be an area of semi-information, in
whose technical details it is unlikely that Richelieu was much
interested. These technical details were due to Gustavus himself; he was
brought up for war and in the expectation of war, but he had to be his
own Philip as well as Alexander. The furious energy of the Vasa family,
to which he belonged, drove him into almost every available department
of human activity (he spoke nine languages with ease, designed
buildings, and wrote hymns which are still sung), but it was to war that
he mainly devoted himself.

There were never enough troops for Sweden, even though Gustavus' father,
Karl IX, had converted the country from something like a feudal state
into something like a military monarchy by requiring each district to
maintain a certain number of men in the standing army. Lacking numbers,
Gustavus turned to technique when came to the throne in 1611, and
gradually hammered out a series of improvements--not all of them
personally, but he knew how to state what he wanted, and he knew how to
delegate authority, so the reforms were really his.

What he wanted was a force that could deal with those solid blocks of
Spanish-trained pikemen, the invincibly terciaries. It occurred to him
that these masses of humanity would make admirable targets for gunfire
if gunfire could be brought against them; and by 1626, Gustavus had
discovered the means, by lightening the musket till it no longer had to
be fired from a crotch and fitting it with a wheel lock. This made it
possible to turn two thirds of the infantry mass into musketeers and to
rank them, together with the one third of pikemen who accompanied them,
six deep, instead of the sixteen, twenty, thirty of the massive Spanish
formations. Nearly all their armor was taken away to let them move.

The cavalry underwent an alteration quite as radical. It had long been
considered that no horse could strike home against blocks of pikemen;
the custom was for them to trot up to an infantry formation, fire their
pistols, file back, and repeat. It struck Gustavus that no law of nature
required so ponderous a procedure; he trained his horsemen to ride in at
the gallop, loose-reined and bloody-spurred, and to use the sword;
moreover, to charge in successive squadrons. It made for violence, but
that was precisely what the king wanted.

The greatest change was in the artillery. The usual guns employed in war
were so heavy that twenty-four horses apiece was the normal allowance;
the pieces were hauled to the field, put in place, and the horses led
away to safety, while the guns operated from that spot from then on. In
fact, the immobility of artillery was one of the reasons for the
relative scarcity of battles; if guns were used, the battle had to come
about by a kind of mutual agreement or because one of the commanders was
so confident that he was willing to attack an artillery position. With
the help of his artillery chief, Von Sigeroth, Gustavus introduced a
4-pounder that could be drawn by a single horse and that used a fixed
cartridge; it could be fired eight times while a musketeer was getting
off six shots. Two of these light guns were attached to each regiment;
slightly heavier two-horse pieces formed an army artillery park. But the
main point was that all these guns could be moved on the battlefield and
under fire, and they were so moved.

Finally, Gustavus would have nothing to do with Wallenstein's system of
living off the country, or Tilly's of occasional plunder. Food,
equipment, and clothing were kept in magazines and issued by proper
officers; the men were promptly paid (this was Oxenstjerna) and they
paid for everything they took, under the severest penalties. This alone
was a revolution; no one had ever heard of such a thing before.

When his instrument was thus constituted, Gustavus summoned his Riksraad
(Senate) and told them he was going to Germany not only because the
cause of Protestantism, of all freedom of thought, was in the scales,
but also because Wallenstein, before his dismissal, had been named
"Admiral of the Empire." His siege of Stralsund, his attacks on the
Hansa towns were specifically aimed at control of the Baltic. The policy
was not likely to be discontinued, and it would be better to fight
abroad than at home. The Riksraad heartily concurred. On July 4, 1630,
Gustavus landed at Peenemunde with 13,000 men. Recruiting agents in
Scotland and Denmark were gathering more and the king expected important
aid from the German princes, but even so this was an insignificant force
to fling in the face of an empire.

Such was the opinion on the other side also. When he heard of the king's
advance, Ferdinand remarked lightly, "So we have a new little enemy, do
we?" and Wallenstein in his castle spoke of the "the Snow King," who
would melt in a German summer.


      IV

Not a Protestant prince stirred to help, not a heart beat faster. Duke
Bogislav of Pomerania only asked the Swedes to go away; to obtain a base
Gustavus had to force Stettin to open its gates, and incorporated its
garrison into his army by decree. (They turned out to be very good
troops.) He held a slender wedge into the Oder valley, completely
surrounded by imperial troops and towns with imperial garrisons, and
even with Stralsund there was communication only by sea. Of the great
Protestant electors, Johann Geoge of Saxony wanted no part of the war on
any terms and Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg even refused to allow Swedish
troops in his territory and admitted imperial garrisons to his strong
places.

The story of the next nine months can be found in most military
textbooks and is immensely admired by soldiers and very complicated.
Gustavus received acquisitions of force by recruitment and new men from
home, and he reduced the imperialists no little by victories in small
battles and the capture of towns. He had to do his work by a series of
maneuvers as intricate as the passes of an expert fencer, which he
accomplished so well that by May 1631 all Pomerania, all Mecklenburg
except the single city of Greifswald, had been freed of imperial
garrisons and exactions, and the Swedish king had a bastion in northern
Germany which could be penetrated only at the cost of fighting a battle.

Tilly was not interested in fighting battles except on the most
favorable terms; they were an unnecessary expense. He had adopted and
extended the method of Wallenstein, subduing the country bit by bit,
burning out everything, killing off everyone, and taking all the goods,
so that no hostile army could support a campaign against him. Behind
this policy was Ferdinand, and it was based on the idea that each
Protestant principality would remain quiet, believing itself safe as
long as
 it remained loyal to the empire. This was usually correct, but
in May 1631 there was furnished an impressive demonstration of where the
peace-in-our-time policy led Protestants.

The city of Magdeburg had once been the seat of an archbishop who was
ejected by the Reformation. Under Ferdinand's Edict of Restitution it
must be returned to a prelate, and in April 1631, Tilly appeared before
the town with 30,000 men to demand submission. The place had been under
a loose siege for several months by Graf Gottfried zu Pappenheim, one of
the best imperial cavalry officers, and Gustavus had been making
energetic efforts for its relief. But between him and Magdeburg lay
Saxon territories, and nothing could move Elector Johann Georg to let
him pass. On May 20, Tilly sent a herald into the town to negotiate;
while the conversations were going on, Pappenheim threw a body of troops
across the wall and the place was taken. The sack that followed became
famous even in the seventeenth century: 40,000 people were butchered and
every building in Magdeburg except the cathedral was burned.

This, then, was the alternative to submitting to the Edict of
Restitution. To Ferdinand the operation was a complete success; it
demonstrated that nothing could stand against the army of the League and
the empire, and he followed it by a series of demands on west-central
Germany. Saxe-Weimar and Hesse-Cassel were to submit to the Edict of
Restitution; Johann Georg was to disband his army, except for a
contingent which was to join Tilly for further police operations. Tilly
was ordered to march at once on Saxe-Weimar and Hesse-Cassel.

The detachment sent against the former caught a Tartar in the young Duke
Bernard, who later became one of Gustavus' most trusted officers, but
the main events were in Brandenburg and Saxony. The fall of Magdeburg
irritated Gustavus to the point where he decided that neutralities in
this war were nonsense; he lined up his cannon at the gates of Berlin
and told Georg Wilhelm that he must have free passage and the keys to
the fortress of Spandau or he would start shooting; and Georg Wilhelm
gave in. The Swedes turned southwest toward the dominions of Johann
Georg, who found himself compelled to join either the imperialists or
his fellow Protestants; and he chose the latter. About 13,000 of his men
were added to Gustavus' army, and on September 17, 1631, just north of
Leipzig, on the plain of Breitenfeld, Tilly found himself forces to
fight a battle.

It was a decisive battle. There were 26,000 Swedes on the field, drawn
up separately from the Saxons, who were on their left. Opposite them,
the imperialists, huge blocks of terciaries in the center, cannon across
the front, on the flanks masses of cavalry, commanded by Pappenheim on
one flank, Graf Furstenberg on the other, 40,000 all told, for a
straight parallel order fight. Across the Swedish front were those new
light guns under Lennart Torstensson, who would be no little famous as a
general one day. He opened a fire so hot that Pappenheim on the imperial
left could not take it, and without orders charged the Swedish right,
while Furstenberg, accepting this as a signal for action, went down
against the Saxons. The Saxons fled at the first fire, and Johann Georg
spurred from the field in terror that did not evaporate until he learned
what happened after he left. Furstenberg turned in on the naked Swedish
left while Tilly obliqued his terciaries to the right to follow and roll
up their line.

But things were not going so well for the empire on the other flank,
where Pappenheim charged with his famous Black Cuirassiers. They found
that between his squadrons of horse in that quarter Gustavus had
interspersed small blocks of musketeers; these stood their ground,
shooting down horse and man, and the Swedish cavalry on their lighter
ponies counterattacked so fiercely that Pappenheim was driven from the
field. It was the moment; Gustavus placed himself at the head of the
cavalry regiments of Vastergotland, Ostergotland, Smaaland, and Finland,
hurling them in at the gallop, in a charge such as no man living had
seen, on the flank of the imperial guns and Tilly's solid _tercias_.

These _tercias_ were already having no easy time in front. They found
that the Swedes had held out a reserve; it formed a new line at right
angles to the first, and instead of taking a naked flank the imperials
were up against another line of those musketeers who shot so fast and,
above all, that dreadful quick-moving artillery. They stood it; the
cruel Spaniards, Walloons, and Croats were hard-bitten fighting men,
veterans who had never known defeat, and they had every confidence in
Father Tilly. But they could not gain an inch against the guns, and the
merciless horsemen kept cutting them down from behind; toward twilight
the stampede began. Seven thousand of the imperialists were dead, 6,000
more were prisoners, and the Snow King had become the Lion of the North.
In Ingolstadt they offered public prayer for deliverance from "the
Devil, the Swedes and the Finns."


      V

It was obvious what the Emperor Ferdinand must do; he now had no choice
but to recall the diabolical genius, Wallenstein. But Ferdinand had so
lively a sense of what this might cost him that for the time being he
merely ordered Tilly to raise a new army in place of that dispersed at
Breitenfeld and cooperate with Maximilian of Bavaria.

Gustavus turned west into the Lower Palatinate and the Rhineland. Some
critics have blamed him for not marching on Vienna at once; but just as
when he was establishing his secure bastion south of the Baltic, he was
less interested in the spectacular than in putting things on a really
solid basis. In three months he had the whole area under control; the
Protestant princes were now ready to help, the Catholics reduced to
treaties and impotence, the Jesuits banished. Mainz, which had a Spanish
garrison, was taken after a brief siege, the Spaniards driven back into
the Netherlands and communications between them and the Austrians
broken, while Johann Georg moved his army into Silesia and Bohemia.

During the winter Tilly got his new army on foot; Gustavus turned toward
it and Bavaria in the spring, and came up with the old general at the
river Lech. On April 15, 1632, the question of forcing a passage across
that stream arose. Gustavus answered it by a device which has since
become classic, but in his day was as original as his light artillery
and galloping cavalry. He selected a bend convex toward his own side,
massed artillery all round it, and made the attack under cover of a
smoke screen from burning wet straw. It was not the least of his battles
or his victories. The imperials lost 4,000 men, including Father Tilly,
was had his leg shattered by a cannon ball. Munich fell and there was
now absolutely nothing for obstinate Ferdinand to do but turn to
Wallenstein.

The genius drove the kind of bargain that might have been expected. He
demanded and received unconditional control of the army, control of all
confiscated territories, a veto on all orders to be issued by the
emperor. That he was promised one of the electorates is also probable;
in practice it would have made him sole elector.

One of the reasons for Wallenstein's uncanny prescience was his ability
at analysis. In retirement he had not lost touch with events, and he
understood perfectly where the weakness of Gustavus' situation lay. It
lay in the Saxon alliance, the personality of Johann Georg, and the fact
that he was across the Swedish communications for any operation in south
Germany. As soon as Wallenstein had recruited a new army, which did not
take long, he moved it into Bohemia and easily drove the Saxons out. At
the same time he very quietly opened negotiations with Johann Georg and
Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg, suggesting that a major objective on which
they could agree was to get the foreign invader out of Germany. If they
concurred, concessions on religion would be forthcoming--even the
abandonment of the Edict of Restitution. Ferdinand might care for
nothing but the true religion; Wallenstein thought in terms of empire.

He now gathered in the Bavarian forces and moved toward Gustavus in the
region of Nurnberg, where he set up a wide entrenched camp and waited.
He had analyzed Gustavus' military operations quite as shrewdly as the
political, and understood that the Swedish tactical system depended on
mobility, especially of guns in the field, and the strategic system on
fighting battles. Wallenstein had no such speed of maneuver and no such
artillery. Very well, he would not fight battles, and see who could
stand the deadlock longer. His own amoral method of supplying his troops
should make his problem of static maintenance lighter than that of the king.

He calculated accurately. For six weeks the armies faced each other,
both going hungry, and decimated by illness. At last, on September 3-4,
Gustavus could stand it no longer and made a desperate attempt to storm
Wallenstein's lines on a commanding height. It failed, with the loss of
3,000 men.

The impact of this event was considerable, and it was followed by
another indication that genius had an answer for every problem, and
Wallenstein's system might be practically superior to that of Gustavus.
It was required of the king to show results, to get the imperial forces
out of the territory, and Wallenstein was dangerously far north,
dangerously close to Protestant lands. To pull him back Gustavus started
a drive toward Vienna. Wallenstein simply ignored him, marched into
Saxony and took Leipzig, then began to devastate the country around it.
Johann Georg sent frantic appeals for protection to the Swedish king,
and the cleverness of Wallenstein's political moves became apparent. The
imperialists could spare Vienna far better than Gustavus could Dresden,
and the Swede was forced
 to send his columns streaming north.

Difficulties of provisioning and the need for garrisons against imperial
raids brought it about that the mobile field force with Gustavus, as he
moved up toward Leipzig, was relatively small--about 18,000 men,
although this was increased by a contingent under young Duke Bernard of
Saxe-Weimar, which presently fell in. Johann Georg had nearly as many
men at Torgau, on the other side of Leipzig, but letters begging him to
join for battle produced only a reply that they would meet at Magdeburg.
Johann Georg had been in one battle and did not wish to see another;
besides, he could always get some kind of terms from Wallenstein.

The Czech was at least 33,000 strong; it was already November and he
intended to entrench a camp for winter quarters on much the same pattern
as his lines at Nurnberg, which would force Gustavus also to be quiet.
The place Wallenstein chose was Lutzen, southwest of Leipzig. There was
no height to work with, as in the Nurnberg position, since this part of
Saxony is all one gently rolling plain, but a road with deep ditches on
either side runs from Lutzen to Leipzig. As a beginning to his
entrenched camp, Wallenstein deepened the ditches until they were very
effective trenches, filling them with musketeers. On the right of his
position was Lutzen village, and behind it the only eminence in the
neighborhood, Windmill Hill; here the bulk of the artillery was posted.
On his left he had the Flossgraben, a fordable stream, but still a
military obstacle.

That is, he was locked in, and could fall on the rear of any force that
tried to get around him. Moreover, it was a position guaranteed to
demobilize Swedish mobility; the causeway road was as near a straight
line as it could be, there was no room for the kind of maneuvers that
had won for Gustavus at Breitenfeld and the passage of the Lech. When,
on November 14, Wallenstein heard that the king was approaching, he
hurriedly sent to recall Pappenheim with 8,000 cavalry from Halle, where
they had been sent to ease the problem of provision.

Wallenstein's judgment was that when Gustavus came he would fight,
regardless of numbers, position, or anything else, and he was perfectly
right. Not only did the king intend to attack, but to attack at once, in
spite of a plea from Duke Bernard that he at least wait for the arrival
of two or three thousand men from Luneberg. Neither would Gustavus sleep
in a wagon; it was a damp, chilly night and his men had to lie on the
ground, he would take no better.

All woke to a dawn heavy with fog; the king ranked the troops and led
the whole army singing "_Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott_," Martin
Luther's hymn. Wallenstein had fired Lutzen village to keep it from
being a cover; the smoke and smell of the burning drifted through the
murk. In spite of poor visibility Gustavus' intelligence of his enemy's
position was good, and in spite of the fact that this must be a straight
parallel order battle he had a plan of maneuver. While Duke Bernard with
the cavalry of the left attacked Lutzen, he himself with a weighted
right wing intended to break down the enemy on that flank, having noted
that it was a "strategic wing," that is, in prolongation of it lay
Wallenstein's line of communication to Leipzig. If it were broken
through, the imperialists would have no line of retreat. There were two
lines of infantry among the Swedes, as at Breitenfeld; General Niels
Brahe led the first, old Marshal Kniphausen the second, while
Torstensson commanded the artillery all across the front.

In the imperial lines Piccolomini commanded the Austrian and Hungarian
cuirassiers; facing the king, General Colloredo some horse and foot
supporting the guns around Windmill Hill, while Wallenstein, in a litter
because his gout troubled him so sore, was carried back and forth along
the solid blocks of pikemen along the center--Spanish or
Spanish-trained, the old terciary formation, not trying to move, as at
Breitenfeld, but on the defensive this day, where they were best.
Through the shrouding mist the guns of both sides boomed.

At ten the fog cleared enough to show the lines to each other, as
through a glass darkly. King Gustavus lifted his sword, as it is shown
in the painting, uttered a brief prayer, and gave the order for the attack.


      VI

Duke Bernard on the Swedish left was overlapped and had a hill to climb.
But he was ardent and a hard driver; the early gain he made attracted
Wallenstein's attention so that the Czech found it necessary to take
charge there personally. In the center the flexible Swedish infantry
swept forward to the double-ditched road, Torstensson got some of the
light regimental guns up to enfilade the imperial musketeers in the
ditches, and the Swedes went right across into the imperial artillery
positions, captured the big immobile guns, and spiked them. The big
blocks of pikemen behind had been deprived of most of their musketry
support in the fighting along the road. Now, under the fire of Gustavus'
line, they began to go back, not breaking, but unable to make a forward
movement in the face of the rapid-firing Swedish muskets and
Torstensson's light cannon. They went back farthest on their own left,
the Swedish right; Wallenstein was anchoring the other flank, and he was
a good anchor. But even Wallenstein could not hold Windmill Hill against
Duke Bernard when some of Brahe's infantry joined the attack; the big
battery there was taken.

Yet it was where the king in person led his famous Stalhanske horse on
the Swedish right that the key events were taking place, and the key to
them all was that (in the words of a wandering Englishman), "As the
Battaile was ioyned there fell soe great a miste that we could not see
one another, which if it had not bene, I beleave wee had quickly made an
ende of them (but all must be as God will have it)." In that murk the
Stalhanskes scattered a group of Croat light cavalry at the first shock,
then came through it against cuirassiers. They were solider, but the
Swedes came on in successive waves; back and down went the imperialists
and the battle was all but won.

All _but_ won. In the blind groping mist word reached the king that he
somehow pulled too far out to the right, that Wallenstein had brought
his pikemen, accompanied by more cavalry, back against the right flank
of Brahe's infantry line where it jutted farthest forward. With only
four companions Gustavus rode off to rectify matters, in the mist got
into a whole party of the enemy, and was instantly killed.

The worst of it was that the tale about the counterattack was perfectly
true. Through the fog it fell as a complete surprise on the extreme end
of Brahe's line and rolled it up. The Swedes went back to the road, lost
one ditch, then the other, and their artillery had no points of aim; the
pikes were better in this weather. Just as the Swedish infantry began to
retreat, Pappenheim reached the field with his 8,000 fresh cavalry.
"Where is the king?" he demanded, burning to revenge the defeat of
Breitenfeld, and being told, led on against the Swedish right. The horse
that had followed Gustavus nearly to Wallenstein's baggage camp were
caught at the standstill and, more than doubly outnumbered, driven back
across the causeway. It was five o'clock and the swing of Pappenheim's
counterattack should have carried the disordered Swedes right away.

It did not, and there were several reasons why it did not. The mist
began to clear, and Torstensson got his guns going again, while the
imperial cannon in the center were still spiked. The captured Windmill
Hill battery enfiladed their line and discouraged any advance beyond the
road; Pappenheim got himself killed.

But the greatest and the ruling reason was what happened when old
Marshal Kniphausen sought out Duke Bernard to tell him that Gustavus was
dead and the duke was in command of the army; the second line of foot
was still undamaged, and the marshal thought he could make good a retreat.

"Retreat?" cried Bernard. "This is not the time to talk of retreat, but
of vengeance!" He snatched off his helmet and rode down the line,
shouting in a great, booming voice, "Swedes! They have killed the king!"

Kniphausen was a careful, accurate soldier. He used his second line to
stay the weak spots of the first at just the right points. But it was
not anything that Kniphausen did that now took charge of the battle, it
was Bernard of Saxe-Weimar and the incredible fury his words engendered
in men who had already been fighting most of the day. They swept forward
in such an assault as has rarely been seen on any battlefield; in such a
rage that afterward there were found imperialists who had been daggered
and even throttled. Brave men, trained men, the terciaries could not
stand it. "The soldyers flonge down theire armes and ran awaye, and the
officers could by noe means make them longer stande; ffor here Hertike
Bernerde charged himself the enimie soe sore."

Wallenstein's army was not so much beaten as destroyed, and "the wilde
bores cut off manie of them in theire flyght."


      VII

It was more than Wallenstein's army that was destroyed at Lutzen; it was
also the imperial system and Wallenstein himself. The genius lasted a
couple of years longer at his castle of Eger in Bohemia when some
bravoes sent by Ferdinand burst into his study and dispatched him. To
the imperial mind the only thing that could justify giving any man power
so extensive was a success complete enough to make possible the
disposition of the rest of Germany as he had the Duchy of Mecklenburg
and the noble estates of Bohemia. When Wallenstein first came on the
scene, the objective was still re-Catholicization. But Richelieu's
intervention and the Battle of Breitenfeld rendered this so clearly
unattainable that the emphasis had subtly shifted, and what had been a
means to an end became the
 end itself. The war of religion was decided
at Breitenfeld; the war for the absolute empire was decided at Lutzen.

Before the Reformation, whatever wars took place, there remained
throughout Europe the underlying concept of an essential unity of
Christendom, an idea that all states still formed part of a common boy.
Even after it, when Charles V came to an agreement with the
Protestantizing princes of the empire in 1555, that idea and ideal
remained. It was technically in the name of this idea, however perverted
in expression, that Ferdinand II launched his campaign of
re-Catholicization. It was still in the name of it that Wallenstein laid
his grandiose imperial plans. Lutzen destroyed the ideal; the concept as
well as the fact of European unity broke.

Both Reformation and imperialism were decided on military grounds and by
military means. The system of Tilly and Wallenstein was essentially to
assemble an army so strong defensively that it was immune to any attack,
then march through the enemy's country, destroying his resources by
devastations--which, incidentally, paid the soldiers. It even provided
mercenary recruits: "Whose house doth burn, must soldier turn" was a
current proverb. Wallenstein developed this system more thoroughly than
Tilly, but only because he was even more ruthless, and to his
predecessor's talent for war he added talents in intrigue, finance, and
diplomacy. Yet even in its highest expression this was no more than a
development of the Spanish system of war and it was fundamentally medieval.

It was this system that Gustavus Adolphus proved invalid. He proved it
invalid tactically at Breitenfeld; proved that a formation based on mere
immunity to attack could always be beaten if the attack moved fast
enough and hit hard enough. The Spanish-Tilly-Wallenstein system was one
of establishing infantry and its guns as a kind of fortress, with the
cavalry making sallies; but the trouble with a fortress is that it
cannot change shape, and it is always possible for a fast mover to throw
overwhelming force against some part of it.

Gustavus also proved the system strategically erroneous. The fact that
he failed to dislodge the fortress army near Nurnberg should not be
allowed to conceal the other fact that Wallenstein's army suffered badly
there from hunger and disease, and the second time Wallenstein tried
that trick, he got Lutzen. An army has to have communications, supply.
The fast-marching Swedes could always threaten communications and force
a battle of the kind they wanted to fight by threatening communications,
and this is what Gustavus did.

Finally and above all, the king produced his demonstration in the field
of morality and morale. The Swedes paid; cities opened their gates and
peasants came with their horses to haul supplies, even in the Catholic
districts from which men fled away before Wallenstein. This enormously
facilitated military operations and assured to Gustavus the widespread
support he began to receive as soon as he proved he could win battles
and protect his adherents against the exponents of the opposite system.

But in the long run this was perhaps less important than what the moral
values did within the army itself. For the whole of the
Spanish-imperialist system was based on men who were fighting for what
they could make out of it; when it became obvious that they were not
going to make anything, the army dissolved, as on the afternoon after
Breitenfeld and through the smoky twilight of Lutzen. The Swedish army
was recruited from men who were enlisted for the war, not hired for the
campaign. They were fighting for something, a ponderable ideal, the
concept that a man should be allowed to do his own thinkin. When the
king died on the field of Lutzen, that concept did not; it was the basis
of the fury of the Northmen that carried everything away before it that
evening and forever ended the Middle Ages.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    10. INTERLUDE: THE DAY OF INADEQUATE DECISIONS




      I

After Lutzen the Thirty Years' War became a very inferior affair. On the
Swedish side there was no one with Gustavus' prestige to keep the
Protestant combination together, and it began to crack at the seams; nor
was there anyone with Gustavus' strategic skill to make a victory mean
something permanent. There was not even anyone who had the king's
tactical ability; the best was Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, and at Nordlingen
in 1634 he sustained a defeat that changed the whole aspect of the war,
and it therefore entitled to rank as a somewhat decisive battle.

It brought two decisions. Johann Georg of Saxony and a group of small
states in alliance with him, having been delivered from the fear of
Ferdinand's imperialism at Breitenfeld and from that of Wallenstein's
imperialism at Lutzen, negotiated a separate peace with the emperor, to
whom at last it had become clear that neither imperialism could be made
to work, and he would have to go on living in a world from which the
concept of European unity had been lost. Nordlingen also brought the
whole of southwest Germany under imperial authority, and once more
closed around France that Hapsburg ring which Richelieu had been paying
the Swedes to break.

The fact was signalized by the unhindered march of a Spanish force from
Italy to the Netherlands; and with the Saxon group out of the war,
Richelieu felt he could no longer delay in the hope of finding another
ally of the stature of Gustavus. France went in, and for thirteen years
more the armies marched and fought across the plains and hills of
Germany, leaving behind such devastation that the land had still not
recovered 200 years later.

This was the only decision really arrived at. Names renowned in military
history stalk across the pages of that war--the Swedes Baner,
Torstensson, Wrangel, pupils of Gustavus; Turenne, the Great Conde,
Montecuculi. Famous battles were fought and campaigns made that have
excited the admiration of soldiers; but still no result. The Peace of
Westphalia in 1648 was a peace of exhaustion.

Why? Because they were all trying to copy Gustavus, and as usual with
military copyists, it was the detail that was imitated, not the
ensemble. They copied his six- or three-deep musketeers against the huge
blocks of pikemen; they copied the light artillery and the cavalry going
in with the cold weapon; they copied his method of provisioning from a
previously established set of magazines; and after some time they began
to copy his process of recruiting a standing army.

But there was always something a little off key, a little out of drawing
about these copies. The guns were never as light as Gustavus had made
them, nor could they move as fast. The cavalry made most of its
"charges" at a slow trot, expect in the hands of the Great Conde.
Gustavus had been so successful with cavalry that horse once again
became the main arm, as numerous as infantry in most armies, and
sometimes more so; and the question of supply became most prominently
one of forage. The system of magazines was degraded into becoming an
objective in itself; a fortress was the usual magazine, and it was
considered very honorable to force an adversary to leave his campaigning
ground by capturing such a _point d'appui_. In fact, it became a main
purpose; Turenne was considered most inelegant for wishing to fight
battles instead of driving the enemy from their positions by maneuver,
and he was often favored with a court order to avoid battle.

On the battlefield also the imitation of what was thought to be
Gustavus' method became the rule. He had opened the fighting in parallel
order, with his infantry in two lines, guns in little groups across the
front, and cavalry on the wings. Therefore everybody else adopted this
arrangement. They failed to realize that at Breitenfeld and Lutzen the
king placed his guns across the front in order to get the most out of
them against the blocks of pikemen; at the Lech he did nothing of the
kind. The diadochi completely overlooked the fact that Breitenfeld and
Lutzen were only parallel order battles at the very beginning; that the
former was decided by battlefield maneuver and in the latter Gustavus
concentrated the mailed fist of his greatest weight to smash the enemy
from his communications. Particularly, the successors made no real
effort to use the three arms in combination and according to
opportunity. In their typical battles cavalry fought cavalry, infantry
infantry, and the battle was decided by whose line went back in a piece.

Nor did they pursue a battle. Gustavus, who had studied the campaigns of
Alexander and knew what pursuit was, followed up his minor battles and
the passage of the Lech remorselessly, but at Lutzen he was not alive to
order a pursuit, and at Breitenfeld it was unnecessary. In the latter he
had broken a mercenary army in the field, and was perfectly aware that
with that breaking the campaign for which the army had enlisted was over
and the army would dissolve. But the armies that succeeded Gustavus were
in tighter bonds. He had taught them discipline; they did not break up
after a defeat, but retreated to the nearest fortress and asked for
reinforcements, and they were able to do so because they remained
unpursued. The result was that in those showy battles and famous
victories the losing side was pushed back rather than destroyed, and the
contradance of fortress plucking and maneuver went on again. The whole
art of war became as formal as fencing with buttoned foils--and about as
decisive.

This was a condition that lasted for a hundred years.


      II

There also developed during the later period of the Thirty Years' War a
new concept--the concept of the expanding state. It had been latent all
the time, and the dissolution of the old basic idea of the unity of
Christendom as the result of the Reformation
 only brought it to the
surface. The dominant political idea of the period following the Peace
of Westphalia became that of a number of states in fierce competition
for power, wealth, territory, everything, and this idea was powerfully
pushed forward by colonizations beyond the seas and the things that
flowed therefrom. Every state was in competition with every other for
the avenues of expansion, and the natural method of competition was war,
just as the natural business of a member of the upper class was fighting.

In 1661 there was injected into this complex the personality of Louis
XIV, King of France. He was magnificent and very proud, author of the
remark that he was not the head of state but the state itself, and at
the death of his tutor, the great Cardinal Mazarin, declared he would be
his own first minister. It turned out that he was perfectly capable of
doing this, for he was industrious, patient and, at least in his early
years, chose subordinates with the greatest skill. The idea of the
competitive and expanding state formed a part of his basic mental
equipment; he would no more have questioned it then he would have
doubted the morality of killing cattle for beefsteaks; the only points
to be decided were those of execution.

Therefore wars. Wars directed in the beginning at breaking the Hapsburg
ring around France, then to placing that country in a position where she
would be invulnerable to the ambition of any nation or combination of
nations. In the early years Louis was lucky enough to catch England
under the self-centered later Stuarts, Spain under Charles II, who was
afflicted with fainting fits and indifference to anything that went on
outside the cathedral, and the Holy Roman Empire busy with a somewhat
revived Turkey. During nearly three decades the French achieved most of
their objectives, and achieved them for good--the left bank of the Rhine
and that part of the Spanish Netherlands which protected Paris against
attack from the north. The plan of these wars, their strategy and
tactics, was essentially the same as those of the last half of the
Thirty Years' War. There were battles which decided nothing except that
the victorious army would be free to besiege another fortress, and since
the area of operations was heavily populated and cut up by water
courses, the fortresses became more important than ever. The wars were
engineers' wars, and the greatest names were those of Vauban of France
and Coehorn of Holland.


      III

By 1700 changes had developed in both the technological and the
political climate. The main technological change was the invention of
the socket bayonet, introduced in France in 1687, in most other
countries within the following ten years. It made pikemen unnecessary
and furnished musketeers with a weapon both for driving home an attack
and for defense against cavalry, enormously simplifying the minor
tactics of infantry.

The political change was that up through the complex of expanding states
there pushed the green shoots of a new idea--the balance of power. If
all states were competitive and expanding, then all were in danger when
any one became so great in territory and resources that it could do as
it pleased. This was in fundamental opposition to Louis XIV's plan of
placing France in precisely such a position, and the ideological
conflict reached the shooting stage with the death of Charles II of Spain.

He was childless, and his heirs were limited to Louis XIV and Leopold,
Holy Roman emperor. Both resigned their claims to younger sons of their
issue--Louis to Philip of Anjou, his second grandson, Leopold to Charles
of Austria, his second son. Both agreed to some partition of the vast
Spanish heritage, which included the southern Netherlands and most of
Italy besides the vast empire beyond the seas. But the accession of
either would destroy the precious balance of power, for if concentration
and administrative efficiency had made France incomparably the strongest
nation on the Continent, victories over the Turk had placed Austria in
control of all Hungary. Yet it was judged by most of Europe that the
French danger was the greater, particularly since the will of Charles II
of Spain left his dominions to Philip and the Spaniards accepted this
decision. England and the states of the empire joined a Grand Alliance
with Holland against France, and the War of the Spanish Succession was
on. Bavaria went with France, a key fact, for it became one of Louis'
politico-military objectives to drive Leopold from the throne of the
empire and substitute a Wittelsbach dynasty, with Munich as its capital.

That war produced some remarkable soldiers, of whom the best was
probably Prince Eugene of Savoy, who was unable to find military
preferment in France in spite of high birth because of a puny physique;
he went to Vienna and, by unusual courage and the ability to exercise
responsibility, became a field marshal at the age of twenty-five. A
perfect example of the reasons why it was difficult for any officer of
the age to attain decisive results was furnished by his campaign against
the Turks in 1697. At Zenta on the Theiss he beat them in a battle where
they lost 20,000 men--and on returning to Vienna was placed under arrest
for having fought without orders.

That is, the prevailing doctrine of maneuver and siege ran all the way
back through the echelons to the cabinet level; it was ungentlemanly to
fight hard, and even victory might somehow upset the magic balance of
power. Of course, this was unexpressed, part of the invisible but
universally accepted mental atmosphere, like the concept of the
expanding and competitive state. Only a man of something close to genius
could shake loose from it sufficiently to form his own ideas--in the
large area as well as the limited, the political as well as the military.

Such a man was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who was reliably
reported to have got his start by jumping out the king's mistress's
window at just the right moment. His talent for war turned out to be
quite equal to that for intrigue; in spite of some extremely dubious
connections he was made commander of the army of the Grand Alliance in
the Netherlands. The campaigns of his first two years there ran
according to pattern. His army was at least half Dutch, there were Dutch
civilian deputies at his headquarters to see that he performed in line
with the wishes of their government, and these wishes were to avoid
fighting and take fortresses.

He took them, but in the meanwhile the Grand Alliance was slowly losing
the war. Villars, the ablest of the French marshals in the field, drove
an army under Prince Louis of Baden into lines at Stolhofen on the
middle Rhine, pinned it there with detachments, and linked up with the
Elector Maximilian II of Bavaria. The Emperor Leopold had a revolt in
Hungary on his hands, and could have made but a very poor defense if the
combined Franco-Bavarian forces had moved on Vienna, which Villars
wished to do. The Elector Maximilian, however, was in business for a
quick profit, and his ideas of profit had the same limitations as all
those in the balance-of-power, expanding-state period. Instead of
striking boldly for empire, he insisted on spending 1703 in conquering
the Tyrol for Bavaria. Villars became so violent with him as to make
himself _persona non grata_. For 1704, Louis XIV adopted the old
political device of repudiating the man with an unpopular plan but
accepting the plan. Villars was recalled; the new marshal, Marsin, was
sent out with orders to insist on an offensive into the heart of
Austria. He had the means for it.

Prince Eugene had been operating for the empire in Italy with some
success; he was called back to command the defense, but his forces were
very weak, not over 10,000 troops at the beginning of the campaign
against some 50,000 or more of the Franco-Bavarians. He got in touch
with Marlborough, or Marlborough with him, and very secretly, to keep
the Dutch deputies and the imperial war council from finding out about
it, they concerted a campaign. The position was that a major French army
was operating in the Netherlands; a secondary one along the Moselle,
north of Metz; another in Baden, under Marshal Tallard, besides the
troops of Marsin and the Elector Max in Bavaria. When spring broke, the
bulk of Eugene's troops, gradually reinforced, shifted westward to watch
Tallard in Baden. Marlborough's plan, as announced to the Dutch, was to
slip leftward to the Moselle country. He moved then, on May 25, to
Coblenz, where the Moselle falls into the Rhine, but instead of turning
up the former river crossed the Rhine and kept right on eastward, toward
Bavaria and the Danube.

That march, with bad roads and heavy transport, was slow by modern
standards, but with relation to the speed of movement and spread of
intelligence of the age, it went at rocket speed. On July 3, Marlborough
was at Donauworth on the Danube, an important fortress. He assaulted it
and carried it out of hand, with 10,000 loss to the Franco-Bavarians,
then began to devastate the Bavarian homeland in a manner that brought
anguished howls from the elector and the calling in of Tallard's army
from the Baden country. Eugene followed, linked up with Marlborough
early in August, and moved forward to where the Franco-Bavarian forces
were posted on the bank of the Danube at Blenheim village.

Marsin and Tallard had 60,000 men, strongly arranged behind a marshy
brook, the right anchored on Blenheim and the river, the left on the
hamlet of Oberglau. They had no expectation of fighting, since
Marlborough and Eugene were only 56,000 strong and one simply did not
attack a position like that. But on the morning of August 13, 1704, the
English and imperialists moved forward as though for reconnaissance and
kept right on coming. Tallard had made the mistake of concentrating his
infantry
 in the two villages; while Eugene pinned and virtually besieged
part of them in Oberglau, with the help of some uncommonly steady
Prussians, Marlborough did the same at Blenheim, then broke through the
cavalry of the enemy center. When evening closed across the smoking
field, France and Bavaria had lost 38.609 in killed, wounded, and
prisoners, and Tallard himself was taken.

This, now, was decisive; but the area of the decision was not extensive
and the decision itself was in negative terms. Blenheim decided that
Wittelsbach should not replace Hapsburg on the imperial throne, that the
empire would remain in the war, and that France should not establish a
hegemony in south Germany. But it did not decide the war except in that
area, and in 1705 Marlborough was back in the Netherlands, hampered by
lack of men and money, maneuvering to protect the frontiers of Holland,
while Eugene was in Italy, working in the valley of the Po.

In 1706, Marlborough managed to assemble enough men and permissions to
take the offensive, and won another great battle at Ramillies; it
decided that the Spanish Netherlands, with Brussels, Dunkirk, Antwerp,
and Louvain, should fall into the hands of the allies. Eugene beat the
French at Turin and took all Italy from them and the Spaniards. In 1708
the two generals were together again and won a famous battle at
Oudenarde; in 1709 they beat the French at Malplaquet, that "very
murdering battle," but nothing at all followed except more maneuvering
and sieges in Flanders and Brabant and Lorraine, and the war died out in
1713.

The terms of peace gave the Spanish Netherlands and Spanish Italy to the
empire, and thus by reflection rendered Ramillies and Turin decisive
battles--in the same manner Blenheim was, for a limited area and in
terms of denial. The matrix of fortresses, slow-moving armies restrained
from fighting battles, consolidated states that could easily make good
losses, and apprehension lest the allies of today become the enemies of
tomorrow were such that the defensive had become superior to the attack.
The balance of power had been struck, the expanding state checked; there
were no longer ideas and ideals on the battlefield, only minor decisions
among members of the same system, which had to be determined by
fighting, but which could be settled without rancor. The military art,
which includes everything back to the recruiting stations and powder
mills, no longer permitted major issues to be settled in war or by war.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    11. FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE UNACCEPTABLE DECISION




      I

When Friedrich II, later called the Great, came to the throne of Prussia
in 1740, he inherited a realm both physically and in population a little
larger than Portugal, but sprawled all across northeast Germany in
little packages, and without any natural barriers to serve as _points
d'appui_ for fortresses. An unfortunate heritage of the Thirty Years'
War was the fact that the armies of both sides had marched very much
where they pleased, regardless of neutralities, except in those few
cases where the neutral had an armed force of his own big enough to
ensure respect. Johann Georg of Saxony was such a neutral until the
Emperor Ferdinand forced him to choose sides; Georg Wilhelm of
Brandenburg tried to be such a neutral and found he lacked the means.
The lesson was not lost on the strong and imperious Hohenzollerns who
followed him and turned the Electorate of Brandenburg into the Kingdom
of Prussia, and most especially not on Friedrich II's father, Friedrich
Wilhelm I, not the least strong or imperious of that remarkable line. In
addition, Friedrich Wilhelm was a kind of military connoisseur. In his
younger days he had personally fought under Marlborough and Eugene at
Malplaquet, and had fully accepted the opinion that one of the leading
concerns of a royal personage was war.

There were no wars anymore, but Friedrich Wilhelm behaved as though he
expected one tomorrow morning. A series of financial and administrative
economies, including the maintenance of his own court on a scale hardly
more elaborate than that of a country gentleman, gave him one of the
fattest treasuries of Europe from one of its poorest countries. He used
the money to equip an army of 80,000, almost as large as the imperial
forces, and equal to 4 percent of Prussia's population. In spite of a
conscription system and the duty laid on males of noble families to
serve in the officer corps from childhood up, little Prussia simply
could not furnish that many men. Friedrich Wilhelm's recruiting agents
cruised through the whole of Europe in search of what they wanted, and
when the candidates did not come willingly, they were kidnapped. This
was especially true of very tall men; in one of those evolutionary
specializations that made the head of triceratops almost too heavy to
carry, the king devoted vast effort to assembling a regiment of giants
for his personal guard. His people even sandbagged and carried off an
exceptionally tall Italian priest while he was saying Mass.

The armies of the age of the balance of power were the product of a
sharply stratified society, seeking everywhere to improve its productive
mechanism. Even in soldier-hungry Prussia the fact that a man was an
artisan or a trader exempted him from military service. It was the
business of the middle class to pay taxes to support the armies, and the
men who made them up were drawn from the lower levels--peasants,
vagabonds, the tradeless. As a result, discipline everywhere was of the
severest sort; but this severity was carried further under Friedrich
Wilhelm than anywhere else in Europe. Flogging through the line was the
usual punishment for talking back to an officer; a man who struck his
superior was simply shot out of hand without trial. With this discipline
went unceasing drill in the Prussian army, day in any day out, till the
men moved like machines, on reflex and without even thinking.

Also there went with it a reduction in the number of movements required
to load and fire a musket, and a new type of iron ramrod, introduced by
Friedrich Wilhelm's friend and officer, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau.
In other armies the ramrods were wood.

The rest of Europe regarded these antics with amusement; the regiment of
giants was funny, and an army that drilled all the time but never did
any fighting was an agreeable royal idiosyncrasy, like a collection of
cameos, and about as useful. Indeed, an official report to the Holy
Roman emperor said that the Prussian soldiers had been flogged so much
that they would infallibly desert at the first fire.

But on October 20, 1740, the Holy Roman emperor died.


      II

King Friedrich II was twenty-seven at the time of his accession, known
for his liberalizing tendencies, his addiction to the arts and sciences,
and what generally considered to be a levity of temper. He abolished
torture, proclaimed the freedom of the press and absolute religious
toleration, and began writing all over Europe to tempt Voltaire,
Maupertuis, anyone with a reputation, to come to Berlin and help set up
an academy. He discontinued the regiment of giants, gave orders that in
view of a prospective poor harvest the army magazines should be opened
and grain sold at low rates. European editorial opinion was that he
would reduce the army and maintain one of those German courts shining
with reflected French cultural glitter.

All this was before the death of the emperor, Charles VI. He had
produced only daughters, but before his death he spent a great deal of
time and effort hurrying about Europe to get everybody to agree to sign
a document called the Pragmatic Sanction, guaranteeing the Hapsburg
succession to the eldest girl, Maria Theresa, who was married to
Francis, titular Duke of Lorraine. Everybody did sign, probably most of
them with mental reservations, for there were two women with better
hereditary claims, the daughters of Charles' elder brother, Joseph. One
was the wife of Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria, and the Wittelsbach
house had never abandoned its hope of becoming imperial; the other was
the wife of Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, who did not
want the whole heritage, but only a part of it. Spain and Sardinia also
had claims of a vague sort; and in the background there was always
France, ready to promote anything that would keep the empire weak and
divided.

These complications added up to the fact that the Hapsburg empire, made
up of a collection of possessions under varying rules of inheritance,
was surrounded by expanding states, which saw an opportunity to chip off
pieces. But the balance of power and the futility of war to attain
decisions had become so well established that nobody did anything
practical about it until December 16, two months after Charles VI's death.

On that date Friedrich marched across the border of the duchy of Silesia
at the head of 30,000 men, claiming it as his own.

Legally the claim was of the flimsiest sort. It was rested on a document
of 1537, in which the Duke of Liegnitz and the then Markgraf of
Brandenburg mutually agreed that if the male heirs of either line ran
out the other should inherit. Actually, as everyone recognized at the
time, it was a straight case of expanding state, and moreover, expansion
by war. The effect was a transvaluation of values, not instantaneously,
but as soon as Friedrich had demonstrated that something important could
be accomplished by such means.

The demonstration was furnished at Mollwitz on 10 April, 1741, on a
field blanketed with snow. Friedrich had been masking and besieging
fortresses throughout Silesia and his strategy left a great deal to be
desired, but he managed to get some 20,000 men to Mollwitz to oppose an
approximately equal number of Austrians under Marshal Neipperg.
 There
were several peculiarities about that battle. Although the total forces
were nearly equal, the Austrian cavalry outnumbered the Prussian
slightly more than two to one, which meant that Austria was similarly
deficient in infantry; and the Prussians had sixty field guns against
eighteen. King Friedrich, in imitation of Gustavus, took his station
with the cavalry of the right wing. In the deployment there was not
quite enough room for all the infantry on that wing, so that some of it
had to be drawn back at an angle, _en potence_; and the ground was such
that this wing was much forward, nearer the enemy.

The battle was opened by the guns; they galled the horse of the Austrian
left so sore that these charged without orders and carried the Prussian
cavalry right away--including the king, who took no further part in the
proceedings that day. But when the Austrians tried to finish things by
turning in on the infantry flank, they found themselves up against
something much tougher than they could have imagined. Friedrich
Wilhelm's foot, drilled to the likeness of machines, did not break, but
stood in their ranks and shot the horsemen down. Five times Austria
tried against that angle of the Prussian right wing, five times the
cavalry went back; at the last charge broken, just as the infantry lines
came into contact. The battalions _en potence_ swung forward, they
overlapped the Austrian left, and with the mechanical Prussians firing
five shots with their iron ramrods for every two of their opponents,
with the overplus of Prussian artillery cutting holes in the Austrian
front, Neipperg's men could not stand it. They melted away into a wintry
twilight, their line collapsing from left to right.

Mollwitz decided Silesia for the time being, and also made in Europe a
noise almost as loud as Breitenfeld, for it was the defeat of a mighty
empire by a power almost as little regarded as Sicily. The required
demonstration was furnished: namely, that the military strength of a
state is not necessarily proportional to its size, and that it was still
possible to accomplish something by military means. Forthwith, Charles
Albert of Bavaria claimed the whole imperial heritage, Augustus of
Saxony-Poland claimed part of it, and their alliance was backed by
France with force of arms. This made it practically obligatory for
England, already locked with France in a struggle for overseas dominion,
to support Austria, and the War of the Austrian Succession began.

But these were only the publicly, immediately decisive events that
flowed from Mollwitz. The privately decisive matters, which became the
more important in the long run, were that Friedrich, who deserves to
rank a a great man, if only because he learned something from every
blunder and accident with humility unequaled in history, meditated long
and hard over what happened in battle. His infantry had withstood the
best cavalry in Europe; very well, infantry trained in the school of
Friedrich Wilhelm could turn back any cavalry. His Marshal Schwerin had
urged him to leave the field after the first cavalry charge, and then
won the battle; very well, he would never leave a battlefield again and
Schwerin was in disfavor. Most important of all was the train of
accidents that resulted in a heavily weighted Prussian right wing
striking the Austrian left at an oblique angle. Friedrich studied
military history very hard and had the memory of an elephant; it
reminded him of Epaminondas of Thebes, and he never forgot it.


      III

If you had spoken to an expanding-state dignitary about anything like
consent of the governed or plebiscites, he would have thought you out of
your mind; but the million or more Silesians conquered by Friedrich at
Mollwitz or in the sieges were well content to be Prussian. They were
predominantly Protestant, and the Austrian Catholic officials, while not
actually oppressing them, made things difficult. Moreover, Prussian
administration was more efficient than Austrian; more precise, with a
better sense of essential justice. Friedrich had not only made a
conquest, he had secured the reconciliation of the conquered.

But there was one person who would never be reconciled to Prussia in
Silesia, and that was Maria Theresa, empress and queen. She regarded
Friedrich as the most wicked and dangerous man in Europe, and she said
so; a reaction not merely of personal pique, but of an underlying sense
that his success threatened the whole system of which she formed a part.
This opinion was implemented through a long series of diplomatic and
military maneuvers. In 1742, at the urging of her British friends, Maria
Theresa signed a peace which turned out to be an armistice. It gave
Friedrich his Silesia and allowed her to turn on the Bavarians and
French. In 1743 the French were disastrously defeated in Bohemia and on
the Rhine; Bavaria fell entirely into Austrian hands and Friedrich
re-entered the war as the ally of France, more or less to keep the
revived Hapsburg power from being turned on him alone. In 1744 he
invaded Bohemia and captured Prague, but got himself maneuvered out by
attacks on his communications. In 1745 the Austrians, now with Saxony as
an ally, counterinvaded Silesia and were well beaten at Hohenfriedberg
and Sohr, so that the peace finally signed only confirmed the verdict of
Mollwitz.

In every series of campaigns certain features establish themselves on a
semi-permanent basis as part of the frame of reference. In the War of
the Austrian Succession one of these features was the operations of the
Hungarian irregular light cavalry, pandours, who hung in clouds across
the front and flanks of every Austrian army. They were barbarians who
used to burn towns, raid camps, and cut the wounded to pieces when they
found them, but they made communications a problem for every army
opposing the Austrian, and they forced the king to fight for his
intelligence of enemy movements. As a result he developed his own
cavalry service on lines parallel to those given the infantry by
Friedrich Wilhelm--careful training, perfect coordination, precision of
movement--and reared up a group of remarkable cavalry officers, Ziethen,
Seydlitz, Rotherbourg. This was not so much a true light cavalry, like
the pandours, but an instrument for combat intelligence and battle
purposes, and it was the first of its kind.

The infantry did not need improving, only an intensification of its
previous status. Friedrich had discovered that his foot could not only
fire twice as fast as its opponents, but also that it could maneuver
much faster, and on this he based a new system of minor tactics. The
infantry was to fire a platoon volley, advance four paces behind the
smoke while reloading for the next volley and, when close enough to the
bullet-racked enemy line, fall on with the bayonet.

In major tactics every one of his big battles of the war--Chotusitz,
Hohenfriedburg, Sohr--was a deliberate repetition of the accident of
Mollwitz. In each Friedrich pushed forward a heavily loaded right wing,
took the enemy at the oblique, and rolled up his line. There were
variations in the individual case, but this was the basic pattern, and
it was noted beyond the borders of Prussia.


      IV

This was the military background for the next act. Part of the political
background was furnished by the fact that, having obtained what he
wanted, Friedrich was opposed to war. "We must get rid of it as a doctor
does of a fever." But there was now on the imperial side Wenzel Anton,
Graf von Kaunitz, counselor to Maria Theresa. She had been rather
reluctantly willing to accept Bavaria in compensation for the loss of
Silesia, but the peace that ended the general war gave her neither, and
though her husband secured election as emperor, there remained in her an
inextinguishable fund of bitterness against the robber who had taken her
province.

Wenzel Anton (who exercised by riding in hall to avoid fresh air and
kept dozens of kittens, which he gave away as soon as they became cats)
exploited this bitterness, and he exploited it in the name of the
balance of power. He argued that the presence of a new great power in
north Germany--and with her army and accession of territory, no one
could doubt that Prussia had become one--had deprived Austria of her
proper place in Europe and freedom of action. If she was ever to recover
either, if the French influence which had become so predominant in
Europe through Friedrich was ever to be allayed, Prussia must be
destroyed. Austria's traditional alliance was with the sea powers,
England and Holland; but it was hopeless to expect these Protestant
nations to support an enterprise against Protestant Prussia. The true
line of Austrian policy was therefore in forming an alliance with France
and Russia, the former of whom could be repaid in the Netherlands and
Italy, and the latter in East Prussia, none of which lands were really
part of the empire.

Thus Kaunitz to the empress. It was not hard to talk Russia into the
combination, for Russia was perpetually ambitious and, for quite
personal reasons, the Russian Empress Elizabeth had conceived a deep
dislike for Friedrich. France and some of the lesser states--Sweden,
Saxony--came harder, but Kaunitz was a diplomat of almost uncanny skill,
who had a goodie for everybody. Also he was aided by the underlying
feeling he used with the empress, more a sensation than a statable idea,
that the balance of power had been overthrown by the expanding Prussian
state, and there was no security for anyone unless this tendency was
ruthlessly punished. France signed; and England promptly allied herself
with Friedrich--the sea power to furnish money, the Prussians troops for
the protection of King George's Hannover.

These were the roots of the Seven Years' War, the first of the true
world wars, itself decisive in more than one way, but whose importance
is
 often hidden beneath the overlays of later struggles.

The actual fighting began in August 1756, when Friedrich invaded Saxony
without a declaration of war, occupied Dresden, and shut up the Saxon
army in an entrenched camp at Pirna. His espionage service was
exceptionally good; he had a man named Menzel in the Saxon chancellery
who, incidentally, was discovered and spent the remaining eighteen years
of his life in irons in prison growing a fine crop of hair. Friedrich
published the documents Menzel furnished as a justification for his
aggression against Saxony. Not that it did much good, since the adroit
Kaunitz instantly summoned the Diet of the empire and persuaded all the
smaller states to send contingents to an imperial army, which made part
of the half million men who began to flow in for the demolition of Prussia.

Friedrich's aggression succeeded in its first object. Saxony was knocked
out, and what was left of its enlisted troops was offered the choice of
serving under Friedrich henceforth or going to prison. Friedrich invaded
Bohemia for a second time, won a battle under the walls of Prague, threw
a blockade around the town and pressed southward until he encountered an
army twice the size of his own under Marshal Leopold Josef Daun at Kolin
on June 18, 1757.

This officer was probably the best commander Friedrich ever faced. His
plan was the same as that of the usual Austrian leader--draw up and
await attack, since he lacked the mobility to compete with the Prussians
in maneuver. But he chose his position very well, the left on a high
wooden ridge, center running across little knolls and swampy pools, and
right resting on another hill, with an oakwood on it and a marshy stream
running past. Daun was in three lines instead of the usual two; all
across the front, in reeds, woods, and tall grass, he scattered
quantities of Croat irregular sharpshooters. Friedrich judges the
Austrian left unassailable and angled to his own left to make an oblique
attack on that wing, with each of what we would call his brigades to
follow on in turn, swinging rightward when they reached position to
sweep out Daun's line. The leading formation, Hulsen's, did break
through the extreme flank and drove back the first two Austrian lines;
but those that followed had to cross Daun's front, with the fire from
the Croats coming into their flanks. One group halted and faced round to
drive off these tormentors by firing a few volleys, and the brigade
immediately behind, believing that the battle plan had been changed,
also faced round and went into action.

That is, they had begun too soon, and in somewhat the wrong place. This
should not have been fatal, for Friedrich had a strong column under
Prince Moritz of Dessau coming up to form the link between Hulsen and
the groups prematurely engaged. But Friedrich chose this moment to lose
his temper and order Moritz in at once, using a form of words that
caused him also to make contact too soon. The consequence was that
Hulsen was isolated. The Austrians counterattacked him, completely broke
up his formation, turned in on the flank of the remainder of the
Prussian line, and drove Friedrich from the field with 13,000 lost out
of 33,000 men.

The allies now thought they had him and began to shoot columns at him
from all directions. The Prince of Hildburghausen with the army of the
empire, and Marshal Soubise with the French, together 63,000 strong,
drove toward Saxony; 17,000 Swedes landed in Pomerania; 80,000 Russians
moved in from their side, and Charles of Lorraine, with his own and
Daun's troops, over 100,000, marched on Silesia from the south.

That summer there was fighting all around the circle, with Prussia
slowly going down. The Swedes were incompetently led, accomplished
nothing against the detachment that faced them, but they still forced
Friedrich to make that detachment. The Russians beat a third of their
number of Prussians in a battle, but their supply organization broke
down, the machine ground to a halt just when it might have taken Berlin,
and a large part of the army melted away in desertions. The Austrians,
as might be expected, made a war of sieges, but it took 41,000 men to
keep them from overrunning everything, and Friedrich could gather barely
22,000 men to meet the incursion of Soubise and Hildburghausen into Saxony.

There was some maneuvering west of the Saale before the two armies faced
each other at Rossbach, Friedrich's at the western terminus of a
sausage-shaped complex of low eminences, with the Janus and Polzen hills
at his rear. The Austrians were moving in Friedrich's strategic rear,
and however slowly they advanced, he was required to do something. He
was proposing to attack the enemy camp, a rather desperate undertaking
in a completely open plain dotted with villages, when on November 5 they
saved him the trouble.

Soubise and Hildburghausen had been reading, and from their documents
they learned that the King of Prussia won battles by throwing his full
strength against the enemy's left flank. Now they decided to outdo him
by hurling their whole army quite around his left and rear to take the
hills there and cut his communications. They formed with their cavalry
in the vanguard, the infantry in three columns behind, and began a wide
sweep around the Prussian left through the village of Pettstadt, with
their trumpets blowing.

There were only three defects in this plan. One was that the plain was
completely open, and Friedrich had an officer on the roof of the highest
building in Rossbach who could observe every move; the second was that
the tracks were both sandy and muddy, and the march slow; and the third
was that the moving column, in some witless idea of gaining surprise,
threw out no scouts or cavalry screen. When word was brought to the king
that the enemy had swung through Pettstadt, he calmly finished his
dinner, then at the double-quick took up an entirely new disposition.
Seydlitz, with all the cavalry, was posted out of sight behind the
Polzen hill, with a couple of hussars as pickets atop; the artillery on
the reverse slope of Janus, only the muzzles projecting; the infantry
behind the guns, most of them rightward. The beginning of the movement
and the apparent disappearance of the Prussian force were observed from
the allied army; they assumed that Friedrich was retreating, and ordered
hurry to catch him.

As they sped up, at three-thirty in the afternoon, Seydlitz came over
Polzen Hill with 4,000 cavalry, "compact as a wall and with incredible
speed." He hit the allied horse vanguard in flank and undeployed; rode
right through them, overturned them utterly, and drove what was left
from the field. Seydlitz followed till the rout was complete; then
sounded a recall and formed in a dip of ground at Tagweben, behind the
enemy right rear. The moment their field of fire was cleared the
Prussian guns opened on the hapless allied columns, tearing down whole
ranks, and as they strove to deploy, Friedrich's infantry came over
Janus Hill, all in line and firing like clockwork. As the writhing
columns tried to fall back, tried to get their rear battalions in
formation, Seydlitz came out of his hollow and charged them from the
rear. It was one of the briefest great battles of record; by four-thirty
the allied army was a panic-stricken mob, having lost 3,000 killed and
wounded, 5,000 prisoners, and sixty-seven guns. The Prussian losses were
541.

Worst of all for the allies, what was left of their army was so broken
that it could never be assembled again. Rossbach was decisive in the
sense that it took France out of the war against Friedrich; he had no
more fighting to do against the French except by deputy in Hannover. He
had cracked the circle of enemies; and he had also achieved a focus for
German nationalism and assured the support of England. After the battle
Parliament increased his subsidy almost tenfold.

But there was still almost too much for any one man and any one army to
do. While Friedrich was eliminating the imperial and French armies from
the war, Austria had slowly rolled up all of southern Silesia, beaten
the Prussian forces there in battle, and taken Breslau and Schweidnitz,
with their huge, carefully assembled magazines. Friedrich turned over
command of the beaten army to Ziethen, a thick-lipped ugly little man;
picked up his forces at Parchwitz, and hurried forward to offer the
Austrians battle.

He now had 36,000 men and 167 guns, of which one big battery was
superheavy pieces brought from the fortress of Glogau. Prince Charles
and Daun had nearly 80,000. The latter had expected winter quarters, but
the news of Friedrich's approach drew him out of Breslau into a position
in double line. The right was under General Lucchesi, resting on the
village of Nippern, behind a wood and some bogs, the center at Leuthen
village, the left on Sagschutz. The tips of both wings were somewhat
drawn back, and General Nadasti, who commanded the left, covered his
position with _abbates_. Forward in the village of Borne was a cavalry
detachment under the Saxon General Nostitz, but most of the cavalry were
in reserve behind the center.

It may have been that Friedrich had some doubts about the morale of the
beaten army Ziethen now commanded; if so, they were dispelled on the
freezing dark night of December 4, when he rode through the camp and all
the soldiers hailed him with, "Good night, Fritz." He assembled his
generals and told them that what he intended to do was against all the
rules of war, but he was going to beat the enemy "or perish before his
batteries," then gave orders for an advance at dawn.

It struck Nostitz and his detachment through a light mist. Ziethen
charged the Saxons furiously, front and flank, made most of the men
prisoners, and drove the rest in on Lucchesi's wing. There was a halt
while the mist burned away and Friedrich surveyed
 the hostile line. He
knew the area well, having maneuvered there frequently; rightward from
Borne there was a fold of ground that would conceal movement, and he
immediately planned to do what the allies had attempted on his at
Rossbach--throw his entire army on the enemy left wing. As a
preliminary, the cavalry of the vanguard were put in to follow up the
Nostitz wreck in the opposite direction. This feint worked; Lucchesi,
who like Soubise and Hildburghausen knew of Friedrich's penchant for
flank attacks, imagined he was about to receive a heavy one and appealed
for reinforcement. Prince Charles sent him the reserve cavalry from the
center and some of that from the left.

But the storm died down there, and to Charles and Daun, standing near
the center, it seemed that this must have been a flurry to cover the
retreat of inferior force, for Friedrich's army had passed out of sight.
"The Prussians are packing off," remarked Daun. "Don't disturb them!"
There is no record of his further conversation down to the moment a
little after noon, when Friedrich's head of column poked its nose from
behind the fold of ground and the whole array of horse, foot, and
artillery did a left wheel and came rolling down on Nadasti's flank at
an angle of maybe 75 degrees.

Nadasti, a reasonably good battle captain, charged in at once with what
cavalry he had, and succeeded in throwing Ziethen back, but came up
against infantry behind, and was badly broken. Once can picture the
hurry, confusion, and shouting as his whole wing, taken in enfilade by
the Prussian volleys, went to pieces. But there were so many of these
Austrians that they began to build up a defense around the mills and
ditches of Leuthen, and especially its churchyard, which had stone
walls. Prince Charles fed in battalions as fast as he could draw them
from any point whatever; in places the Austrians were twenty ranks deep,
and the fighting was very furious. The new line was almost at right
angles to the old and badly bunched at the center, but still a line,
heavily manned and pretty solid.

Friedrich had to put in his last infantry reserves, and even so was
held. But he got his superheavy guns onto the rise that had concealed
his first movement, they enfiladed the new Austrian right wing and it
began to go. At this juncture Lucchesi reached the spot from his former
station. He saw that the Prussian infantry left was bare and ordered a
charge. But Friedrich had foreseen exactly this. The cavalry of his own
left wing, under General Driesen, was concealed behind the heavy
battery, and as Lucchesi came forward at the trot, he was charged front,
flank, and rear, all at once. It was like Seydlitz's charge at Rossbach;
Lucchesi himself was killed and his men scattered as though by some kind
of human explosion, while Driesen wheeled in on the Austrian infantry
flank and rear around Leuthen. Under the December twilight what was left
of them were running.


      V

Leuthen was the extremest example of Friedrich's oblique-order attack
and also his most destructive victory. He lost 6,000 men, but the
Austrians lost 10,000 in killed and wounded, besides 21,000 prisoners,
and two weeks later Breslau surrendered, with 17,000 more. The effect
was crushing, but it was not decisive, except locally and in a temporary
manner, as to who should hold Silesia until the next campaign.

Austria was unable to get another army into the field until late in the
following summer, but in the meanwhile the Russians, who had thus far
been trying to assure themselves of the possession of East Prussia,
pushed a column into the home counties as far as Frankfurt an der Oder,
and Friedrich had to go fight it. He beat it at Zorndorf in a
slaughtering battle in August, but by October the Austrians were on foot
again, now under Daun, and at Hochkirch they beat the king.

They beat him in a way one would have least expected against so acute a
commander, by leaving their watch fires burning while they made a night
march and surprised him at dawn. That is, they caught him being
careless. And in the following summer, 1759, a combined Austro-Russian
army inflicted a paralyzing defeat on Friedrich at Kunersdorf, one in
which he lost over 20,000 men--again through his own fault, for he sent
his troops into action after two days without sleep, up a steep hill in
broiling sun. "Will not some curst bullet strike me?" he cried
afterward, and "I believe everything is lost," he wrote.

But he had done better than he thought and everything was not lost;
neither after Hochkirch nor Kunersdorf did his enemies make any
follow-up. They could not; they were too disorganized in terms of lost
officers, mingling of regiments, breakdown of supply. They had no such
solid basis as the Prussian army; when any of them lost a battle, that
particular campaign was over, when it won, it merely went on.

A realization that their sole real asset was numerical penetrated allied
minds in 1761, and they adopted a plan of campaign to make numbers
count. There were to be three columns, one operating through Saxony
under Daun, one through Silesia under the Austrian General Loudon, and a
Russian column through Poland. Each was to deplete Friedrich's resources
by eating up the towns. He could maintain only one army large enough to
deal with any of the three; whenever he turned against one, the others
would keep moving stolidly toward Berlin.

This plan was modified by events. The Russians came slowly through
northern Silesia. Daun was also slow, and when Friedrich turned against
Loudon, the Austrian marshal thought he saw an opportunity to repeat the
surprise of Hochkirch. He swung around toward the northwest of
Friedrich's position at Liegnitz while Loudon marched by a circuit to
close him in from the northeast, with the Russians under General
Czernicheff pushing up from behind.

But Daun did some careful scouting from the heights above Liegnitz,
which not only slowed his march, but attracted Friedrich's attention. On
the night of August 14, 1761, the king turned the Austrians' trick right
around on them, leaving a group of campfires burning and making a fast
march along the road Loudon was to occupy. Loudon reached it cross
country in the morning; was received by musketry fire, and being already
too deeply committed to get out without battle, fought one that cost him
10,000 men and eighty-one guns. Daun reached Friedrich's former camp
only just in time to see the column of smoke rising over the defeat to
the north; his pursuit was not a success.

As for the Russians, Friedrich supplied a peasant with a message
addressed to his brother, Prince Henri, who was facing them: "Austrians
totally defeated today, now for the Russians. Do what we agreed upon."
The peasant was to let himself be taken by Czernicheff and give up the
paper to save his own life. There is something peculiarly pleasing about
these devices of Friedrich the king; they are so firmly rooted in
understanding of the men he was dealing with and so unexpected. This one
worked precisely according to prescription. Czernicheff, beset by
nameless terrors, marched right away from the area of action and the
Russians were next heard of besieging Kolberg on the Baltic coast, which
would be more use to them than another victory over Friedrich, anyway.

Two of the three attacking columns were thus eliminated, for Loudon had
been so badly knocked about as to be out of it. Friedrich spent some
weeks maneuvering in Silesia, but was recalled by the news that Berlin
had been taken. He rushed north with his army; it turned out to be not a
serious occupation, but a handful of Cossack raiders and a wing of
Austrian light cavalry, who dispersed at once. But it was now evident
that something would have to be done about the Daun column, which had
taken nearly all Saxony and established itself at Torgau, 64,000 strong.
By whittling down garrisons Friedrich managed to assemble 45,000 men,
and approached the place at the end of October.

It was not Daun's intention to fight, except as he had done at Kolin,
long ago, on terms that would force the king to attack under every
disadvantage. He chose his position very well for the purpose, along a
certain Siptitz Hill that runs roughly westward from Torgau. Its
southern edge was covered by a deep, wide, muddy brook, the Rohrgraben,
a good military obstacle; all around the height were sparse forests of
pine, growing out of sand. The lines were so good that Prince Henri had
previously held them against this same Daun with much inferior forces,
and the Austrians now had no less than 400 guns.

Friedrich moved up toward the installation from the south. It struck him
at once that the place was unduly cramped for as many men as Austria had
and offered poor opportunities for mounting a counterattack, and he
determined to assault it from front and rear simultaneously. Ziethen,
with nearly half the army, would take the southern side, across the
brook; Friedrich himself would swing by a circuit through the woods in
three columns, the outermost one of cavalry.

The king marched fairly early; it was nearly two in the afternoon when
Friedrich, leading the innermost column, reached the edge of the woods,
just in time to hear the boom-boom of guns from the southward. To him
this meant that Ziethen was already engaged; there was no sign yet of
his second column or his third, but he immediately hurled 6,000
grenadiers straight at the Austrian position.

The trouble with any converging-column arrangement is that it is
impossible for the commander of one wing to know precisely what is
happening to the other. Ziethen's engagement, in fact, was with some
outposts of light troops, who had a few guns south of the Rohrgraben.
These retired slowly eastward, in the Torgau direction, drawing the
Prussians out of their true line of advance during hours, which caused
Friedrich later to rate Ziethen
 roundly for his stupidity. But this was
no help at the moment to the 6,000 grenadiers, who were met by the fire
of nearly all the 400 Austrian cannon. Friedrich himself said he never
saw anything like it; the Prussian artillery was smashed before it had a
chance to load, the grenadiers were cut to pieces. Enough of them
survived to reach the Austrian line for some deadly lose work, but Daun
brought up infantry, drove them out, and even tried a counterattack,
which came to considerable grief in a heavy shower of rain. At the end
of it not 600 of the 6,000 were left; it was three o'clock and the
attack had failed.

Shortly later Friedrich's second column arrived; there was a pause for
reorganization, and at about three-thirty it and the remnants of the
first attack went forward again. This was the hardest fighting of the
day, along the northwest portion of Daun's line; the Prussian infantry
got in among the guns, and there was hot hand-to-hand work on Siptitz
Hill, but Daun summoned his reserves from every quarter and after a long
struggle drove the Prussians back again, the king himself wounded.

Not until four-thirty, with the sun down, was the coming of the cavalry,
which had gone astray in the woods. Friedrich dauntlessly organized a
third attack through gathering dark and smoke, cavalry and infantry
together. This storm was at least a partial success: four whole
regiments of Austrians were taken, with many of the guns; Daun's whole
left wing was reduced to a jelly-like consistency, and there was
confusion all through his lines, but the thing could not be carried
forward. Friedrich gave orders to bivouac on the field and try again
next day if possible; Daun, himself wounded, sent off a courier of
victory that caused all the windows of Vienna to be illuminated.

But at six, under a night grown wet and very cold, there was a sudden
glare of red in the sky southward. It was Ziethen, free at last of his
preoccupation with the Austrian light forces, trying to close to the
sound of the king's guns, and he had taken the village of Siptitz, south
of the Rohrgraben, and set the place afire. His men could not cross the
stream through the blazing village, but an intelligent officer named
Mollendorf found a bridge beyond it, and Ziethen poured through, up a
saddle at the southwest angle of the ridge and down on the Austrians,
his drums beating the Prussian march, muskets all in line blazing across
the dark.

There is a famous picture of Friedrich, wrapped in his cloak, chin on
chest and stick across his knees, waiting in deepest discouragement for
the dawn at Torgau. The dawn came before the day, it is said, in the
person of Ziethen himself, to tell the king he had won after all, the
Austrians were driven through Torgau with a loss of 10,000 men and most
of their guns. Daun's army was a wreck and the allied campaign with it.


      VI

There was some bickering and some maneuvering the next year, with
Friedrich on the defensive and neither Austrians nor Russians daring to
besiege or attack; and early in 1762 the Tsarina Elizabeth died and Tsar
Peter, her successor, made peace with Friedrich and sent a Russian corps
to _his_ help, while France could no longer pay subsidies to Austria,
and Maria Theresa had to reduce her army to 20,000 men.

It may be put that Torgau ended it. It did not decide the war--probably
the one battle that went furthest in that direction was Rossbach--but it
decided that Austria could not carry the war to a successful conclusion.
And in so doing it established in north Germany a new state and a new
type of state, with a standing army, a centralized administration,
officials who looked to the building of dams, canals, roads, bridges,
internal communications, and who promoted agriculture and internal
colonization. Before Friedrich the Great's death he had settled 200,000
people on previously unoccupied lands; and the efficiency of his
administration was such that the other nations of Europe were forced to
imitate him if they wished to remain level in the complex game of the
balance of power. "It appears," he said once, "that God has created me,
pack horses, Doric columns, and us kings generally to carry the burdens
of the world in order that others may enjoy its fruits." His ideal of
peace was to have the government help every citizen; his ideal of war
was not to have the civil population know that a war was going on. His
seizure of Silesia was doubtless anything but moral; but when he made it
stick on the field of battle, he forced the rest of Europe into a new
sense of the responsibility of government.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    12. QUEBEC, QUIBERON, AMERICA




      I

The fog cleared in the afternoon to show the uneasy chop normal off Cape
Race at this season, and British ships all around. M. de Hocquart,
Captain of His Most Christian Majesty's ship _Alcide_, 64, knew enough
about his English to suspect their intent, and made sail, but the
necessity of tacking brought some of them always nearer, and at about
eleven the next morning a two-decker was close aboard to windward and a
heavier ship hauling up fast. A red flag snapped to the two-decker's
graff, the ammunition signal; Hocquart lifted his speaking trumpet and
shouted across the swell, "Are we at peace or war?"

"_La paix, la paix_," came the reply.

"Who is your admiral?" asked Hocquart.

"The Right Honorable Edward Boscawen."

"I know him well; he is a friend of mine."

"What is your name?"

Before Hocquart could reply there was a crash as every gun in the
two-decker's broadside went off, and a moment later another from the big
ship. _Alcide_ made what defense she could, but the odds were too heavy
and De Hocquart presently hauled down his flag, with eighty-seven dead
aboard. Off to the west two other British were taking the transport _Lys_.

The date was June 8, 1755, and though the British captain had been
technically right when he called out the word of peace, De Hocquart was
as well aware as he that matters must sooner or later come to the
cannon. For the two French ships were stragglers from a fleet sent to
reinforce Quebec, and in London there sat that strange, grumpy, gouty,
and furiously able man, William Pitt, who had, as it were, an oath
registered in heaven to put a period to the colonial ambitions of
France. At the moment he was not actually in power, but it was his
spirit that had driven England on, and no administration could draw back
from the line he had taken.

The conflict was one of mutually incompatible ambitions, of opposed
dynamisms seeking the same object. The strategic lines were extremely
simple; France held the St. Lawrence and at least the mouth of the
Mississippi, and was embarked on an effort to link them together in a
cordon that should forever limit the British colonies to the eastern
watershed of the Appalachians. The British were embarked on an effort to
break that cordon, and the prize was a continent. (There is a curious
parallel to the continuing French effort to pierce the Hapsburg cordon
in Europe.) The taking of the _Alcide_ was only accidentally the first
tactical incident. At that very hour Edward Braddock was marching to his
death on the Monongahela, Baron Dieskau was preparing to lead a motley
column against the English establishment on the lakes that flow into the
Richelieu, and the western frontier of the colonies was all one blaze of
war.

It became formal in May 1756, and one of the leading protagonists
stepped on the scene, Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, newly appointed
commander of the French land forces in Canada. He was a small man, very
vehement, ardent and uncompromising, who gestured rapidly as he talked;
had fought with credit in Bohemia and Italy; was the complete antithesis
of the man with whom he was supposed to work, the Sieur de Vaudreuil,
Governor of Canada. The latter was a colonial, who regarded all officers
from metropolitan France with dislike and suspicion, and most especially
those belonging to the army, for Canada was under the naval
establishment, and the troops Vaudreuil commanded were technically
marines. There were nearly 3,000 of these; Montcalm had about as many
army regulars; and in addition there were available the Canadian
militia, never called to the colors to the extent of more than 1,100
men, very good forest fighters and trackers, very poor in any stand-up
battle.

On paper this was a singularly small defensive force for so important an
area, and in fact it was, but the knowledge and attitudes of the time
have to be taken into account. Nobody knew that the struggle for a
continent was engaged; in fact, nobody knew there was a continent there.
The general supposition was that the land ended somewhere not far beyond
the Mississippi. To French policy makers Canada was another island like
St. Domingue or Martinique; like them, a part of naval strategy and a
matter for naval administration. Moreover, the current government of
France was predominantly non-naval or even anti-naval. It was actually
in the hands of the king's mistress, Mme. de Pompadour; she grudged
every livre spent on a ship, and was interested chiefly in helping out
her good friend, Maria Theresa of Austria, in putting down that evil
man, Friedrich of Prussia, and in securing French predominance in
western Germany. The number of French colonists in Canada was not above
80,000 as against a million in the British colonies.

However, there were countervailing factors which made the French
military position much stronger than either population figures or home
government indifference would indicate. One of these was that by their
very organization the British colonies were unable to deliver in the
field anything like the force their numbers appeared to indicate, but
more important were the Indians. From the beginning British policy was
to drive
 them out, dispossess them in favor of more British colonists;
from the beginning French policy was to make friends with them,
intermarry, and use them as bird dogs for the fur trade. It was no
accident that the series of borer conflicts was called the French _and
Indian_ Wars. Montcalm thought these allies were dirty villains, but
recruited them all the way from Lake Superior and the Des Moines River,
and they were a ponderable force.

For the expanding frontier was by its nature open, and even the
secondary line of defense could not always be made good against raids.
Armaments that might easily have dominated Canada were pinned down to
tasks of security, and military operations were directly affected. All
the lines of communication between the French colonies and the British
lay through the woods, and while these woods were full of pro-French
Indians, Montcalm could move easily and with a minimum of transport, his
opponents only slowly and with difficulty, making heavy detachments for
flank guards and outposts.

Although Montcalm got his training in the plains warfare of Europe, he
turned out to be just the man to use the dirty villains, and one of
those driving characters who overcome all obstacles besides. By August
of 1756 he had an expedition landing at Oswego, one of the anchors of
the English border, and when the colonial scouts arrived three days
later, they found nothing but staved-in rum casks and burned buildings.
Lake Ontario was wholly French, and middle New York open to Indian raids.

The following summer Montcalm launched an expedition against Fort
William Henry, at the head of Lake George. There were promptly revealed
some of the other factors balancing the over-all French deficiency in
numbers. Everything went wrong on the English side. The commander in
America was Loud Loudon, "whom a child might outwit or terrify with a
popgun"; the colonial governors failed to call out the militia; the
commandant at nearby Fort Edward had not men enough to attempt a relief,
and in addition was a coward. Fort William Henry fell and a good many of
the prisoners were massacred by the Indians among scenes that provided
James Fenimore Cooper with his best novel.

The whole frontier quivered with terror.

This victory solidified the reputation of France and Montcalm among the
Indians. But he could not control these unruly cattle, and when they all
went home after the fall of Fort William Henry, he had to postpone the
business of gradually eating up the British colonies for another year.
And during that year there came to power in England not merely the
spirit of William Pitt, but William Pitt in person, a man with a quite
different set of ideas than his predecessors.

Their general theory may be described as one that the colonies could
best be defended in Hannover; Pitt's that the essential struggle was
naval and colonial, in which decision would be found on the banks of the
St. Lawrence. A vast tide of energy and effort flowed from the man; he
not only worked like a devil unchained himself, he demanded that
everyone else do so. He recklessly promoted men without regard to their
political connections and removed them with the same insouciance. The
incompetent Loudon was replaced by General James Abercrombie; to help
him Pitt jumped Colonel Jeffrey Amherst, who had done well in Germany,
at one step to a major general, and for 1758 there were planned three
expeditions to break the French cordon in North America.

One was against Fort Duquesne, in the Pennsylvania colony; Montcalm was
too weak to hold it and the other places too, and it succeeded. One was
against Louisbourg, the fortress France had built at immense expense on
Cape Breton Island to hold the mouths of the St. Lawrence. It was under
Amherst and the Admiral Boscawen who had begun the war, and after a long
and incidented siege, it succeeded, too. The French lost not only their
stronghold, but five battleships in the harbor. The third was led by
Abercrombie against Ticonderoga; Abercrombie tried a frontal assault and
failed, with the loss of 2,000 men.


      II

Two successes out of three was still a respectable result. The grip of
the French cordon had been sensibly loosened, and some of the glitter
rubbed off Montcalm. But Pitt had now advanced to a wider concept than
merely breaking the cordon; for 1759 he meant the destruction of France
in America. Abercrombie was replaced by Amherst, who had demonstrated
that he was a capable, if not very rapidly moving, soldier; he was to
head the colonial forces against Ticonderoga and then down the
Richelieu. But the main blow would be amphibious, delivered straight
across the Atlantic against the heart of the enemy installations at
Quebec. A fleet of twenty ships of the line was assigned, under Admiral
Charles Saunders, some of them already on station out of Halifax under
Rear Admiral Philip Durell, who was to blockade the St. Lawrence till
the blow fell. The land forces were about 9,000 men under Brigadier
James Wolfe.

He was a curious character, only thirty-two years old at the time, with
a long, upturned nose, an amateur of the arts, as ardent as Montcalm
himself. Wolfe had been the inspiration of the siege of Louisbourg and
wrote angry letters home when it was not at once followed up by a push
on Quebec. The Duke of Newcastle, technically head of the
administration, was horrified at the disregard of precedent and
seniorities shown by Wolfe's appointment, and told George II the man was
mad--to which His Majesty, who did not want a certain wit on occasions,
replied, "Mad, is he? Then I hope he will bite some others of my
generals." All Wolfe's subordinate commanders were under thirty; "it was
a campaign of boys." Wolfe and Saunders sailed from Spithead on February
17 to meet the rest at Louisbourg; the attack was to be a surprise.

But it was not a surprise. Durell had failed in his blockade, and before
the British fleet reached Louisbourg, a French squadron was at Quebec
with reinforcements and, what was much more important, a letter from
Amherst, intercepted at sea, which gave the whole plan away. Montcalm
was horribly hampered by the highhanded and incompetent Vaudreuil, and
surrounded by such peculations that he could write, "Everybody appears
to be in a hurry to make his fortune before the colony is lost." But the
intercepted letter gave him a chance. He secured from Vaudreuil
"provisional authority" to command all forces. Instead of concentrating
toward Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, as the British expected, he
sent only a detachment there, while himself preparing to hold Quebec
with his main body, now something over 10,000 men, including the militia.

The northern bank of the St. Lawrence is very high and precipitous; from
the falls of the Montmorenci to above Cap Rouge he covered the whole
range with a line of redoubts and entrenchments, most especially between
the Montmorenci and the St. Charles, which falls in at Quebec town.
Floating batteries were established at the mouth of the St. Charles. The
French ships were sent far upstream; their gunners came down to help man
the batteries.

Landings below the Montmorenci, Montcalm did not fear; he could stop any
advance at that stream. Landings above he feared still less; it would be
impossible for ships in sufficient number to work up the river in
support, and if they did and the men landed, they would be in just the
kind of forest country most suitable for the French type of operation.
There were some fireships and gunboats; Quebec held 106 guns, and was
fairly immune to direct attack. By October fogs and gales would drive
from the St. Lawrence any English ships that dared to enter it, and when
they went, the troops must go too, for the essence of amphibious
operation is that it must depend upon seaborne supply.

Considering that Montcalm had inferior numbers and many of his troops
could not be trusted in offensive operations in the open, it was an
excellent plan. The leading defect was that there were not enough men to
hold all the entrenchments solidly.


      III

On June 9 the fleet entered the river, as bold a stroke as ever struck,
for battleships had never before come that far through the fogs, rocks,
and eddies that haunt the St. Lawrence. On the twenty-sixth Wolfe landed
with his chief engineer on the Ile d'Orleans to survey his problem, with
a great many of the troops following. His plan had been to land on the
north bank at Beauport, then push across the St. Charles into the rear
of the fortress, but a glance told him this would never do; not only did
guns on the heights rake the projected landing area, but it was composed
of extensive mud flats with more batteries behind them. Two nights later
the French tried their fireships, loaded not only with combustibles, but
rockets, bombs, and grenades. The night was pitch-dark, but all the
French got out of it was a rather spectacular show of fireworks; the
ships were set alight too soon, and those that offered any real danger
were grappled and towed ashore by imperturbable British sailors.

At Point Levis, opposite the city, the river is less than a mile wide;
Wolfe opened batteries here to bombard the town under cover of one of
his brigades, Monckton's. With the other two he effected a landing east
of the mouth of the Montmorenci, for an effort to bruise a passage
across that stream. Quebec is terraced from the heights down to the
water; the Point Levis batteries soon tore to bits everything that did
not burn, sending the inhabitants into huts in the fields, and under
cover of the gunfire _Sutherland_, 50, and a frigate were shot through
into the upper river. Montcalm was forced to detach 600 men to Cap Rouge
in case the ships were there to cover a landing. The over-all French
position could be regarded as unstable; food was short in their lines,
except with Vaudreuil and the higher civil officers,
 who were living on
pen-fattened chickens, while the rest had enough to do to get gruel.
Many of the Canadian militia were deserting; they were perfectly willing
to turn out for a raid, but not to take the discipline of a campaign.

It has been a matter of speculation why Montcalm did not sift his light
forces through the woods on the upper Montmorenci for an attack on
Wolfe's left flank, where "a Canadian in the woods is worth three
disciplined soldiers." One answer is that a couple of nights after
Monckton's brigade was established around the Point Levis batteries some
of the Canadians tried this trick for themselves against him, landing
west of the point for a night attack; they panicked and accomplished
nothing. The other and more complete answer is that Montcalm was content
to play a waiting game. Wolfe had declared that he would have Quebec if
he had to stay till November, but with every tick of the clock the date
of storms and ice drew nearer, and no real progress, while the whole
back country was filled with Indians, who picked off sentries and patrols.

The English were thus compelled by meteorology to break through
somewhere, reach the high ground within the entrenched camp, and on July
31, Wolfe tried, just west of the mouth of the Montmorenci. At the base
of the heights there the French had built a series of redoubts. Wolfe
conceived that if he attacked them frontally, the French would come down
from their summits and he would have the open battle he wanted. On the
morning in question ships were moved in to give the place a long naval
bombardment; when the tide went out to leave wide flats, the attack was
launched from boats.

It was a dismal failure. The grenadier regiment in the lead made its
rush without orders and without waiting for the rest; the French calmly
abandoned their redoubts at the base of the cliff and shot the English
down from the fortifications above, which were so high that they had not
been at all damaged by the artillery preparation. Wolfe lost 450 men,
most of them scalped by Montcalm's Indians, and he would have lost more
but for a torrential storm of rain that wet all the powder. In the
French lines "everybody thought the campaign as good as ended." It was
true that Amherst had entered the strategic situation by forcing the
French out of Ticonderoga, but he was still a long way from the St.
Lawrence, and Montcalm sent his best officer, the Chevalier de Levis, to
Montreal for the defense.

There is a hiatus in the story at this point. Wolfe had a new plan for
getting onto the high ground behind the city, but he told no one who
recorded it, and in the meanwhile sent one of his brigadiers on a raid
upstream to the Richelieu River and himself embarked on a perfectly
deliberate campaign of burning out the countryside to force more
desertions among the Canadians. He was despondent; in August he fell ill
and lay incommunicado for a week.

In the meanwhile the British, always active on water, had been sending
light ships and flat-bottomed boats through into the upper river, and
Rear Admiral Charles Holmes, Saunders' second, had gone up to command
them. This did not passed unnoticed in Montcalm's camp; he assigned
Louis Antoine de Bougainville, later one of the most famous of
navigators and a senator under Napoleon, to watch this force with 1,500
men. Holmes amused himself and drove Bougainville to distraction by
keeping his motley squadron together and drifting with the tide, up and
down, up and down, firing from time to time and occasionally embarking
troops, compelling the French to march back and forth to keep pace with
him. As soon as Wolfe was out of bed, the admiral and the brigadiers
urged him to try a night landing between Cap Rouge and Quebec. He caught
up the idea, and on August 31 ordered the abandonment of the lines on
the Montmorenci, everything to be concentrated at Point Levis. Wolfe
himself reconnoitered the chosen spot, a cove named Anse du Foulon. The
difficulty would be to hit it in the dark and with the tide running.

Montcalm had not missed the troop movement. He wrote to Bougainville,
urging him not to let Holmes get out of sight, but on the afternoon of
September 11, Saunders moved his big ships up toward Beauport and began
firing and lowering boats. News of this apparent landing attempt
affected Bougainville; when the tide began to ebb at two in the morning,
he let his weary men rest instead of following Holmes down. Wolfe's
expedition silently joined the drifters, twenty-four men in the leading
boat, with Wolfe himself, who in a low tone recited Gray's _Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard_ as far as "The paths of glory lead but
to the grave," and said, "Gentlemen, I would rather have written those
lines than take Quebec tomorrow."

Twice they were hailed by French sentries, but each time a
French-speaking Highlander gave the right word. The tide carried them a
quarter of a mile beyond the destined landing spot, but this turned out
to be good luck, for the only path where they could have mounted from
the cove had a barricade and a post on it. The twenty-four pulled
themselves up the steep by tree roots and bushes, and took the post in
the rear with a few shots and a shout; the path was cleared and the
English began to climb, while boats passed and repassed to bring those
who had not been embarked at first. By daybreak slightly less than 5,000
English had formed line of battle across the bush-starred Plains of
Abraham, west of the city.

Within it, and especially in the high command, there was a good deal of
confusion. Montcalm, concentrated opposite Saunders at Beauport, began
marching for the plain as soon as he heard of the landing, but Vaudreuil
insisted that this was a feint, and would not release the men holding
the lines from Beauport to the Montmorenci; nor would the Governor of
Quebec give up the twenty-five field guns Montcalm wanted. Still, with
what he had, about 5,000 men, approximately the same number as the
English, he advanced to the attack, which was now his only resource--for
if he so much as waited for Bougainville or Vaudreuil, the English would
dig themselves in, and they were between him and his sources of supply.

Montcalm advanced, then, with five regular regiments, three guns, and
his front covered by a cloud of Canadian militia, who lay among the
bushes as sharpshooters. They did some damage, including wounding Wolfe
in the wrist; but he made his own men lie down and not rise until the
French came cheering within 130 yards, somewhat disordered by passing
their skirmishers. Wolfe had trained those men himself, on lines learned
from the Prussian Friedrich, and he had them under close control. They
stood there while the French came marching and firing forward until the
enemy were within forty yards, then let go with a volley so coordinated
that it sounded like a single cannon shot, advanced four paces and fired
again, and then again. Within fifteen minutes it was all over, the
French flying in disorganized groups, with many killed and Montcalm
mortally wounded.

So was Wolfe; two bullets went through him and he lived just long enough
to hear the French were running and remark, "Now God be praised, I die
in peace." Quebec surrendered five days later, and though the
decapitated snake writhed for a while, the French dominion of Canada was
ended.


      IV

But it was not exclusively ended on the Plains of Abraham. It was not
because in December 1758 there had come to the head of affairs in Paris,
Louis Etienne, Duc de Choiseul, who had the double advantage of being a
great favorite of La Pompadour (he was so much of a gallant that even
Casanova admired his amorous exploits), and a man of both drive and
ideas, quite different from the lazy pedants who had preceded him. When
he reached power, Rossbach had been fought, Canada was going, and India
almost gone. Choiseul realized that it was eleven o'clock and only by
the boldest throw could the game be won. He prepared the boldest of
possible throws--the invasion of England by 50,000 men.

By at least one historian the plan has been called crackbrained; within
terms of the means available it was nothing of the kind, and Napoleon
Bonaparte, who was assuredly not crackbrained about military matters,
adopted an inferior version of it in 1805. Troops were collected in the
Austrian Netherlands, Normandy, and at Vannes in the Morbihan. Thurot,
the gallant sea raider, was to take a squadron out of Dunkirk, sail
north; this would draw off some British strength. Admiral de la Clue,
with the Toulon battle fleet, was to pass Gibraltar and sail for the
Morbihan. As soon as weather permitted, he would be joined by Admiral
Conflans with the Brest fleet; they would sail together, covering a
convoy for the south of England, then pick the troops in the Netherlands
and land them on the Clyde. Sentiment for the exiled house of Stuart was
still a force in Scotland, and it was less than fifteen years since
Bonnie Prince Charlie almost won. The over-all objective was not so much
conquest as the attainment of a bargaining position for the peace table.

It was true that both De la Clue and Conflans were watched by superior
British squadrons. But they were watched from a distance, the squadrons
were not much superior, and the conditions under which sailing ships
operated must be remembered. A heavy easterly gale, not unusual in the
Mediterranean, would drive De la Clue's ships through without
possibility of interruption. A strong westerly gale, common in the
English Channel, would hold British blockaders to their usual base in
Torbay, while the configuration of Brest was such that Conflans could
work out against it, using the same wind to reach the Morbihan. Once
there, once the transports were picked up, Conflans was to fight his way
through, no matter what happened to his warships. In 1747, Commodore
L'Etenduere lost
 six of his fleet of nine of the line to an English
fleet of fourteen, but assured the safety of a convoy of 252.

The De la Clue part of the plan worked very ill. In August, when he
tried to run Gibraltar, some of his ships missed orders and put into
Cadiz, while the rest were caught off Lagos by that Boscawen who began
the war and almost totally destroyed. This neither prevented nor
discouraged the operation of Conflans, who had twenty-one line-of-battle
ships against the twenty-five of Sir Edward Hawke, who was charged with
watching him from Torbay.

This Hawke was a tall, strong, broad-faced man, who has left an impress
on history by his actions, but almost none by his personality. He had
indulged in the singularly dangerous pursuit of speaking against Pitt in
Parliament, and the great minister did not like him, but George II did,
and made the retention of the admiral in command a personal obstinacy.
Since Hawke's war record was outstanding--it was he who had captured
L'Etenduere's six ships in '47--Pitt was forced to give way.

The ships of 1759 were not copper-bottomed, and readily became so foul
that they lost speed. It was thus the general custom of the age to fit
out a squadron for a specific operation, then bring it home and clean
house before starting again. Hawke was well informed on French
intentions, and very early realized that this normal procedure would be
playing the game exactly as the French wanted it. Even if he caught up
with their fleet in the Channel, even if he beat them, it would not be
hard for them to slip the convoy through--as the convoy of 1747 had got
away. The only valid answer was to prevent the convoy from sailing under
cover of Conflans' fleet, and the only sure method of accomplishing this
was to keep fleet and convoy from assembling at the same place.

Hawke therefore kept the main body of his fleet in Torbay, where they
could be quickly careened for bottom-scraping; off the exits to Brest he
stationed four or five heavy ships, and off those to the Morbihan he
placed Commodore Robert Duff, with four fifty-gun ships, two-deckers
midway between a line-of-battle ship and a cruising frigate, both
squadrons having instructions to whistle him up at once if the enemy
began to move. It was an outrageously expensive procedure to keep so
many ships at sea, and Hawke heard himself denounced in Parliament for
wasting the king's guineas. A gale drove one battleship on the rocks off
Brest; another became so leaky that she had to be retired from service;
two of the fifties fouled up and had to go home; but all that summer and
early fall the guard was maintained, and when he was criticized, Hawke
replied only, "By the grace of God, we will give a good account of them."

There must, nevertheless, have been a considerable degree of strain and
short temper in the Channel fleet that summer, while Wolfe toiled with
the problem of reaching the heights behind Quebec. It would be sometime
in October that news of the Canadian success came, and the windows were
illuminated, but it had grown to November 15 and the season of autumnal
gales when the light frigate _Gibraltar_, 24, came bursting into Torbay
with the news that Conflans was out, 21 of the line, twenty-four leagues
off Belle Isle, steering southeast.

The wear of service had cut Hawke's battle line to twenty-three, many of
them smaller and less well found than those of the French, although he
had four of the giant three-deckers that were like floating fortresses
in a sea fight. He sailed at once for the Morbihan, sure that they were
thither bound. The wind came in south by east and held Hawke westward
for days; it was the nineteenth before the breeze turned fair and he
could crack on sail.

Next morning early a frigate firing signal guns ran in on Commodore
Duff, at anchor inside Belle-Ile-sur-Quiberon with his fifties. It took
him no time at all to realize that the French were on him in force; he
ordered cables cut and made all sail for the south passage out, but the
enemy came down so fast that his dullest sailer was almost under the
guns of their leader, a little west and south of the island and the
entrance to Quiberon Bay, when they suddenly abandoned the chase. Duff
held his course and was out of it; the French bore before the wind for
the bay, where there are numerous rocks, shoals, and intricate passages
well known to them, but unknown to Hawke's ships, which they had seen in
pursuit. All morning long the west wind freshened toward gale, with
frequent heavy squalls.

This westerly stormwind pushed the heavy British ships along fast,
rolling their lower-deck ports under and sending men staggering by life
lines across the decks. They held on, Hawke flying signals from his flag
that each ship should engage as it came up, not waiting to form. At two
in the afternoon _Warspite_, 74, and _Devonshire_, 70, were in range of
the rear ships of the rather confused French and opened fire; a little
later seven other British ships were in action. Shot from one of them
partly dismasted the French _Formidable_, 80, and each Briton fired into
her as she passed; at four she struck, with 200 dead, including an admiral.

It was now falling dusk on a wild tossing sea among the shoals and
rocks, British and French mixed in a mad combat against weather and each
other. Hawke had no pilots but, reasoning that the enemy would serve him
that purpose if he stayed close aboard them, held right on into night
and storm. The French _Thesee_, 74, foundered when she opened her
lower-deck ports against the English _Torbay_, 74, and 780 men went down
with her; _Torbay_ almost shared her fate. The French _Superbe_, 70,
sank likewise; _Heros_, 74, struck just as she crashed on the rocks;
_Soleil Royal_, 80, Conflans' flag, was so surrounded that she had to be
beached and burned.

In the last of light, in the rising seas, Hawke made the signal to
anchor. Morning showed that he had lost two of his battleships, wrecked
on the inhospitable shores of Quiberon. But seven of the French
twenty-one were gone and the remainder were driven up the little rivers,
Charente and Vilaine in two groups, aground, unable to unite, all
damaged, never to emerge.


      V

Quiberon Bay was the crowning achievement of that _annus mirabilis_,
1759, when, as Macauley says, "Men woke up to ask each other what new
victory there was that morning." It was the justification of William
Pitt, who made England an empire. The importance of the fall of Quebec
and the ejection of the French from Canada needs no comment; the
subsequent history of the American continent is its product. But it does
need to be noticed that Quebec without Quiberon Bay decided nothing. In
the previous war the New England colonists had valiantly taken
Louisbourg, but it had to be given back at the peace table to recoup
British losses elsewhere. Quiberon Bay made permanent the result of
Quebec, decided that Choiseul would never attain his bargaining
position. He would live to be an old man and somewhat recover France
from her doldrums; but after Quiberon Bay the question was no longer
which nation should dominate the seas and the empires, but how far
England could be restrained.

Something else of the greatest importance had happened. Sir Edward Hawke
had invented blockade; the idea of not meeting an enemy's overseas
expedition with another expedition, but of closely watching his ports at
whatever cost, whatever strain, and clobbering him as soon as he came
out. The concept of blockade and such questions as enemy goods in
neutral bottoms go back at least as far as Hugo Grotius, but no one ever
before had thought of a blockade that prevented all ingress and egress
of whatever nature; in technical terms, a close blockade. Boscawen
watched De la Clue's Toulon fleet from the distance of Gibraltar, but
Hawke watched Conflans from the distance of his doorstep. And this idea
of close blockade was to dominate the story of war on the waters of the
world for at least 200 years.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    13. WHY THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION SUCCEEDED




      I

When the troubles began in Boston in 1775, the Secretary of State for
Colonies was Lord George Germain. He was a gay dog of an Anglo-Irishman,
haughty and domineering, who had taken up the army as a career, and
remained in it till the Battle of Minden in 1759, where he commanded the
cavalry. When a charge of English foot broke the French line, Prince
Ferdinand of Brunswick, who led the Anglo-Prussian forces, three times
ordered Lord George to charge to turn the victory into a rout, and he
three times refused to do anything of the kind. For this he was
pronounced "unfit to serve His Majesty in any military capacity
whatsoever." The order was entered in every regimental book, and a black
cloak of cowardice was draped round him--somewhat unjustly, for there
seems to have been nothing wrong with his personal courage; he had
fought in battles before and been wounded. He was simply in a bad mood
that day.

Still, he was cordially hated in the army, and in addition he knew
nothing of its problems in the woods and vast reaches of America, nor
cared to know. Whatever energies, whatever abilities he possessed flowed
into politics, society, and the gaming table. It was vitally important
to cry banco! and to maintain that balance among the forces represented
by the king, the city, and the ruling gentry, on whom the administration
rested. The conduct of affairs in the revolting colonies fell into his
department, but he began by regarding it as a kind of police operation
against mere rioters, and neglected everything he could possibly put aside.

There was thus no mobilization of energies into great thunderclouds that
discharged destructive bolts of lightning, as with Pitt, no call to the
national spirit. A good half of the soldiers for the police
 operation
were rented from the minor princes of Germany. Lord George never learned
that General Sir William Howe, his leading commander in America, had
suffered a psychic block as the result of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
That celebrated action was correctly counted a British victory, but Howe
lost nearly half the storming party that participated, and he never
again dared attack American sharpshooters in position. At Long Island,
Harlem Heights, White Plains, he might easily have destroyed the
Continental forces opposed to him by bold assault; instead he
maneuvered, and George Washington's little army survived to slash back
hard at Trenton.

To Germain, Trenton was merely an "unhappy affair." He had little
concept of the king of man Howe was up against, and in February 1777
there came to him Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, dramatist and commander in
Canada, with a plan of campaign for the year. It called for Burgoyne
himself to move up the Richelieu and the lakes, Howe up the Hudson to
meet him at Albany, splitting the colonies, and holding the split open
by a chain of blockhouses. The conquest of New England would then be
easy; it would be isolated from the sources of the supply in the west.
While this was being discussed, there arrived a letter from Howe with
his own plan; he proposed a column from Rhode Island to reduce Boston, a
second to ascend the Hudson to Albany and there meet a force under
Burgoyne, and a third to deal with Washington. For this plan he needed a
reinforcement of 15,000 men.

It was characteristic of Germain that he accepted both plans except for
the single detail of the 15,000 additional men for Howe; that would
throw his budget out of gear. He could spare only 2,000 reinforcements;
and this would probably not be enough for Howe to carry out the full
three-column plan. Therefore he dictated a letter to Howe saying that
the Rhode Island-Boston project could be conveniently dropped, and of
the other two, the Hudson River move was the more vital. If Sir William
did not feel himself strong enough both to make it and to follow
Washington, the Hudson should have precedence, a positive order. It was
also characteristic of Germain that he was in a hurry to make a previous
appointment for a country weekend, and went off without signing the
letter. It was never sent.

Howe thus learned nothing but that he would not have all the men he
needed for his three-pronged offensive. On the ground and in fighting
contact with the Americans, he had quite other opinions than those
entertained by Germain in London, and one of them was that General
George Washington was the most dangerous man on the Continent. If Howe
could not execute all his projects, that of dealing with Washington must
have first place. Besides, he had an American prisoner, a general named
Charles Lee, who assured him that the middle colonies of Maryland and
Pennsylvania would return to their allegiance if the royal standard were
raised there. Howe therefore cut the Hudson expedition to a raid,
boarded his transports, and sailed for the Chesapeake.

The details of the campaigns that followed are often confused, but the
main lines are simple. Howe beat Washington in battles at Brandywine and
Germantown, and took the colonial capital of Philadelphia, a stroke that
would have been decisive. Here it was decisive also, but in the contrary
sense. For while Howe was beating Washington but failing to destroy his
army, thanks to that psychic block, something perfectly dreadful
happened to Burgoyne. A diversionary force that was to join him by way
of Oswego failed to deliver, and was driven back with loss. Burgoyne
took Ticonderoga and reached the head of the lakes without too much
difficulty, but then found himself involved in a campaign in dense woods
against woodsmen who every hour increased in number and in the intensity
of their attacks. Their rifles were slow-loading, but very accurate and
of a range far superior to the British muskets; and volley fire was no
use against them.

Burgoyne's supply and transport problems became practically insoluble.
It took him twenty days to cover less than that number of miles to the
upper waters of the Hudson. When he sent a strong foraging party into
the valley of Vermont in quest of provision, it was practically wiped
out at Bennington in a battle that enormously raised American morale. By
the date when the British reached the neighborhood of Saratoga, the
Americans were much stronger than they. The Continental Congress, which
had about as much military sense as Lord George Germain, placed a "fussy
old midwife" named Horatio Gates in command of its army, but they gave
him the fiery Benedict Arnold as a second. When Burgoyne attempted to
solve his difficulties by a battle on September 19, 1777, he was thrown
back with the loss of a third of those engaged. Word drifted in that the
Americans had taken the posts in the British rear and communications
with Canada were cut. Burgoyne tried another battle on October 7, and
was surrounded when Arnold led a charge that broke his flank. His whole
army surrendered ten days later.

The fighting at Saratoga was decisive in one sense. It not only marked
the failure of the Burgoyne plan and the loss of his army, it also
decided the French court that the clandestine aid being given to the
revolters should be converted into active alliance with a nation which
had established its independence. Troops and fleets would help the
colonists, and the theater of conflict was swung round the zones from
the West Indies to the coasts of India. One must never forget India.


      II

The French navy that entered the war in 1778 was a far different
organism from the one whose failures caused the loss of Canada. Choiseul
started it; he wanted a fleet that could meet the British on equal
terms, and he spared neither trouble nor expense in setting it up. A
naval academy was organized, the calibers of guns were standardized, and
a corps of gunners established along the lines of the land artillery
service; the civil housekeeping officers lost their former control of
the movement of ships; new regulations prescribed that admirals,
captains, lieutenants, and midshipmen should dine with each other; the
best engineers of France were sought out to improve the breed of ships,
and did so to an astonishing degree.

The French are peculiarly ready to take fire when a powder train of this
sort is ignited, and something like a wave of national enthusiasm for
the navy swept over the country on the heels of Choiseul's reforms. The
estates of the various provinces donated ships, the city of Paris a huge
three-decker, and the associated tax farmers a whole squadron--which,
incidentally, they could very well afford. By 1770, Choiseul felt his
new navy was strong enough in spirit and force for a war of revenge
against perfidious Albion, and he wanted to try it; Louis XV disagreed,
and the minister was dismissed.

But he had been given twelve years in which to build the new structure,
and it stayed built. Moreover, when Louis XVI came to the throne in
1774, France had a head of state who was really interested in naval
matters; and when she entered the war on the side of the colonies in
1778, there were not Continental commitments to distract her attention.
It should, however, be noted that the French idea of naval strategy was
by no means the same as the English. In French thinking the basic
purpose of naval war was not to be an end in itself, to assure control
of the sea for purposes of commerce and everything else that could be
moved by water, but to support definite, specific operations ashore.
This has been condemned by Mahan as false strategy, and he was doubtless
right, but in the hands of such ships and seamen as those of the French
naval revival, it could lead to results.

The first of these results followed close on the heels of the alliance.
Comte d'Estaing sailed for the Chesapeake with twelve battleships, and
forced Admiral Lord Howe, brother of the general, to take his smaller
fleet out of there. That meant the army would have to go too, and Sir
Henry Clinton, who had succeeded Howe in command of it, made his way
back to New York, not without a battle at Monmouth, which ended in no
decision, in spite of some heroic swearing by Washington at generals who
were not executing his orders in the way he wished.

The British now held only New York and Newport, Rhode Island, and if
they were to make any progress in putting down the rebellion, needed a
new plan of campaign. Germain conceived one for transporting troops by
sea and working up through the weak southern colonies to Virginia and
Maryland. There were three basic assumptions behind this plan. One of
them was correct: that the French were more interested in the rich West
Indies than in supporting American operations on the continent, and
would send fleets thither only for brief campaigns, while the British
could afford to maintain a permanent American squadron and move troops
along the coast at will. The second assumption seemed to be correct:
that there were no solid American forces in the South, and regular
British troops could deal with anything there. The third assumption was
never to be tested: that if Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia were
overrun, "all America to the south of the Susquehanna would return to
its allegiance"--a phrase which had an invincible attraction for Lord
George Germain.

In accordance with the first two assumptions a force was dispatched to
Savannah, which took that place with ease, practically subdued Georgia,
defeated General Benjamin Lincoln without difficulty, and marched into
South Carolina. Considerable maneuvering followed, but the essential
feature of the campaign was that on May 12, 1780, Clinton himself took
Charleston with Lincoln's whole army of over 5,000 men, the worst
disaster suffered by the American arms,
 and a fair set-off for Saratoga.

During the previous fall d'Estaing and his fleet had briefly reappeared
from the West Indies, and been roundly beaten in an attempt to recover
Savannah. Atop this, General Lord Cornwallis, whom Clinton left at
Charleston with 8,500 men while himself returning to New York, marched
into the Carolina upcountry. At Camden on August 16, 1780, he virtually
destroyed the American southern army, which had been placed in charge of
Old Midwife Gates. Sumter, the partisan leader, was surprised in his
camp at night and his force wiped out, too. British posts held down the
whole countryside, and Germain's campaign was a thing of genius.

But the British now found themselves in the presence of a master spirit.
To replace Gates, Washington sent to the South his quartermaster
general, Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker who had been ejected
from that society over his interest in military affairs. At Charlotte,
where he assumed command of the wreckage from Camden, he found 1,482
men, with equipment for 800; but he was a man who could perfectly
analyze a situation and who knew exactly what he wanted to do. His
advantage lay in the converse of Germain's third assumption: that
wherever any small core of regular American fighting men appeared enough
local assistance would rally round to make things impossible for lesser
British detachments, while a major British force could continually be
dogged.

The campaign that followed was the classic example of how small war
should be waged. There was an incident at King's Mountain, where a group
of backwoodsmen swarmed out of nowhere to annihilate a force of 1,100
British and Tory militia, and another at Cowpens, where Daniel Morgan of
the famous Rifles nearly wiped out another British detachment. But the
real weight of the campaign was in the marchings and maneuvers all
through North Carolina, in which Cornwallis tried to pin the elusive
Greene down for a fight, and in the work of the partisans in the
background. It lasted all winter long. On March 15, 1781, Greene at last
gave the British leader his battle at Guilford Court House. Cornwallis
won it, but when it was over he found himself with no supplies, more
wounded than he had wagons for, and a distance of 260 miles between him
and his base. He left the wounded behind and, in order not to give an
appearance of throwing up the campaign, made for the coast at
Wilmington, which was still in North Carolina, under the wing of the
Royal Navy.

Greene marched off to try his bag of tricks on the forces Cornwallis had
left to hold South Carolina.


      III

The importance of Greene's campaign lay in its effect on the mind of
Lord George Germain. There was nobody to tell him that the remainder of
the British army in the South was being subjected to a process of
extraordinary and destructive erosion. In his view resistance in the
Carolinas was practically over. Cornwallis had marched where he pleased
through the states and won a battle over a force that could not now be
much more than a disorderly rabble. Throughout the criss-cross of
correspondence between the minister, Clinton at New York, and Cornwallis
at Wilmington, with all sorts of suggestions and changes of detail,
there runs the fixed idea that the South being now in strong hands, the
British purpose should be the establishment of a solid naval station on
the Chesapeake as a prelude to the reduction of Virginia. For that
matter, Cornwallis himself did not regard the Carolina campaign as a
failure, only thought that "until Virginia is in a manner subdued, our
hold of the Carolines must be difficult."

He marched to Virginia then, in the spring of 1781, picked up a
detachment that had been operating in the area and, with reinforcements
from Clinton bringing him up to over 7,000 men, began to look for his
naval base. Opposing him was Washington's friend, the young French
volunteer, the Marquis de Lafayette, with strength so limited he dared
not risk battle. Cornwallis tried to bring him to book and failed, as
with Greene; and was engaged in an intricate correspondence which
contained continual changes of plan, with the letters taking from six
weeks to three months to reach destination. The essential feature that
emerges is that, after investigating the Hampton Roads-Portsmouth area,
Cornwallis decided that the facing positions of York and Gloucester on
the river of the former name would be the best station for ships of the
line, and in the closing days of July established himself there and
fortified.

It was about the same date that there arrived in Washington's camp
outside New York a reinforcement of four strong regiments of French
infantry with artillery and engineers under the Comte de Rochambeau. He
came overland from Narragansett Bay, having been convoyed in by Admiral
de Barras, with eight of the line; and Barras bore word that the main
French battle fleet, twenty-five to twenty-nine ships, would operate on
the American coast sometime that summer, the fleet of De Grasse. There
was a British fleet in the West Indies, with which De Grasse had engaged
in an indecisive action. But now he not only had the more ships, the
British must see their huge summer sugar convoy to England; he was
confident that he could slip their vigilance.

Since the beginning of the war Washington had not ceased to insist on
how British control of the sea permitted them to strike where they
pleased. "The amazing advantage the Enemy derive from their ships and
the command of the Water keeps us in a state of constant perplexity," he
wrote as early as 1777. Nor since the forging of the French alliance had
he relaxed his efforts to obtain the help of a fleet. "A constant naval
superiority on these coasts is the object most interesting," he set down
in 1780; but Versailles was interested in the sugar islands. Now,
however, De Grasse was coming; the point was where should he come?

Washington's own taste had been for an attack on New York, and he
submitted the idea of De Grasse as one of three possible plans; but the
more he considered it, the less good it looked. The British had eight
ships of the line under Admiral Thomas Graves on the New York station.
It would be very difficult for even a largely superior squadron to beat
into New York Harbor against these and the forts. On the land side
Clinton now commanded 16,000 men; even with the three additional
regiments De Grasse was bringing, Washington would have less, and would
be faced with the problem of crossing a river against fortified lines.

There is one thing to be remembered about George Washington. He has
received so much admiration for constancy and character that he is in
danger of becoming a plaster saint. General Howe was perfectly right in
regarding Washington as one of the deadliest military opponents in
history. His instrument was often weak or flawed; but there runs a
consistent strain through every campaign in which he was involved, every
battle he ever fought. He made no effort to maneuver the enemy out of
position, but sought to destroy, to annihilate; and under the conditions
of the American Revolution this only had to be achieved once or twice.
After Saratoga the British hold on the northern colonies was gone; and
since calculation showed there was no very good chance of wiping out
Clinton in New York, the decision was for annihilation on the shore of
the Chesapeake. De Grasse replied that he would leave the Indies for
that area on August 13 with ships and troops; would remain until October
15, when he must return. He would be perfectly at Washington's
disposition until the latter date.

The commander of the British fleet in the West Indies was Sir George
Brydges Rodney, and he was one of the greatest seamen in English
history, but that summer he made a serious miscalculation. On July 5 one
of his frigates reported that De Grasse had been seen coming out of Port
Royal Bay of Martinique with twenty-seven sail of the line and 200
merchantmen, the latter being the French summer sugar convoy. There had
been some intelligence that they intended summer operations off the
North American coast, and to Rodney it was perfectly clear what this
movement meant. De Grasse was going to send a detachment to cooperate
with the Barras squadron at Newport against New York, while with his
main body he covered the passage of the sugar convoy. To provide against
this Rodney detached fourteen sail of the line under Sir Samuel Hood,
his best fighting junior, to join Graves at New York; this would give
the latter twenty-two battleships, superior to anything the French could
assemble. Rodney himself sailed for home with his own sugar ships. He
did not know that the French merchantmen had gone back to Port Royal to
wait until November, or that De Grasse with his whole fleet had slipped
up the Old Bahama Channel, north of Cuba, south of the Bahamas; nobody
used that route. He did know that Hood detested Graves, but as he hated
the man himself and you cannot always choose your bedfellows in the
service, this did not seem important.

On August 21, Washington and Rochambeau crossed the Hudson at King's
Ferry and began one of the great marches of history, leaving only
General Heath with 2,500 men opposite Clinton's 16,000. Twenty-eight
days later, through a country of unmetaled roads or no roads at all,
with utterly inadequate transport, Washington had covered 400 miles and
was on the Chesapeake, joining Lafayette and the troops just brought be
De Grasse, and closing his jaws around Cornwallis.

When Hood reached New York and anchored outside Sandy Hook, Clinton was
still uncertain that Washington and Rochambeau were after Cornwallis,
but he had reliable intelligence that Barras had sailed from Newport
with eight battleships, eighteen transports, and a siege train. This
situation might be dangerous to Cornwallis. Graves came out with the
only
 five ships he had in sailing condition and the combined squadron of
nineteen made for the Chesapeake. Toward noon on September 5, Graves
raised the entrance of Cape Henry and found De Grasse coming out to meet
him, with twenty-four battleships in line.


      IV

Admiral Thomas Graves was certainly not the type of man who would invent
gunpowder, and he had nineteen ships against the French twenty-four, but
he was a British sea dog and he knew precisely what to do in the
presence of an enemy who was threatening something vital--fight a
battle. He had the weather gauge, the wind on his side, as the French
formed a rather straggling line east from Cape Henry, and he bore down
on them from the northward. The signals he hung out from his flagship
_London_, 98, midway along the line were for "Close action" and "Line
ahead at half a cable."

The fatal words were "Line ahead." There existed in the British navy of
that date something called the Fighting Instructions; in the most
decided terms they prescribed that when a line of battle had been formed
every ship must follow directly in the wake of her next ahead, and in
1756 an admiral had been court-martialed and shot on his own quarterdeck
("_pour encourager les autres_," according to Voltaire) for having
violated this absolute rule. When the British leader, _Shrewsbury_, 74,
bore down to engage _Pluton_, 74, at the head of the French line, the
rest of the British ships followed her, head to tail, instead of making
directly for their French opposite numbers. The consequence was that the
British line came in on the French at an acute angle; the leading ships
were hotly engaged, those at the centers of the lines very little, and
those at the rear not at all.

The commander of the British rear division was that fighting admiral,
Sir Sam Hood, and it is possible that could have fallen on the French
rear, which was in some disorder. But he was not going to break that
signaled line ahead in violation of the Fighting Instructions and expose
himself to a court-martial in order to get that fool Graves out of his
difficulties; and he did not. When dark closed over a mild swell, the
French seamen gunners at the head of the line had done so well that the
British had three to two of their losses and several ships badly
battered, one of them so much that she had to be burned a couple of days
later.

Next morning Graves tried to close again, but the French kept away
across the entrance to the bay and the English battle cripples fell
behind. If Graves had had an anchorage where he could make repairs, it
might have been different, but it was De Grasse who held the anchorage.
Three days more they maneuvered, the French now in possession of the
weather gauge, thereby permitted to fight only under conditions most
favorable to themselves. On September 10, Graves discovered that Barras
had joined De Grasse, who now had thirty-two battleships to his
eighteen. These odds were too heavy even for a British sea dog; Graves
called a council of war to make sure that nobody was going to criticize
him seriously, then went back to New York to repair damages.

On September 27, Washington's army was assembled at Williamsburg, 16,645
strong, nearly half French. Cornwallis has been criticized by some
military men for not trying to move past him, but this ignores the
question of where he was to go in a completely hostile countryside,
opposed by the fast-marching Washington and French regular troops quite
equal to his own in numbers and training, plus some excellent French
cavalry. Formal siege operations were opened on September 29; the
parallels were vigorously pushed forward. Alexander Hamilton led a
brilliant night assault which took two redoubts, and the 24- and
18-pounder guns brought by Barras pounded everything in sight. On the
morning of October 17, four years to the day after Burgoyne's surrender,
a red-clad drummer mounted the Yorktown ramparts to beat the chamade,
and two days later Cornwallis and all his men marched out and gave up
their arms.


      V

The effects of the success of the American Revolution have received
sufficient comment to need no more here. It was not only the
establishment of the new nation, but also the cradle of the French
Revolution. Yorktown decided a revolution ideological as well as
physical. But although Lord North threw up his hands and cried, "Oh, my
God, it is all over!" when he heard the news from the Chesapeake, there
were still points at which the decision could be proved in reversible
error, and if Frederick the Great's was the first of the world wars,
that of the American Revolution was the second.

An England victorious elsewhere in the circuit of the zones could easily
have built up Clinton's forces in New York to attack point, or enabled
those in Charleston to undertake something else than the quiet defense
to which Greene's operations presently reduced them--even an England
under the administration of Lord North and George Germain.

The reasons why England did not make or even attempt an American rally
have been hidden behind the hurricane of events that blew along the
corridors of that second world war. Spain and Holland joined France in
August 1781, and while Washington was debating the question of New York
or Yorktown, there was a bloody dingdong battle between British and
Dutch off Dogger Bank which resulted in a draw. The West Indies fighting
reached a climax six months after Yorktown in a battle off the Saintes.
There Rodney took five French ships of the line, including the
three-decker flagship _Ville de Paris_, 110, with De Grasse in person
aboard, and so prevented an attack on Jamaica, but by no means drove the
French from the islands. A year after Yorktown the Spaniards attacked
Gibraltar with ten huge floating batteries and the help of French
troops, but were foiled amid immense thunders, with the loss of all the
battering ships and 1,500 men.

The sum may be stated as defensive success and negative decision. Some
of the sugar islands changed hands and changed back again, but the
allies lacked the power and skill to drive home a real offensive against
the widespread British possessions, while the British lacked resources
to take the offensive themselves. Thus the situation remained fairly
static down to the late months of 1782, by which date the most serious
of the allied attacks had been beaten off, and it became possible for
Britain to consider a counterstroke in America or elsewhere. At this
point there arrived a piece of news that made it imperative to abandon
the American venture.


      VI

One of the results of the Seven Years' War had been the ejection of the
French from India, except for a few "factories," with which
communication was maintained through Mauritius, then called the Ile de
France. A smallish French squadron operated from there to India under M.
le Comte d'Orves; it was opposed by a British force of approximately
equal weight under another of the sea dogs, Sir Edward Hughes. The
British were having infinite trouble with Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore,
the only prince of India who ever beat them in battle, but D'Orves
refused to amalgamate the wars, or in any way to help the sultan; was
himself beaten in the manner of the Seven Years' War, and retreated to
the Ile de France, while the British snapped up French outposts.

Early in 1781, with things going pretty well for them (Cornwallis had
"conquered" the Carolinas and was getting ready to move into Virginia),
the British decided to improve their own communications with India by
seizing the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. A squadron was fitted
out under Commodore George Johnstone, one seventy-four-gun battleship, a
sixty-four, and three of the fifty-gun intermediates so useful in
colonial service, with numerous transports, supply ships, and frigates.
After operations at Good Hope were completed, Johnstone was to move on
and join Hughes, giving him a sharp superiority over D'Orves.

The existence and purpose of this force were not hidden from the French
cabinet; on the same day that De Grasse sailed from the West Indies on
the voyage that was to take him to Yorktown, there left Brest a squadron
of two seventy-fours and three sixty-fours, with a convoy of troops to
reinforce Good Hope. Its commander was a newly made rear admiral, Pierre
Andre de Suffren, who had done some service with the Knights of Malta
and there acquired the title of bailiff, _bailli_. In the Seven Years'
War he had been twice a prisoner of the English and learned to dislike
their arrogance; an enormously fat man, ardent to the point of violence,
filled with a desire that was almost an obsession to restore the honor
of the French marine.

On the voyage down the latitudes one of his ships ran short of water. He
determined to put in at Porto Praya in the Cape Verdes to fill up, and
on the morning of April 16, Suffren arrived off the harbor and found it
full of English ships, Johnstone's ships. These were neutral waters, but
it was in neutral waters that he had been taken prisoner by the British
in '57; he hung out the red flag for battle from his flagship, _Heros_,
74, and drove right in, neglecting the British transports, anchoring in
the middle of their warships, and opening both broadsides. Unfortunately
his own captains were as much surprised as the British. _Annibal_, 74,
was not completely cleared for action; she came in boldly enough, but
fired ineffectually. The captain of _Artesien_, 64, was killed by a
musket ball at the first fire; she did not do much in the confusion but
carry a big Indiaman out. The other French ships only marched through
the roadstead, firing as they went, and after an hour or so of it
Suffren pulled out. At the mouth of the bay _Annibal_'s masts went over
the side.

Yet it was anything but a setback, anything but a failure. Suffren had
sent his convoy on ahead; now he
 got _Annibal_ in tow, formed line of
battle in the offing, and waited for Johnstone to come out. In the
afternoon Johnstone did; the masts of one of his own ships promptly
crashed down from the damage they had received, most of the others had
been more or less hurt, the French were down to leeward on a rising sea.
If he followed them he might not be able to get back to his convoy at
all and would be involved in a night battle against superior forces. He
turned back, therefore, and wrote a report speaking of the anguish of
his cruel situation.

As might be expected, the French were in full possession when he reached
the Cape; Johnstone sent three of his battleships on to reinforce Hughes
off India and turned back with the rest of the convoy, expedition
aborted. Suffren had to stay at the Cape for two months while
arrangements were made and his damaged _Annibal_ repaired; he reached
Ile de France in October, just after Yorktown surrendered. It was now
the hurricane season, and the year had rounded before he and D'Orves
sailed for the Coromandel, or east coast of India, to take some French
troops to the help of Mysore. This was probably Suffren's urging, for
D'Orves would hardly have thought of it for himself. On the way two
things happened: Suffren's _Heros_ fell in with and took one of the
British fifties, and D'Orves died.

The Bailli de Suffren was now commander of the fleet. His objective was
to land the troops at Mysore, then, if possible, take Trincomalee, which
controlled Ceylon. Trincomalee had an excellent harbor, though, like all
others except those in English hands, devoid of supplies that would
support a fleet. On the morning of February 17, 1782, French and British
sighted each other off Sadras, the French covering their convoy
northeast of the British; twelve French, nine British battleships, but
the latter heavier ones. The wind was mildly off the land from the
French side. Hughes began to form his line heading eastward downwind, so
that when the usual afternoon sea breeze rose he would be in a good
position to attack from windward, in the best tradition of British sea
dogs. Before he got things completely in order he was startled by a
sight no one had seen for a hundred years, the French coming down like a
herd of charging elephants to attack him.

Suffren himself led the line; he ran along the port side of the British
formation as far as number 4 from the head, Hughes' own flagship,
_Superb_, 74, hove back and began to fire at pistol shot. The three
British ships ahead were now downwind and would have an exceedingly
difficult time tacking back to get into action, which was precisely what
Suffren intended. He also intended that the rear ships of his fleet
should run up the leeward side of the British rear and so double on
them; but in the French service, as in the British, there were Fighting
Instructions that prohibited breaking the line of battle. Most of
Suffren's captains either did not believe he meant what he said when he
gave the doubling order, or were so bound by custom that they could not
bring themselves to obey. Only one ship really doubled, and she was a
fifty, though toward the end another made it; but even so the British
had enough to do. When the sea breeze did rise after two hours of
fighting, the British had two ships badly damaged.

Suffren saw he could accomplish nothing more that day, landed his
troops, and ran south to cruise off Trincomalee, writing furious letters
to the Ministry of Marine about the conduct of his captains. "I should
have destroyed the English squadron," and, "My heart is wrung by the
most general defection." Hughes had to go to Madras to refit; there he
was joined by two fresh battleships and sailed for Ceylon, reasonably
worried about Trincomalee and anxious to throw supplies into the place.
On April 11, about fifty miles northeast of the port and off Provedien,
the French ships were in sight again to the windward. In spite of the
fact that the two new ships gave him slightly more than the French
strength, Hughes was not especially anxious to fight a battle; he had
another mission. But the experience of Sadras had taught him that if
this fat Frenchman wanted a fight he was going to have it, and when dawn
of April 12 showed the leading French overtaking his rear ships, he
formed line and waited.

This time Suffren forbore anything fancy; he simply ordered all ships to
form on a line of bearing, which is at an angle to the line of approach,
and bore down for a ship-to-ship attack, with his one extra,
_Brilliant_, 64, to double on the British rear ship. But the sailing
qualities of the ships were very unequal and a line of bearing is very
hard to maintain. Moreover, as the ships at the head of the French line
came under fire, they luffed up and replied, and so, ultimately, did
those at the tail of the line. Led by Suffren himself, the French at the
center pressed in, and seeing a gap, so did _Brilliant_. The consequence
was a French line in a curve, concave toward the British, with ship
after ship crowding toward the center until there were no less than five
French ships engaged in the closest kind of action with three British,
and there ensued one of the bloodiest naval combats in history, at a
range where it was almost impossible to miss.

The British _Monmouth_, 64, was beaten out of line with a third of her
crew casualties, her mizzen- and mainmasts down; Hughes' flagship lost
nearly as many, and so did _Monarca_, 68. _Heros_ was much disabled in
rigging, but stayed in tight action till three-forty in the afternoon,
when Hughes wore away out of the fight and there was too much damage and
laxity among Suffren's ships for him to follow. Even a direct order by
signal for _Artesien_ to take possession of the completely disabled
_Monmouth_ was not obeyed.

For two days the fleets lay at anchor making repairs, and temporarily it
looked like a draw. But in reality Hughes had been so hard hit his fleet
operations were paralyzed. He had to put into Trincomalee and stay for
six weeks, while Suffren ramped all around Ceylon, mopping up British
convoys of supplies and transports and seeing his own through. The
sultan took the British stronghold of Cuddalore; there was no fleet to
cover it.


      VII

This was the news that, reaching Europe late in the summer--when the
British got their hands free enough from other entanglements to afford
an expedition somewhere--determined that the expedition should be to
India, not America. It was the news that the French had a new kind of
sea captain, one who always attacked, who fought terribly, who beat
British sea dogs at their own game, and who had a high sense of
strategy. They did not know of Suffren's difficulties with his captains;
or that he was so short of spare spars that he had to take the masts out
of his frigates; or that he was so short of men he had to embark land
artillerists.

They did not know his troubles, but they knew their own. The fact that
there were three more of those desperate combats later, with the bailiff
always victorious in spite of increasing British reinforcements, has
made historians and readers alike regard the fighting off the Coromandel
Coast as a flowing, continuous campaign--which, indeed, it was. But the
continuous campaign has drawn attention away from the vital factor,
which was the time factor, the date the news reached Europe that the
British fleet off India was faced by an antagonist who thought in terms
of destroying it, and who possessed the will, the skill, and probably
the means.

For on that fleet the British empire in India depended. The American
colonies were about as good as gone, and under the conditions of the
time, they were as much of a liability as an asset anyway, but the
empire of India was the great cash crop of Britain. It not only
furnished the widows and orphans and retired colonels with their
pensions, it provided much of the means by which the British government
itself existed. Let America go, then, but for heaven's sake, save
India--this was the unspoken principle, the line on which Whitehall was
forced to act. It is not too much to say that if De Grasse made it
possible for the British to be ejected from the thirteen colonies the
Bailiff of Malta, halfway around the world, was the man who kept them
from recovering.

When word of the peace came, Suffren's return to France was like a
triumphal progress down an avenue of cheering; even the British captains
came aboard at Table Bay to honor the man who had fought them so hard.
In 1788 a dispute arose between England and France, and Suffren was
appointed to command a great fleet fitting out at Brest. He died on his
way thither and the dispute was settled. One can only wonder.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    14. TRAFALGAR, AUSTERLITZ, AND THE FALL AND RISE OF EMPIRE




      I

It is important to view events in their contemporary context.

In October 1797, General Bonaparte, officially "captain of artillery in
temporary command of the Army of Italy," signed a peace with the
Austrians and returned to Paris to face an unstable government of five
Directors, who were practically without popular support and intensely
jealous of their all too popular army commanders. The war on the
Continent was over; the only remaining hostility to the Revolution was
the absolutely implacable hatred of England. General Bonaparte was
appointed to command an army for the invasion of the seagirt isle--with
an implied threat that non-acceptance of the commission would result in
his being returned to his captaincy.

In February 1798 he accordingly inspected the coast of Normandy and the
flotilla of small craft gathered there, and reported in a sense
unfavorable to the enterprise. Of his own capacity and that of the
French soldiers he entertained no doubt; the difficulty was to bring
them into contact
 with the British. To do that would require the
extremely dangerous enterprise of stealing a crossing during one of the
long winter nights in the face of heavy English ships that could easily
scatter the whole flotilla. He advised, however, that the preparations
be kept up to fix British attention at the Channel and confirm them in
that withdrawal of fleets from the Mediterranean to which an otherwise
profitless French naval expedition to Ireland in 1796 had so effectively
contributed. Bonaparte himself would be glad to undertake an expedition
through that now friendly Mediterranean against Egypt, a practically
independent suzerainty of Turkey, a storehouse of immense resources, and
the gateway to the East, "where there are a hundred million men." The
East, even more importantly, from where the English drew those resources
which enabled them to dominate the financial exchanges and markets of
Europe.

The English war against the French Revolution was primarily a war about
those markets, though it had been prettied up with a good many phrases
about lawlessness let loose in the world, insatiable ambition, and the
murder of divinely anointed kings. In the address which was the younger
Mr. Pitt's proclamation of that war, the only physical act charged
against the French government was the opening of the Scheldt to make
Antwerp a port of entry, a place closed to commerce by treaty ever since
the southern Netherlands became Austrian. The Anglo-French section of
the wars of the Revolution was thus a separate struggle, a continuation
under new terms of the sempiternal English effort to exclude all others
from the business of delivering both home and colonial products to the
Continent--in fine, to establish and maintain a commercial monopoly, a
monopoly of gold. Down to the date when General Bonaparte was sent to
the Channel, this war had followed the normal course, with English
expeditions snapping up colonial possessions, English money supporting
the armies that attacked France on land, and English bankers profiting
hugely on the whole transaction through an involved structure of
international debt.

This was the system that Bonaparte proposed to break in on by giving
France a new colonial area, peculiarly her own. If this new colonial
empire did not emancipate her from the need for overseas products, it at
least would provide a medium of exchange for them other than the gold
that was being indirectly drained out of the country, even in wartime.
Something of the kind was more or less necessary if France was to make
the Revolution permanent. Up to this time the government had been
largely financed by seizures from the Church and nobility, but the end
of that resource was in sight. As for the strategy of the operation,
Bonaparte thought in the essentially military terms of deception and
speed--and calculated that by the time the British could react they
would be faced with the _fait accompli_ of a French Egypt, with Malta as
a guard post on the line of communications.

The government of the five Directors decided that an expedition to Egypt
would relieve them of the awkward problem of providing for some
thousands of soldiers who had been defending the country for so long
they had become professionalized, and the movement was approved. But
Bonaparte failed--understandably since it had not been that way
before--to calculate on the aggressive strategy of the new group of
British admirals, and his deceptions deceived too well. The destination
of the armament fitting out at Toulon was put forward as Ireland, and
the British believed it. But instead of falling back from his blockade
of Cadiz and the Gibraltar Straits to cover the Channel approaches,
Admiral Lord St. Vincent of the Gibraltar command jutted forward into
the Mediterranean a squadron of thirteen battleships and a fifty under
orders to find the Toulon fleet, wherever it was, and to destroy it.

The commander was a little one-armed, one-eyed sailorman named Sir
Horatio Nelson, recently made rear admiral for gallantry in an action
with the Spaniards. The evidence is that the appointment was due to the
personal intervention of dim-witted old George III, who liked the man
without being at all aware that he had some very unusual qualities
indeed. For one, this Nelson was perfectly prepared to give literal
obedience to the order to destroy the enemy, instead of merely defeating
him and confounding his projects, like all previous naval commanders
with the sole exception of Suffren. He wanted everything; once he wrote,
"Now had we taken ten sail and allowed the eleventh to escape, when it
had been possible to have got at her, I could never have called it well
done." In the second place he called his captains "a band of brothers,"
and treated them as such. It is hard to realize today exactly what that
meant in 1798. For over a century every naval battle in which the
British were victors, as they usually were, had been followed by a
court-martial in which the captain who did least well was condemned and
dismissed from the service as a kind of booby prize. It was part of the
tradition, like flogging and the Fighting Instructions. Nelson laid it
down that "No captain can go far wrong who lays his ship alongside the
enemy," and left his band of brothers to their own devices, apart from
the most general orders.

He concentrated his fleet off Sardinia on June 7 and shortly afterward
learned that the Toulon armament had left port on May 19. It had
certainly not gone through the straits for Ireland or he would have met
it. His instructions mentioned the possibility that the revolutionary
army was sailing for the twin kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, then under
the misrule of a monarch called "Ferdinand the Burglar," a perfectly fit
object of attack to a government that had proclaimed its intention of
abolishing monarchy everywhere. Off Sicily, Nelson learned that the
French had taken Malta and gone east; he had no orders but those for the
destruction of the fleet, but he followed, and the succeeding weeks were
filled with looking for them at Alexandria (where he arrived too early),
Crete, Turkey, Greece.

On the late afternoon of August 1, Nelson found them at last, fourteen
ships of the line, anchored in Aboukir Bay, heads to the wind, which was
light from the north. Sir Horatio, who had taken practically no food at
all for a week, ordered an ample dinner, remarking, "Before this time
tomorrow I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey." Without
orders beyond the preliminary general instructions, the British
battleships formed and rushed down on the French line, the four leading
British ships doubling around its head on the inshore side while the
others took station outside. Thus each French ship at the head of their
line had two opponents, usually with one of them in position to rake her
lengthwise along the decks; nor could the French ships at the rear beat
up against the wind to join the battle. As the head of the line was
crushed into striking their colors, the British moved down. All night
the cannon roared across the bay, the French flagship caught fire and
blew up, and in the morning there were only two of them left to escape.

Sir Horatio had carried out to the letter his orders to destroy the
French fleet (for the two refugees did not last long) and gained his
peerage; the Abbey would come later.


      II

The Battle of the Nile, as it came to be called, was decisive in more
than one sense. It said no to Bonaparte's Eastern dream and placed him
in a dangerous position. The wars for the colonies during the eighteenth
century had been fought out on land; English sea power gave tremendous
advantages in the transmission and support of expeditions and the
English usually won, but French fleets remained in existence even when
beaten, and it was possibly for them to provide at least intermittent
help to the overseas areas, as it had been given to Montcalm. The night
in Aboukir Bay wiped out the only part of the French navy that mattered
in that area. Not even precacious communication with metropolitan France
was any longer possible. The load of maintaining Egypt had become one
that not even military genius could carry; there were too many shortages
at the colonial end of the severed line of supply.

Bonaparte was perfectly conscious of the fact that this demonstrated no
French overseas dominion could be established in the face of such naval
power except on a self-supporting basis. When he became First Consul of
France, already emperor in all but name, one of his first projects was
to set up such a dominion--in Louisiana, with San Domingo as a way
station. The project is generally held to have foundered on yellow fever
and the resistance of the San Domingo blacks, but First Consul Bonaparte
was a persistent and intelligent man, and it is not at all impossible
that he would have succeeded in setting up his system--given time.
Probably few wars were ever begun for reasons having less to do with the
realities than the one which ended the brief Anglo-French peace in 1803.
On the British side the pretext was Bonaparte's interference in neutral
Switzerland and Holland; while the French claimed that Britain had not
evacuated Malta and Cape Town, according to treaty. Actually, both sides
were fully aware that the real issue was the French laws excluding
British ships and products from ports under Bonaparte's control and the
British failure to get a commercial treaty that brought this state of
affairs to an end.

Bonaparte was rebuilding the French navy, but it was still well short of
the almost parity point he needed. A war with England on the basis of
overseas possessions maintained by occasional expeditions that evaded
British fleets was the classical formula. The new strategy, the new
tactics of the Nile demonstrated that his means were inadequate for such
a project. He knew that
 only a radical solution would do, and the only
radical solution that would be permanent was to strike England down on
the home grounds; that is, get an army into the island and smash up
those dockyards that were the nexus of her fleet and overseas trade.

Bonaparte estimated that 100,000 men and six hours' undisputed
possession of the Channel would be about right. The army, called "of the
Coasts of the Ocean," assembled from the Texel to Brest, was one of the
finest ever brought together anywhere, far more effective than that army
he had refused to lead in 1797. For the crossing there were to be
provided 2,000 vessels of the type called praams, designed by the
distinguished naval architect Pierre Alexandre Forfait, tubs just barely
able to sail, but with oar power in addition, and armed with guns heavy
enough to keep light British craft, such as frigates and sloops, at a
distance. They were built at every place where ships could be built from
the Dutch harbors down to the upper waters of the Loire.

It is hard to tell precisely what the master plan for their employment
was because of Bonaparte's habitual policy of concealment and still more
habitual method of leaving himself alternatives, but in the beginning it
seems to have been for the invasion fleet to concentrate at Boulogne and
make a crossing under night, storm, or fog. This was dropped out early
in the game. Tests showed that Forfait's design was imperfect. The
praams could not work along the coast to concentrate in the face of
opposition. It would take a full forty-eight hours to get them loaded
and across the bar at Boulogne, and when the wind blew strongly enough
to move the clumsy vessels, they could not work their guns.

Bonaparte was thus driven to revise his plan in the direction of
obtaining genuine naval command of the Channel for the necessary
crossing period and using big ships. He counted on deception again, as
when he went to Egypt. A new fleet had been built up at Toulon under
Admiral Louis-Rene de Latouche-Treville, eleven battleships strong. It
was being watched by Sir Horatio, now Lord Nelson, who had twelve of the
line, but the shape of the coast was such that no intimate blockade
could be maintained. Bonaparte, always so prescient in following the
mental qualities of his opponents, believed that Nelson had a fixation
toward Egypt. If Latouche-Treville were sighted steering south out of
Toulon, Nelson's scouts would inform him, and he would almost inevitably
be off to Alexandria. But Latouche-Treville would go in the opposite
direction, out into the Atlantic, making for Rochefort, where five
French ships were blockaded by an equal number of British. These he
would release, and having picked up one ship from Cadiz in friendly
Spain, he would have seventeen, a force superior to the fifteen British
ships under Admiral Cornwallis who were blockading the other major
French fleet of fourteen in Brest. If Cornwallis stayed close to Brest,
Latouche-Treville would hurry to the Channel and cover the invasion; if
Cornwallis instead chose to fight, it did not matter whether
Latouche-Treville won or lost, the British would be in no shape to
prevent the Brest fleet convoying the army across.

This was quite a good plan, which encountered only one obstacle: before
it could be executed, while Latouche-Treville was still training his
crews to an efficiency such as no French fleet had possessed since the
Revolution, the admiral died.

And he was the last of the admirals. All the others senior enough to
command a fleet bore what Bonaparte himself called "the souvenir of the
Nile." They had been in that horrible disaster, and it had been borne in
on them in a way hardly to be expressed in words that no French officer
could conquer the English at sea. The First Consul, always peculiarly
sensitive to matters of morale, was fully conscious of this. When he
appointed Pierre Charles Jean Sylvestre Villeneuve to replace
Latouche-Treville at Toulon, he altered the plan to one which involved
no fighting except in possession of enormously superior numbers.

Villeneuve was to dismiss Nelson as before, but instead of making for
Rochefort and the Channel, would run for the sugar islands of the West
Indies. News of this would reach London, and as the sugar islands were
almost as important to England as India, it would cause a squadron to be
sent there. Villeneuve was to stay among the islands only long enough to
pick up six battleships that would escape from Rochefort to meet him
there, then return to Europe, wipe out the five British blockaders who
were holding a French group of equal strength at Ferrol in northwest
Spain; then, avoiding Cornwallis off Brest (if he had not already been
sent to the West Indies), make for the Channel and the invasion. He was
not to fight except with the blockaders of Ferro, twenty-three ships
against five.

In execution of this plan Villenueve duly put out of Toulon. Nelson was
deceived according to prescription and went off to Egypt. But the French
fleet met a storm and had to put back, and Nelson closed in again. A new
factor was introduced when friendly Spain decided that going to war with
England would be cheaper than paying the treaty subsidies that enabled
France to continue her war "for the mutual benefit." Everybody told
Bonaparte that the Spanish navy was not in good shape, but his motto was
always, "There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels," and the
attraction of a number of Spanish battleships that would give him a
clear superiority on the water was irresistible. He again altered the
plan to include Spanish squadrons.

It now became an enormously complicated device for moving British fleets
around as though they were under Bonaparte's orders. Villeneuve was to
escape from Toulon again, sending Nelson to Egypt, pick up Spanish ships
at Cartagena and Cadiz, and sail for the West Indies. There he would
meet the Rochefort squadron, whose blockaders would of course imagine
that it was making for Ireland and go there. The big Brest fleet would
escape blockade and meet him there. Admiral Cornwallis, with the Western
Squadron (as it was called) would obviously pursue the French to the
West Indies, in accordance with the principle of making the main enemy
force the objective. The Brest fleet would elude him, join Villeneuve,
return to Ferrol and, on releasing the squadron there, attain the
Channel for the vital six hours. This was the plan actually put into
operation, and it all depended upon the idea that the British must
concentrate to follow any French fleet that put to sea.

The working out was not as complex as the plan itself, and it had
features that Bonaparte had failed to count on. One was that Nelson
could not be hoodwinked a second time; instead of going to Egypt he
followed Villeneuve to the West Indies, and news that he was among the
islands brought the French admiral back to Europe prematurely, in order
to avoid fighting the battle he had been forbidden to fight. The Cadiz
and Rochefort Franco-Spanish squadrons got out, but instead of following
them their blockaders simply joined with the Western Squadron at the
gates of the Channel. As soon as a French fleet reappeared anywhere, one
adequate to deal with it was detached from the Western Squadron. That
is, the British did not concentrate against the moving French fleets,
but at the point where these fleets must take decisive action. Even
Nelson joined this concentration when he returned from the Indies.
Villenueve simply dared not try to run around this concentration. He
made for Ferrol instead and, after an indecisive action with the British
blockaders there, pushed in.

There were twelve Franco-Spanish ships inside, which brought
Villenueve's strength to the paper-potent figure of twenty-eight.
Bonaparte expected him to come to the Channel at once, and even
addressed a letter to him at Brest; but as the head of the French state
failed to grasp the basic British strategic plan of reinforcing the
Western Squadron every time a French fleet disappeared, so also he
failed to understand that there was no fundamental identity between a
military base and a secure harbor. At the former all things needed by an
army are almost automatically provided by the surrounding country; but a
fleet requires such specialized items as masts, tar, timber, and
cordage. There were none of these in Ferrol, and Villeneuve's ships had
returned from their double transit of the Atlantic so worn down in
precisely these items that most of them would need refit before
attempting battle or even another cruise. Ferrol was for the time being
not under blockade; Villeneuve accordingly sailed for Cadiz, where he
could get his supplies.

This was the decisive event; all the rest was appendant.


      III

It was evident to the man who had now become the Emperor Napoleon I that
this ended any chance of his gaining control of the English Cannel for
the necessary time. Villeneuve had succeeded in effecting a
concentration of thirty-three battleships at Cadiz, but this was a long
way from the western approaches, where there was already a far greater
British concentration. The admiral was accordingly ordered to get out of
Cadiz and report to Toulon for a different campaign, whose precise
nature has never been determined, but which would be a part of the new
policy Napoleon instantly adopted on the arrival of the news from Cadiz.
"You have much to do to regain His Majesty's confidence," read part of
the order; Villeneuve decided that the only way to that accomplishment
was to accept battle and win when he put out of Cadiz.

And he would have to accept battle. British cruisers had of course
spotted the retreat from Ferrol to Cadiz, and Lord Nelson was at once
ordered to the latter point. He had thirty-three ships of the line, the
same number available to the allies, but six of them had gone to
Gibraltar for
 food and water, so there were only twenty-seven when on
October 21, 1805, the Franco-Spanish fleet was sighted off Cape
Trafalgar, running down for the straits under light airs from north and
northwest.

Nelson had already formed a battle plan--an outgrowth of the one at the
Nile--to advance against the allied line in two columns, break through
it in both places, and double against their center and rear while their
van would have to work back against the wind to help, and could hardly
arrive until the other ships had been crushed. (Sailing battleships
maneuvered very slowly against the wind.) This would apparently involve
each British ship being subjected to end-on raking fire as she
approached the allied line, but the danger was less than it looked,
because once the first ships had broken through and counterraked the
allies at the point of penetration the latter would no longer be able to
fire effectively, and as successive British doubled down the allied line
and gaps would grow. Nelson led one column of twelve ships in the
three-decker _Victory_, 100; Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood headed the
other in _Royal Sovereign_, 100.

A rather odd and unnoticed thing about the plan was that it was exactly
what Villeneuve anticipated, though he had not foreseen the detail of
Nelson's two-column arrangement. In the earlier action off Ferrol the
British had tried something like it; a fog which partially concealed
movements and a quick-witted turn by the Spanish Admiral Gravina foiled
them. This time Villeneuve placed the same Gravina in charge of a while
division of ships at the head of the line, with instructions to operate
independently, at his own discretion, to prevent any British
line-breaking, doubling attack. But just as Nelson's two columns began
their slow-motion rush across the gently heaving sea, Villeneuve was
visited with an inspiration. He turned his fleet simultaneously till it
pointed nearly northwest, close-hauled, almost head to wind; and this
had the effect that instead of being at the head of the line Gravina was
very near the tail of it, in no position to make a counterattack or
signal anyone else to do so.

In the British fleet Nelson hung out his famous signal, "England expects
that every man will do his duty," and there was a burst of cheering from
the line of battleships, as _Victory_ headed for the huge four-decker
_Santissima Trinidad_, 130, largest warship in the world, Nelson being
certain that the French flagship would not be far from her. It was just
falling on noon when the allies opened fire against Collingwood's
column, slightly in advance of Nelson's. _Royal Sovereign_'s sails were
rags and she had a good many dead before she reached contact point, but
when she did, her first tremendous raking broadside brought down 400 men
aboard a Spanish three-decker. Now as ship after ship piled through the
gap Collingwood opened and the allied vessels on their line of sailing
began to bunch toward the area, the battle at the rear of the line
turned into a disorderly, smoke-shrouded tangle; but it is to be noted
that there were always two or three British ships to one of the allies,
usually in raking position.

The cloud of smoke and thunder had been collecting over this area for
quite half an hour when _Victory_ plunged through the line, just where
Nelson wanted to be, under the stern of the French flagship,
_Bucentaure_, 80. _Victory_ had lost a tenth of her people during the
advance; now she repaid it all in one terrible broadside that dismounted
twenty of _Bucentaure_'s guns and wrecked the ship, then locked side to
side with _Redoubtable_, 74. The French ship should have been, and was
in fact, no match for the three-decker, but her Captain Lucas had
trained his men carefully with small arms, and from her tops there
poured down a devastating fire of musketry onto _Victory_'s upper deck.
Captain Hardy saw the admiral beside him spin around and sink to his
knees, saying slowly, "They have done for me at last."

"I hope not, sir."

"Yes, my backbone is shot through."

It was true. All afternoon, as the admiral of England lay dying, the
whole ocean area around Trafalgar was covered with rocking, blazing
warships, broken masts, and accumulating debris. At four-thirty Captain
Hardy went to the cockpit to report a victory and Nelson closed his eyes
for the last time. He had taken eighteen of the allied ships, another
went to wreck that night, and four more were captured as they tried to
escape, while nearly all the rest were so damaged as to be useless.

Except for the always immobilized Brest squadron, Napoleon now had no
navy. There would be none of the "ships, colonies, commerce" that he
regarded as the foundation of a sound polity; no emancipation from the
commercial toils; and Britain was free to deliver her goods, her
resources, her troops to any point touched by salt water.


      IV

The night he received word that Villeneuve had gone to Cadiz was spent
by Napoleon in dictating orders which flung the Army of the Coasts of
the Ocean, now become _Grande Armee_, halfway across Europe to the banks
of the Danube. For if he could not "end all coalitions at London," as he
had hoped, he must at least deal with the land arm of the one
confronting him, the most dangerous of all the coalitions faced by
France in the post-Revolutionary periods. In inception it owed a good
deal to that morose, flighty, ambitious, and personally charming
character, Alexander I of Russia, who took his own name seriously and
wanted to be great. In form this coalition was a general European
congress of peace and mediation, whose basic purpose was to put an end
to the quarrel between England and France, a kind of precursor to the
United Nations. In fact, it was a general alliance against France and
the Revolution, for although Alexander referred to himself as a liberal,
his liberalism did not extend to people who decapitated hereditary kings.

Of course, the thing was not altogether that simple. The trigger event
in determining Alexander to launch the war of the Third Coalition, and
Austria somewhat hesitantly to join, was Napoleon's assumption of the
crown of (north) Italy. In the eyes of diplomats with memories this made
the new France into an expanding state of the Louis XIV type. But the
basic Continental idea was that espoused with considerable skill and
passion by Friedrich Gentz, the publicist--the idea of eliminating from
the world a system utterly subversive of all society and good order. The
fact that its head now called himself an emperor did not conceal from
either Gentz or Alexander that this "empire" rested on usurpation, the
confiscation of Church and landed properties, and the execution of those
who had held them by "the canaille."

Austria and Russia agreed to go to war against this system even though
they could not persuade the Prussians to join their pan-European peace
union at once. A plan of campaign was drawn up by General Karl Mack of
the Austrian service. Along the frontier in Italy he established a
"cordon sanitaire" of troops, technically to prevent the spread of a
yellow fever epidemic from Tuscany, actually to hide Austrian
mobilization and strength. The main theater of war would be there, in
Italy, where Austria could hope the greatest gain, and it was assigned
to the ablest of the Hapsburg princely soldiers, Archduke Karl, with
94,000 men. North of the Alps, the Austrian army of 84,000, under Mack's
personal command, would first coerce Bavaria into joining the alliance,
then push forward to Ulm, where the Iller falls into the Danube, ready
to strike at the heads of any French columns coming through the Black
Forest. The first Russian army of 40,000, under General Kutuzov, would
arrive in Mack's rear on October 16, 1805, closely followed by 30,000
more under General Bennigsen; they would operate north of the Danube,
sustaining Mack as he pushed forward from the Iller. Fifty thousand more
Russians under General Buxhowden would follow through Silesia and
Bohemia, operating down the Frankfurt gap against the middle Rhine. Mack
was pretty well informed about the force of the French army. It would
have to leave troops at the Channel to provide against English invasion,
and on the basis of this and logistic problems, Napoleon could hardly
reach the upper waters of the Danube through the Black Forest before
November 10, and then with not over 70,000 men.

Ample allowance was thus made for accident and error, but there were two
errors Mack failed to take into consideration. One was introduced by his
personal intelligence officer, the man who collected the information
about the French army, theoretically a young Hungarian nobleman named
Schulmeister, who had been in France for some time; actually a French
spy, who was feeding the Austrians whatever information Napoleon thought
they ought to have and sending to Paris everything he could find out.
The second error was that in the staff conversations with the Russians
nobody but Schulmeister had noticed that they were talking according to
the Orthodox calendar, while the Austrians were referring to the
Gregorian, which had a twelve-day difference. Schulmeister sent this
information to Paris instead of referring it to Vienna.

The Russians would thus be nearly two weeks late, and the French would
arrive many weeks too soon, not with the 70,000 Mack had been led to
expect, but with nearly 177,000, propelled from the Channel at
Napoleonic marching speed. Moreover, this was a new kind of army. The
normal arrangement attached a force of cavalry to each division, and
artillery to each infantry battalion. In the _Grande Armee_ the guns
were taken away from battalion to be concentrated in divisional parks,
and the cavalry assembled in one huge corps, 22,000 strong, with its own
artillery. Its mission was to screen the movement, which flowed in
parallel rivers of steel,
 not through the Black Forest, as expected, but
across the whole northwest of Germany to a series of points on the
Danube between Mack's position and Vienna.

In the later days of September, Mack's outposts at the debouches of the
Black Forest began to encounter French horsemen; from the fact that they
had guns with them he deduced that infantry could not be far behind, and
ordered a concentration in the Ulm area. The first solid news came on
October 7, and it was appalling: the French were already south of the
Danube, across his line of communications, in great force.

The Austrian general did his best to cut his way out, first along one
bank of the river, then the other, but he was outnumbered at every point
of contact, bewildered, surrounded. A week later he was bursting into
tears as he delivered his sword to Napoleon, with, "Behold the
unfortunate Mack!"


      V

Nearly 70,000 of Mack's men were dead or prisoners, but Napoleon's
problems were only beginning. His line of communications stretched back
a hundred miles to the Rhine, and many troops were required to maintain
it; considerable forces had to be detached to cover the south flank
against Austrians in the Tyrol and Italy; and in late October, before
the advance down the Danube could begin, Kutuzov reached Vienna with the
first Russian contingent. The next six weeks were occupied by a campaign
of maneuver down the funnel of the Danube valley toward where Vienna
stands at the eastern gate of Europe. After the disaster at Ulm and the
arrival of the Buxhowden contingent with their emperor, the Russians had
much the larger proportion of the allied forces and were able to call
the strategic tune. They greatly shocked the Austrians by their doctrine
of giving up space and even Vienna city for time, but it was done, and
in a fighting retreat the French were drawn through the mountains into
Bohemia just east of Brunn at the end of November.

A not unimportant element in the situation was stiff Austro-Russian
diplomatic pressure on Prussia to join the league of mediation with her
180,000 soldiers, drilled in the manner of Frederick the Great. This
pressure had reached its peak; as French and allied patrols bickered
along the road between Brunn and Olmutz, the Prussian foreign minister
was at Napoleon's headquarters to deliver an ultimatum and the allies
knew it. They were also fully conscious that successive retirements
toward reserves had given them a field numerical superiority (the cold
figures were 85,000 to 70,000), that the French cavalry had for several
days been showing a want of enterprise, the French infantry advances had
been stopped. Napoleon seemed to regret having been pulled so far from
his base and to be preparing for a withdrawal. To strike him at such a
moment of doubt would not only take advantage of the moral and numerical
factors, but would undoubtedly draw Prussia in. Colonel Weyrother, the
Austrian Kaiser's chief of staff, was appointed to draw a battle plan.

Patrols had located the French in a roughly northeast-southwest line
across the Brunn-Olmutz highway, on some hills with steep slopes but
flat tops, just behind a brook called the Goldbach, which flows south
into some pools, now frozen. East of this brook is a high hill, the
Pratzen, just in front of the village of Austerlitz, which the French
had held but abandoned, one of the reasons for thinking they meant
retreat. At the village of Sokolnitz, on the French side of the
Goldbach, the hills occupied by them break away sharply southwestward
toward the road running south to Vienna. This road was Napoleon's line
of communications, and Weyrother, who was a great student of Frederick
the Great, perceived that the position offered an admirable opportunity
for an oblique attack in Frederick's own manner, the weight to be
directed against the French right wing, their sensitive flank.

The detail of the plan was that Austrian General Kienmayer, with the
Austrian cavalry and some light infantry, would work close along the
ponds around the French right toward Raigern Abbey, on the Brunn-Vienna
road. Russian General Dokhtorov, 8,500 men, would strike the extreme
French right; General Langeron, a French emigre in the Russian service,
with 12,000 men was to attack Sokolnitz, next in line; General
Przebyschevski, 14,000 strong, to assault Sokolnitz Castle, just
upstream from the village. While this triple attack was breaking the
French right, their left center would be contained by General Bagration,
striking along the Brunn-Olmutz highway toward a little round hill
called the Santon, supported by 6,000 Austrian cavalry and the Russian
imperial cavalry guard under Grand Duke Constantine, 8,500 men.
Concealed behind the Pratzen were 25,000 more men, a heavy column under
Russian Miloradovitch and Austrian Kollowrath; they would follow the
Dokhtorov-Przebyschevki-Langeron columns, rolling up the French line
after their right was broken.

The plan was explained at a council of war on the night of December 2,
1805, and the attack was set for dawn. It was indeed the sort of battle
plan the great Frederick might have conceived, and there was only one
thing wrong with it--that it was exactly what Napoleon was inviting the
allies to do. In view of the menace of Prussia it was even more
necessary for him to win a battle than for them, and he had planned not
merely to win, but to destroy. His left did not extend beyond the Santon
hill; but there he placed Marshal Lannes with three heavy and very good
divisions, ordered to hold hard. On his right, along the hills from
Sokolnitz to Raigern Abbey, he stationed his very best fighting
commander, Marshal Davout, with orders to hold like hell; all the rest
of the army, over 40,000 men, were arranged in depth between the Santon
and Sokolnitz, a coiled spring under heavy pressure waiting to be
released, a torpedo waiting to be launched. That evening the Emperor of
the French rode along the lines, and as the soldiers made torches of
straw and shouted at him, said, "Before tomorrow night I'll have that
army," gesturing toward where the allies had taken up position precisely
as he had hoped they would.

The morning broke thick, with a growl of cannon out to the allied left,
the French right. Kienmayer found he did not have room to work up his
horse for a swing on the extreme flank, and as Dokhtorov's column
crossed the Goldbach, it met sharpshooters on vineyard-covered slopes,
slowed up and pinched in by the fact that the neighboring columns
occupied so much room that nobody could deploy properly. The Russians
came on with their usual Slavic resolution, and Langeron even took
Sokolnitz village in fighting so fierce that both sides were shooting
across parapets of corpses; but the assaulters could not make their
numbers count, and at the very moment when they began to close on
Sokolnitz Castle, Davout violently counterattacked them with a storm of
heavy cavalry. The advance against the French right was halted dead by
eight in the morning.


At the same hour the sun--the sun of Austerlitz, as it came to be
called--burst through the clouds and Napoleon, looking across the clear
valley at the Pratzen, said to his Marshal Soult, "How long do you
require to reach those heights?"

"Less than twenty minutes."

"In that case, let us wait a quarter of an hour more."

He waited, while smoke and thunder erupted from the valley where Davout
was struggling against the three allied columns, and then launched his
torpedo just as Miloradovitch began to slant across the eastern edge of
the Pratzen to the support of the allied left. His men were in column,
totally undeployed, and their guns were in limber at the tail of the
mass. The hasty line they tried to form as thousands of French came
across the Pratzen was swept right away; the men of the column
surrendered by hundreds and thousands and the whole high plateau was
French by ten o'clock in the morning. The allied center had disappeared;
its right and left were now separate forces.

On the allied right, the French left, Bagration hit hard at the French
infantry, but Lannes' men formed square, and Bagration was himself
struck in the flank by cuirassiers dispatched from the Pratzen by
Napoleon. By eleven the allied right was broken; Napoleon turned his
attention to their left, where the columns of attack had come to a
stand, laced them with artillery and musketry fire, and ordered the guns
to break the ice on the frozen pools across which some were attempting
to escape. When the shouting twilight closed in, Austrians and Russians
had lost 30,000 men, all their baggage, guns, food, ammunition, and
transport, and this particular war was over.


      VI

Austerlitz was decisive in two dimensions, one military and one
political. It changed the whole art of war, the method of obtaining
decisions in battle, by introducing grand tactics. In the system of
Gustavus, in that of Frederick the Great, and even in the earlier
Napoleonic battles, it was possible for a commander to change his mind
while the fighting was going on, to reinforce one wing from another or
alter the direction of an attack. Not so at Austerlitz; the major units
were irrevocably committed to a course of action the moment the fighting
began.

Napoleon was the first to perceive that the masses had grown too large
for anything else; that with 70,000 men on a front seven miles long, no
one eye or brain could exercise continuing control. Oriental armies had
often been larger than those that fought at Austerlitz, but in them
there was no effort at any coordinated tactical plan; it was simply a
case of achieving contact and awaiting the result of a melee. That is,
Austerlitz introduced the system that made it possible to handle in the
field and with precision the new large national armies that were the
product of the universal conscription introduced by the French Revolution.

But
 this was attained at a price. The Napoleonic grand tactics involved
committing a unit up to a 15,000-man corps to an assigned course of
action and being unable to change its operations thereafter until it had
accomplished its mission. (The columns of attack on the Pratzen did
swing in other directions, but not until they had demolished
Miloradovitch.) This involved not only pre-planning the battle; it also
required that subordinate commanders should be deprived of all but local
initiative. At least it did in Napoleon's day, before anyone but himself
understood what the new tactics meant.

In the failure to give initiative to subordinates, in the failure to
develop juniors who seized it for themselves, may be found one of the
causes for the ultimate military downfall of the Napoleonic empire. The
general criticism of Napoleon's marshals is that they could lead but not
direct. Davout and Massena were exceptions, to be sure; but in
Napoleon's effort to extend grand tactics into strategy and personally
to control armies operating across the whole face of Europe, even these
two never got an opportunity to make the most of what they had. The
French Empire may be said to have perished because it had only one man
who could command an army of over 50,000, and his method of grand
tactics did not allow him to bring up successors. When the allies
overwhelmed Napoleon, they did it by beating all the armies but the one
he personally commanded. They had no generals of his ability, but they
had many equal to his subordinates.

Yet the defect in the Napoleonic method was not in the method itself,
but in the physical techniques that supported it; specifically, those of
communication. During the campaigns in Spain officers accustomed to
receiving very precise orders that launched them in a certain course
kept getting directives that no longer related to the changed
conditions. Napoleon had invented something he lacked the tools to apply
to any larger field than Austerlitz, yet tried to apply everywhere. The
French Empire perished through this fault; but it was the French Empire,
not the French Revolution and the changes it stood for.

If the idea of the universal state died at Lutzen and that of the Empire
of all Germany at Torgau, at Austerlitz there fell the final claim to
imperial dominion over those lands that had once been Charlemagne's.
Before the campaign of 1805 there remained such a claim, however
shadowy; George II of England was still _Elector_ of Hannover,
Maximilian Joseph was still _Elector_ of Bavaria, each with at least a
theoretical share in the government of the empire. After that campaign
the Holy Roman Empire became one frankly of the Austrian crown lands
alone, a kind of zombie which would stagger around for another 113 years
before falling down, but whose fate was really decided on that one field.

There had ceased to exist any real point of focus for the forces
represented by Friedrich Gentz, or any power that stood a chance of
successfully challenging the ideas and policies of the Revolution as
consolidated by Napoleon. The war would last as long as he lasted, but
beneath it the work of consolidation went on, and after the allies got
rid of the man they called "the Monster," they found they could not do
more than throw a veneer over the solid work that remained. The new
society was established; the most the rest of Europe could do was to get
rid of the man who had given it permanence.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    15. THE THINGS DECIDED AT VICKSBURG




      I

In the beginning no one realized how important Vicksburg was. It was not
even a major item in the system of fortifications by which the
Confederacy hoped to secure its natural frontiers in the West and to
exert pressure on the northern states of the Mississippi valley by
blockading the outlets for their products. That was the original
concept; a land blockade of water traffic. In the terms of 1861 thinking
this was a logical project. Ever since the Old Northwest began to fill
up after the Revolution, the natural outlet for its wheat, beef, pork,
lumber, and even the manufactured products of Pittsburgh had been by way
of the Mississippi. The lakes carried some items to Buffalo for
transshipment down the Erie Canal and the railroads were beginning to
extend steel fingers to the plains, but the great river remained the
main artery.

To dominate the upper river General Leonidas Polk of Confederate
Department 2 lunged forward into "neutral" Kentucky and built a great
fortress on high bluffs at Columbus, armed mainly with the guns taken in
the huge windfall at Norfolk Navy Yard. Forts Henry and Donelson on the
Tennessee and Cumberland covered his rear areas, and it is interesting
to note that they should be regarded as adequate for that cover; the
movement of the armies, like that of commercial traffic, was regarded as
ultimately dependent on water transport because of the supply problem.
No one believed that any serious military advance could be made through
the tangled western Kentucky country between Columbus and Fort Henry
without exposing its flanks and rear. Below Columbus, at the
Tennessee-Kentucky line, low-lying Island No. 10 was heavily fortified,
and the high ground on the Tennessee side opposite. At spaced stages
between the island and Memphis, wherever geography offered a field of
fire that would make downcoming ships slow up and take difficult turns,
there were other forts--Pillow, Randolph, Harris. Even Pillow received
forty guns; Vicksburg, so far downstream that its function was
considered that of a guard post, got only a few.

The Confederate strategic concept of 1861 was thus that commercial
necessity would force the Union to make a campaign down the Mississippi;
and that this campaign could be slowed up, brought to futility against a
chain of fortresses, like those that held the Belgian frontier against
France in the old wars. The plan had this advantage: that, while in the
flat plains of Europe any one of several lines of operation was
available to an invading army, the Union forces were practically
compelled to work down the Mississippi, supporting their drive on river
traffic.

That was how it looked to Richmond, specifically to Jefferson Davis,
graduate of West Point and book-learned soldier. The strategic concept
seemed to be confirmed in November 1861, when a Union force dropped
downstream with a couple of gunboats and temporarily occupied Belmont,
opposite Columbus, but was easily driven off. Not until word came
through that the Yankees were building warships at Cairo and St. Louis
was any thought given to defending the river on the river itself; then
there were laid down at Memphis two powerful ironclad rams of the
general type of _Virginia_ (ex-_Merrimack_). Down at New Orleans there
was a naval command, but it was solely concerned with the area between
that city and the sea. When General Mansfield Lowell arrived to take
military command of the New Orleans district late in 1861, he became so
exercised over naval defense on the stream that he seized twelve river
ships and converted them to rams, bulwarked with timber and pressed
cotton bales. Most of them were sent to Memphis as the "River Defense
Fleet" under army command.

The reason for this was that by the time they were ready Union strategy
in the Mississippi valley had unfolded along lines utterly different
from the original Confederate conception. The major method of operation
was less thought out than felt out, but began to develop fairly early in
the fall of 1861, when Brigadier General U. S. Grant, in military
command of an area of vague definition out of Cairo, Illinois, made
contact with Commodore A. H. Foote, who had been sent west to lead the
Mississippi naval squadron.

This squadron had been in process since sumer, and its principal units
were the product of the mind and drive of James B. Eads, a remarkable
man who started as an apple boy, taught himself diving and engineering,
and became a millionaire. The ships were nine gunboats, intended
specifically to deal with fortifications ashore. They were aptly likened
to turtles, with iron plating around their prows, carrying three heavy
guns ahead and four 32-pounders on each beam. Foote hit it off at once
with Grant, and loaned him two earlier-built wooden gunboats for that
operation to Belmont. It was really a raid, intended to attract
attention from operations elsewhere, and when the Confederates who
crossed to the Missouri shore tried to mop up the little force Grant had
brought, they were stopped cold by the heavy guns of the ships.

The difference in conception as to what had happened at Belmont had
important effects. It confirmed Confederate strategists in their view
that the river could be closed by forts, and it convinced Grant that
guns carried by ships could be moved so fast and in such numbers that it
would be almost impossible for field troops to stand up against them
when also assailed by infantry. In other words, he had this early
attained at least a rudimentary concept of combined operations, and it
was to this type that he addressed himself as soon as ice-free rivers
permitted, at the beginning of February 1862.

But he did not project this operation down the Mississippi, as the
Confederates expected. A reconnaissance up the Tennessee in January
convinced him that Fort Henry was weakly held. With some difficulty, he
persuaded his departmental commander, General H. W. Halleck, to let him
attack the place, and moved upstream against it, with seven of Foote's
gunboats leading. On February 6, while the troops were struggling
through drowned land and forest toward the rear of the fortress, the
ships shot it all to pieces, and Grant arrived only in time to find that
it had surrendered to the navy.

It was characteristic of Grant that instead of asking Halleck
 for any
more permissions, he should telegraph that he was going to take
Donelson, too, and start marching his men for the place while the
gunboats went around by the rivers. Donelson was a far different
proposition than Henry; instead of being almost water level, it was
mounted up the sides of a steep bluff, its cannon commanding a bend. The
consequence was that when the gunboats moved in on February 14 they took
a plunging fire into their upper decks, where there was no armor, and
were driven off, with several of them disabled and no particular damage
to the fort.

But while this was going on Grant closed on the fort from the rear. An
attempt at a sortie failed, Grant counterattacked and took enough of the
works to make the position untenable. On February 16, Donelson
surrendered with 15,000 men.

It was a turning point in the Civil War in the West. The Confederacy was
all along to suffer from manpower shortages, and the loss of the
Donelson garrison was a serious blow. Still more serious was the fact
that the Confederate defense system was invalidated, and most of the
essentials of war along the western rivers worked out. The gunboats
cruised up the Tennessee clear into Alabama, and on the Cumberland took
Nashville without help from the land forces. It was also demonstrated
that they would have a decidedly rough time against artillery mounted
high for plunging fire, but could cover and support the operations of
troops to take that artillery from behind.


      II

The Henry-Donelson debacle made nonsense of the great fortress at
Columbus, which could be outflanked and cut off along fairly good lines
of communication from Grant's position on the Tennessee. It was
abandoned, the guns being moved to places farther downstream, while the
troops were called in to Corinth, Mississippi, by General Albert Sidney
Johnston, overall Confederate commander in the West. He also summoned
troops from every other area under his authority for a great smash to
demolish Grant, who had moved up the Tennessee to Pittsburgh Landing, a
position very dangerous to the Confederacy. It was the normal
transshipment point where goods left the rivers to reach at Corinth both
the rail line running deep into Mississippi and the long lateral road
Memphis-Corinth-Chattanooga, one of the only two such lines crossing the
Confederacy. Halleck ordered General Buell with the Army of the Ohio to
join Grant; he was going to undertake a campaign against Corinth.

On the morning of Sunday, April 6, 1862, Johnson delivered his attack,
achieve surprise, and almost did demolish Grant's army. Thousands of
them fled to the cover of the bluffs along the river; but the rest,
sustained mainly by Grant's personal leadership and the hard fighting
around Shiloh church by a hard-faced, red-bearded brigadier named
William T. Sherman, made it into the most savage battle yet fought on
the American continent. The Union right was driven far back. But early
in the afternoon Albert Sidney Johnston was killed and there was some
confusion in the Confederate command. The decisive attack on the other
wing, intended to pry Grant away from his river landing and
communications, did not come till very late. By this time the Union line
had impacted around the landing with its artillery in position. The
Union gunboats in the river shelled the rebel lines all night, while
Buell's steady battalions crossed and filed into line. In the morning
the Union forces counterattacked, drove the Confederates from the field,
and it was Grant's victory.

It is natural that the early battles in any war should lead to a good
deal of deducing, as it becomes evident that the current conflict
contains elements that have not been present in any other. Shiloh told
both sides that the apparent ease with which the South had won at Bull
Run and the North at Fort Donelson was illusory; that a hard and
probably long struggle was in prospect--and this was true. It also
founded in the North the reputation of Grant as a smash 'em, hard-bitten
fighter who did not do much thinking, and though this was not true at
all, it clung to him to the end, and was reinforced by his taciturnity,
his immobile countenance, and a certain deliberation of physical movement.

Probably more important to the progress of the war were the deductions
drawn by the commanders. One of the reasons Grant got himself surprised
was that he failed to entrench. Halleck, who now assumed command of the
combined armies of Grant and Buell for the drive on Corinth, did not
intend to let that happen again, and conducted his drive by digging,
which achieved the lightning speed of a mile a day. He got Corinth, all
right, but not until May 30, 1862, and then found he did not know what
to do with it. His army numbered above 100,000 men; the Confederates had
torn up the north-south railroad down from Columbus so that all supplies
had to come by the Tennessee, but that river was now so low it would
hardly any longer carry the necessities for so many troops. Moreover,
the Confederates, relieved of immediate pressure, had set up an area of
operations around Chattanooga, and it was important to prevent the army
there from jabbing northward. Just before he was called East to take
general direction of the armies of the republic, Halleck accordingly
divided, sending Buell to counter the force around Chattanooga and
leaving Grant to conduct operations from Corinth.

But the most significant of the lessons from Shiloh was in the work of
the river navy, which supported the army at the end of a long line of
secure communications and furnished that invaluable artillery cover for
the endangered Union left wing. The point was underscored by an event
that took place farther west at almost the same time. This was the fall
of the great Confederate river barrier at Island No. 10. General John
Pope approached the place along the Missouri shore with an army of some
20,000, but was prohibited from crossing to pinch it out from the
Tennessee side by field guns along the narrow strip of dry ground there.
But on the night of April 4, Commander Henry Walke of the ironclad
_Carondelet_ ran his ship downstream right through the batteries in a
storm of thunder and lightning. After a day's rest the gunboat knocked
out the field guns on the east bank, escorted Pope's troops across, and
Island No. 10, its communications completely gone, had to surrender with
7,000 men.

Another term had been added to the complex of combined operations on the
rivers. Ships could run past batteries, no matter how formidable and,
once past, could support troops to cut in behind them.

This was presently reinforced in resounding terms from the other end of
the Mississippi, where old Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut brought
up a strong fleet of ocean vessels and some bombardment mortars to try
conclusions with the two powerful forts covering New Orleans. Three days
of bombardment failed to tame the forts; Farragut impatiently ran his
ocean-going ships past them, destroying the Confederate fleet on the
lower river in a terrific battle, and on April 25 anchored off New
Orleans. Two days later the forts surrendered, and the largest city in
the Confederacy was gone.

This was the event that suddenly made the importance of Vicksburg vital,
for after Halleck took Corinth on May 30, the forts on the upper river
became useless; he was behind them. Pillow and the lesser works were
evacuated peacefully on June 4, and two days later the Union gunboats
wiped out the River Defense Fleet off Memphis. The city surrendered to
the navy and became Grant's downstream base. Vicksburg was now the only
barrier to Union domination of the whole stream, the only cover for
communication between the east and west Confederacy. The rebels began
fortifying it heavily in April, just after Island No. 10 fell, and
neither effort nor expense was spared.


      III

There was a certain amount of misapprehension on both sides, and at this
point the Confederates had already paid for most of theirs. The thing
that bothered Richmond from the beginning was those Union ironclads on
the upper river. The attack on New Orleans from the sea fell as a
stunning surprise, and the defenses were neither coordinated nor fully
prepared. At a date when Farragut's ships were already moving up to
begin the bombardment, the Confederate Navy Department sent a stern
order that a strong ironclad building at New Orleans should be sent up
to Memphis at once. That is, they recognized--to late--the defects of
the fortress system in the face of amphibious operations, and tried to
make good the deficit by supporting the forts with floating defense. But
the floating defenders were now all gone except the ram _Arkansas_,
which had been towed down from Memphis and then up the Yazoo River for
completion. There was nothing left to do but try to make the fortress
system work through better control of the inland areas behind. The
process was sensibly aided by the fact that all available forces could
be concentrated in support of the only major fortress remaining, and by
the lack of a good water route leading to the rear of that fortress.

On the Union side there was still comparatively little understanding of
the fact that success had really been due to combined operations.
Halleck's army at Corinth had had quite as much to do with the movement
of the gunboats down past forts Pillow, Randolph, and Harris as the
gunboats had with the fall of Island No. 10. It was too easily assumed,
on the basis of both river operations and successes along the coast,
that no sort of fort could stand up against ships with heavy guns.
Farragut at New Orleans received very positive orders to go upstream and
help the gunboat fleet take Vicksburg. The only military support
allotted consisted of 3,000 men from the New Orleans occupation command.

It was somewhat unrealistic to expect this force to
 climb the 200-foot
bluffs of Vicksburg in the face of the defenders, who now amounted to an
army, and the unreality was compounded by the fact that the deep-draft,
long, unarmored ocean vessels were about as unsuited for work in a
winding river filled with uncharted snags and sand bars as any ships
could well be. Farragut went up, nevertheless, and after numerous
groundings and accidents, was just south of Vicksburg on June 25 and in
communication across the isthmus opposite the place with Flag Officer C.
H. Davis, now commanding the gunboat squadron. The mortars that had
bombarded the New Orleans forts were brought up to shell the batteries,
and on the night of the twenty-eighth Farragut's fleet ran fighting
through to join the gunboats at the mount of the Yazoo, just above the town.

Now the operation rapidly turned to failure in spite of the ships' not
being much hurt. Against the midnight hills the ships had to fire at
flash and they obviously did no damage to speak of. As for the river
gunboats, they were ocean again facing plunging fire, as at Donelson,
Columbus, and Pillow, and could do no more than assure the
communications and cover the flanks of an army that was not there. For
two weeks the naval commanders discussed the situation, then sparked
apart, Farragut back through the batteries to New Orleans, Davis to base
at Helena, Arkansas.

It was merely one of those ventures into the domain of the fantastic in
which the Civil War is so rich that the vent which touched off the
splitting of the fleets was the wholly unexpected appearance of the ram
_Arkansas_ from the Yazoo, running through the combined squadrons to
anchor under the guns of Vicksburg. Her career lasted just twenty-three
days. When she tried to go down and supply naval support for a
Confederate army attack on Baton Rouge, her engines gave out in the
presence of Union gunboats and the crew had to burn her up. But the
Vicksburg fortress had fulfilled its mission so well that the
Confederates now built another farther down at Port Hudson to keep the
ocean ships from coming back, and to hold open communications with the
West via the Red River.

The leading military event of the late summer and early fall in the West
was Confederate Bragg's invasion of Kentucky. Troops were drawn off from
Grant to help against this move until he had barely 30,000 in his mobile
force, and this with the railroad supply line from Columbus to Corinth
to cover. In October, Grant decided to take the offensive, Bragg's
invasion having been turned back at Perryville, a Confederate force
having been defeated at Corinth, and word having arrived that new troops
were coming downstream to Memphis, as well as some reinforcements from
the trans-Mississippi. His line was down the Mississippi Central
Railroad, which projects from Corinth to reach the rear of Vicksburg at
the junction of Jackson. The plan was this: Grant was to move down the
railroad line, rebuilding destructions as he went, while Sherman picked
up the new troops at Memphis, came downstream in transports and, with
the help of the gunboats, attacked the Chickasaw Bluffs just north of
the mouth of Yazoo. The Confederates did not have force enough to be
strong both against Grant's advance and the bluffs; one of these attacks
should break through, communication with the rivers from the high ground
would be established, and a campaign against Vicksburg from the rear begun.

This plan ignored two factors, one of which was not immediately
apparent. The Confederates had become very alarmed about the safety of
their fortress, and had appointed General Joe Johnston to command the
whole area west of the Alleghenies; he built up the forces under General
John C. Pemberton in the Vicksburg area to a strength that permitted
freedom of movement. As Grant pushed down his railroad line, reaching a
point over 200 miles from his major base at Columbus, he established an
advanced depot of stores at Holly Springs, east of Memphis, and
unconnected with that town except by inefficient wagon tracks, the
railroad connection having long since gone. On December 20, the day
Sherman's expedition left Memphis for downstream, the Confederate
cavalry of Van Dorn fell on the Holly Springs depot, burned it out and,
with the help of other cavalry raiders, tore up many miles of track
toward Columbus. Grant had to go back to Memphis at once, the troops
marching on three-quarter rations, and there was no way to tell Sherman
what had happened, since the wires were down and a letter would have to
reach Memphis before proceeding downstream.

The consequence was that Pemberton was quite free to concentrate against
Sherman and did so, bloodily beating off his attack when the gunboats
proved no more capable of dealing with artillery on high bluffs than
they had ever been. The essential fact was that this was the mirror
image of the naval attempt on Vicksburg in June, not really a combined
operation. Sherman's men were carried by ships and supported by them,
but this was an amphibious attack, quite a different thing. At no time
was Grant's own striking force in touch with or aided by the fleet. In a
country so wide and generally flat as the Mississippi valley,
communications that did not travel a great deal of the distance by water
could be protected only at ruinous cost in detachments.


      IV

When Grant reached Memphis after a hard march, he made the appalling
discovery of the second factor of ignorance. Back in September one of
his corps commanders, John A. McClernand, had gone to Washington on
leave. This was a politician who had been commissioned out of civil
life; a Democrat from Illinois of outstanding loyalty to the Union and
somewhat more outstanding loyalty to his own advancement. In the capital
he told Lincoln that it would be easy for a man of his popularity to
recruit an entirely new army in Indiana, Illinois, and Opwa for a
campaign down the river against Vicksburg. The recruiting problem was
becoming serious, the word "draft" was being mentioned and it was rather
a dirty word. Lincoln was persuaded to give McClernand a secret order
empowering him to command an "Army of the Mississippi." McClernand
performed the recruiting part of his mission very well; many of the
levies that came to Memphis were of his provision. But many also were
not, and neither were the troops from the trans-Mississippi or the other
formations Grant had left with Sherman. All the same, McClernand turned
up at the bluffs of the Yazoo just after the repulse, brandished his
secret order and, in virtue of it, not only assumed command of half
Grant's army, but went off with it up the Arkansas on a private
expedition against a fort there.

Of course the command arrangement was straightened out after a somewhat
acrid exchange of telegrams with Washington, and McClernand returned to
his position as a corps commander under Grant. But the operative fact
was that Grant now had to go down to the lower river base at Young's
Point and take command in person, with enough troops from the inland
expedition to make it clear that this was no McClernand's army but his
own. At this point the politics of strategy entered the picture. The
news of the dreadful defeat at Fredericksburg had just shaken the North,
and it came on the heels of the failure of the Lincoln party in the fall
elections. If Grant now brought all his troops back to Memphis and
replanned an overland campaign, it would be an admission of defeat and
the effect might well be disastrous. Grant was perfectly conscious of
this and of the fact that although the setback had really taken place,
it was vitally important not to let people know about it. McClernand's
action had thus politically committed him to a campaign against
Vicksburg from the low west bank.

In itself there was nothing wrong with this. It ensured another combined
operation, and Grant had become rather partial to working with the
gunboats, now under command of the vain, irascible, dynamic, and able
David Porter. But it imposed a virtually insoluble problem of means and
communications. Below Vicksburg, all the way to Port Hudson and beyond,
the highlands follow the east bank of the stream. It would be possible
to march an army down the west bank and win a crossing by one of the
methods established in the military art since the days of Gustavus
Adolphus, but once across, how would that army maintain itself? On the
basis of previous experience, the armored warships could be expected to
run through the batteries with an acceptable amount of loss, but there
were needed vessels that could provide a steady flow of supplies for
over 30,000 men, ships making round trips. It was idle to suppose that
such thin-shelled craft could work back and forth past those heights
which daily grew more formidable.

Thus Grant's problem was to secure logistic support for a move across
the river to some spot south of Vicksburg. The first attempt (on a
suggestion from Washington) was by digging a canal across the neck of
the land opposite the city. Grant never had much faith in it, and it
never produced more than enough water to float a rowboat, while the
Confederates set up new batteries opposite the exit, but it did keep the
people busy during an uncomfortable winter in the Louisiana lowlands.

The next attempt was double. South of Memphis the high ground slants
wide to the eastward before turning back to touch the Mississippi again
at Vicksburg, forming the great diamond-shaped area of marshy flatland,
cut by slow-paced watercourses, known as the Yazoo delta--nearly 200
miles long, nearly fifty miles broad, across which troops cannot march.
The rivers of the eastern high ground flow west before they break
through to attach themselves to the Yazoo in this delta. With the coming
of January and freshet water it should be possible to shoot gunboats
into the maze of streams in the delta,
 win a way into one of the
westward-flowing streams where it breaks the highlands, and there
establish a beachhead fed by naval support.

Far up the line a levee closed an old gap called Yazoo Pass, where the
Mississippi had earlier annually flowed through into the Coldwater River
and thence the Yazoo. This levee was blown on February 3, 1863, and four
days later, the flood having reached sufficient height, eight light
gunboats passed in, with transports carrying 800 troops. Overhanging
branches and underwater obstructions tore at them and slowed progress;
the Confederates got word of the movement and had time to erect a
brand-new fort at the mouth of the Tallahatchie, surrounded by waters so
that it would not be taken from the land side. The stream was so narrow
that only two gunboats could approach at a time; they proved nowhere
near enough to deal with the new fort, the commander of the Union
expedition went insane, and it miserably pulled out.

While this was still undecided, Admiral Porter in person, with a
squadron of ironclads, was trying to work through the maze of bayous and
rivers from near the mouth of the Yazoo to reach high ground north of
the bluffs that had stopped Sherman. He had better luck than the Yazoo
Pass expedition in encountering no forts; and worse, in that at a
critical point in his progress he encountered a stream-barring bed of
underwater willows which his ships could not break through. Confederate
snipers attacked him from the banks; he had to unship rudders and drift
downstream to safety, and the only gain of the expedition was a pair of
fine turkeys for General Sherman's table.

There was, then, no way of reaching the Vicksburg high ground via the
Yazoo delta, and while these projects were under way, another canal
effort failed. West of the main stream was an old course named Lake
Providence, which it seemed might be deepened to lead into the Red River
below Vicksburg. The channel was cut; Lake Providene flooded indeed, but
then ran out into marshes and there was no passage for ships. By
mid-April people in Washington were condemning Grant in unmeasured
terms, and there was still no visible means of furnishing an army with
logistic support for an advance along the high ground on which Vicksburg
stood. The general asked Porter whether he could run enough gunboats
through the batteries to cover a crossing and, being told yes, gave
orders for the army to march down the right bank.

There was a great moment during that march, the moment when William
Tecumseh Sherman sat beside Grant on a log and asked what he meant to do.

"Cross here and reach the high ground," said Grant.

Sherman said, "That would be putting yourself voluntarily in a position
which the enemy would be glad to maneuver a year to get you in." He
urged that Grant should go back to Memphis, fortify, build a road. Grant
heard him out and said shortly, "The country is tired of retreats. I
shall cross here."

Sherman said, "But your communications? You cannot get supplies down the
west bank."

"No communications. We will live off the country."

At the time Sherman said nothing at all, only stared, he was too amazed
to do more, but later he was to remark, "I am a better general than he
is, but I lack his iron nerve."


      V

There was no precedent for any such thing since Napoleon's first
campaign in Italy, and even this was not a solid precedent, since the
Corsican cut loose from one line of supply only long enough to uncover a
new one. It would be utter disaster for Grant and the country if he
failed, and the elements of failure were present. He had not over 41,000
men in the three corps of McClernand, McPherson, and Sherman, while
Pemberton had at least 40,000 in the Vicksburg area, and Joe Johnston
was eastward in range with unknown but formidable numbers. When the
gunboats ran through the batteries with seven transports to test
matters, only one of the latter was sunk, but several were reduced to
barges that had to be towed, and the first attempt to shoot out a
foothold at Grand Gulf ended in a beating for the ships. There could be
no turning back; and if the army failed, the ships were faced with the
prospect of being caught in a steadily narrowing area of fire from high
places.

But Grant gave himself every chance for success. The initial crossing
was made by the corps of McClernand and McPherson at Bruinsburg, well
south of any fortified point and three miles from the foot of the
bluffs, a place where surprise could be achieved. Sherman stayed behind
temporarily at the mouth of the Yazoo with several gunboats to make a
noisy demonstration toward the bluffs where he had been hurled back
before. This worked; Pemberton shifted some of his strength in that
direction and did not even begin to change arrangements until he heard
of what was happening farther south.

The news was the landing of McClernand's whole corps, 16,000 men, at
four on the afternoon of April 30, with three days' rations in their
haversacks. Grant, at last on high ground, but with all the perils yet
to come, nevertheless "felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equalled
since" as he watched Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa swing past, no
parade soldiers, but dusty and competent. The bands did not play; there
was only the inexorable tramp, tramp, tramp of marching men, and after
them, the guns. By twilight the corps was on the cliffs at Port Gibson;
at dawn contact was made with the enemy.

There was a division of some 7,000 men under General Bowen, who had been
in command of the Grand Gulf garrison, and who had, of course, been
advised of the landing as soon as it took place. Pemberton had spent
most of the night getting off telegrams to assemble his various
commands, and off to the east Joe Johnston was assembling men at
Jackson, the obvious point of impact if the Federal line of advance were
prolonged.

The country around Port Gibson is composed of high ridges slashed by
ravines filled with brush and canebrake, admirable for defense, but
McClernand had too many men, and by noon two brigades of McPherson's
joined him; in a sharp little battle the Confederates were thrown off
northwestward, with 600 prisoners lost. Near Grand Gulf they were joined
by another division Pemberton sent in support and various scattered
groups that brought Bowen up to 17,000 men. He did not consider Grand
Gulf safe, and got behind the Big Black River, his men much worn with
marching. A division of McPherson's slashed out to keep him going, the
rest of the Union army pushed on toward Jackson, officers and men
working together in waist-deep water to build bridges. Sherman came
crowding up behind the advance.

They marched. There was no bread, the country was rough and the roads
were bad, but there were local bacon, beef, and molasses, and by God,
they marched; not in the direction of Vicksburg, as Pemberton was
expecting, but toward Jackson. On May 12 at Raymond more Confederates
were encountered, a brigade being called in on Pemberton from farther
south. They were beaten by McPherson and lost 400 prisoners.

"Its effects were trifling," wired Johnston, but he considered
McPherson's force a detachment with which the nearly 12,000 men he had
assembled at Jackson could deal, and urged Pemberton to fall on the rear
of Grant's main body. Pemberton's main ideas at this point were that he
must not get too far from his base at Vicksburg, but that if Grant were
as far east as Raymond the Union line of communications back to the
river was becoming excessively long. He therefore stayed generally _in
situ_, shifting his weight slightly to the right for a blow at that line
of communications when he had a good chance.

Thus both Confederate commanders had an incomplete and inaccurate
picture of what was going on. Actually, as soon as the Battle of Raymond
was won, McPherson shot off leftward to strike the Jackson-Vicksburg
railroad at Clinton, while Sherman moved straight on Jackson. On the
thirteenth McPherson took Clinton and was between Johnston and
Pemberton. It rained in torrents, the water was often a foot deep as the
men marched, but they were in high spirits, with a taint of victory in
the air; they cheered their general wildly as he rode past. On the
fourteenth both McPherson and Sherman were before Jackson; they
assaulted, Sherman got a division around a flank, Johnston was driven
from the town, with 800 prisoners and seventeen guns lost. He turned
north with what he had left, sending a message to Pemberton to urge that
general to join him in that direction for an attack on Grant's rear.

But Grant's flowing mass of force had no real rear, and Pemberton was
already moving south toward the attack on the nonexistent line of
communications. In addition, Grant got a copy of the Johnston message,
which the Union cryptographers promptly deciphered. He turned everything
toward Pemberton, McPherson from Jackson with Sherman shoving along
behind, McClernand from Raymond. Fighting contact was made on May 16 at
Champion's Hill--a high hill slanting southwest to the considerable
stream of Baker's Creek. McClernand, who was to break through on the
left, was inexcusably tardy in going in, but after four hours of
fighting two of McPherson's divisions got around and stormed the peak on
the Union right. Ruin spread along the Confederate line and they were
driven from the field in rout. They lost 3,000 in killed and wounded,
3,000 prisoners, and twenty-four guns. Grant personally drove
McClernand's men in on their collapsing right so fast that what was left
of a whole Confederate division, unable to find a ford across Baker's
Creek that was not already in possession of the Yankees, wandered off
far southward to turn up at Mobile.

Grant followed hard. Next morning he found the refugees from the battle
ensconced in a bridgehead at the Big Black. Sherman was already pressing
forward on the right
 to gain a passage farther up the stream. The other
two corps moved up to the bridgehead, and just at this moment there
arrived before Grant a colonel who had ridden hard with a telegram from
Halleck in Washington, transmitted through New Orleans. It ordered the
disorderly general to return to his base Grand Gulf. Grant remarked that
it was rather late in the game for that; the colonel started to argue,
but just then there was a burst of cheering on the right, and General
Lawler of McClernand's command went past in his shirt sleeves, leading a
charge for the bridgehead. It broke right in; the Confederates lost
1,751 more prisoners and eighteen more guns, and by the next night the
coils were closing around Vicksburg and Pemberton was telling his chief
engineer that his career was ended in disaster and disgrace.

Down on the river the crew of the gunboats looked aloft to see men in
blue capering on those bluffs so long inexpungable. Among them was
Sherman; he turned to Grant and said, "Until this moment I never
believed in your success. But this _is_ a campaign; this is a success,
if we never take the town."


      VI

The measure of the success is statistical: in seventeen days Grant had
marched 130 miles, won five battles, put out of action, killed, or
captured 14,000 of Pemberton's men, taken over sixty pieces of
artillery; his own loss was 2,000. Of course he took the town; there
were six weeks of assaults repulsed, hard bombardment, exploding mines,
and endurance to follow after that meeting of the generals, but it had
become a fully combined operation once more. Down the river, covered by
the navy, there poured an inexhaustible flood of ammunition, supplies,
reinforcements until Grant had 75,000 men in the lines and there was no
chance of relief. A few days after Vicksburg surrendered on July 4,
1863, Port Hudson gave up to a force operating out of New Orleans and
the Mississippi became fully Union territory.

The obvious economic result was that communication between the Northwest
and the Gulf was restored, though it never again regained the
proportional importance it had before the war. The obvious tactical
result was that Pemberton surrendered 30,000 men, which was more than
the Confederacy could afford. The obvious strategic result was that the
Confederacy was cut in two, and not only were all the forces west of the
river almost as effectively out of the war as though they had been
prisoners too, but also the Confederate east at once began to go hungry
for lack of goods from the producing lands of western Louisiana and
Texas. General Dick Taylor, in command there, remarked that when the
Union river blockade clamped down he had twelve loaded steamers on the
Red, on one of which alone there were 300,000 pounds of bacon for the
eastern armies. None of this, or any other supplies, ever was to get
through.

Vicksburg thus condemned the operative parts of the Confederacy to slow
starvation by completing the iron ring the Union navy had thrown around
the coast. It was a combined operation, but its effect was to extend the
blockade to inland waters. The only real chance remaining to the seceded
states was that of crushing one of the great northern armies in a
battle, and the event which took place at Gettysburg on the day
Pemberton signed the surrender papers indicated how improbably that was.
Of course, there was some chance also in the political area--that war
weariness would drive the Lincoln government from office in the 1864
election, as Lincoln himself at one time thought it might. But Vicksburg
was also directly operative in this field, a political as well as a
military victory, a visible evidence of progress; and indirectly it
helped provide the means for the military success which made the
political position secure. Many of the troops who went hammering into
Atlanta behind Sherman at the crisis of the political campaign were
those released from other preoccupations by the fall of Vicksburg.

In a sense, Atlanta, the Chattanooga battles, the Wilderness fighting,
Cedar Creek may be called decisive. They ruined the morale and much of
the physical equipment of the staggering Confederacy. But they all
rested firmly on the foundation of Vicksburg, and it is necessary only
to ask what would have happened had Grant been defeated there.

He never received qualitative credit for the accomplishment. The
correspondents could not get their dispatches out during those terrific
seventeen days of marching and fighting, and when it was all over the
victory so stood in the shadow of Gettysburg that hardly anyone realized
that the man usually set down as a dull plodder was actually a general
who hurled troops along the roads at Napoleonic speed, deceived and
bewildered the opposition. The campaign against Lee in Virginia looks at
first sight like mere hard pounding, but when the details are examined,
it contains an astonishing amount of maneuver. Grant is always pulling a
corps from the right of his line and performing the extremely delicate
operation of bringing it around to the left through the rear areas of
forces already fighting; and it was Grant who conceived the strategy
that brought an end to the war.

There is also something that, if more tenuous, goes rather deeper. The
Revolution left the American army a heritage of confidence in the aimed
fire of the individual infantryman. In the same way the Vicksburg
campaign, as the culmination of a series of combined operations, left an
inbred tradition in favor of this method of making war. And this was not
to be without value some eighty years later, across the vast reaches of
the Pacific and on the beachheads of Europe.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    16. MORE THAN MIDWAY




      I

In considering the point at which decision was reached in World War II,
one's attention is almost irresistibly drawn to the events of November
1942, when within a few weeks the Germans were driven from the frontiers
of Egypt, the Allies made good their combined operation against western
North Africa, Hitler's drive into Russia was crushed at Stalingrad, and
Japanese battleships went down in flames off Guadalcanal. It is possible
that the European war was indeed decided at Stalingrad, but we do not
know for certain, and perhaps we shall never know. The deliberate
falsification of history by both sides was so elaborate and so complete
that there is now not recoverable any account of the operation that
makes military sense. For instance: the German story has been that Von
Paulus was ordered to retreat from the trap and failed to do so; the
Russian story is that he wanted to retreat and was not allowed. There is
equally contradictory testimony on such matters as the behavior of the
Rumanian troops and the efficiency of the Soviet artillery.

And Stalingrad may also be viewed as a dependent event--the product of
the failure of the tank columns before Moscow in the bitter winter of
1941. The other battles of the November 1942 series were more obviously
the activation of decisions already reached. None, of course, was
strictly inevitable; any one might have been an Allied defeat. But it
was not necessary to the outcome of the general war that all should have
been Allied victories. The forces mobilized against the Axis were
already so tremendous that if Stalingrad, Alamein, Casablanca, and
Guadalcanal had never taken place substitute decisions must have brought
the same result.

A somewhat better case as decisive actions can be made out for the air
battle over Britain in 1940, the failure of the German tank columns to
take Moscow in the winter of 1941, and the Allied success in overcoming
the submarines in '42 and '43. But these were negative decisions,
preventive victories; they determined that the Axis was not going to win
in a particular way, but failed to decide that it could not win at all.
That decision was reached when the industrial power of the United States
was released to give full support to Britain and Russia in Europe and to
take the counteroffensive against Japan. "You want a hundred airplanes
for this mission?" an acute French observer reports an imaginary
American officer saying to his ally. "Wouldn't a thousand be better?"

The decision that liberated such forces, that turned the Allies from a
parsimonious defensive to a richly supported attack, was a battle decision.


      II

No comment on the complex Japanese naval command arrangements and staff
planning is necessary beyond remarking that they were outrageously
intricate, and a Japanese plan of campaign was the result of a kind of
badminton game played at Imperial headquarters with ideas for birds.
Documents now available show that after the success of the "first phase
operations" was assured as early as January 1942 the question of whether
to hold an established line or two continue the offensive against the
United States came up; and the decision worked out in conferences at
which admirals argued with tears running down their cheeks was in favor
of the occupation of Midway Island early in June, when a full moon would
make night landing operations possible.

It would take the entire strength of the "Combined Fleet," which was in
effect the Japanese navy; but it had certain advantages. The consent of
the dominant army people was easy to obtain since it involved the
commitment of only a single regimental combat team of the forces they
were so carefully hoarding; and the United States fleet would almost
certainly be involved, so that what remained of it could be brought to
action and destroyed. That fleet was the chief preoccupation of Admiral
Isoroku Yamamoto, head of Combined Fleet, though not of the Naval
General Staff, of which he was theoretically the servant. His
intelligence network in Hawaii had ceased to operate, but he was fully
aware that the American battle line had
 been smashed at Pearl Harbor.
His worry was about the heavy cruisers and the carrier task forces they
supported; and when Doolittle bombed Tokyo on April 18, all objections
to the Midway plan ceased. Quite apart from strategic considerations, it
was an absolutely intolerable loss of face that any such thing should
happen. Land- or lagoon-based patrol planes must be established to
prevent a repetition.

The plan for the occupation of Midway, with an appendix of the western
Aleutians as a diversionary measure, was therefore definitely laid on
for the full moon in early June. The proponents of the idea of first
severing American communications with Australia were nevertheless strong
enough in the badminton game to get their plan adopted too; a task force
built around two heavy carriers and one light was accordingly dispatched
to secure Port Moresby in southern New Guinea and Tulagi in the Solomons
in preparation for a more serious movement against New Caledonia, the
Fijis, Samoa in July. In May, while war games were being played at
Japanese headquarters to determine the probable outcome of the Midway
operation, this task force encountered American naval vessels in the
Battle of the Coral Sea. In spite of the fact that the light carrier was
lost, one of the heavies so damaged that she was barely towed back, and
the other deprived of her air groups to an extent that made her
inoperative, the thinking of the Japanese high command about Midway was
not in the least disturbed.

They had positive evidence that two of the big American carriers had
gone down at the Coral Sea. That this evidence turned out to be spurious
did not affect their thinking at the time. The estimate was that the
U.S. fleet had only the carriers _Enterprise_ and _Hornet_, and there
was a strong possibility that these were still in the Solomons late in
May. To be absolutely certain, the Japanese made allowance for the
possibility that they had come back north or that _Wasp_ had arrived
from the Atlantic and threw out a double scouting line of submarines off
Hawaii to report any carrier sorties from Pearl Harbor.

Even if the American carriers did come north, even if they were joined
by _Wasp_, there was little they could accomplish beyond giving the
Japanese the general fleet action Yamamoto desired after Midway had been
taken. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, in charge of the carrier striking force,
had _Kaga_, _Akagi_, _Hiryu_, and _Soryu_, the largest in the Japanese
navy; they would launch a surprise air attack on Midway from 250 miles
out, destroying shore installations and any planes based on the island.
Behind them would come the Midway invasion force, covered by the "Main
Force" under Yamamoto in person, to fight the Americans on the surface
as soon as they reacted to the occupation of Midway. By this time the
carriers would have the help of land-based air-, or at least seaplanes,
from the captured islands. These were counted on merely to soften up the
enemy in preparation for the battleships to step in and deliver the
decisive punch.

The fleet was organized in separate units in a somewhat complicated
fashion. They would operate in mutual support, according to the tactical
system that had yielded such happy results at Tsushima and had since
become classic in the Japanese service. The essential feature was that
Yamamoto could bring into action no less than eleven battleships and ten
heavy cruisers against an enemy whose gunnery forces were estimated as
consisting of five heavy cruisers at most.

In the north two light carriers would knock out the small American base
at Dutch Harbor, the only one in the area, as a preparation for
occupying Attu, Kiska, and Adak. This would take place three days before
the Midway attack. As the American fleet might be drawn in that
direction, north of Midway, one wing of Yamamoto's fleet would slant in
that direction during the approach; once contact was made, the others
could close in quickly. Nagumo would swing out to approach Midway
sharply from the northwest, with Yamamoto behind him. The invasion force
would stage from Saipan and approach Midway from the west-southwest.
After the occupation and the battle Nagumo's group would go to Truk to
prepare for the occupation of New Caledonia and the Fijis, this in
itself a preparation for bombing raids against eastern Australia, then
turn back to capture Hawaii sometime in August.

The fleet sailed on May 27, "everybody singing war songs at the top of
their lungs."


      III

That same day the carrier _Yorktown_ arrived at Pearl Harbor from Coral
Sea, badly damaged internally and leaking. The estimate of the time
necessary to repair her was ninety days; it was done in two by 1,400
workmen who toiled right around the clock. The reason for this frantic
haste was that ever since 10 May, Naval Intelligence had been feeding
Admiral Chester Nimitz of the Pacific Fleet most precise information as
to the composition and purposes of the Combined Fleet, information
secured chiefly as the result of having broken the Japanese radio code.
At the time Nimitz had the carriers _Enterprise_ and _Hornet_ and seven
heavy cruisers in addition to _Yorktown_, and that was all he had. There
was six American battleships ready for service, but they were in San
Francisco, whence they could hardly reach the scene of action in time,
and were a good deal slower than the Japanese ships of similar class.
Nimitz did not count on them; in diametrical opposition to Yamamoto, he
was counting on no gunnery battle at all.

The ships put out on the last day of May to an area northeast of Midway
under a somewhat peculiar command arrangement. Rear Admiral Frank Jack
Fletcher had his flag in _Yorktown_ and, as senior officer present, was
technically in charge, but he had no air staff, and most of the real
direction of affairs was in the hands of Rear Admiral Raymond A.
Spruance, who had moved up to carriers from the cruisers. This was "the
human machine," visibly cold as the mountains of the moon, who drank a
pint of the strongest black coffee ever seen every morning and was
supplied with a brain that was a metronome and never ceased its accurate
tick. Ashore on Midway, Captain C. T. Simard was in charge; as soon as
Nimitz got the word of the coming attack, he began reinforcing the land
elements there. The place held a total of 121 planes, including some
army B-17s and a good many navy patrol planes, besides light bombers and
a torpedo unit. The patrol plans were flying day and night searches up
to 700 miles out in all directions on the arcs west of Midway, but bad
weather hampered them much. The shore defenses had a heavily reinforced
marine defense battalion, the two islands that comprise Midway were
ringed with guns and obstacles, and there were ten motor torpedo boats
in the lagoon. Bombproof shelters were supplied for all hands. A cable
connecting Midway with Hawaii insured that there would be no abnormally
heavy radio traffic to attract Japanese attention.

The sortie of the American ships on May 31 introduced a first and
violent element of error into the Japanese plan. The submarine scouting
line sent to watch for them was not yet in position, so they saw
nothing. As Yamamoto approached Midway through rain and fog that gave
him admirable concealment but made navigation and communications
difficult, he had no positive information whatever as to the number or
whereabouts of the American ships.

There was an arrangement that might have rectified this lack. The
Japanese planned to have Pearl Harbor and its approaches watched by
four-engine flying boats working out of Wotje beyond their normal range
and refueled by submarines at French Frigate Shoal, between Midway and
Hawaii. But they had already tried that one in March, and when the
flying boats then showed up at Pearl, Nimitz deduced precisely what was
going on. The Japanese submarines that were to refuel planes for the
Midway operation found the approaches to French Frigate Shoal mined and
the place crawling with American patrol craft, so the air scouting
program had to be dropped. Thus Yamamoto had to depend for intelligence
on the Naval General Staff in Tokyo, which continued to advise as to the
possibility that the two American carriers were in the Solomons, which
would deprive him of the chance for a showdown battle with the United
States fleet. He "seemed in unusually low spirits." The opinion of his
staff was that the Imperial fleet would have plenty of time to deal with
the Americans after the occupation of Midway. They would have 1,100
miles to run from Pearl after they heard the news of the attack.


      IV

The background was now complete; the rest was up to the operations.
Those in the Aleutians achieved next to nothing on either side. The two
light Japanese carriers ran their bombing raid against Dutch Harbor on
June 3 without damaging anything important or suffering any important
damage in return; but when they tried a second attack, the planes were
set on out of the fog by army fighters, P-40s. This meant that the
Americans had in the area an air base of whose existence there had been
no previous report and of whose location the Japanese had no idea; and
the photos taken during the Dutch Harbor raid showed a far more solid
installation than had been expected. Hosogaya, the admiral in charge,
turned back and settled for Attu and Kiska; Adak would be altogether too
near that new American air base. His effort at drawing American strength
northward had failed because of Nimitz's prior information as to the
real objective.

The curtain raiser for the big show came at 0900 on the morning of June
3, when a patrol plane sighted the Japanese invasion force 600 miles
southwest of Midway and dogged it for several hours. The B-17s, which
had the range, were sent out to make a high-level bombing attack in the
afternoon. Actually, they hit nothing but,
 in a manner that was to be
highly characteristic of Army Air during the entire operation, reported
damage to two battleships and a transport and persuaded Navy to send out
a submarine to look for cripples. During the night four of the big
patrol planes took off with torpedoes under their wings, the first time
they had been used in this way. They ran in on the convoy, loosed
torpedoes down a path of moonlight, and one of them got a hit on a
tanker that caused twenty-three casualties, but the ship was able to
maintain station.

At 0430 on June 4 the Japanese striking force for Midway, 108 planes,
took off from Nagumo's carriers, with the deck crews shouting the
_Banzai_ as each machine cleared; half an hour later came another 108.
The ships were 240 miles from Midway, still under cloud cover and low
visibility. At the same hour a search for American ships was flown, and
Japanese accounts make it clear that this operation was formal,
perfunctory; hardly anyone in the Japanese fleet expected the Americans
to be at sea, far less that they would be looking for the invaders with
violence in their hearts.

The American ships got the word of enemy carriers present at 0534 from a
patrol plane; then successive messages that spoke of many enemy planes
heading for Midway and two Japanese carriers with battleship cover. As
it happened, the reported position of the Japanese was wrong. A little
later Admiral Fletcher, whose ship had flown the American dawn patrol
and who wanted his planes back, signaled Spruance to proceed southwest
with the other two carriers and strike, promising to follow with
_Yorktown_ as soon as possible.

This was at 0607; and at almost the same moment radar warning sent every
plane off Midway--patrol planes to the rear, out of trouble, a marine
fighter group to attack the incoming Japanese, a formation of six navy
torpedo planes, another of marine dive bombers, four army B-26s carrying
torpedoes, and sixteen of the B-17 Flying Fortresses, all for the
counterattack.

At the island the Japanese came in through what they described as fierce
anti-aircraft fire, burned out a hangar and a fuel tank, blew up a
storehouse which scattered packages of cigarettes all over the island,
and did assorted damage to other aboveground installations. In the air
their tactically superior, too numerous Zero fighters made mincemeat of
the marine squadron, fifteen of whose twenty-seven did not return. But
the attackers did little damage to the airstrips, caused only twenty
casualties, and they were sadly surprised at not obtaining surprise and
catching American planes on the ground. As the attackers soared back to
their carriers with the black plume of the burning fuel tank beneath,
the air group leader radioed, "There is need for another attack. Time:
0700."

He was perfectly right; not even an invasion force supported by
battleships and heavy cruisers could readily have struck home against
the shore installations remaining. But a decisive factor in what
happened next was the failure of the land-based Midway planes. The
torpedo carriers came first; they got not a single hit and only three
out of ten came back, two of which crash-landed. Then came twenty-seven
dive bombers, half of them shot down, again without damage to the ships;
and the B-17s, whose efforts produced nothing but boasts from the army
air force. At 0715 the land-based air attacks from Midway were over and
not a Japanese ship had been damaged. This carried conviction to Admiral
Nagumo; the Americans were not going to hurt him, and their Midway base
needed another strike. He had on the decks of his carriers ninety-three
planes armed with torpedoes and armor-piercers on the off chance that
enemy surface forces might be encountered. Now these were taken down to
the hangars to be rearmed with fragmentation bombs for the second strike
on Midway.

While this was going on, there came a report from a Japanese cruiser
search plane which had taken off belatedly; it had found five American
cruisers and five destroyers, and twenty-five minutes later it brought
the surprising news that there was an American carrier present. By this
time the rearmed planes were on the flight decks again, and Nagumo had a
baby in his lap without an adequate supply of diapers. The ninety-three
were all torpedo-type planes, which had to fly level for an attack, and
the fate of the unescorted American torpedo planes showed they stood
little chance without fighter cover. But the first wave of Japanese
fighters was just beginning to arrive overhead with the planes of the
Midway strike, low on gas and needing to be taken aboard. The second
wave of fighters was flying combat patrol, and certainly could not
accompany a preventive strike.

Under the circumstances, Nagumo decided to play it safe. He turned north
to get deeper under cloud cover and avoid attack while the planes of the
Midway strike were taken in. The combat patrol remained up; the planes
on the decks were struck below for a second time, to be rearmed for work
against ships. This would give Nagumo plenty of strength for an attack,
but the second reloading was done so hurriedly that there was not time
to send the fragmentation bombs back to the magazines, so they were
arranged in racks on the hangar decks. It still took time to recover and
rearm the planes of the Midway strike, and the action against the
American force of "five cruisers, five destroyers, and one carrier" was
scheduled for 1030.

Spruance originally intended to run southwest until 0900 and launch his
strike 100 miles from the Japanese force, now accurately located. The
news of the attack on Midway changed his mind; if he launched early,
though the distance was so great that he was likely to lose many planes
through running out of gas, he just might catch the Japs refueling. He
launched then, a little after 0700, a full strike of every operational
plane he had, itself a daring decision. _Yorktown_, coming along behind,
did not launch for more than another hour, and then only half her planes.

The air squadrons made their getaway in standard formation, torpedo
planes low down, dive bombers higher, and fighters above all. But
Nagumo's turn north and floating layers of cloud introduced an element
of uncertainty. The Japanese ships were not where they were expected to
be; _Hornet_'s dive bombers and fighters swung southeast toward Midway
to search for them in that direction, missed them entirely, and had to
put in at the island, out of the battle for that day. But underneath,
Lieutenant Commander John J. Waldron, with the fifteen planes of
_Hornet_'s Torpedo 8, saw smoke northwestward; he turned in that
direction and about 0917 made out the four Japanese carriers in a
diamond formation. Nagumo had just finishing recovering his planes and
was again turning toward the Americans to launch his attack.

Waldron had no fighter cover and had flown so far that he knew his
chances of return were poor, but he bored in. He was promptly jumped by
no less than fifty Zero fighters and ran into a terrific curtain of
flak. Very few of his planes survived to launch torpedoes, and of those
that did, every one was shot down. There was a single survivor, Ensign
George H. Gay, who came up to find a bag floating free from the wreck of
his plane, with a rubber life raft in it. He hid under a seat cushion to
keep out of sight of low-flying Japanese fighters and from that ringside
position saw the next wave of attack come in.

This was Torpedo 6 from _Enterprise_, under Lieutenant Commander Eugene
E. Lindsey, which had lost its fighters in the clouds. Doctrine called
for him to wait and attack simultaneously with the dive bombers, but he
was short on fuel. He went in, therefore, and tragedy of Torpedo 8 was
repeated. Zeros and flak got all but four of his planes, and again there
were no hits on the Japs. The attack was hardly over when _Yorktown_'s
Torpedo 3 arrived; they had fighter escort, but nowhere near enough to
meet the swarming Japanese patrols. Only five planes got torpedoes away
and three of these were shot down; again no Japanese ship was it.

Thus at a little after 1000 the American torpedo attack had been utterly
suppressed without doing the slightest damage, and only four of its
planes got home to mother. On the Japanese carriers they were feeling
high; deck crews cheered the pilots of fighters returning for ammunition
and patted them on the shoulder. The radical maneuvering to avoid
torpedo attack had prevented getting planes away, but now it was over;
at 1020, Admiral Nagumo gave the word to launch, and the four carriers
turned into the wind, their decks covered with planes, engines revved up
and ready.

V

There were still, however, the thirty-seven dive bombers from
_Enterprise_ under Lieutenant Commander Clarence McClusky, and the
seventeen from _Yorktown_ under Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie. The
latter had been instructed that if the Japanese were not in the
anticipated position he was to search for them on a reverse course.
McClusky, flying longer, got off on an errant west-northwest course, but
saw a Japanese destroyer beneath the projected its line of motion. The
consequence was that both forces arrived simultaneously over the
Japanese carriers at 1024, while all their fighters were at the low
level, where they had been demolishing the torpedo planes, in time to
treat Ensign Gay on his rubber raft to such a spectacle as no man had
ever seen or would again.

Back on the American carriers they heard McClusky's ardent swearing as
the first three bombs missed. Then _Kaga_ was hit forward of the island,
killing everyone on the bridge, hit three times amidships, with all the
planes on deck set afire, and one bomb penetrating the hangar to the
gasoline tanks; she drifted, a mass of flame. _Akagi_ took two, one a
1,000-pounder just behind the midship elevator, that sent it drooping
into
 the hangar as though it were rubber, and all those bombs and
torpedoes began to burn and go off; the other on the port side aft,
which left the armed planes on deck belching flame, smoke, and
explosions. Everything began burning, even the fireproof doors burned
down and the fire mains melted. _Soryu_ took three hits from the
_Yorktown_ planes, one that folded the forward elevator back against the
bridge, two amidships; the whole deck became a sheet of flame in a
matter of seconds and the fires were joined by those from the hangar so
rapidly that "Abandon ship" was ordered in twenty minutes.

In five minutes of attack the entire complexion of the battle had
changed, and the Japanese no longer had their margin of superiority.

There remained _Hiryu_, bearing the flag of Rear Admiral Tamon
Yamaguchi, one of the most highly regarded officers of the Imperial
Navy; at the point of the diamond formation the ship had been farther
north and more under cloud cover than the others and thus escaped
attention during that devastating attack. Nearly a day's streaming
farther north still were the two light carriers that had bombed Dutch
Harbor. They were already on their way south; Yamamoto ordered them to
speed up to join _Hiryu_ on the morning of June 5 for a renewal of the
battle, which had not gone well this day, while the battleships and
cruisers covering the occupation force joined his own to press east for
a night surface action and _Hiryu_ launched an attack on what was still
believed to be the only American carrier present.

This happened to be _Yorktown_. After launching their attacks the
American carriers turned southeast and away into the wind to recover
planes, but Fletcher's flagship was still some distance behind the
others and was being dogged by a search plane from a cruiser shortly
after the three Japanese carriers began to burn. Yamaguchi launched
eighteen dive bombers, with six fighters for cover, at 1100; two hours
later (it takes time to ready these strikes) ten torpedo planes took off
with another six fighters. It would be just after noon when the first
wave reached _Yorktown_, which was just preparing to take in her own
dive bombers. They were waved off to land on _Enterprise_; fighters and
escort took on the attackers and knocked down all but five, but the ship
was hit three times by 500-pounders.

The fires they set were quickly brought under control, but the third
bomb disabled two boilers and snuffed out the fires in others, so that
the big carrier gradually ground to a stop. The damage control parties
worked hard; by 1340 they had the ship up to eighteen knots again, but
at 1430, when the torpedo attack came in, she still did not have her
full speed and maneuverability, and though five of the torpedo planes
and three of the fighters were shot down, _Yorktown_ took two torpedo
hits that cut off all power and gave her a deadly list. "Abandon ship"
was ordered, and only salvage parties were aboard when she was finished
off by a Jap submarine on the morning of June 7.

But while _Yorktown_ was taking it, two important things happened. One
was the return to _Hiryu_ of a new type search plane, sent out earlier,
whose radio had failed. The pilot verbally brought the news that instead
of a single American carrier there were three, _Enterprise_, _Yorktown_,
and _Hornet_, two of which were not supposed to be there and one of
which was supposed to be at the bottom of the Coral Sea. The second
event was that before _Yorktown_ was knocked out Admiral Fletcher
ordered a wide ten-plane search. At 1445, after three hours of hunting,
it found _Hiryu_, and at 1530, Spruance (now in command, since Fletcher
was aboard a cruiser) launched a strike of twenty-four dive bombers, a
mixed group from all the carriers, with McClusky leading.

It had no fighter cover, but aboard _Hiryu_ there were only six fighters
left; their pilots had been working since before dawn and were at the
utmost limit of exhaustion. When McClusky's planes roared in at 1703,
there was practically nothing but anti-aircraft fire to oppose them and
they landed four hits in the bridge area. The whole foredeck was peeled
back, all forms of control were lost, and gigantic fires began to run
through the ship. Like the others, she was doomed, but it was not until
dawn that she went down; all three of the others were under water by 1925.

During the night Admiral Yamamoto underwent a change of heart. He had
been steaming east, still hoping for that night surface engagement, but
as the constellations streamed past and intelligence slowly ironed out
the details of the shimmering picture, it became more and more likely
that instead he would have a dawn attack from those dive bombers that
had wrecked his four beautiful carriers; there were no contact reports
and the Americans appeared to be retiring eastward. (This was perfectly
correct; Spruance had not the slightest intention of fighting Japanese
surface forces at night, when his carriers could not operate, but still
desirous of being in position to break up a dawn landing, turned west
again at midnight.) The Americans clearly still had two big carriers
operative; Yamamoto's own light carriers would not reach the scene until
too late and, with the attrition their air groups had taken in the
Aleutians, would be no match for _Enterprise_ and _Hornet_ even if
_Yorktown_ were badly used up, as his flyers claimed. At two in the
morning he signaled the powerful squadron of four new heavy cruisers
that were to have bombarded Midway during the night to give up the idea;
at 0253 he turned westward himself and the conquest was abandoned. Next
morning he sat on the forebridge of the largest battleship in the world,
sipping rice gruel with a pale face and staring eyes. Few men have come
down farther in twenty-four hours.

But Yamamoto was not yet through with Spruance. When the heavy cruiser
squadron began its retreat during the night, it both saw and was spotted
by an American submarine. The admiral in charge ordered a sharp
simultaneous turn away, but the last ship in line, _Mogami_, did not get
the signal soon enough. She came so violently in contact with the stern
of _Mikuma_, next ahead, that _Mogami_'s bow was all staved in. She
could not make more than sixteen knots, and dawn of June 5 found her
pushing westward with the slightly damaged _Mikuma_ and two destroyers
in company, a good deal to the south of Yamamoto's main body, which now
comprised practically all the other ships present. A patrol plane
sighted the two cruisers; the B-17s went out from Midway but, as usual,
accomplished nothing, this time because they could not find the ships.
There were six of the marine planes left at Midway; they were sent out
also, picked up an oil slick and charged in, a glide-bombing attack, the
only kind they could make. The flak was so heavy that it bounced them
around and spoiled their aim, but when Captain Richard E. Fleming's
plane was hopelessly hit, he crash-landed on _Mikuma_'s No. 4 turret,
and a damaging hit that was. It spread fire over the air intake to the
starboard engine room, brought about a fume explosion that killed
everyone in the compartment and disabled the engine itself, so that both
cruisers were now cripples.

Spruance was not involved in this attack. At dawn on June 5 he was still
without assurance that _Hiryu_ had gone down, and late reports from
patrol planes seemed to indicate that she was still afloat. The weather
was thick; it was afternoon before a strike of fifty planes could be
flown, and all they found was a single destroyer, dispatched by Nagumo
to pick up _Hiryu_ survivors. They attacked her, with the worst luck of
any strike flown during the battle; she shot down one plane and was not
hurt.

The Japanese main body was now out of range, but the damaged cruisers
were not and Spruance held on after them all night, launching the first
of three strikes before dawn. The cruisers had no cover but their potent
anti-aircraft fire, and the planes hit them hard. _Mogami_ got a bomb
that penetrated a turret and killed everyone within, and another that
sealed a burning engine room and killed ninety men. _Mikuma_ took six
hits from heavy bombs, fires raged through the ship, her own torpedoes
exploded, and finally a magazine went. She sank about noon; most of the
survivors were killed by another bomb as they stood on the deck of a
destroyer. _Mogami_ escaped, but in such shape that she could not put to
sea again for two years.

That was the Battle of Midway. Spruance was getting so close to range of
land-based planes from Wake that he turned back.


      VI

The battle has been subjected to more detailed analysis than any other
sea fight except Jutland, and deservedly, for it was one of the two
naval battles in American history in which the distinctly inferior force
won crushingly. (Lake Champlain was the other.) It is easy to make a
catalogue of Yamamoto's mistakes. He was the great apostle of aviation
in the Japanese navy, the man who organized the Pearl Harbor attack as a
purely naval air operation, yet here he assigned the carriers to a
secondary role and tried to do everything with his battle line. The
heavy ships were not even near enough to furnish gunnery cover for the
carriers--and it is to be remembered that later in the war no carrier
that had a battleship in company was sunk.

The fact that the Americans had cracked the Japanese code was not
properly Yamamoto's fault, of course, but the fact that he failed to
allow for so many of their carriers' being in the area is; and this was
doubly compounded by the failure to take any precautions against the
chance of their being there. A submarine scouting line is very useful
but, in the nature of things, not infallible; they cannot see very far
and are apt to be driven underwater just when it is most important that
they should be seeing. When the air reconnaissance
 via French Frigate
Shoal failed, Yamamoto should have realized that there was a large area
of ocean in which he knew absolutely nothing about American movements,
and that area included the space it was most vital for him to know about.

Nagumo shares the fault here. His dawn search of June 4 employed far too
few planes and they did not go far enough. Japanese sources place the
fundamental blame on a doctrine that called for all possible planes to
be used for attack instead of for search; and behind that on an
arrogance that made a fatally easy assumption of victory, because
everything had previously gone well in their campaigns. Even Coral Sea
did not disturb this complacency; at Combined Fleet headquarters it was
counted a victory on the basis of the two American carriers sunk, and
Admiral Inouye, who ordered the withdrawal, received a severe wigging
for not pressing on.

So the Japanese allowed themselves to be surprised because they felt too
strong to be surprised. But there is no negative without a positive, and
on the positive side of the American victory there is not only the work
of the cryptographers, who laid the foundation for the whole business,
but also the speed and thoroughness with which the information was
exploited. There may have been complacency in American councils before
Pearl Harbor; there certainly was none at the date when _Yorktown_'s
repairs were rushed through in forty-eight hours of round-the-clock work
or Nimitz's provision for moving every available form of force up to
Midway; or in the continual painstaking searches flown by American
planes. The afternoon search that located _Hiryu_ after the other Jap
carriers were already fatally hurt, after the American planes had been
flying and fighting since before daybreak, actually contained more
planes and covered a wider area than Nagumo's search at dawn, before he
had any information at all.

That is, the Americans took pains and the Japanese were too confident to
take them. At first sight there seems also an element of luck involved
in the opportune arrival of the dive bombers over the Japanese fleet at
the precise moment when their attack would prove fatal. But luck will
not explain the fact that Spruance cleared his decks in expectation that
he would catch the Midway strike returning. It was, rather, bad luck
that the American torpedo planes, through one accident or another, had
to go in piecemeal, without fighter cover and uncoordinated with the
bombers. The basic planning and tactics were sufficiently good too for
such an onset of unfavorable circumstance. Later in the war the American
forces had some luck, for example the single torpedo that sank the giant
carrier _Taiho_ at the Philippine Sea; but there was none of that
elusive component at Midway.

And the battle ruined Japan, as the title of a Japanese book about it
says. Nobody on the American side realized it, even though Admiral
Nimitz delivered himself of a pun about being "Midway to victory" in his
communique. But the Japanese realized it, at least at the topmost level.
Even their official documents glossed over the matter, even within the
Japanese navy it was almost treason to discuss what really happened.
Nagumo's air officer, who escaped wounded, was taken from the rescue
ship by night in a covered litter and held incommunicado in a hospital
for weeks until it was certain he would not talk; and he was not the
only one subjected to isolation for fear the dreadful secret might leak.
But it was not a secret from Yamamoto; he now knew that he could not
gain his decisive victory before the industrial power of the United
States was cast into the scale.

Not only were the four carriers so nearly irreplaceable that their loss
caused a revision of the entire Japanese ship-building program, to the
detriment even of the escorts that were so bitterly needed when the
American submarines got to work. This was serious enough, deadly enough,
but the control of the sea air was more. At the hour when the battle was
fought, there were already nine new United States carriers on the way
against two for Japan, and the latter could never catch up after the
Midway subtractions. Not only was there a crippling and unforeseen loss
of planes. The sinking of the carriers cost the Japanese 250 of them,
and the naval air squadrons that were supposed to have a one-third
reserve suddenly had no reserve at all.

But the most serious loss was among the pilots who were shot down or
killed when the bombs fell among the planes ready for flight on the
carrier decks. It can be said that the Japanese would have come out of
the battle better if they had never tried to make the attack on
_Yorktown_ at all, even though they eventually sank her. They spent too
many pilots.

Before the war there was opinion and even a certain number of flat
statements that "the Japanese do not make good aviators." At Pearl
Harbor, Coral Sea, and Midway this seemed to be disproved. The Japanese
flyers there yielded nothing to the Americans in any aspect of their
art. But in the long run the prewar statement turned out to be true. The
Japanese made good flyers only after careful selection and prolonged
training under experienced men, much longer training than that required
by American aviators, and at Midway the seed corn was eaten up. The
indispensable teachers and squadron leaders with combat experience were
shot down or went down with their ships, and in spite of the desperate
combats that some of the new men later waged in the Solomons, the
service never recovered. New men were trained to fly after a fashion,
but it was not a good fashion, and two years after Midway, 404 of them
were shot down in a morning at the Philippine Sea, when Spruance
collected his dividend on the investment he made on June 4, 1942.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    BIBIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING



It would be impudent (and imprudent) to attempt a thorough bibliography
for a book which covers most of the course of recorded history, but some
indication of sources used and places where further information can be
found by anyone interested may not be out of place.

For Alexander the Great the sources are very good, considering the lapse
of time and the disappearance of the works of so many ancient authors.
Arrian is the chief one, and though he wrote some time after the events
he chronicles, he had the great advantage of having before him the
memoirs of two of Alexander's generals, Ptolemy and Aristobulus.
Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Curtius, and Justin have also given
connected accounts of Alexander, and though they often used inferior
source material, they just as often check on each other, so that it is
fairly easy to get at what went on.

As to Pyrrhus, the sources are just as bad as they are good for
Alexander. The books of Livy that cover the period are among the lost;
Diodorus does not supply much, and Polybius hardly anything. Dionysius
of Helicarnassus and Hieronymus give accounts, but only in flashes; the
main reliance among the ancients is Plutarch. Colonel T. A. Dodge
(_Hannibal_) went over the battlefields and worked out the course of
events with a keen military eye.

G. P. Baker's _Justinian_ is a tower of light for anyone dealing with
the period. Of course, he based on some secondary sources, such as
Gibbon and J. H. Bury's _History of the Later Roman Empire_, which have
also been used here. The basic original sources are Marcellinus and
Procopius. Delbruck (_Geschichte der Kriegskunst_) is too much of a
debunker by half, but useful on details of arms and equipment.

Most of the ultimate sources for Kadisiyah are Muslim chronicles and,
besides being romantic and highly mendacious, they have little regard
for either figures or dates. The best is that of Al Tabari, written in
the ninth century, and translated in the _Journal of the American
Oriental Society_. Modern writers have done a good deal of emendation
and deduction; those in the _Cambridge Medieval History_ are worth
reading, and also Huart's _Ancient Persia and Iranian Civilization_ and
Sir Percy Sykes' _History of Persia_.

The excellent papers in the _Cambridge Medieval History_ are most of the
background for Las Navas de Tolosa. The Spanish chronicles are windy and
picturesque, without thorwing a great deal of light, but they have been
winnowed by several English authors, notably George Power (_History of
the Empire of the Musselmans in Spain and Portugal_), H. E. Watts (_The
Christian Recovery of Spain_), and Stanley Lane-Poole (_The Moors in
Spain_).

An excellent book, _The Sieges of Vienna_, was translated from the
German of Karl Schwimmer "and other sources" by the Earl of Ellesmere.
R. B. Merriman's _Suleiman the Magnificent_ is worth a look, as is
Eversley's _Turkish Empire_. An article on Salm by Johann Newald
appeared in the _Verein fur Geschichte der Stadt Vien, Berichte_.

As for Leyden, J. L. Motley's _Rise of the Dutch Republic_ still stands
up after nearly a century, and he went so thoroughly into the original
sources that no one need do so again. Also see Frederick Harisson's
_William the Silent_ and Avermaete's _Les Gueux de Mer_.

_Gustavus Adolphus_, by Colonel T. A. Doge, is a first-class military
work. Behind it stand a number of other sources, one of the better being
C. V. Wedgwood's _Thirty Years' War_, a book of the same title by Anton
Gindely, and Bryce, _The Holy Roman Empire_. The quotations are from
_George Fleetwood's Letter to His Father_, which was not dug up and
published in the _Camden Miscellany_ until 1847.

For Frederick the Great nobody is quite up to Carlyle, even at this
date. His research was enormous and painstaking, and he is surprisingly
good on military detail. Dorn's _Competition for Empire_ is also good.
Most readers will not want to bother with the numerous German sources.

Parkman's _Montcalm
 and Wolfe_ is, of course, the classic for Quebec.
The general background is nicely covered by Dorn's _Competition for
Empire_, naval and strategic matters by Mahan's _Influence of Seapower
upon History_, and _Types of Naval Officers_, while there is excellent
detail on both Quebec and Quiberon Bay in the monumental _History of the
Royal Navy_, edited by W. Laird Clowes.

On the American Revolution the best authorities are F. V. Greene's
_American Revolution_ and Douglas Southall Freeman's huge _George
Washington_. Naval matters are covered by Mahan and Clowes, mentioned
above, and the _Histoire de la Marine Francaise_ of Rene Jouan.

The literature of the Napoleonic period is so huge that even compiling a
supplementary reading list from it is a formidable task. The present
author has covered the military and naval background in two books,
_Empire and the Sea_ and _Empire and the Glory_.

The literature of the American Civil War is almost as extensive as that
devoted to Napoleon. But Grant's _Personal Memoirs_ may be mentioned,
also a recent volume by E. S. Miers, _Web of Victory_. More nearly
contemporary are F. V. Greene's _The Mississippi_, and _Battles and
Leaders of the Civil War_.

Further reading on Midway can be done in S. E. Morison's _Coral Sea,
Midway and Submarine Actions_, a part of his history of the naval war;
also Fuchida and Okumiya, _Midway: the Battle that Doomed Japan_, and
the interrogations of Japanese naval officers, an official publication.


    Endnotes

1. W.W. Tarn

2. No doubt not her exact words, but there is no question that her
discussion was very much like this, and the final line was recorded by
more than one person. G.P. Baker's translation.