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Ancestral Voices: The Influence of the Ancients on the Military Thought of the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries

Author(s): Donald A. Neill
Source: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Jul., 1998), pp. 487-520
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Ancestral Voices: The Influence of the
Ancients on the Military Thought of the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Donald A. Neill
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoilseething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty mountainmomently was forced;
Amidwhose swift half-intermittedburst
Hugefragmentsvaulted like reboundinghail . ..
And 'mid this tumult Kublaheard fromfar
Ancestralvoices prophesyingwar!
-Samuel TaylorColeridge,KublaKhan
The Renaissance Revisited

FROM the chasm of the Dark and Middle Ages "with ceaseless turmoil
seething," the Renaissance resonated across Europe from the rise of
Petrarch in the mid-fourteenth century, to the Enlightenment of the
eighteenth-imposing itself, like Coleridge's metaphorical mountain,
upon all aspects of religious, social, scientific, political, and philosophi-
cal thought, and scattering fragments of long-forgotten wisdom about
like "rebounding hail." In many ways, the period represented a coming
of age: a waxing dissatisfaction with the patronizing Christian interpre-
tation of man as inherently sinful and the world as a wheel of pain for
the unrighteous; the slow growth of the sense of human "self," of a des-
tiny not foreordained; and a new appreciation of the intrinsic worth of
Man. Novelist Jostein Gaarder summarizes the intellectual revolution of
the era: "Throughout the whole medieval period, the point of departure
had always been God. The humanists of the Renaissance took as their
point of departure man himself."'
1. Jostein Gaarder,Sophie's World (Sofies verden), trans. Paulette Moller (New

York:Berkley Publishing Corp., 1996), 200.
The Journal of Military History 62 (July 1998): 487-520 ? Society for Military History * 487
DONALDA. NEILL
Barbara Tuchman further eulogizes the secularism of the era, noting

that:
Under its impulse the individual found in himself, rather than in
God, the designer and captain of his fate. Hiis needs, his ambitions
and desires, his pleasures and possessions, his mind, his art, his
power, his glory, were the house of life. His earthly passage was no
longer, as in the medieval concept, a weary exile on the way to the
spiritualdestiny of his soul1.2
Art and music, philosophy and government, science and warfare
underwent a gradual but profound transformation. Man, grown weary of
the Tantalan quest for salvation, had decided to supplement it with the
pursuit of knowledge, discovery, and wealth-all expressions of a gradui-
ally emerging individualism.
It is generally accepted that scripts faithfully preserved by the Chris-
tian monasteries, supplemented by knowledge retrieved from the exotic
hinterlands of Palestine, Egypt, and Persia, and in many cases expanded
upon by the considerable scientific accomplishments of the Muslim
Moors, served to kindle the intellectual conflagrations of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, and led eventually to the voyages of discovery,
the development of the printing press, the Protestant secession, the
explosion of the humanist arts and, in the Enlightenment, to the "Age of
Reason." Revealed knowledge lay therefore at the heart of all contempo-
rary scientific, philosophical, and artistic endeavour, the rediscovery of
the wisdom of Athens and Rome serving as the fundament upon wvhich
Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Galileo, and Copernicus stood to
achieve the pinnacle of their respective arts and sciences.
The explosion of the humanist ideal was effected by myriad devel-
opments, discoveries, and re-discoveries during the fifteenth century:
the invention of printing immensely extended the access to knowl-
edge and ideas; advances in science enlarged understanding of the
universe and in appliedscience suppliednew techniques;new meth-
ods of capitalist financing stimulated production; new techniques of
navigation and shipbuilding enlarged trade and the geographical
horizon; newly centralized power absorbed from the declining
medieval communes was at the disposal of the monarchies and the
growing nationalism of the past century gave it impetus; discovery of
the New World and circumnavigation of the globe opened unlimited
visions.3
Increasing populations added to the tax base, which made more funding
available for voyages of discovery, which in turn opened up new vistas
2. BarbaraW. Tuchman, The March of Folly from Troy to Vietnam (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1984), 52.
3. Ibid., 57-58.
488 * THE JOURNAL OF
Ancestral Voices
for trade and exploitation, which in turn poured more capital into the
national economies. This newfound wealth and scientific wherewithal
led to the increasing availability of monies disbursable upon military
pursuits, which facilitated the vast increase in the size of armies neces-
sitated by the tactical and technological pressures of the era. Henry V led
ten thousand men to Agincourt in 1415, a "horde" which Turenne, two
centuries later, would exceed by an order of magnitude, and Napoleon,
at his pinnacle, by two orders.
The "rebirth" paradigm

Analyses of the Dark and Middle Ages suffer from a regrettable
dearth of reliable historical record, hence the problem with analyses of
the intellectual impact (or lack thereof) of this period on the Renais-
sance. Gutenberg's press multiplied by ten thousand times the number
of books available in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so
that what had previously been unobtainable at any price gradually came
within the reach of the slowly expanding literate class. A glut of rag
paper4 and the ability to print books much more rapidly than even the
most ardent monastic copyist, are alleged to have exhausted quickly the
supply of printable contemporary wisdom, and the scions of Gutenberg
turned to the ancient scholars, soldiers, poets, and kings as a means of
generating income. The growing availability of ancient wisdom is
assumed to have sparked an intellectual revolution, and the soldiers, sci-
entists, and kings of Europe, we are led to assume, merely "picked up"
where their ancient forebears had left off centuries before.
This thesis is central to conventional interpretations of the history of
the Renaissance. The contemporary Roman Church held as one of its
central tenets that nothing could be created or destroyed save by the
hand of God; and thus knowledge, if it came not from God, must there-
fore have come from someone in the past ... to whom God had at that
time vouchsafed it. Citing "the Ancients" as a source of inspiration
offered many an easy escape from accusations of heresy, and thus we can
assume that the Church would have been less uncomfortable with emerg-
ing wisdom if an "Ancient" origin could be plausibly claimed. Galileo, in
point of fact, brought condemnation (and house arrest) upon himself by
refuting the accepted, erroneous, Aristotelian model of the universe.
The "rebirth paradigm" carries over into the study of military his-
tory and conventional explanations for the military reforms of the fif-
teenth through seventeenth centuries. George Dyer has argued that
4. Paper produced, science historian James Burke has suggested, from the dis-
carded clothing of victims of the Black Death which struck Europe in the mid-
fourteenth century.
MILITARY HISTORY * 489
DONALD A. NEILL
"What the European states were really doing in the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries was reinventing the infantry armies of classical antiq-
uity,"5 while John Keegan notes that
It is ... usually claimed that two of the most important military
reformersof the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,Mau-
rice of Nassau and GustavusAdolphus,were consciously influenced
in the making of their armies by what they had learnt about the
RomanLegionfrom Caesar'sGallic War.6
Henry Guerlac goes even further in his support of the influence of the
Ancients; in his view, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Antiquity was still the great teacher in all that concerned the
broaderaspects of militarytheory and the secrets of militarygenius.
Vegetius and Frontinus were deemed indispensable;and the most
popularbook of the century, Henri de Rohan'sLe Parfait capitaine,
was an adaptationof Caesar'sGallic Wars.7
And yet we must question the validity of the "rebirth paradigm." To
what degree did the resurrected philosophical works of Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, and Seneca; the military treatises of Xenophon, Julius Caesar,
and Flavius Vegetius; the scientific efforts of Pythagoras, Archimedes,
and Galen; the historical works of Thucydides, Homer, Virgil, and Pliny;
or even the "Frogs" of Aristophanes underlie the later accomplishments
of Giordano Bruno, Gustavus Adolphus, Galileo Galilei, Erasmus, Spin-
oza, Martin Luther, Cervantes, Rabelais, and Thomas More? Did the mil-
itary adaptations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mimic the
scientific and cultural leaps through which Copernicus and Titian added
the methods of their antecedents to the fruits of their own genius? Or
was the gradual resurgence of large, standing, professional infantry
armies attributable to some other outgrowth of the Renaissance and
Enlightenment not directly related to restored historical knowledge?
Some authors disagree with the "rebirth paradigm." Michael
Roberts, in his short treatise on warfare between 1560 and 1660, argues
that "this period . . . seems to ... have witnessed what may not improp-
erly be called a military revolution."8 Keegan expands on this theme in
the opening discussion to his case studies in The Face of Battle:
5. GwynDyer,War(London:BodleyHead,1986), 55.
6. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 62.
7. HenryGuerlac,"Vauban:
The Impactof Scienceon War,"in PeterParet,ed.,
Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J.:
PrincetonUniversityPress,1986), 71-72.
8. Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660 (Belfast: Queen's Uni-
versity Press, 1956), 4.
Ancestral Voices
A great deal of controversyhas flowedroundthe issue of exactly how

influentialclassicalwriterswere on Renaissancemilitaryaffairs.Veg-
etius, a late Romanauthor,is known to have been widely read. But
F. L. Taylor[in TheArt of Warfarein Italy, 1494-1529] came to the
conclusion, after reviewingwhat authorsthe Condottierimight have
studied, that "the influence of classical history and literature was
mainly academic. We view the warfareof the Renaissance through
the academic medium of contemporaryhistorians and teachers and
are consequently apt to form an exaggeratedopinion of the effect of
theoretical writingson militaryoperations."9
A question therefore lies before us: Were the military theorists of the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment moved to flights of genius by their
times, their tools, and their fellows-or by the example and intellectual
birthright of their ancient forebears?
The problem
The temporal context of the following examination, therefore, is sev-
enteenth- and eighteenth-century France; the individuals, Sebastien le
Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707) and Hermann Maurice, Comte de Saxe
(1696-1750); the domain, ars bellicus; and the question, whether con-
ventional wisdom is correct in asserting that the military thought as
expressed through the works of these gentlemen is attributable primar-
ily to their study of the ancients (in particular, Vegetius's De Rei Mili-
tarii), or rather to the realities of the temporal context in which they
lived, worked, fought, built, and wrote.
I shall address the subject in two phases: first, a broad-brush exam-
ination of the military mechanism of the Roman Empire through the
eyes of the theoretician and historian Vegetius, followed by a brief sur-
vey of the evolution of warfare from the Middle Ages through the Renais-
sance to the European Enlightenment; second, a more in-depth look at
the principal themes of the military literary works in question, accom-
panied by an analysis of the probable nonderivative sources of their con-
cepts. I hope that this methodology will demonstrate that the military
achievements of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France were only
superficially attributable to the works of the ancients; and that the con-
tributions thereunto of Vauban and Saxe were, as Roberts suggests, "the
product of military logic"10 rather than the echo of ancestral voices
emphasizing the military wisdom of a bygone age.
9. Keegan, Face of Battle, 61-62. Emphasis added.

10. Roberts, Military Revolution, 19.
DONALD A. NEILL
The Mirror of Memory

Fabrizio: ... without the principles adopted from the ancients, men of
the greatest experience in military affairs say that the infantry
is good for little or nothing ...
Cosimo: Which method of arming would you recommend, the German
or the Ancient Romanone?
Fabrizio:The Roman,without a doubt.
-Machiavelli, Arte della Guerrall
If
Fluellen: you wouldtake the pains but to examine the wars of Pom-
pey the Great,you shall find, I warrantyou, that there is no tid-
dle-taddlenor pibble-pabblein Pompey'scamp . . .
-Shakespeare, Henry V12
Virgil recounts in vivid prose the founding of Rome by the defeated

exiles of Troy. Through the centuries of Mycenaean, Athenian, and Hel-
lenistic Greece, the citizens of the Italian peninsula remained relatively
inward-looking. It was only a century after the death of Alexander that
the denizens of Rome arose in might and began the struggle to carve out
an empire. Between the destruction of Babylon in 689 B.C. and the fall
of Rome itself in 476 A.D., the Romans fought more than a hundred
major wars, campaigns, and battles-in excess of ten for every century
of her existence. Until the defeat and destruction of Carthage in 146
B.C., arguably each of Rome's wars was a war for national survival; from
that date forward to the early Christian era, each was, with few excep-
tions, a war of expansion; and from thence to its fall, each of Rome's wars
was a battle against imperial entropy and the encroachment of chaos
from beyond the frontiers of empire. It has been postulated by authors
as temporally disparate as Edward Gibbon and Paul Kennedy that
empires intrinsically lack stability and are capable only of expansion or
contraction; if this is true, then once having achieved the maximum
extent of its empire, Rome may have been ineluctably destined for dis-
solution.
Two authors of vastly different backgrounds and eras recommend
themselves to this study. The first is Julius Caesar (c. 100-44 B.C.), the
general and statesman who, over a nine-year period from 58 to 50 B.C.,
conquered the entirety of modern France, Belgium, and Switzerland,
seized parts of Germany and Holland, and twice invaded Britain. His
best-known work, De Bello Gallico, describes this campaign and offers
considerable insight into Caesar's military thought, concepts of leader-
ship, and-if only peripherally-his considerable political acumen; Kee-
11. Niccol6 Machiavelli, The Art of War, trans. Ellis Farneworth (New York:
DaCapo Press, 1965), 47.
12. William Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Fifth, in W. J. Craig, ed.,
Shakespeare: Complete Works (London: Magpie Books, 1993), 488; Act IV, Scene I,
69-72.
492 * THE JOURNALOF
Ancestral Voices
gan notes the study's wide availability throughout Europe during the
Renaissance:
Although Caesar'sCommentaries [De Bello Gallico and De Bello
Civili] had only recently been rediscovered, they had achieved a
wide popularityin fifteenth-centuryItaly and were being translated
into other European languages by the beginning of the sixteenth
(French, 1488; German,1507; English, 1530).13
The second author, Flavius Vegetius Renatus, wrote De Rei Militarii
in the failing years of the empire that Caesar had helped to build. A the-
oretician and historian rather than a soldier, his work is of greater sig-
nificance to this present study because it spells out his vision of the
Roman army at the height of its power half a millennium before his own
birth, and is a description of the military machine of the Roman Empire
rather than a campaign chronology. For this reason, we will concentrate
on Vegetius the theorist rather than on Caesar the general in this present
work.
Vegetius
The Romansowed the conquest of the worldto no other cause
than continual militarytraining,exact observanceof discipline
in theircamps and unweariedcultivationof the other artsof war.
-Flavius VegetiusRenatus14
In 212 A.D. Caracalla, with the declaration Civis Romanus sum,
conferred Roman citizenship upon every free-born subject within the
empire. Eight years later, the Goths invaded Asia Minor and occupied the
Balkan peninsula; and in 285, only four decades after its millennial
anniversary, the empire was sundered into its Eastern and Western
halves.15 An empire that had subjugated the Egyptians and the Greeks
and occupied the biblical lands, the Iberian peninsula, and the northern
reaches of the Gauls and the Celts, had only two hundred years of exis-
tence left to it. Although two centuries is today considered a relatively
long period in the life of a state, the downfall of Rome had already been
foreshadowed in the degeneration of its once near-invincible armies, the
13. Keegan,Face of Battle, 62.

14. Thomas R. Phillips, ed., in his preface to Vegetius, The Military Institutions
of the Romans (De Rei Militarii), trans. John Clark (Harrisburg,Pa.: Military Service
Publishing Co., 1944), 13, 112.
15. Although it would be reunited in the early fourth century by Constantine, it
would fragment again in 340, this time permanently. Arguably,given the subsequent
sack and fall of Rome, the rise of Islam, the intellectual heritage of Byzantium, and all
of the myriad other results of this event, the division of Empire was one of the most
significant developments in Western history.
DONALDA. NEILL
slow but implacable advance of the eastern barbarian nations, and the
fatal arrogance of imperialism. This was the Rome of Vegetius, who is
believed to have lived and produced his prescriptive manual during the
final quarter of the fourth century.
Vegetius appears to have been a Roman of relatively significant rank,
albeit in the civilian rather than military sphere. Although the details of
his life are obscure, it is generally accepted that his practical military
experience, if indeed he had any at all, was at best limited; his works
consist largely of the collected arguments of historians and other mili-
tary theorists rather than his own observations. Writing apparently for
the eyes of the emperor Valentinian (371-392) in much the same fash-
ion that Machiavelli produced The Prince for his prospective Medici
patron, Vegetius's work appears to have been a textbook example of
advice which came too late to be of any use.
The legions that Caesar employed to great effect in the conquest and
garrisoning of Gaul represented the apex of Roman republican military
evolution: citizen infantry, recruited, trained, and equipped by Roman
citizens, and led by long-service veterans. The vast expansion of the
empire, however, led inevitably to an increase both in the amount of ter-
ritory to be garrisoned and the variety of subject peoples that were avail-
able to serve as auxiliaries, each possessing their own peculiar military
attributes. Conventional wisdom and historical record alike suggest that
the requirement for additional soldiery coincided both with the growing
availability of "barbarian" troops and the waxing desire of the Roman cit-
izenry to enjoy the fruits of their struggles for empire. The end result of
these trends was a gradual increase in the percentage of foreign troops
within even the Roman national legions relative to the numbers of citi-
zen infantry, a trend that was even more pronounced in the "allied"
legions. Of even greater consequence was the increase in relative num-
bers of light, unarmoured, stirrupless cavalry and the decline in infantry
of all sorts. The stolid line of disciplined, trained infantrymen, whose
flights of javelins and follow-up attacks with the short sword had rarely
failed to break the lines of less disciplined troops, was no more; and
Phillips suggests that by the time Vegetius put pen to parchment, "the
decay of the Roman armies had progressed too far to be arrested by [a]
plea for a return to the virtues of discipline and courage of the
ancients."16
The absorption of barbarian troops, such as Gauls, Iberians, and
Celts, and the supposed unwillingness of the Roman citizenry to defend
what they had won, however, do not tell the whole story of the evolution
of the legions from infantry to cavalry. By the third and fourth centuries,
16. Phillips in Vegetius, Military Institutions, 2.
Ancestral Voices
horsemen were slashing at the edges of the empire: the Goths along the
shores of the Black Sea (257) and throughout Greece (268); the Marco-
manni in Bohemia (270); the rise of the individual German kingdoms (c.
300); the victory of the Persians in Armenia (350); and the Huns' inva-
sion of Europe (360) and Russia (376). The catastrophic defeat of Valens
by the Visigoths at Adrianople (378), the worst reverse suffered by a
Roman army since Cannae, convinced the emperors that the solidity of
the line of heavy infantry armed only with the pilum and the gladius
was no longer sufficient to meet the surging cavalry attacks of the bar-
barians.
The solution chosen was the incorporation of greater numbers of
cavalry troops and longer-range missile weapons within the legions. For
both of these, it was necessary to go beyond the Roman citizenry, who
had comparatively little experience with either the horse or the bow.
This was accomplished-but only at the cost of the infantry that had been
the backbone of the legions. Oman notes that by the early fifth century,
The day of infantry had in fact gone by in southern Europe;they
continued to exist, not as the core and strength of the army,but for
various minor purposes-to garrisontowns or operate in mountain-
ous countries. Romanand barbarianalike threw their vigourinto the
organizationof their cavalry.17
In short, Rome adopted the cavalry and missile-launching capabilities of
her enemies, but without the solid skill base thereof, employing merce-
naries rather than cultivating the "cavalry nation" that the Huns, the
Goths, the Persians, and later the Mongols were to display,18 while at the
same time critically weakening the one arm of the legions in which, until
then, Rome had been unsurpassed. The result was a series of defeats that
gradually ate away the territory and strength of the empire, until in the
time of Vegetius it is arguable whether, as Phillips suggested, the legions
could in fact have been salvaged.
Vegetius's chief contentions, arguments, and maxims were, in hind-
sight, representative more of common sense and historical argument
than actual military experience. He had little of the latter, but was well
acquainted with the former two; and to his credit, he was apparently able
to draw on and synthesize the writings of his predecessors in order to
distill an appreciable quantity of useful advice.
17. C. W. C. Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages, ed. John H. Beeler
(Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1990), 10.
18. Victor Davis Hanson describes, in The Western Way of War:Infantry Battle
in Classical Greece (New York:Knopf, 1989), the fundamentally dichotomous nature
of oriental (slashing) and occidental (shock) warfare during the classical Greek
period.
DONALD A. NEILL I __
Vegetius's manual, however, describes a legion that did not exist in

his time and which, perhaps, never existed save as the Platonic ideal of
his imagination. It is reputed to have been influential in the campaigns
of the Count of Anjou (1092-1143), Henry II of England (1133-1189),
and Richard Coeur de Lion (1157-1199)-who, it has been suggested,
carried the tome with him to the Holy Land. His works have been lauded
by Montecuccoli (1609-1680) and the Austrian Field Marshal Prince de
Ligne (1735-1814). "A manuscript by Vegetius was listed in the will of
Count Everard de Frejus, about 837 A.D.,"19according to Phillips, who
describes the publishing history of the work. He notes that approxi-
mately 150 manuscript editions date from the tenth to the fifteenth cen-
turies, and that the first printed edition appeared in Utrecht in 1473, to
be followed rapidly by printings in Cologne, Paris, and Rome. The first
printed English edition was produced by Caxton in 1489,20 antedating by
two centuries the accomplishments of Vauban and Saxe. Vegetius's
advice, theories, and maxims were, therefore, readily available to the
military thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; and, in the
manner translated by the American military during the Second World
War, certainly seem applicable to modern warfare. However, it must be
borne in mind that the tactical methodology of the legion-armed as it
was with javelin and short sword and offering shock through steadiness
rather than firepower-differs vastly from that forced upon European
warfare by the appearance of the firelock. This critical difference will be
discussed at greater length further along in this paper.
The cavalry interregnum

The gradual paring away of the Western Roman Empire by the
Franks, Huns, and Visigoths that culminated in the fall of Rome in 476
has been credited largely to the superiority of the light barbarian cavalry
over the inept auxiliary cavalry and debased light infantry of the later
Roman Empire. The cavalry lesson was not lost on the European suc-
cessors to Rome, and over the next half-century, the development of
scale, chain, and later plate armor; the improved breeding of large, heavy
horses; the invention of the stirrup; and the emergence of the feudal sys-
tem of governance (which concentrated limited capital in the hands of
scattered warlords and kings) led to the development of the armored
class of elite warrior. Warfare devolved even further from the dissolute
practices of the later Romans and the disorganized raiding of the eastern
European and Asiatic horsemen into a contest involving two distinct
19. Phillips in Vegetius, Military Institutions, 1.

20. Ibid., 1.
Ancestral Voices
(and grossly mismatched) groups: the poorly armed, equipped, and

trained serf-based infantry, and the exquisitely equipped, well-trained,
and aloof noble cavalry. As the peasant infantry of the time was, without
a twenty-to-one advantage, generally incapable of harming the heavily
armored cavalryman; and the cavalryman-for reasons of prestige, hon-
our, and perhaps most importantly, prospects of ransom-unwilling to
engage the infantry, battles tended to consist of a prolonged fight
between the ill-equipped serfs, either preceded or followed by a selective
melee between the mounted heavy cavalrymen.
This state of affairs persisted from the time of Charlemagne well into
the terminal decades of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1457), when the
mounted horseman was gradually unseated by a combination of factors.
The first of these was his relative vulnerability while on foot; a man wear-
ing some seventy pounds of armor, equipped with heavy muscle-powered
weapons and possessed of extremely restricted vision and breathing
arrangements could, if isolated from his fellows, be easily overwhelmed
and dispatched by an unencumbered peasant armed with a dagger-the
fate of the bulk of the dismounted French knights at Agincourt (1415).
Although proof against the lighter missile weapons encountered during
the various crusades (light javelins and even light composite bows), the
knight had become vulnerable to close-range fire from the Welsh long-
bow and the crossbow-the latter a weapon which, although expensive,
required little training to operate and which could easily transfix an
armored man at a range in excess of one hundred meters. He was further
vulnerable to the emerging power of gunpowder arms which, although
finicky and expensive like the crossbow, were also easy (if unsafe) to
operate, and possessed the added quality of a noisy and violent dis-
charge.
But the most significant threat to the armored knight was the rein-
troduction of disciplined, formed infantry armed with a variety of pole-
mounted weapons such as the bill, fauchard, guisarme, bec-de-corbin,
lochaber axe, and the dreadfully effective Swiss pike and halberd-all of
which were designed to keep the knight at a distance and dismount him
from his horse, the source of his mobility and striking power; and, while
prone and helpless, to penetrate his armor with relative ease. The same
weapons (and to a lesser extent, the two-handed sword and battle-axe)
served, through leverage and the reduction in cross-section of the cut-
ting or penetrating edge of the weapon, to puncture even the heaviest
and most expensive plated armour of the era. Once the vulnerability of
the armored man to "stand-off" infantry weapons such as the pike and
the halberd had been demonstrated repeatedly in battle, armor began
gradually to disappear from the field, although it did retain a hallowed
place in the tilting contests of European monarchs well into the six-
DONALDA. NEILL
early twentieth century).

Deprived of its invulnerability and shock value, cavalry was once
again relegated to the support role it had played in the Greek and early
Roman armies: messenger, reconnaissance element, and pursuit force.
Through the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries, the hal-
berd complemented the pike and, for a brief time, the phalanx re-
emerged as a dominant formation for infantry. As Roberts notes, "The
pike was 'queen of the battlefield'; the millennial ascendancy of cavalry
was broken."21 The demise of the mounted, armored horseman-the
"flower of chivalry"-was due less to the quirky, expensive, and unreli-
able hand-gun than to the offensive value of the "can-opener" halberd,
and the defensive value of the pike.22
Infantry renascent
Interestingly, Oman in Art of War in the Middle Ages draws a pointed
comparison between the soldiery of Imperial Rome and Renaissance
Switzerland. After contending that there are but two means of van-
quishing any particular foe-either through shock corps-a-corps or mis-
sile fire-and offering the Swiss pikeman and the English and Welsh long
bowman as the respective medieval epitomes of these two methods,23
Oman suggests that, in their e'lan, ferocity in the defence of their home-
lands, cruelty in the conquest of foreigners, sheer bloodthirstiness, and
"moral guilt," the Swiss closely mimicked the action and capabilities of
the Roman legions. However, Oman's comparison lays little emphasis
upon the rigorous training and fierce discipline of the legions, suggesting
instead that the "free herdsman of the Alps" was something of a natural
soldier who, the pike or halberd once thrust into his willing hands, was
capable of falling on the foe not only with gusto, but with precision and
professional deliberation. He further credits their tactical mobility and
speed of movement on the march to their rejection of encumbering
armor24-the same decision, Vegetius argues, that ultimately cost the
legions their superiority as heavy infantry. Finally, the pike phalanx, as
previously noted, itself fell victim to the concentration of manpower that
gave it both its relative invulnerability to cavalry and its massed ability
to inflict "shock."
21. Roberts, Military Revolution, 6.

22. Richard A. Preston and Sydney F. Wise, Men in Arms (New York:Holt, Rine-
hart and Winston, 1979), 92-95.
23. Oman, Art of War, 73-74.
24. Ibid., 80. It should be noted, however, that the Swiss pikemen did retain the
helmet and cuirass.
Ancestral Voices
The development and employment first of siege and then of field-

transportable artillery (the former by Charles VIII, the latter by Gus-
tavus and Maurice) and the widening distribution of the arquebus soon
reversed the resurrection of the pike phalanx, there being no more
appropriate target for the wildly inaccurate early field artillery and large-
bore hand-guns than an enormous block of tightly-packed soldiery.25
Infantry began to adapt to the increasing prevalence of gunpowder on
the field of battle. For the first time, infantry bodies, armed with a com-
bination of the arquebus for firepower and the pike for defence, were
able to conduct offensive operations against other, similarly armed bod-
ies-an innovation briefly epitomized by the Spanish tercio. What then
began to determine the difference between victory and defeat was the
skill and speed of the arquebusier in reloading and discharging his
weapon, and the steadiness of the soldiers in the face both of fire and the
disciplined, menacing approach of a forest of eighteen-foot pikes.
Roberts's inference that the pike-and-arquebus combination imme-
diately obviated cavalry is somewhat exaggerated; in fact, more than two
hundred years were required to effectively relegate cavalry to a sec-
ondary role on the battlefield. The introduction of first the arquebus and
then the matchlock musket into the pike formations was a slow and
gradual one, and did in fact coincide with the slow and gradual disap-
pearance of the heavily armored knight; however, like most military
institutions, the knight's actual disappearance only occurred long after
he had been rendered militarily irrelevant by the polearm. Jones argues
that the waning need for a stand-off weapon to compete with the knight's
lance led to a gradual decrease in the length of the pike, and that the
growing proportion of musketeers to pikemen led equally to the growing
recognition of the offensive capability of such formations. However, the
need to coordinate the fire of the arquebusiers led to linear rather than
phalanx-like formations, and the linear pike-and-arquebus formations
soon proved to be relatively immobile and difficult to manoeuvre on the
battlefield and tended-unlike the traditional four-sided Swiss pike
squares-to offer vulnerable flanks to slashing attacks by emerging
sword-and-pistol cavalry. Unable with a pike-musket phalanx to effec-
tively exploit a penetration or pursue a broken enemy,
the Europeanshad at last reached the identical tactical situation as
the Alexandrianand Roman armiieshad.... The linear system and
the battalion's lack of an all-round defence capability made the
infantry particularly vulnerable to cavalry attacks on its flanks. And,
25. Martin van Creveld, Technology and War from 2000 B.C. to the Present
(New York:Free Press, 1991), 91. Van Creveld states that "It was with artillery that
the French finally blasted the Swiss phalanx from the battlefield at Marignano in
1515."
DONALD
A. NEILL
unlike Roman heavy infantry, the musketeers could not protect

themselves against shock action by sabre-armedcavalry. By com-
parison with the Romans, they lacked the level of articulationthat
had often enabled Romanheavy infantryto manoeuvreso as to pre-
sent a front to heavy cavalry.26
Jones further argues that the conscious and somewhat slavish adoption
of Roman tactical methodology by Gustavus Adolphus and Maurice of
Nassau in the early seventeenth century contributed heavily to this lack
of adaptability, and attributes the prolonged importance of cavalry to the
"intrinsic weapon-system advantage" of pistol and sabre over pike and
musket, a less-than-convincing argument given the difficulty of reloading
a pistol on horseback, and the questionable shock effect of sabre- over
lance-armed cavalry. He then argues, more convincingly, that what
turned the tide in favour of the infantry was the invention of the bayo-
net, which enabled each musket-armed soldier to, in effect, serve as his
own pikeman, thus simultaneously increasing both the firepower and the
defensive capability of the battalion.
Increasing the cumulative firepower of an infantry body of the era
could be accomplished in three ways: by increasing the proportion of
muskets to pikes; by increasing the rate of fire; and by increasing the
shock effect of musketry. The first was accomplished by the elimination
of the pike and its replacement first by the plug, and later by the socket,
bayonet, an invention attributed to Vauban; the second, by incessant
training and harsh discipline; and the third, by the practice of firing in
controlled volleys. Of these innovations, the second-training and disci-
pline-rapidly took on paramount importance as it became apparent
that victory in a contest between close-ordered troops exchanging volley
fire would go to the side which maintained its discipline and regularity
of fire the longest:
Battlelosses were bound to be severe when soldiers advancedshoul-
der to shoulder,halting at the word of command to trade volleys at
distances suited to duelling pistols. Only an iron discipline could
nerve men to keep on reloadingand firingwhile they stood firmamid
the heaped-up bodies of writhing or motionless comrades. Only
years of drill could school them to close up their tattered ranks and
march forwardwith the bayonet at that slow and solemn pace of
eighty steps a minute.27
Creveld in Technology and War agrees, and suggests that
26. Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World (New York:Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 249.
27. Lynn Montross, War Through the Ages, 3d ed. (New York:Harperand Broth-
ers, 1960), 336.
Ancestral Voices
conditions pertainingto both safety and effectivenessdemandedthat

[gunpowder]weapons be used in a precisely coordinated fashion.
This required great concentration and a wall-like steadfastness
under fire, qualitiesthat took years of trainingand a ferocious disci-
pline to inculcate.28
This tactic of massing fires-imposed by the inherent inaccuracies, com-
plexities of loading, and slow rate of fire of the musket, to say nothing of
safety considerations-put a premium on high states of training and
ruthless discipline. Fortuitously, a model for such training and discipline
was readily available in the works of Vegetius and other historians of
Imperial Rome.
The question of the "rebirth" of infantry in the Renaissance there-
fore leads us to wonder whether the need for drill, training, and strict
discipline imposed by the musket would have led to the types of forma-
tions and operations that Vegetius recommended even had he not writ-
ten his book. Roberts argues that in attempting to find a solution to the
problem and promise of the musket,
Maurice[of Nassau]and his cousins, inspiredby a study of Vegetius,
Aelian, and Leo VI ... attempted to return to Roman models in
regardto size of units, order of battle, discipline, and drill. ... [and
noted that] the sergeant-majorof Maurice'sarmy [had to] be capa-
ble of executing a great number of intricate parade-groundevolu-
tions, based on Romanmodels.29
It is readily apparent that Maurice and his contemporaries, as well as
those both antedating (Machiavelli) and following (Saxe) their military
heyday, drew some degree of inspiration from Roman writings. The next
section will, in examining the contributions of Saxe and Vauban to the
military art, attempt to determine whether ancient writings merely com-
plemented, or actually furnished, the military thought of the French
Enlightenment.
Giving Fire
The militaryrevolutionof early modern Europepossessed a number
of separate facets. First, the improvements in artillery in the fif-
teenth century, both qualitativeand quantitative, eventually trans-
formed fortressdesign. Second, the increasingreliance on firepower
in battle- whether with archers, field artillery,or musketeers-led
not only to the eclipse of cavalryby infantryin most armies, but to
28. Creveld, Technology and War, 94.

29. Roberts, Military Revolution, 7, 10.
DONALD A. NEILL
new tactical arrangements that maximized the opportunities of giv-

ing fire.31
The "devilish cannon"

And the nimble gunner with linstock now the devilish
cannon touches,
And down goes all before him!
The foregoing citation from Parker's Military Revolution demon-
strates his agreement with the proposition that tactical innovations flow
from technological developments rather than the reverse. While the gen-
eral thrust of this essay thus far accords with this sentiment, it seems
likely on closer examination that the flux and flow of military thinking
vis-a-vis technical innovation is less a one-way street than a Marxian the-
sis-antithesis-synthesis interaction in which competing doctrines and
technologies, rather than nullifying each other, establish a modus
vivendi-for lack of a better term-and result in a wavelike transforma-
tion of the battlefield, displaying "troughs" and "crests" as tactics and
technologies alternately gain and relinquish momentary advantage. The
best illustration of this principle is the ages-old dialectic between war-
head and armor. This competition led through the early and high Middle
Ages to a gradual increase in both the thickness of personal armor pro-
tection and the amount of body surface protected, and resulted, by the
late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in genuinely impressive
technical solutions to the nettlesome problem of armor-plating a flexible
human body. Despite the fact that the longbow, the cranequin- or wind-
lass-operated crossbow, and eventually the hand-gun were capable of
penetrating this armor protection, each of these weapon systems pos-
sessed inadequacies that ensured that armor would not be instantly
swept from the battlefield, but would in fact endure centuries after the
introduction of weapons capable of defeating it. This would seem to indi-
cate that, the continual evolution of military technologies notwithstand-
ing, the advantage they confer to the side which possesses them has
historically been less than the difference between the relative capabili-
ties of two armies (including the relative talents of two commanders). As
Creveld suggests, Frederick II (like countless other successful generals)
almost certainly owed his successes more to his tactical innovations
than to any minute differences between the personal firearms borne by
his soldiers and those borne by the enemy.32
30. Geoffrey Parker,The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise
of the West, 1500-1800 (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1988), 24. Emphasis
added.
31. Shakespeare, Henry V, 480; Act III, Chorus.
32. Creveld, Technologyand War, 97.
Ancestral Voices
The introduction of firearms into general use was neither sudden nor
did it have an immediately tumultuous effect upon the battlefield.
Although both the French and English possessed cannon at Agincourt,
contemporary accounts thereof make no mention of their use in action.
Machiavelli even argues against them in his Discourses, stating that they
were inconsequential and ineffective on the battlefield. And yet that
same year, as Gat notes, and six years prior to the appearance of Arte
della Guerra,
the guns of Francis I broke the dreadfulSwiss infantryon the battle-
field of Marignano(1515). And only a year after Machiavellidis-
missed the significance of the new arquebuses, sarcastically
remarkingthat they were useful mainly for terrorizingpeasants, the
Spanish arquebusiersinflictedon the Swiss infantryits second great
defeat at the Battle of Bicocca (1522).33
The gradual rise in proportion of muskets over polearms during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that, in combination with light field
guns, had eliminated the Swiss pike phalanx from the battlefield bore
simultaneous witness to the rapid expansion of gunpowder artillery. The
vast expense of the casting and boring processes necessary to the pro-
duction of great guns virtually ensured that the creation of an artillery
arm would be a military option open only to the monarch of a large and
wealthy state. This fact in turn ensured that the larger monarchies would
have at their disposal the means of reducing the fortified places of the
smaller, and led eventually (albeit indirectly) to the consolidation of the
European absolute monarchies. It had another, related effect as well; the
ease with which the high, narrow curtain walls of medieval castles were
battered apart by flat-trajectory cannon prompted, over the period
beginning with Henry V's 1415 siege of Harfleur and carrying through to
Vauban's day, the gradual transformation of the fortified place, whether
field redoubt, military garrison, or walled city.
The invulnerable fortress

So twice five miles of fertile ground
Withwalls and towers were girdledround.
-Coleridge, KublaKhan
Fortressesare the buttressesof the crown.
-Montecuccoli
With the introduction of heavy cannon, a number of requisite archi-
tectural adaptations rapidly became apparent. First, the fortress had to
be capable of mounting heavy guns. This necessitated a broadening of
33. Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to
Clausewitz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 5.
DONALDA. NEILL
the tops of walls and towers to hold carriages and permit recoil and the
loading of the guns, as well as a thickening of support members to with-
stand the weight of cannon and absorb the shock of recoil. This led to a
broadening and general flattening of towers, as well as the vast thicken-
ing of their walls, pilasters, and other supporting structures. Second, the
fortress had to be strengthened against gunfire. During the wars of the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries, it was observed that, where only a few
dozen or hundred strikes by the immense stone and iron balls of siege
guns were necessary to reduce a stone wall to rubble, thickly banked,
wood-faced earthen walls were often capable of withstanding thousands
of impacts while retaining their defensive properties. This suggested the
adoption of earthen ramparts rather than stone machilocation, which
had a tendency to shatter and produce unpleasant shrapnel-like effects.
The third element was the relatively flat trajectory of cannon and
musket shot over ranges of less than two to three hundred meters.
Where a cannon ball shot from a high tower would have a greater range
than one shot from ground level, the latter would sweep the earth before
it and therefore would be more likely to cause casualties among assault-
ing infantry, particularly after the adoption of grape and canister shot
and the introduction, also by Vauban, of grazing and ricochet fire. This
also resulted in a relative lowering of the walls of fortresses, an innova-
tion which further reduced the profile of the structure and made it even
less vulnerable to enemy siege guns; and engendered the construction of
a long, gently sloping plain or glacis around the fortress, offering no
cover to an advancing force. Finally, in order to take advantage of
enfilade fire, parallel rather than perpendicular to the ranks of an
assaulting formation, it was necessary to ensure that the front of each
gun position could be covered by mutually supporting fire from other
gun and musket embrasures.
The gradual combination of these innovations-broader, flatter,
heavier works; the substitution of packed earth and wood for stone; the
reduction in height of gun towers; and the redesign of fortresses to allow
flank shots and converging fire-over a period spanning two centuries
gradually increased the defensibility of fortresses to the point where
their capture either by storm or siege became a particularly thorny
proposition. The result, as Guerlac points out, was that by "the late sev-
enteenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, warfare often
appears to us as nothing but an interminable succession of sieges."34
These sieges required the employment of thousands of infantrymen
for circumvallation and contravallation of the besieged stronghold, as
well as for the occasional frontal charge to test the mettle of its defend-
ers. The new forms of fortress construction often baffled medieval
34. Guerlac in Paret, Makers of Modern Strategy, 73.
Ancestral Voices
mining techniques, as the process of tunnelling under walls, shoring with

wooden beams, and then firing the supports was less than effective
against thick, broad-based ramparts of packed earth; and the ground-
sweeping effect of round-shot, grape, and canister at ranges of up to five
hundred yards rendered the glacis an extremely unhealthy place for an
assaulting force. Within one hundred yards of the fortress, the volley fire
of musketeers would be added to that of the gunners, and still closer in
the addition of impeding or canalizing obstacles served to break up the
momentum of an attack and render the attackers even more vulnerable
to the fire of the defenders.
The tactical problem for the attacker, then, became one which the
trench fighters of the First World War would later come to ponder and
which, in fact, would be a major spur to the development of the tank-
how to cross the "last three hundred yards" in the face of massed gun-
fire. The cost in human life of this type of operation was such that it
tended to rapidly deplete both the manpower and the morale of the
assaulting army, a solid footnote to Sun Tzu's admonition that "the worst
policy of all is to besiege walled cities."35
The supremacy of the fortified place was symptomatic of the afore-
mentioned eternal struggle between warhead and armor, but was not to
last. In the late seventeenth century, a Frenchman of humble origins-
peasant, foot-soldier, lieutenant of infantry, and later Marshal of
France-would capture the imagination and the heart of Louis XIV, both
by providing a cost-effective solution to the problem of siege warfare,
and, paradoxically, by continuing until his dying day to contribute to the
intricacies of the problem itself.
Vauban
Gower: The Duke of Gloucester, to whom the order of the siege
is given, is altogether directed by an Irishman ...
Fluellen: ... he has no more directions in the true disciplines
of the wars, look you, of the Roman disciplines, than is a
puppy dog ...
Gower: Here 'a comes; and the Scots captain, Captain Jamy,
with him.
Fluellen: Captain Jamy is a marvellous falorous gentleman, that
is certain; and of great expedition and knowledge in
th'aunchient wars ... by Cheshu, he will maintain his
argument as well as any military man in the world, in the
disciplines of the pristine wars of the Romans.
35. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ed. James Clavell, trans. Lionel Giles (New York:
Dell Publishing, 1983), Chapter III.
37. Shakespeare, Henry V, 481; Act III, Scene II, 72-91.
DONALD A. NEILL
Unlike either Vegetius or Saxe, both of whom penned explicit vol-

umes on the conduct of war as they saw it, Sebastien le Prestre de
Vauban wrote little in the way of elaborate treatises, instead expressing
his military thought through two media: his extensive correspondence
with a variety of personalities, notably with his patron, Louis XIV, and
through his impressive array of architectural achievements. His col-
lected writings were in fact only published between 1842 and 1845, in
three volumes entitled Oisivetes de M. de Vauban. His technical accom-
plishments were, however, most impressive; over the thirty-year period
of his professional activity, he personally designed a great number of new
fortresses and oversaw the improvement, in line with his theories of for-
tification, of literally thousands of others. In all this time, he produced
only a single treatise on siege craft, another on the defence of fortresses,
and a short paper on mining operations. He conducted nearly fifty sieges
throughout this period, all of which were brilliantly successful, and from
which evolved his method of operation known as the "scientific siege"
and characterized by his system of "triple parallels."
Vauban's siege technique was slow, deliberate, utterly certain, and
parsimonious of human life-the latter characteristic endearing him to
his strangely humanist patron and his soldiers alike. The method began
with the circumvallation and contravallation of the fortress in order both
to cut off the defenders from outside aid and to protect his own forces
from counterattack.37 He then constructed a long trench, or "parallel"
(so known because of its orientation relative to the exterior works of the
fortress) just beyond the maximum effective range of its guns. He then
sapped forward in a number of "zigzag" approach trenches, so oriented
as to prevent the enemy from enfilading them. At a given distance, a sec-
ond parallel would be constructed to permit the horizontal movement of
troops, guns, and supplies, while from the approaches, battery positions,
complete with ramparts, would be constructed to enable his siege guns
to engage the fortress, sweep its ramparts, and attempt to disable its
guns. From the second parallel, additional approaches would be con-
structed to a third parallel, along with additional battery positions to
bring the siege artillery even closer to the besieged fortress to pound the
defending batteries further. From the third parallel, generally well within
enemy cannon and musket range, tunnels would be dug and the outer
works and ramparts prepared for demolition with explosive charges. At
37. It should be noted that the apparent similarities between Vauban's tech-
niques of circumvallation and contravallation, and those employed by Caesar at, for
instance, Alesia, are only cosmetic. Caesar'slegions built the standard rampartedwall
with wooden palisade and circumferential towers; Vauban'sdefensive works consisted
of trenches, redoubts, and batteries. The two systems of fortification and siege were
predicated on unique tactical principles derived from entirely different weapon sys-
tems.
Ancestral Voices
this point, the besieged force was generally offered the opportunity to
surrender; if this was refused, the mines would be detonated and the
assaulting parties would charge across the demolished ramparts and into
the fortress, generally at a grave cost in human life despite the weeks of
pounding by the besieger's batteries.38
As it was possible to calculate the rate of digging of which the work
parties were capable; and from that the length of time it would generally
take to construct the parallels, approaches, batteries, and mines; and
since the maximum range of the enemy cannon could be measured,
Vauban boasted that he could calculate to the hour when an enemy
fortress would fall. The inexorable nature of his siege methodology led,
interestingly, to the evolution of a surrender convention; once the third
parallel had been constructed and the mines charged, the commander of
the fortress would generally accept an offer of terms, and was usually
accorded the right of departure bearing arms, with drums beating and
colours flying, certain in the guarantee that the population he had
defended would be spared. This spectacle became so commonplace dur-
ing the years of Vauban's ascendancy that picnic parties of French nobles
often turned out to witness the departure of the vanquished force. This
convention was less the result of nobility and altruism than common
sense; fortress commanders generally surrendered before the final
assault because victorious troops who had been forced to attack a well-
defended fortress and suffer hideous losses in so doing were unlikely
thereafter to be well disposed towards the defenders and the local popu-
lace, and their commanders less likely to prohibit or prevent acts of rap-
ine, pillage, murder, and arson. The surrender convention therefore
avoided undue unpleasantness for the attacker, the defender, and the
defended.
Vauban is best known, however, for having turned his understanding
of geometry, architecture, and gunnery to the science of fortification.
Over his career he built small but impregnable redoubts, redesigned
fortresses, rebuilt walled cities, fortified large cities, and constructed
defensible harbor sites. His methods of fortification centred upon the
ballistic characteristics of heavy cannon and the matchlock musket. His
aim was to encircle the defended locality with an interlocking web of rel-
atively flat cannon trajectories out to maximum effective range, and
reinforce this at close range with interlocking musket trajectories
designed to inflict further damage on a force that actually managed to
approach the walls. In order to accomplish this, he improved walls and
ramparts and invented numerous types of outworks (the ravelin, the
demi-lune and the "covered way" among them) designed to enable the
38. It was for this reason-their expected casualty rate-that the assaulting bat-
talions generally received the wry nickname of "ForlornHopes."
DONALDA. NEILL
defenders of the fortress to achieve interlocking arcs of enfilade fire

while remaining behind the overlapping fire of mutually supporting posi-
tions. His achievements in this regard were exceptional and received
international acclaim; "Vaubanian" fortresses began to spring up else-
where on the Continent, and even appeared as far away as North Amer-
ica and India. His defensive methodology remained unchallenged until
the development of internal ricochet fire, known otherwise as the "Ger-
man method," in the early nineteenth century. Even Governor Fron-
tenac of Quebec consulted Vauban on the plans for the fortification of
that city.39
His contributions to the arts of siege and fortification reversed them-
selves once again in his later years. By the turn of the eighteenth cen-
tury, he had become a strong advocate of the replacement of the
matchlock musket by the flintlock (the wheel-lock never having gained
wide distribution due to expense of construction, complexity, and cost of
maintenance) in order to increase the reliability of the primary infantry
weapon system. He resolved the problem of the plug bayonet-which
gave the infantryman the unpalatable choice of being able to either fire
or repel a charge, but not both-through the invention of the socket bay-
onet, which allowed the soldier to do both simultaneously and, inciden-
tally, completely obviated the pike. He attempted to perfect a method for
recruiting troops as a precursor to national conscription, a policy for
which Saxe would later express considerable support; and he made
inroads towards developing a workable pay system, an important inno-
vation in an era when the pay of soldiers was a chancy thing. This latter
was a surprising failing, given the extensive incidences of mutinies by
unpaid troops during the Thirty and Eighty Years' Wars, and Augustus's
avoidance of similar catastrophes within the legions through the imple-
mentation of a reliable pay system.40
One equally significant outcome of his siege methodology was the
"professionalization" of the military engineers, in much the same fash-
ion as Gustavus and Maurice had "professionalized" the artillery, trans-
forming their role from an arcane art into a military science. Montross
notes that Vauban was responsible for the organization of "the first engi-
neering corps of uniformed soldiers whose operations were combined
39. In a letter written at Quebec, 20 September 1692, in Louise Dechane, ed.,

La correspondance de Vauban relative au Canada (Ottawa: Ministere des affaires
culturelles, 1968), 14.
40. Michael Grant, The Army of the Caesars (New York: Charles Scribner's,
1974), 55-59. Also noted by Grant in his The Twelve Caesars (New York:Charles
Scribner's, 1975), 60-61. This point was also underscored by John English in March-
ing Through Chaos: The Descent of Armies (New York:Praeger, 1997).
Ancestral Voices
with those of other arms" in the conduct of the scientific siege.41 His
methodology had an additional and historically significant strategic
impact; by concentrating on the taking of fortresses, most of which for
reasons of transportation lay along important river routes, Vauban's
method enabled the monarchy to avoid exhausting, time-consuming,
and costly movement by road of large bodies of troops, by simply taking
strategic choke points with mechanical precision and on a predictable
time-line. This policy must have appealed greatly to Louis XIV, who by
all accounts was possessed of a pragmatic as well as frugal turn of mind.
Vauban's strategic outlook was similarly portrayed in his treatise on
fortress defence, which stated that a defensive network should offer two
fundamental characteristics: first, it should close to the enemy all points
of entry into the kingdom, and second, it should facilitate attack into
enemy territory. Fortresses, he insisted, should never be designed solely
for defence.
Guerlac, in his review of Vauban's military contributions, has sug-
gested that the latter may have drawn certain of his principles from
Blaise de Pagan (1604-1665) and the main ideas from Lesfortifications
du comte de Pagan (1645), which were grounded in the growing effec-
tiveness of cannon in both the offence and the defence; and from Mai-
gret, whose Treatise on Preserving the Security of States by Means of
Fortresses suggests a number of important characteristics of strategic
defences, all of which can or should control key routes into the kingdom;
dominate bridgeheads on great rivers; control important internal com-
munications lines; provide a base for offensive action; serve as a refuge
for the local populace; offer a fortified seaport for trade or reinforcement;
stand as a frontier city; and supply the sovereign with a place to store
treasure.42 Of these, Vauban agreed explicitly with the first and fourth
roles, and spent the majority of the latter half of his career seeking to
redesign France's strategic defences along the lines of this philosophy.
Although it is unlikely that he was familiar with Sun Tzu's aforemen-
tioned admonition regarding the folly of attacking fortified places,
Vauban's career is a curious admixture of innovations proving the
ancient Chinese strategist both right and wrong.
Near the end of his career, Vauban slowly drew back from his plans
to create an enormous and complex network of strategic fortresses
across the French countryside and began instead to advocate the cre-
ation of camps retranches to fill the interstices between the existing for-
tifications. This may have been the result of a number of influential
factors. One was likely the enormous cost of building large and compli-
cated citadels, which, despite his liking both for Vauban and his strate-
41. Montross, War through the Ages, 339.

42. Guerlac in Paret, Makers of ModemrnStrategy, 87.
DONALD A. NEILL
gic aspirations, must have begun to concern Louis; and another, the vast
increase in the proportion of infantry in the French army as a result of
Vauban's infantry-intensive methodologies. An infantry regiment man-
ning an "entrenched camp" could offer as significant a pause to an
attacker as a regiment manning a vastly more expensive fortified citadel,
and either location would be able to meet the strategic requirements of
denying entry and supporting offensive action.
Ironically, although there is no evidence in Vauban's work to support
such an allegation, the camps retranches philosophy came to resemble
closely the ancient Roman practice of the construction, by the legions,
of simple fortified camps along their lines of march to serve as way-sta-
tions, a defended locality for choke points, and a place of refuge in the
event of a reverse. This may be additional support for the notion that an
idea that continues to make military sense will be perpetuated regardless
of who originates it. Finally, the "entrenched camp" idea may also reflect
Vauban's slow disillusionment with fortification and his growing belief in
the importance of the individual infantryman, to whose effectiveness he
had made so many contributions. Guerlac suggests this evolution may
have been a sign that the "great engineer, toward the close of his career,
was led gradually to lay more emphasis upon armies and less upon forti-
fication";43 that, having invented the key to unlock fortresses, Vauban
gradually turned his attention back to improving the effectiveness of the
individual soldier. His latter-day strategic evolution towards advocacy of
the entrenched camp over the citadel may have been rooted in his ori-
gins as a common musketeer. It is in any case reminiscent of a Japanese
adage dating from the early Tokugawa Shogunate, to the effect that "the
soldier is the castle."
Saxe
I am not particularlywise, but the great reputationsof
Vaubanand Coehorn do not overwhelmme. They have
fortified places at enormous expense and have not made
them any stronger.
-Maurice De Saxe44
In the late sixteenth century, the ratio of infantry to cavalry in the
French Army was approximately two to one. A century later, immedi-
ately following the heyday of Vauban and just preceding that of Saxe, the
infantry-cavalry ratio had increased to five to one. This evolution was a
reflection of many variables peculiar to the times, not the least of which
were the aforementioned decline in the dominance of the battlefield by
43. Ibid., 90.

44. Marshal Hermann Maurice de Saxe, Reveries on the Art of War, trans. and
ed. Thomas R. Phillips (Harrisburg,Pa.: TelegraphPress, 1944), 89.
Ancestral Voices
the horseman; the unsuitability of firearms to the cavalier (it being diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to reload a wheel-lock pistol on the back of a trot-
ting destrier); and the infantry-intensive nature of the scientific siege,
which had for most of Vauban's career been the dominant form of com-
bat, as well as the one most certain of outcome and least expensive in
personnel. Mastery of the infantry, long a subordinate arm, had become
of paramount importance to the metier of the general-although rank
nomenclature had, in England at least, recently been cemented to reflect
otherwise.45 At the turn of the seventeenth century, Turenne had been
the undisputed master of the arms of France. His successor in the title
of Grand Marshal would prove his superior as well.
Maurice de Saxe was arguably one of the most successful generals of
the era of musketry; he was certainly one of the most ambitious and
flamboyant. He reached his peak of military glory between 1745 and
1748, the latter half of the War of the Austrian Succession, during which
period he captured Ghent, Brussels, and Maastricht and won the battles
of Lauffeld, Rocroi, and Fontenoy, the latter reportedly through a feat of
personal physical courage that won even the grudging admiration of his
enemies-all of these victories accomplished, as Montross puts it, "with
an indolent ease."46 Where Vauban concentrated his intellectual efforts
on rendering cities impregnable and then proving that they were not,
Saxe disdained heavy, immobile fortifications, preferring the rapid move-
ment of infantry and cavalry in the offence, and depending for the
strengthening of his defences on the rapid construction of mutually sup-
porting field fortifications and hasty obstacles to reinforce his infantry
formations.
An assiduous student of the writings of both the Romans and his
more immediate predecessors (he cites Montecuccoli extensively in his
Reveries sur l'Art de la Guerre), Saxe was of the opinion that harsh
training and iron discipline were of greater value than firepower or num-
bers and would remain for the foreseeable future the decisive factor in
battle. When he died in 1750 at fifty-four years of age, two equally mem-
orable epitaphs were uttered by the nobility of France: Madame de Pom-
padour, mistress of King Louis XV, eulogized his lack of character with
the phrase "The only pleasure he takes in the society of women can be
summed up in the word 'debauchery.' It is only on the battlefield that he
is great." Louis, his patron, was more complimentary; upon learning of
the loss of Saxe, he is reported to have lamented "I have no generals,
now; only captains."47
45. The command structure of the English military had since the 1660s included
a Captain-Generalof the Army, a Lieutenant-General of the Cavalry, and a Sergeant-
Major General of the Infantry.
46. Montross, War through the Ages, 380.
47. Saxe, Reveries, 3-4 and 10 respectively.
DONALD A. NEILL
While Saxe relied heavily on the writings of Vegetius, there is an

important difference between the two men; where Vegetius was a theo-
retician and historian with little or no military experience, writing about
events and soldiers that antedated him by half a millennium, Saxe was
an experienced combat veteran who, by the time he penned his Rever-
ies, had been a soldier for all of the twenty-three years since he had first
fought under Prince Eugene at Malplaquet in 1709. His work and Veg-
etius's diverge in two significant areas: Saxe's includes gunpowder rather
than muscle as the primary engine of destruction in war, and Saxe-
unlike Vegetius-includes important insights and anecdotes which could
only have been gained through extensive experience in long military
campaigns.48
A reader familiar with Vegetius who peruses Saxe's Reveries will be
immediately struck by the similarities in structure, phrasing and tactical
methodology between the two books. This is not surprising, as Saxe con-
tinually credits the Romans and their assiduous historians for the source
material underlying his tactical innovations. He even goes so far as to
suggest a redesign of the French Army along the lines of the legion, and
employs such terms as "cohorts" to describe his short battalions. Where
Vegetius detailed an inventory of fifty-five ballistae and ten onagri as
support weapons for the legion, Saxe refers to the use of a siege train of
heavy cannon (presumably twenty-four-pounders), drawn by oxen
rather than horses (as Vegetius's onagri are drawn by oxen rather than
horses), and proposes the invention of what he terms an amusette, a
heavy breech-loading musket mounted on a swivel and drawn by
horses-"an accompanying gun for the infantry," in effect a gunpowder
analogue for the ballista.49 In the same chapter, he proposes that the
troops should be accompanied by wagons loaded with tools and materi-
als for the quick construction of field fortifications, precisely as Vegetius
suggests the legion would have done.
Saxe further advocated the reintroduction of the half-pike (thirteen
feet in length, as opposed to the eighteen-foot Swiss pike) to the soldier's
basic load, which would be advanced by the third and fourth ranks in
order to allow the first and second to load and fire in relative safety. He
advocates the introduction of an effective breech-loading musket (more
48. Of particular note is the paragraph he devotes to inspecting the baggage of

his troops for accumulated bric-a-brac: "It is necessary from time to time to inspect
the baggage and force them to throw away useless items. I have frequently done it.
One can hardly imagine all the trash they carry with them year after year. The poor
horse has to carry everything. It is no exaggeration to say that I have filled twenty
wagons with rubbish which I have found in the review of a single regiment." (Saxe,
Reveries, 62-63). Such an observation could only have been made by an experienced
campaigner.
49. Saxe, Reveries, 11, 38.
Ancestral Voices
than a century before one was to become available), and the division of
cavalry between the true light cavalry reconnaissance and pursuit
troops, and heavier skirmishing troops, whom he terms "dragoons."
As slavishly as he follows the work of Vegetius (and at times it
appears he was writing with a quill in one hand and a copy of De Rei Mil-
itarii in the other), Saxe departs radically therefrom where his own tac-
tical experience so dictates. He admits that the principal difference
between his theoretical army and that of his Roman antecedents is gun-
powder, but hastens to argue that the musket is less significant on the
battlefield than might be expected, asserting that vastly more casualties
are caused by the firing, bayonetting, and sword-strikes which follow the
sundering of the enemy's ranks than by the opening musket volleys.50 He
states instead that drill and discipline are more fundamental than fire-
power: the former to enable the infantry to fire as rapidly and accurately
as possible (interestingly, he repudiated volley fire, insisting rather that
each marksman should be free to fire at will); and the latter, to enable
both the infantry and the cavalry to carry out a bayonet or sabre charge
in good order and without losing cohesion.
He even calls the ancients to witness in this argument: "The prodi-
gious success which the Romans always gained with small armies against
multitudes of barbarians can be attributed to nothing but the excellent
composition of their troops,"51but hastens to add that this was due not
to their ethnic homogeneity, of which there was none, but to the excel-
lence of their training and the rigidity of their discipline. He further
invokes Roman wisdom in dressing and feeding the soldier, recruiting
and paying him, providing him with music while marching or at labour,
conditioning him through constant physical exercise, organizing him
into small, flexible groups rather than large, unwieldy phalanges, and
encouraging him with personal leadership and example. Saxe considered
himself the intellectual successor to the Roman historians, and, in the
chapter entitled "Formation of the Legion," goes to extreme lengths to
carry his theorizing into adapting the cohort, maniple, and legion for-
mations to firearms and the half-pike. He even divides his infantry into
the younger, more lightly-armed men, whose role is to act as skirmish-
ers (although he does not go so far as to call them velites), and older, vet-
eran soldiers, whom he equips with armor, musket, pike, and shield, in
50. "AndI have never seen, and neither has anyone else, I believe, a single dis-
charge [volley] do enough violence to keep the [charging] troops from continuing for-
ward and avenging themselves with bayonet and shot at close quarters. It is then that
men are killed, and it is the victorious who do the killing." Saxe, Reveries, 33. Only
a lead-from-the-frontgeneral could make such an assertion. Interestingly, Saxe, with
this statement, proves himself one of the intellectual forebears of the Baron de
Jomini, ardent proponent of elan.
51. Saxe, Reveries, 19-20.
DONALDA. NEILL
close resemblance to the veteran triarii of Vegetius. Finally, he suggests

that each soldier receive a military identification mark on his right hand,
inscribed with Indian ink. Vegetius, of course, also prescribed the "mili-
tary mark"-although he would have applied it with a branding iron, and
does not specify which of the recruit's hands was to be marked.52
But what is significant in Saxe's blatant imitation of Vegetius's writ-
ings is that while Saxe advocated copying the latter's formations and
ideas in exquisite detail, he pointedly ignored Vegetius's tactics. There is
no mention by Saxe of anything even remotely resembling Vegetius's
"'seven formations" for attack and defence, for making use of open
ground or obstacles, and for maximizing the power of cavalry and
infantry. Instead, Saxe offers a number of maxims regarding the use of
terrain, interlocking and overlapping arcs of fire for musketry, his
amusette, and cannon, and the proper design and spacing of redoubts to
reinforce infantry positions with fire while leaving open gaps for opera-
tions by cavalry. In short, Saxe has adopted from Vegetius only those ele-
ments of Roman military theory which either ease the administrative
pressure of supporting a large army in the field, or facilitate the handling
of large bodies of men and animals-principles and concepts which ante-
date the Romans by millennia, and for which scattered records today
exist, describing (if rather sketchily) the military campaigns of Sargon
the Great, the battles of the Egyptians against the Hyksos, the chariot-
fight at Megiddo, and the biblical campaigns recounted by General Yadin.
The same principles are in use today, perhaps indicating a timelessness
based less on the alleged brilliance of the military thinkers of Imperial
Rome than on physical necessity imposed by the capabilities and limita-
tions of the human form, the strengths of materials, the diurnal charac-
ter of homo sapiens, patterns of weather, topography, and agriculture,
and a host of other variables.
This argument, governing the "chicken-and-egg" question of
whether tactics determine capabilities or vice-versa, is of sufficient ven-
erability that it is unlikely to be resolved here. However, given the con-
ventional wisdom favoring the former viewpoint, it is appropriate to
assemble arguments supporting the latter-to wit, that capabilities
determine operational methodology. Keegan, for example, offers a pow-
erful anecdote on the origins and purpose of specialized infantry drill:
Christopher Duffy, who was lucky enough to spend some weeks
teaching Yugoslavmilitia the elements of Napoleonicdrill for a film
enactment of Warand Peace, described to me the thrill of compre-
hension he experienced in failing to manoeuvre his troops success-
fully across country "inline" and of the comparativeease with which
he managedit "in column,"thus provingto his own satisfactionthat
52. Vegetius, Military Institutions, 17-18.
Ancestral Voices
Napoleonpreferredthe latter formationto the formernot because it

more effectively harnessed the revolutionaryfervour of his troops
(the traditional "glamorous"explanation) but because anything
more complicated was simply impracticable.53
Napoleon's use of the column for movement across broken country
echoes the practice of the Roman legion as described by Vegetius. The
march formation of the army (one or two legions plus auxiliaries), as
described in Book Three of De Rei Militarii, consists of a mixed
infantry/cavalry vanguard led by a reconnaissance element consisting of
light cavalry, skirmishers, and pioneers; followed by the main body of
the infantry, the baggage train, and a mixed infantry-cavalry rearguard.
The whole is surrounded by a cavalry-based flank guard, and Vegetius
even notes that the most experienced soldiers should be placed in the
rearguard so as to be able to react promptly to any enemy attack.
This is precisely the same combined arms march formation used in
modern mechanized armies. Vegetius antedates us by more than fifteen
hundred years, and Saxe by more than two hundred; and yet the com-
bined arms operations of infantry and cavalry operate in a similar fash-
ion on the march, although Vegetius's men were equipped with javelins,
short swords, ballistae, and light cavalry, Saxe's with muskets, sabres,
and siege cannon, and our own with main battle tanks, infantry fighting
vehicles, and long-range anti-armor missiles. If there is a common thread
of ideas linking us to our ancestors, is it absurd to postulate that simi-
larities between their operations and our own are due less to slavish pla-
giarism of their writings than to the fact that what worked for them,
regardless of changes in military technology, by-and-large also works for
us, not because we have consciously imitated their methods, but
because the method itself is founded upon something deeper and more
durable that is relatively resistant to changes in technology?
Saxe is an excellent illustration of this notion, simply because his
writings differ so little from Vegetius's own work; the former diverges
from the latter only in Saxe's requirement that the elements he adapts
from his predecessors be applicable to a battlefield ruled by gunpowder.
It is unfortunate that Saxe wrote when he did; had he lived another hun-
dred years (or even fifty), he would have seen the power and rate of fire
of musketry amplified to the point where his arguments in favour of the
pike and the bayonet charge would have been obviated. In proposing a
return to the pike, he was arguing for the reintroduction of a weapon
which had already been swept from the battlefield, and for the imple-
mentation of a system of conscription, training, and discipline that
would never be possible even in France under an absolute monarchy. A
half-century after his death, the greatest of French despot-generals
53. Keegan, Face of Battle, 32-33. Emphasis added.
DONALDA. NEILL
would continue to accomplish tactical miracles even after the exquisitely

trained Grande Armee had been decimated and replaced by a vast army
of poorly trained, poorly disciplined, poorly fed, unpaid, and ill-equipped
troops fired by revolutionary fervour and little else. His achievements
are perhaps the most eloquent refutation possible of Saxe's advocacy of
the theoretical Roman model he attempted to adapt from Vegetius.
Napoleon, the epitome of the rational soldier, used column formations
and other concepts theoretically derivable from the ancients because
they worked, not because of their hoary intellectual credentials.
In short, Saxe advocated the resurrection and employment on the
battlefield of only those elements gleaned from the ancients which were
applicable to the wars of eighteenth-century France, and ignored those
which were not-and for this we accuse him of deriving his excellence
from his antecedents. We attempt the same today, and congratulate our-
selves on our originality.
Conclusion: Through a Glass Darkly

As a caveat to this discussion, one must first be prepared to acknowl-
edge the weaknesses of the source materials at hand. Caesar, a consum-
mate politician, wrote his works for political purposes to enhance his
own stature at home. Vegetius, a military neophyte, was describing in De
Rei Militarii not the military institutions of which he may have had per-
sonal knowledge, but those of a half-millennium earlier and of which his
knowledge was apocryphal at best. Vauban left a vast array of corre-
spondence but only limited descriptions of his theories and principles;
and Saxe, by his own admission, wrote his little book "in a fever" over a
period of thirteen nights, and even goes so far as to caution the reader
against taking him too seriously. There is none of the reasoned objectiv-
ity displayed by Thucydides; the simple, almost point-form notations of
Sun Tzu; or the astute, cynical analysis of Machiavelli in any of the
works in question. While this is not necessarily a crippling factor in this
present study, it is incumbent upon the reader, as it is upon the
researcher, to carefully consider the source when evaluating its import.
This said, the first deduction which may be drawn from the forego-
ing discussion is that technological change had a considerable influence
on the battlefield following the Renaissance. While it may be stated with
some certainty that Saxe in his Reveries attempted to follow Vegetius as
closely as possible, it must also be acknowledged that he only did so
where the adoption of Roman formations and tactics complemented, or
at least did not interfere with, the formations and tactics dictated by the
weaponry in use in France in the early seventeenth century. This point
is more telling when we consider that Vauban, who had equal access to
Ancestral Voices
the works of the ancients, made no reference to them either in his the-
oretical developments, his siege techniques, or his architectural accom-
plishments, as the siege warfare of the Romans would have been entirely
unsuited to similar activity in the era of gunpowder. Caesar, for example,
built his palisades to repel hordes of spear- and axe-wielding Gauls, not
to absorb the repeated strikes of hundred-pound stone balls hurled with
terrific force on a flat trajectory. The siege techniques of Vauban, both in
the offence and the defence, were dictated entirely by the ballistic char-
acteristics of large- and small-bore guns; thus any resemblance they
bear to the siege techniques of the Romans is at most coincidental.
It may therefore be fair to deduce first, that the influence of the
ancients held sway only where their principles were complemented by
the new realities of gunpowder combat (e.g., in the areas of training, dis-
cipline, drill); but that also, their writings had little or no impact where
their principles were no longer relevant (e.g., in the areas of fortification,
siege warfare, the employment of cavalry, and the importance of disper-
sion on the battlefield).
A second point which merits attention is the intellectual frenzy of
the times. During the Renaissance and for three centuries thereafter,
familiarity with the works of the ancients was "chic" in much the same
sense that the ability to discuss art and theatre is today considered
essential for the socially aspiring. The passion for all things Roman
extended from the arts to political life, science, history, and the military
sphere as well. As Keegan notes, "By the end of the eighteenth century,
the Neo-Classical revival had made fashionable an outward assumption
of Roman symbols, to express an attitude which was already internal-
ized."54The argument that all things Roman were adopted for reasons of
fashion rather than because they made any particular military sense is a
telling one. Keegan, in a further discourse, goes on to accuse the imita-
tors of Rome of slavishly implementing ideas which they little under-
stood, because comprehensive explanations thereof were simply not
available; nobody really knew what a legion was like, because no one at
the time of the Enlightenment had ever seen or fought in one; and no one
in ancient Rome had made a credible attempt at describing them in inti-
mate detail.
Mauriceof Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus may have believed that,
given money, time and effort, they could recreate armies in the
image Caesar had revealed to them. Modern classical scholars,
increasinglyinclined to fret at the lack of real understandingof the
inner life of the Legions which the Ancients have left them, suspect
that they were far more complex, fickle and individual in their
behaviourthan Caesar lets on. If this is so, then Mauriceand Gus-
54. Ibid., 63.
DONALDA. NEILL
tavus were chasing a chimera. Certainly no military institution of

which we have detailed, objectiveknowledgehas ever been given the
monumental, marmoreal,almost monolithicuniformityof character
which classical writers conventionallyascribe to the Legions.55
In short, in their passion to imitate that which had been recently redis-
covered, the military "Romanophiles" of the Enlightenment were follow-
ing a model for a military force that may never have existed in reality,
and which in any case was so poorly described in the available literature
as to raise considerable doubt about the veracity of accounts of its mirac-
ulous performance on the field of battle. This is akin to attempting to
build a Model "T" Ford with no other knowledge of the vehicle than a
black-and-white photograph. And yet the passion for vanished Rome
persisted; even Napoleon's cuirassiers wore helmets resembling those of
the legions, and his troops-in conscious mimicry of the glories of
empire-bore the Roman Eagle with their regimental colors. Aspirants to
Roman glory, they had succeeded in capturing the form of their model,
but the substance escaped them. This may be due to the fact that no reli-
able account of the "substance" of the legions has ever been found to
exist.
As a third point, we should recall the argument presented above to
the effect that, in the wave-like fluctuation of ascendancy between tech-
nology and tactics in continental warfare, the difference between the two
has invariably been less than the difference between the soldierly quali-
ties of the opposed forces and the tactical capabilities of their respective
commanders. This is, in point of fact, both an argument in favour of the
influence of the ancients and an argument against it; as Creveld notes,
there is no doubt that Frederickthe Great'sobliqueorderowed more
to his reading about the exploits of the ancient Theban general
Epaminondas [at Leuctra]than to any minute differences that may
have existed between the muskets employedby his troops and those
of his enemies.56
However, it is also an argument in favor of the present thesis in the sense
that the influence of the ancients only makes itself felt with significance
when all other factors have been rendered equal. Had Frederick's troops
been equipped with the assegai, or those of his opponent with breech-
loading rifles, it is doubtful whether the tactical precepts of Epaminon-
das (or anyone else) would have led to victory.
This is not to suggest that I am in agreement with the comments of
Sir Roger Williams in his Briefe discourse of Warre (1590), to the effect
that "the introduction of geometric fortifications, and of the firearms
55. Ibid., 67-68.

56. Creveld, Technology and War,97.
Ancestral Voices
that made them necessary, revolutionized warfare to such an extent that

nothing valuable [is] to be learned from past precept."57 Far from it. It is,
however, necessary to measure that which we wish to adopt against the
yardstick of contemporary utility, and weigh the evidence of our prede-
cessors within the context of the times in which they lived, fought and
wrote. Azar Gat argues this point well in the conclusion to his volume:
what people think cannot be separated from the question of how
they think, or from the circumstances in which they operate and to
which they react. Militarytheory is not a general body of knowledge
to be discovered and elaborated,but is comprised of changing con-
ceptual frameworkswhich are developed in response to varyingchal-
lenges, and which always involve interpretation.58
Michael Mallet more accurately summarizes the influence of the
ancients than does the bulk of conventional wisdom:
The fifteenth-centurycaptain learnt the art of war as an apprentice
to an established condottiere, not from books. He may have been
gratifiedto learn fromone of the humanists in his entouragethat his
tactics resembledthose of Caesar in Gaul, but it is unlikely he con-
sciously intended it to be so. It was not a study of the Romanrepub-
lican army which produced a revived interest in infantry but the
practicalnecessities of fifteenth-centurywarfare.59
Throughout Saxe's days of glory during the War of the Austrian Suc-
cession, the infantry demonstrated a dominance of the battlefield that
had been conceived with the rout of the French at Agincourt, improved
by the Swiss, mastered by the French, and which would later be epito-
mized by the Prussians under Frederick II. It would remain essentially
unchallenged until the first ominous appearance of the tank during the
twilight of the First World War, a reign of more than five hundred years.
Even then and thereafter, infantry would continue to have a dispropor-
tionate impact on the battlefield; and today, in an era of man-portable
"brilliant" antiarmor weapons, the individual infantryman is arguably
even more effective against the armored cavalryman than the bow-
bending peasant who so humbled the French nobility in October 1415.
The study of the wars of Vauban and Saxe is the study of infantry
reborn-the retaking of the battlefield by the arm which had unwillingly,
perhaps accidentally, ceded it to cavalry with the collapse of Rome. The
new-found power of the foot soldier, conferred in equal parts by the mil-
itary potency of gunpowder and the training and discipline that had been
the hallmark not only of the Romans but of nearly every successful mil-
57. Quotedin Parker,MilitaryInnovation,6.

58. Gat, Military Thought, 254.
59. Quotedin Keegan,Face of Battle, 62.
DONALD A. NEILL
itary force since the fall of Jericho, would serve him well through the
wars, misfortunes, and military innovations that lay ahead; and is con-
vincing evidence to support the assertion that the lessons of history,
however valid, can never be considered other than according to our own
interpretation of their utility to the world we know.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from this analysis, it is that the
"rebirth paradigm" is convincing only if one accepts the hypothesis of
military revolution over that of military evolution. In light of the history
of European conflict between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise
of the absolute monarchies, it would seem that the military develop-
ments of the Enlightenment were more the result of the normal course
of military innovation and counter-innovation-in short, simple evolu-
tionary adaptation-than to some sudden and thunderous change attrib-
utable to the rediscovery of the military genius of the ancients.
520 *

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Ancestral Voices: The Influence of the Ancients on the Military Thought of the Seventeenth

and Eighteenth Centuries

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoilseething,

The Renaissance Revisited

1. Jostein Gaarder,Sophie's World (Sofies verden), trans. Paulette Moller (New

Barbara Tuchman further eulogizes the secularism of the era, noting

488 * THE JOURNAL OF

The "rebirth" paradigm

MILITARY HISTORY * 489

490 * THE JOURNAL OF

A great deal of controversyhas flowedroundthe issue of exactly how

9. Keegan, Face of Battle, 61-62. Emphasis added.

MILITARY HISTORY * 491

The Mirror of Memory

Virgil recounts in vivid prose the founding of Rome by the defeated

492 * THE JOURNALOF

13. Keegan,Face of Battle, 62.

MILITARY HISTORY * 493

16. Phillips in Vegetius, Military Institutions, 2.

494 * THE JOURNAL OF

MILITARY HISTORY * 495

Vegetius's manual, however, describes a legion that did not exist in

The cavalry interregnum

19. Phillips in Vegetius, Military Institutions, 1.

496 * THE JOURNAL OF

(and grossly mismatched) groups: the poorly armed, equipped, and

MILITARY HISTORY * 497

early twentieth century).

21. Roberts, Military Revolution, 6.

498 * THE JOURNAL OF

The development and employment first of siege and then of field-

MILITARY HISTORY * 499

unlike Roman heavy infantry, the musketeers could not protect

500 * THE JOURNAL OF

conditions pertainingto both safety and effectivenessdemandedthat

28. Creveld, Technology and War, 94.

MILITARY HISTORY * 501

new tactical arrangements that maximized the opportunities of giv-

The "devilish cannon"

502 * THE JOURNAL OF

The invulnerable fortress

MILITARY HISTORY * 503

34. Guerlac in Paret, Makers of Modern Strategy, 73.

504 * THE JOURNAL OF

mining techniques, as the process of tunnelling under walls, shoring with

MILITARY HISTORY * 505

Unlike either Vegetius or Saxe, both of whom penned explicit vol-

506 * THE JOURNAL OF

MILITARY HISTORY * 507

defenders of the fortress to achieve interlocking arcs of enfilade fire

39. In a letter written at Quebec, 20 September 1692, in Louise Dechane, ed.,

508 * THE JOURNAL OF

41. Montross, War through the Ages, 339.

MILITARY HISTORY * 509

43. Ibid., 90.

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While Saxe relied heavily on the writings of Vegetius, there is an

48. Of particular note is the paragraph he devotes to inspecting the baggage of

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close resemblance to the veteran triarii of Vegetius. Finally, he suggests

52. Vegetius, Military Institutions, 17-18.