“By exploring a wide range of factors that influence armies before and during combat, and by considering the ways in which they collide and combine, we can begin to build an understanding of battle over the past millennium.”
By Graeme Callister and Rachael Whitbread
BATTLES HAVE changed enormously over the past millennium, from clashes relatively limited in expanse and duration, to drawn-out affairs that spread over weeks and hundreds of miles.
Combatants who once fought face-to-face can now strike their enemies from afar by land or air, even from continents away, in the case of modern drone operations.
Yet there are common factors that echo down the centuries, linking the experiences of King Harold’s huscarls at Hastings to Field Marshal Montgomery’s motorised infantry in Market Garden. We explore these in our recent book, Battle: Understanding Conflict from Hastings to Helmand.
The most important of those commonalities is the sheer number of factors that feed into the outcome of a battle, and the number of different issues that should be considered to truly understand the course of a combat.
Obvious issues such as terrain, army size, weapons and commanders all play their part, but so do a host of other considerations. The cultural and social background of the combatants, their training, morale and motivation, the grand strategy of their political masters, logistics, and even the actions of the attendant non-combatants will have subtle but vital impacts on the course and outcome of a clash of arms. Moreover, it is assessing the combination and interplay of these factors that will help the researcher to build the fullest understanding of battle.
When trying to make sense of a battle, it is often tempting to unfurl the maps, trace the movements of units, assess command decisions, and judge a combat won or lost from this God’s-eye perspective. But relatively few battles are lost solely by catastrophic command decisions, and fewer still are won exclusively by strokes of tactical genius. Bad leadership can be compensated by the staying power of troops, and tactical masterplans can only be carried out with troops adequately armed, prepared, and led at unit level.
Many of the broader factors help us to understand why tactics work in some cases but not others; why men stand in some battles and flee elsewhere; and why, fundamentally, the top-down view of battle can only ever offer a partial explanation. The quality of troops, for example, is foundational to the understanding of battle – including their motivation, morale, physical condition, and their cultural and social backgrounds that will inform how they view violence and combat, and how they see issues such as dealing with the wounded or taking prisoners. The training and experience of troops is equally vital. Untrained troops can and often do fight with great courage and even skill, but inexperience will usually lead to inefficiencies, higher casualties, and a brittleness in units when things go wrong. Better training generally offers greater tactical flexibility and more effective use of weaponry.
Good leadership can go some way to improve weaker troops, and is itself an important part of combat. Throughout the past millennium leaders have been expected to provide examples for their soldiers. William I famously lifted his visor at Hastings to rally his men; Henry V was in the thick of the action at Agincourt; Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus charged at the head of his troops at Breitenfeld and Lützen. In modern battle the role has devolved to more junior officers, but the importance of leading from the front remains.
Leaders are also responsible for keeping their troops well supplied – a vital and sometimes overlooked element in combat. Logistical support to some extent depends on grand strategy and on a state’s industrial or agricultural capacity, as these can determine the resources available for an army or campaign. Logistics will dictate whether men go into combat fed or hungry; watered or thirsty; well armed or poorly equipped. Tired, cold, hungry soldiers are likely to have less resilience, physical or mental, than well-rested and fed counterparts. This also links to the conditions of weather and terrain, which can make a huge difference not just to tactics but to the physical abilities of the combatants.
These factors, and many more, help us to understand the physical and mental state of those going into combat. If we then add an assessment of terrain, weaponry, tactics, and of the indefinable qualities of human ingenuity, we can begin to gain a better understanding of how combat is fought and experienced, won and lost.
One iconic clash that brings together many of these factors is the Battle of Waterloo, fought between Napoleon’s French army and the allied forces of the Duke of Wellington and Prussia’s Prince Blücher on 18 June 1815, in modern-day Belgium.
The quality of soldiers had an impact not just on the battle’s outcome, but on its course. Wellington’s army was a patchwork of British, Dutch, Belgian and Germanic troops, around half of whom were inexperienced recruits or raw militiamen, adequately armed and uniformed but barely trained. Although enjoying near numerical parity, the inexperience of Wellington’s force severely constrained his tactical options and ability to manoeuvre. Napoleon’s army, although mostly conscripts, was a largely veteran force. The majority of men had fought at least one campaign, and many were recently returned prisoners-of-war who brought a wealth of combat experience. Yet this force too had a hidden brittleness; recent political upheavals had made soldiers more suspicious of senior officers, and more susceptible to morale-sapping rumours.
The conditions famously played an even more direct role in the battle. The battlefield spread between two gentle ridges either side of a shallow valley, punctuated by a few scattered buildings – unspectacular landscape, but with enough strong points to allow Wellington to anchor his front on a ridgeline, with temporary fortifications at the chateau of Hougoumont on the right, the farm of La Haye Sainte in the centre, and the settlements around Frischermont on the left. The ridge also afforded a reverse slope on which his army could find some shelter from French artillery, while the high crops that covered the mid-June fields proved an impediment to both vision and movement for some combatants. Movement was hampered even more by the ferocious rains that had fallen for much of the previous afternoon and night. Thick mud made early morning movement difficult, and even later in the day the underfoot conditions were far from ideal.
Shelter on the battlefield was minimal, and most men spent the night before exposed to the deluge. Sodden uniforms contributed to the physical discomfort of those about to go into battle – a discomfort exacerbated by poor logistics. Neither side’s supply wagons had kept up with the armies on the march, and men on both sides of the valley spent the eve of battle hungry as well as wet. Some had not eaten for three days. For many, alcohol was more readily available than food. The chill, damp and lack of sustenance would not prevent men from fighting, especially once the adrenaline of battle began, but would have made them more susceptible to fatigue, and less resilient to mental shocks. Too much alcohol certainly encouraged some to rash action once the battle began.
More dangerously, the logistical trains could not always supply ammunition when called upon. These failures nearly cost Wellington the battle. On his left, the troops defending Frischermont were reduced to sending drummer boys to beg cartridges from neighbouring units. At La Haye Sainte, the German garrison ran out of ammunition entirely, forcing them to abandon this pivotal central position. Ammunition did get through to Hougoumont, however, allowing the allies to hold their crucial right flank.
If the armies, conditions and logistics helped to set the scene for the battle, tactics also impacted its course and outcome. Wellington’s tactical plan – influenced by the quality of his troops – was simply to hold his ground until Blücher’s Prussian army could arrive in support; Napoleon’s was largely to bludgeon Wellington out of the way. The lack of subtlety proved costly for Napoleon: I Corps lost almost a third of its men as Napoleon hurled them at the allied centre-left, and the French cavalry was squandered in rash unsupported attacks on solid squares of allied infantry. The allies too made errors – not least in sending unsupported infantry forward in counterattacks that led to the destruction of three German battalions – but they were fewer and less costly. Waterloo was no great tactical duel, but French errors contributed to their failure to evict Wellington from his position.
Commanders on both sides were effective in inspiring their men to action. Wellington’s leadership proved pivotal in encouraging tired, inexperienced and sometimes terrified allied soldiers to hold their ground, especially later in the day. Dozens of soldiers’ memoirs remembered him riding amongst them, his calmness and example stiffening their resolve. The French soldiers were equally keen to perform under the eyes of their emperor and were heartened to see attacks led forward by the legendary Marshal Ney. However, even this leadership failed at the last. Eager to keep the news of Blücher’s approach from his troops in the late afternoon, Napoleon spread word that the new arrivals were French rather than allied reinforcements. The startling disintegration of Napoleon’s army shortly afterwards in the face of the joint allied and Prussian counterattack can at least in part be explained by the panic of exhausted troops faced with an apparent betrayal.
The wide range of factors that can be considered to understand Waterloo is echoed elsewhere, although it is not always possible to trace every detail. Wellington himself questioned whether anyone could really ever understand “all the little events of which the great result is the battle lost or won.” But perhaps, by exploring a wide range of factors that influence armies before and during combat, and by considering the ways in which they collide and combine, we can begin to build an understanding of battle over the past millennium, from Hastings to Helmand.
Graeme Callister and Rachael Whitbread are authors of Battle: Understanding Conflict from Hastings to Helmand from www.penandswordbooks.com. Callister is a senior lecturer in history and war studies at York St John University, with extensive experience of researching and teaching the history of warfare. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Whitbread has a PhD in History from the University of York. Her thesis focused on warfare and formal combat in late-medieval Western Europe and she has produced several papers on the subject.
