When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women are coming to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier!
Go, go, go to your God,
Go to your God like a soldier.
In fact, officers in that era (and for some time thereafter) were often not even expected to engage the enemy themselves. John Keegan’s “Faces of Battle” quotes this wonderful passage from a British officer’s diary in which he talks about how he’d been surprised by an enemy soldier at close quarters, and so he handed his his sergeant his revolved and ordered him to fire. Officers were meant to direct the killing, not muddy their hands by killing or being killed themselves.
Good post.
Although apparently not, after reading some further posts. I still think this is a decent summary in a general sense.
More from Kipling on why you should stand your ground in a fight: “That Day”.
And that’s also the point of the Latin poem from which we get the phrase Wilfred Owen was so down on: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Up until the 19th century at least, standing your ground and thinking patriotic thoughts to stiffen your resolve served you a lot better that to cut, run, get butchered from behind and condemn your companions to the same.
I don’t think things get much more disciplined than that- forming up in ranks on the deck of the sinking ship so that the women and children could safely board the lifeboats, and only breaking that formation when the ship actually sinks!
Militiamen in the South, at least, carried hunting rifles. As I alluded to earlier, this was the reason militia had a bad reputation for breaking and running. The rifles took a long time to load, and by the time they were reloaded, the enemy would be upon them with bayonets. Running away at that point was the best option.
At Cowpens, Morgan put the militia out front. After firing, they retired behind a line of Continental troops bearing muskets. The muskets bought the militia time to reload. Meanwhile, the British, seeing the militiamen retiring, thought they were breaking, and were lured into chasing them (thereby breaking their own ranks and bringing them right up to the muskets of the regular troops).
I believe I was mostly correct in answering why pikes disappeard, even though I muddled together different tactics and tech within a hundred year or so interval. I simply should have skipped the details instead of trying to show off 
Though don’t forget the Patton Corollary: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country!”
Side note: That was one of the things I loved about Heinlein. He would drop a reference to “the Birkenhead Drill” into a book and expect you to get the reference. That forced the 12 year old me to actually head back to the library and do some research to find out what he was talking about. For which I am eternally grateful.
I’m also interested in the other half of that line “… a damn tough bullet to chew”. It is my understanding that this is a reference to the use, in the military first-aid of the time, to putting a bullet in the mouth of a wounded man so that he could bite down on that in his agony (in this case, refering to the stoicism of standing around to be killed).
I assumed it came from the musketry drill at the time, which included biting open the paper cartridge before priming the pan and pouring the remaining powder into the barrel.
Did he? Interesting. I don’t remember that. In which book(s) and in what context(s)?
Double Star, for one. It’s mentioned on the wiki page.
*The phrase also appears in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Double Star”:
“I knew I was sunk-but, damn it, if you are caught by the Birkenhead Drill, the least you owe yourself is to stand at attention while the ship goes down.”*
[QUOTE=Malacandra]
And that’s also the point of the Latin poem from which we get the phrase Wilfred Owen was so down on: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
[/QUOTE]
An aside, but I’ll mention anyway (because how often is trivia about that phrase relevant).
You’ll frequently read the above phrase in “famous last words” as the final words of Simon, Lord Lovat. Many sources don’t mention that he meant it as a cruel if erudite joke.
He was very old (about 80) and very fat and more than a bit Falstaffian: wine, women, song- had children (legitimate and il-)well into his old age, a man of convenient outward loyalties constantly being pardoned after pledging his loyalty to the crown after his most recent participation in a Stuart rebellion or other uprising but finally reached his “no more pardons” point after Culloden. A long life as a bon vivant left him a near invalid who had to be carried to his trials and prison in a sedan chair and taken to his beheading on a litter. He’s most famous as answer to the trivia question “Who was the last man to be beheaded at the Tower of London?”
Lovat’s last words were Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, and in the first book I read that mentioned him it said he and many others present laughed after he said them. I never understood what was so funny until I read in a separate book that at his execution a set of bleachers erected for spectators collapsed and dozens were seriously injured and about 20 killed, so my guess would be he made his comment after this as a sort of “The more the merrier!” dying F.U..
Of course. What good is the world’s greatest swordsman against a wall of pikes? When your weapons have limited range and power, it is much more effective to have your soldiers work in compact phalanxes or skirmish lines. In fact, those tactics were used up until the American Civil War and WWI until weapons like rifles, Gatling guns and Maxim guns mad them suicide.
It was Mel Gibson’s tomahawk-jitsu that was more likely a bullshit style of fighting.
Except musket range is 100 yards or less. So when the other guys blob marches up to your concave skirmish line, fires one volley, then charges, you don’t really have time to turn your skirmish line into a blob. Which means, even though your volley might be more effective than his volley, the center of your line is now on the wrong side of a two-to-one bayonet fight. And the losses from a bayonet fight are going to be more than the losses from the volleys, so he wins, overall. Plus there’s a giant hole in the center of your line, which is usually bad for your troops morale.
Now, this kind of tactic was used a little bit. Infantry could be formed up in spread-out lines to shoot better, or compact squares to defend against a cavalry charge, but the spread-out lines were still shoulder-to-shoulder and a couple rows deep. So it really was more of a thick blobby line versus compact blobby square.
Ah, thanks. I’d forgotten that long ago.
And your volley won’t be more effective. You have no way to communicate the “Fire!” order, so what you’ll get is a ragged ripple, with most rounds missing their target. Even those little blobs that get off simultaneous fire won’t have the impact, because there are too few of them. The thing that won these battles was iron discipline and rate of fire. Well-drilled troops could get off volleys more quickly than their opponents, making the impact greater.
The original handgun was arquebus. In the early tercio, most of the gunners would use those. In the corners there were “heavy” gunners, who would use a musket, which was a weapon that was supported with a stick. It had longer range and would penetrate armor better. This weapon seems to have replaced the arquebus by the 30-years war completely. And the armor seems to have vanished by the end of that war. So it seems that musket firepower was delibarately increased until armour became unpractical to infantry. Later when muskets became lighter (but kept or increased their power) and the sticks became obsolate, the term musket was kept instead of arquebus.
As another side note, one of Gustavus Adolphus key strengths was cavalry charge with cold weapons instead of the pistol wolleys, another Polish influence. He really knew Dutch, Danish, German, Polish and Russian ways of fighting and was very good at combining those into what became the European art of war for the next centuries.
[QUOTE=Malacandra]
And that’s also the point of the Latin poem from which we get the phrase Wilfred Owen was so down on: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
[/QUOTE]
Jesus Fuck, if you’re going to post about a phrase in Latin, can you have the decency to translate it?
It is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country.